A Glass Half Full
M. Night Shyamalan's Signs
Read Mercer Schuchardt
April 1, 2002
Signs, directed by M. Night Shyamalan (Buena Vista Pictures, 2002), 106 minutes. It has often been observed that whereas South Americans see visions of the Holy Virgin Mary, North Americans see only UFOs. To those in the industrialized world, the strange and unusual can be admitted through only one frame of reference, which is science. To those in the developing world, where the organic and agricultural roots of faith have not been completely cut off, it is still possible to perceive things in terms of the old mysteries. We may consider them ignorant, but we also travel incessantly to their cultures in search of holy relics to serve as aesthetic magnifiers for our impoverished but well-decorated interiors. The truth is that we postmoderns crave the old mysteries, and in fact are made more desperate for them by their supposed disappearance. Religious scholars and sociologists tell us that every religious system is essentially a narrative blanket thrown over two irreconcilable realities: that which Native Americans called the world of the Here Now and the world of the Not Here Now, what Mircea Eliade called the Sacred and the Profane, and what the average Sunday worshipper understands as the realms of Heaven and Earth. (Which, incidentally, is now the name for a soft drink marketed by Coca-Cola in Asia. The same company, incidentally, that owns the trademark in South America for a future soft drink named Jesus.) "Science fiction"-nearly as quixotic a name for a genre as "non-fiction fiction"-is our age's scientific-sounding wet blanket thrown over the inescapable reality that there are simply some things we cannot understand, that we cannot reduce to mere "facts." What we can do, in our post-religious and arguably also post-secular ...
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