The so-called Gaia hypothesis, first put forth by British chemist James E. Lovelock in the late 1960s, describes our entire global ecosystem as a single organism, capable of regulating its own environment in much the same way that human cells neutralize certain toxins and control their internal temperature and salinity. More mystical interpretations even assign a consciousness to the global organism--a literal Gaia who watches over her component creatures, sometimes rewarding or punishing them for their service to, or infractions against, the collective good. Perhaps she's not so all-powerful after all, though; in the classic Simpson's episode "The Old Man and the Lisa," Mr. Burns simultaneously acknowledges and ridicules the Gaia hypothesis with the remark, "Nature started the bitter fight for survival, and now she wants to call it off just because she's losing!" Of course, he wanted to chop up all the marine creatures into a protein-rich slurry, which is a fine idea if you don't expect the resources to be renewable, and if you don't happen to be one of the species targeted for destruction.But what happens when Nature turns the tables again and the human race is on the extermination program's receiving end? Enter our good friend M. Night Shyamalan.
No No Blade of Grass
The problem with being Shyamalan--with exploding onto the scene with an instant classic like The Sixth Sense--is that nothing he does can be judged on its own merits, but only in comparison to what has gone before. And it's true, The Happening is no Sixth Sense. It's also no No Blade of Grass or Day of the Triffids, two mid-50s disaster novels by John Christopher and John Wyndham, respectively, which The Happening somewhat resembles. For that matter, this film's opening sequences bear a more-than-passing similarity to the start of Stephen King's Cell (which is possibly the best argument I've seen for retiring good authors before they go soft in the cranium, but I digress) and to pretty much every plague movie, zombie movie, body-snatcher and eco-thriller the Hollywood machine has ever churned out. Shyamalan is not exactly breaking new ground with this story. Then again, he never has, nor should we want him to; his specialty is throwing unexpected twists into familiar tales. The Happening falls short by that standard as well, but not by very much, which brings me to my central question: Exactly what kind of weed is Shyamalan smoking these days, and why do the metareviews at Rotten Tomatoes seem to reflect an herbal high (or low) of some entirely different sort?
It's true that plants can communicate with one another via chemical messengers, and they can also sense when they're being eaten or broken or strangled out by another plant. When that happens, yeah, they really can release chemical warfare agents designed to kill off pests in potentially quite horrible ways. Still, different species of plants have never have cooperated in anything but the loosest ecological sense, and there's no evidence that they spontaneously evolve novel toxic countermeasures over the span of a few decades. For that to happen, the swapping of chemical messages would need to cross some threshold of complexity to form a kind of Internet, a global veggie network capable of detecting damage and routing around it. And that's not science, mi amigos, it's mere ... science fiction.But hey, isn't that why we go to movies in the first place? The point is not whether this kind of thing really happens--we know it doesn't, never has, most likely never will. Neither will lightsaber battles, vampire infestations, universal translators or world peace. Does that mean the ideas aren't worth exploring? The point--which Tomatometer reviewers seem to have missed entirely--is that a gimmick like this is plausible enough--albeit barely--to support a horror movie script full of lurid, grisly death scenes that make young women in the audience hide their faces in the arms of young men. You can almost hear Shyamalan's soothingly boyish voice murmuring, "... or something like that. If not this disaster, then that one. Don't worry; something bad will surely happen. Boo!" And that's right, right? In fact, two separate characters come right out and say it: This is strange, this is complex, we don't really know what's going on or why. And this excuse rings true: The fog of war, the chilly hand of natural selection, the overwhelming reality of an Earth covered in 6 billion fertile, hungry humans ...
Oh there's room enough for 6 billion, maybe even enough for 10 or 12. But where do we put all the nature? Or where does it put us? The exact details of the disaster matter only for cinematic purposes, but this much we know for sure: If we don't get our population under control, natural forces will eventually step in and do it for us--probably sooner than we expect. Is that a downer? Tough luck, pally; take it up with Gaia.
Freshness is in the eye of the beholder
This is not to say The Happening is a great movie. It isn't. It's actually kind of annoyingly least-common-denominator in its science and its sensibilities. Plant-based neurotoxins are credible enough, but how could they be so exquisitely tailored to attack only humans? Because we're the ones being punished, yes, and Gaia has an advanced degree in molecular biology and a billion years of on-the-job training. Um, okay. But this also begs the question: Why flee the cities at all? Why not simply burn all the trees, pave over the suburbs, and put our farmers in space suits? Flamethrowers, weed killer, napalm ... if plants want to declare an all-out war on human beings, they'd better be prepared for the consequences! So it's pretty bad when the obvious solution to your ecocatastrophe is, you know, more ecocatastrophe. Your audience is not that stupid, M.
And yet, The Happening entertains enough that you don't feel like getting up, walking out, demanding your money back and boycotting all future Shyamalan films. It's neither ridiculous nor sublime, just kind of ... there. And this exposes, finally, a flaw in the very concept of metareviews; most of the contributors--in fact, most paid reviewers--simply aren't qualified to judge a science fiction movie. In fact, they're less qualified to judge a bad one than a good one, because they can't see the merit, if any, behind the failure. Actually, the problem runs deeper than that, because the Tomatometer reduces every review to a binary value--fresh or rotten, veggie or splat, growing or dying--and then computes a simple average. The result is unstable; a near miss that everyone agrees about ends up with the same abysmal 10 percent rating as a total flop that everyone agrees about. Similarly, a movie that no one hated can end up with the same 90 percent as a movie that everyone loved. In either case, missing the point means the Tomatometer is reviewing a different film from the one that's actually up there on the screen.Ultimately, we have to face the facts: Plant-based computing may be good enough to destroy the human race in an orgy of neurotoxic mayhem, but for the more nuanced task of picking out watchable movies for the science fiction audience, we still need the human touch. In this case I give the Tomatometer a 20 percent, The Happening a solid 50, and the SCI FI Weekly audience a reminder that cinematic beauty is in the eye of the ticket holder. I may be marginally qualified to judge the science behind a movie, but only you can decide whether it's actually worth watching. And the irony there is, you'll never know until you've seen it, and by then it's too late!
Sources:
www.rottentomatoes.com: "The Happening"
Encyclopedia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2008 Edition: "Gaia Hypothesis"
Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org): "Gaia Hypothesis", "No Blade of Grass", "Day of the Triffids"
http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/06/the-happening-s.html
