GITS Script Reading & Analysis: “The Sixth Sense” — Theme

This week we are analyzing the screenplay for the 1999 movie The Sixth Sense written by M. Night Shyamalan.

You can access the September 12, 1997 draft of the script through myPDFscripts here.

Today we discuss the script’s themes.

There are several of them. Which ones do you see at work in the story?

For those of you more academically inclined, how about this:

“Questions of Unreliable Narration in The Sixth Sense,” from Coral Houtman, University College of Wales, Newport, Wales

This paper will address two questions about the narration of the film The Sixth Sense. The first is: How far is the narration unreliable, tricking the viewer into a misunderstanding of the plot? The second is: How far is this unreliable narration consistent with the underlying thematics of the film, and the way these are addressed through the characters’ interactions and their interactions with the viewer? I will argue that whilst the viewer is tricked into perceiving events in ways that subsequently turn out to be false, they are actually being placed in a situation by the film-maker whereby they leave the cinema having had some of their prejudices questioned, their unconscious assumptions revealed. They thus achieve a catharsis whereby their traumas are integrated into a more satisfying state of closure. What I hope to show is that the narration in The Sixth Sense serves a consistent aesthetic, and its very unreliability at the level of plot demonstrates a deeper coherence functioning at the level of character psychology, motivated by the film’s self-conscious understanding and use of psychoanalysis. To this end, I shall be employing narrative theory and its understanding of how narrative comprehension in film depends on fulfilling a consistent set of expectations set up by the rules of the film and film-making more generally, in order to explore how the film disguises its own inconsistencies, but also using Lacanian psychoanalysis to test the rigour of the film’s psychoanalytic project. I shall argue that the ghost story in The Sixth Sense is a parable of psychoanalysis and the listening cure, and the film’s narration treats the audience, as well as the major characters, as part of the analytic relationship. In taking up this thesis, I am also relying on a signal of authorial intention from the director, M. Night Shyamalan. I read Shyamalan’s cameo role as a children’s doctor as the work of the text (what I shall call the implied author) directing us to make connections between film directing, and the psychoanalytic practice of the story. Shyamalan’s own background — the son of two parents who were doctors and who, according to Shyamalan wanted him to follow in their footsteps, and a wife pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology (Antonio 2000), creates correlations which encouraged me to look for a psychoanalytic structure in the narration of the film, as well as in its narrative. In my conclusion I shall be looking at how this particular reading of the film fits into the context of cognitive and psychoanalytic approaches to narrative and to film studies and whether these two diverse approaches can be reconciled.

For more, go here.

See you in comments to discuss the themes in The Sixth Sense.

For Day 1 of our analysis of The Sixth Sense, go here.

For Day 2 on structure, go here.

For Day 3 on characters, go here.

NOTE: THIS SERIES AND THE USE OF SCRIPTS IS STRICTLY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES!

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