Last night, the Couch Baron accompanied me to The Sixth Sense. I like going to the movies with the Couch Baron because he is, as Nicole would say, easy like Sunday morning. The Couch Baron has movie tastes similar to mine, i.e. all over the map and often risibly bad, and he has a charming habit of producing Budweiser tallboys from his rucksack to wash down sticky fare like Cruel Intentions. Well acquainted with my preview-compulsive tendencies, he arrives at the theater promptly and in plenty of time to procure snacks, and not only does he not raise a concerned eyebrow when I tell the kid behind the counter “not to skimp on” the fake butter, but he himself will often decide that non-pareils alone will not stave off hunger for the duration of the film, a decision which occasions a mad mid-word-jumble dash out to the lobby to acquire a one-hundred-percent all-beef Nathan’s Famous Frank. During one particularly cruel bout of buttcheek fatigue, a.k.a. Casino, the Couch Baron excused himself to use the bathroom, and when he returned, he made a great show of checking me for a pulse.

The Baron and I usually attend movies on Sundays, and the decision-making process usually follows a familiar path – one of us sighs, “Oh, I don’t know; I should really do some housework around here, I can’t even see the damn floor,” to which the other responds, “Yeah, I have about ten thousand crusty-ass dishes in my sink,” and the first one says, “I mean, it would be nice to start out the week with a clean house, right?” and the other one says, “Right. On the other hand, Milk Duds.” It probably goes without saying that we never, ever choose to do the chores, because “trashy movie” trumps “clean sheets” no matter which way you play it, but the ritual would feel incomplete if we didn’t pay lip service to the idea of neatening up. Anyhow. Saying “fie ye, dirty shirts” to the laundry pile leads us to the next phase of movie selection: opening the paper to the movie-listings page and reading off all the “good” movies over the phone. Slowly but
inevitably, we realize that a) one or both of us has already seen all of the “good” movies currently in theaters, b) neither of us wants to see any of them again, and c) we now must turn our attention to the “less good,” “not good at all,” and “slightly less entertaining than a colitis attack” movies on the list, a process which involves d) feigning elaborate reluctance to see anything not in line for an Academy Award, then pretending to give in and watch a trashy movie by saying things like, “Well, I guess I’d see that if we can’t settle on anything else,” and “Oh, all right, if we can find a theater near my house.” Only after the house lights go down will one of us say, in a tone of supreme contentment, “I think this one is really going to suck,” and the other one will respond, in an equally satisfied tone, “It’s going to suck my left one,” and then the movie begins.

Last night, we went through the very rigmarole that I’ve detailed above, finally settling down with sixteen thousand calories each in front of a movie that looked, to our practiced eyes, so campy we’d need canteens. We both knew a number of people that had really enjoyed The Sixth Sense, and I’d read a few good reviews, but still, we had serious doubts about the film’s quality (not necessarily a bad thing for us two, but still). The presence of Donnie Wahlberg’s name in the opening credits did little to assuage these doubts. The patently absurd trailer (“I see dead people.” How…subtle. Well, except for the “subtle” part) and Bruce Willis in the starring role didn’t help either. I have no problem with Bruce Willis; no, nobody will point to him as the poor man’s Olivier in fifty years’ time, and they won’t teach the scripts of his movies in schools either. Willis does a decent job with what he’s given, though, and he doesn’t chew excessive scenery. Alas, in spite of what executive producers go around telling themselves, he can’t carry a poorly-written movie with an annoying child actor in it, and based on the previews, it seemed clear that we had exactly that to look forward to. Never mind suffering by comparison to The Blair Witch Project – we thought The Sixth Sense would suffer by comparison to The Haunting.

Imagine our pleasant surprise, then, when the movie didn’t suck at all. It didn’t suffer by comparison to TBWP at all, though like the other film, it started out slowly, with what seemed like excessive ground-laying at the time, and it took a while to get scary – a few mildly eerie coincidences in the first hour, but nothing truly frightening. (Wahlberg showed up early on, playing a former patient of Willis’s character’s, and to his credit we didn’t even recognize him until the end credits rolled.) The scariness, when it did arrive, arrived with a deliciously unexpected jolt. Lulled by what we’d seen so far, the entire audience ignored the signature Discordant Strings Of Imminent Terror, and to punish us for our complacency, a ghost promptly materialized and crossed the screen, and we all jumped a foot in our seats. Nobody saw it coming. We thought we did see it coming when a phantasm kitted out in the hippest seventies fashions appeared; then he turned around, and we hadn’t seen it coming after all. For the rest of the movie, we kept thinking we knew what to expect and not knowing after all, right up until the final twist, which tied up all the loose ends, answered all the questions, didn’t contradict anything that had gone before it, and never would have occurred to us. Said twist – more spooky than startling or outright scary – garnered a collective “ohhhhh” from the audience, followed by another, sadder “ohhhhh” when we realized what it meant, and third “ohhhhh” of appreciation at getting so thoroughly fooled by the film. I teared up, myself, though that probably doesn’t come as any surprise.

I enjoyed The Sixth Sense a lot. All the actors performed quite well, especially Haley Joel Osment as young Cole and Toni Collette as his mother, and I always find it gratifying to watch a movie that takes such care with the storytelling; it makes a welcome change from the customary clever-but-careless approach to plot. The mangled dead themselves made me appropriately queasy, and at one point I found myself looking-not-looking-looking-not-looking through my fingers, waiting for the telltale rattle of ice cubes which meant that everyone in the theater and their jumbo Pepsis had flinched again – I love it when that happens, and it happens to me so rarely. Most of all, though, I related to the film’s perspective on why ghosts return. The story in The Sixth Sense seemed to come from the belief – a belief I share – that ghosts manifest for a reason, that they haunt those who believe in them and do so for a purpose. Our society views children as more susceptible and open to “seeing,” and The Sixth Sense offers an interesting version of the old saw that children can “see” things, both manifest and not, that adults can’t. Most horror films portray the dead as unable to leave, or unwilling to, but The Sixth Sense spins it a little differently – not that the dead can’t leave, or won’t leave, but that they just don’t. I believe this, too – that the dead have their world, and we have ours, but that the two worlds often occupy the same space. I found one of the ideas of the film – that the ability to see the dead can act as a blessing as well as a curse, if the seer learns to accept it as such – quite touching. After all, we miss the dead – not always, but usually we do. We talk aloud to them, we keep their photographs, we pray for their protection. Again, not everyone does this, but many of us do, even the rational and unsuperstitious among us. Strange, then, that we always seem to greet the return of the dead by screaming and backing away.

Towards the end of the movie, just after another bloody apparition has popped up and then gone on its way, Cole delivers a message to his mom, Lynn, from her late mother. As he begins to relay what his grandmother has told him, Lynn stares at him open-mouthed, as much fearing for his sanity as wondering how he can know the things he tells her. Then she begins to cry, and of course I did too; both actors did a splendid job with the scene, but it was the notion that we just don’t listen when the dead speak to us that truly touched me. I won’t give away the ending, but I take great comfort in the idea that the dead return to put things right. You don’t have to believe in such things to enjoy The Sixth Sense. It has the chops to win you over as a straight suspense thriller. But if you’ve ever stood at the grave of a loved one and held a conversation, maybe you do believe in such things after all.

Don’t take my word for it.

Or Ebert’s, for that matter.

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