[COLUMN] The Sixth Sense's Most Prominent Ghosts Aren't Even Dead | by Darren Mooney

Hey there! 1999 was arguably one of the greatest years in the history of the cinema. We’re running a series of retro articles looking at the movies of the year with 25 years of distance, coinciding with the anniversaries of their original release dates. Also, if you haven’t seen The Sixth Sense, be warned: this article contains spoilers.

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense is, famously, a movie about ghosts. Its central plot twist hinges upon the concept. The movie’s most lasting contribution to the cultural zeitgeist might be “I see dead people.” However, what’s really striking about the film, particularly on rewatch, is that it’s also haunted by the ghosts of people who haven’t died.

The Sixth Sense is a movie about absences. This is apparent from the film’s opening scenes. Anna Crowe (Olivia Williams) is picking out a bottle of wine, to celebrate the bestowing of a prestigious award upon her husband, child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis). The camera moves through the space, eventually settling on an empty space on the wine rack. In its opening moments, even before the plot unfolds, the camera asks the audience to consider what isn’t shown.

Anna returns upstairs to join her husband. The mantle piece is decorated with childish drawings, all acknowledging the work that Malcolm has done with Philadelphia’s children. These are the sorts of paintings that a loving parent might pin to a refrigerator, but the camera’s lingering gaze draws attention to another conspicuous absence: Malcolm and Anna don’t have children of their own. Reading the dedication on the plaque, Anna muses, “They called you their son.”

The bulk of The Sixth Sense concerns Malcolm’s relationship with a troubled young boy named Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Cole is being raised by his mother, Lynn (Toni Collette). Cole’s father apparently “lives in Pittsburgh with a lady who works in a tollbooth.” There is no visual record of Cole’s father to be found in The Sixth Sense. Even the family photos hanging on the apartment wall draw attention to the absence in Cole’s life, with lens flares occupying the negative space.

However, Cole clearly feels his father’s absence. He removes the lens from a set of his father’s old glasses, so that he can wear them. He also wears his father’s watch on his wrist. When Malcolm speculates that the watch was a gift, Cole corrects him, “He forgot it in a drawer.” Trying to properly diagnose Cole’s behavioral issues, Malcolm focuses on the absent father. The words “status - divorced” are highlighted in Malcolm’s earliest notes about the strange young boy.

“You asked a lot of questions about dad today,” Cole notes after one of their sessions. “How come?” Malcolm effectively articulates the concept of subtext for his young patient. “Well, sometimes we do things to draw attention, to express our feelings about certain issues... divorce, whatever,” he explains. Discussing Cole’s behavioral issues – including “upset words” – Malcolm asks, “Did you ever write any upset words before your father left?” Cole replies, “I don't remember.”

While the trailer foregrounded the movie’s supernatural elements, Shyamalan takes the better part of an hour for The Sixth Sense to reveal the source of Cole’s anxiety. The young boy has the power to communicate with the dead. With Malcolm’s help, Cole discovers how to harness his gift, to help those trapped souls to move on from the trauma that they cannot seem to leave behind. The movie then builds to one of the great cinematic twists: Malcolm is himself a ghost, unable to move on.

In revisiting 1999, canonically one of “the best movie years ever”, patterns inevitably present themselves. It is very difficult, for example, to rewatch The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor and eXistenZ without even subconsciously connecting those three films (and earlier movies like Dark City and The Truman Show) to the millennial anxieties over “simulacra and simulations” articulated by philosophers like Jean Baudrillard.

A lot of discussion of late 1990s horror tends to fixate on the self-aware slasher revival that followed in the wake of Scream: Scream 2, Halloween H20, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend and so on. This movement undoubtedly existed in the context of millennial irony and nostalgia. After all, this explosion in meta slasher films occurred almost exactly two decades after John Carpenter’s Halloween first codified the genre.

However, there was a smaller and more low-key movement taking place in millennial horror, with a renewed interest in the supernatural. In contrast to the self-awareness that defined the post-Scream slashers, these were often built around traditional supernatural monsters. Alongside The Sixth Sense,1999 saw the release of The Blair Witch Project, The Haunting, House on Haunted Hill and Stir of Echoes. The next couple of years would see the release of The Gift and Thirteen Ghosts.

It is perhaps interesting to include The Blair Witch Project among these films, given its found footage conceit. However, these movies often mediated their supernatural elements. Both The Haunting and House on Haunted Hill are essentially stories of sinister charlatans (Liam Neeson and Geoffrey Rush) who try to fake a haunting to scare their subjects, only to realize that the house they’ve chosen to use is actually haunted. The lines between reality and performance often blur.

The Sixth Sense is similarly fascinated by mediation. Very few of the parents at Cole’s school play are actually present in the moment, instead watching the performance through the viewfinders of their camcorders. In the second half of the movie, Malcolm repeatedly comes home to find Anna playing their old wedding video, as if trying to relive that moment. Malcolm is only convinced of Cole’s gift when he studies tape recordings of an old session with patient Vincent Grey (Donnie Wahlberg).

In The Sixth Sense, it seems like everything is being recorded and re-watched, but nobody actually sees anything as it is actually happening. The logic of the film’s central twist – that Malcolm was dead all along – would suggest that Malcolm should only appear in scenes with Cole, the only character who can interact with dead people. However, after his death, Malcolm shares scenes with Anna and Lynn. It’s part of what preserves the illusion, preventing the audience from getting ahead of the film.

Those scenes only work because the audience understands intuitively that two people can share the same physical space without engaging with one another. In those scenes between Malcolm and Anna, Anna simply acts like Malcolm isn’t there. On rewatch, the audience understands that this is because she literally cannot see him, because he is a ghost. However, on first viewing, these scenes are so effective because they play into the movie’s emotional core: Malcolm and Anna are alienated.

The Sixth Sense suggests that only when images and sounds are played back can people understand what was really happening. This happens within the film’s narrative, with a video tape proving that Kyra Collins (Mischa Barton) was being poisoned by her mother (Angelica Page). However, the film itself demonstrates this argument in its closing moments, replaying key scenes for the audience so they can finally understand what the movie was about and the true nature of Malcolm’s existence.

This is perhaps an extension of the virtual worlds suggested by The Thirteenth Floor and eXistenZ. People may not live in completely imaginary worlds, but they can still occupying their own worlds, entirely separate from one another. In 2000, Robert D. Putnam published Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, adapting his 1995 article Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital and arguing that American culture was becoming increasingly fractured and disjointed. There was no longer a sense of shared community or reality.

The Sixth Sense is undeniably of its moment, tapping into the same vein of “…what is reality?” anxiety that made The Matrix so resonant, albeit from a slightly different angle. However, it is also in conversation with horrors of the 1970s. Recalling films like The Exorcist, Don’t Look Now or even The Shining, this is a supernatural horror in which the real terror is the dissolution of a family unit, the absence of a husband or a father: Cole’s separation from his dad, Malcolm’s separation from Anna.

During the production of Signs, Newsweek (infamously) touted Shyamalan as “the next Spielberg.” That is a frankly insane label to apply to any director, but it makes a certain amount of sense. The Sixth Sense is certainly of a piece with many of Spielberg’s earlier films, a story of something paranormal that is ultimately just a prism through which the filmmaker might explore otherwise unspeakable familial traumas. Indeed, Osment would go on to become “a Spielberg kid.”

Those 1970s horrors are often read as articulating anxieties around the divorce rate, which spiked during the era as a result of the spread of no-fault divorce laws across the nation. The Sixth Sense is certainly engaged with this idea, suggesting both Cole and Vincent are more sensitive to these supernatural forces due to the collapse of their families. Malcolm’s notes on Vincent stress that he came from a “single-parent family” and was “having trouble coping with [his] parents’ divorce.” The home is also a source of violence and trauma for Kyra, who is being victimized by her own mother.

Of course, The Sixth Sense synthesizes two of the core themes that run through Shyamalan’s work. Shyamalan has openly acknowledged his fascination with religious ideas and beliefs, perhaps rooted in the fact that he grew up as the “only Hindu in Catholic School.” He is also preoccupied with the importance of family, with his films often focusing on the complicated relationships between parents and children, a theme obvious even in his less well-regarded work like After Earth.

As such, The Sixth Sense feels at once timeless and timely. It feels like a work that is both in conversation with decades of American supernatural horror films and a blueprint for the next two decades of Shyamalan’s career. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the same parental anxieties that inform his recent films like Old and Knock at the Cabin. At the same time, it’s also a movie that feels firmly rooted in its time and place, resonating with a millennial sense of disconnect and alienation.

The real fear at the heart of The Sixth Sense is that we’re all ghosts.