Summary
Critical Essay
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From despair to hope, from fear to redemption: religious transformation in The Sixth Sense.
The Sixth Sense met with astounding box office success after its release in August 1999. It grossed $27 million in its first weekend, reached the $70 million mark in ten days, and has joined the top-grossing films of all time, bringing in more than $600 million to date.
Its popular success mirrored its critical success, as it garnered six Oscar nominations in 2000, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Haley Joel Osment) and Best Supporting Actress (Toni Collette). Screenplay writer and director M. Night Shyamalan says that he was thrilled to learn that the movie's two strongest audiences were young boys and older women, who generally don't go to see the same movies. (1) Shyamalan was born in India and grew up within an Indian family in the Indian community in Philadelphia. In an interview, he commented on the inherent spirituality of his Indian-American roots and how that spirituality has influenced his filmmaking: I get asked the question a lot about whether the Indian culture--the Indian-American mix--influenced the filmmaking. It had never occurred to me. It's not like you sit outside yourself and say, "you know, this is really unusual." But perhaps the fact that the body is not the end of your life, that the spirit continues, is something that I just accept, because of all of these Indian ceremonies about spirits or ghosts in the house, protecting the house from spirits. It's just an accepted thing over there, so it was something I just accepted as common, but I guess it's not. So in that respect all of my scripts, I think, have a certain spirituality that is fairly unusual for a young guy in Philly playing ball, eating Big Macs, to have. (2) The spirituality of the Indian community was not Shyamalan's only childhood religious experience. He also attended a Roman Catholic school for ten years, where his faith and attitude toward spirituality were doubtless influenced. The Sixth Sense is a profoundly religious movie. Even on the surface, the religious themes seem to jump out and demand notice: the question of life after death, our interaction with the supernatural, the possession and use of a "sixth sense." When we dig a little deeper, our analytical spade turns up themes such as Cole's desperate search for protection and sanctuary in religious places and Malcolm's quests: on the ethical side, the righting of an old wrong; on the religious side, a desperate search for forgiveness. We will encounter the deep religious roo...See the full content of this document
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