The Sixth Sense

Distributor: Buena Vista Home Entertainment

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense is about the terrifying consequences of being unwilling to look at critically important truths about oneself. The film also explores the transformative experience that ensues when one finally looks at those truths and actually grasps them. The methodological schema employed in this review is ‘the analysis of spectatorship’—that is, ‘the engagement of the audience member's perspective, as if the camera itself’ (Gabbard, 1997, p.  4↗— ‘The psychoanalyst at the movies’,  Int. J. Psycho-Anal.,  78:  1-6)↗. Though the element of spectatorship pervades the film, it achieves its most powerful and undeniable moment in the final scene, which therefore requires exposition at the beginning of this essay to establish a context of interpretation for the film as a whole.

In the film's final moments, a shocking revelation simultaneously assaults Dr Malcolm Crow (Bruce Willis), and the audience. Dr Crow is dead. He turns out to be one of many traumatised ghosts who wander in torment until the source of what haunts them is discovered. Particularly bedevilling to these lost souls is the fact that they do not know they are ghosts. Dr Crow's 9-year-old patient Cole (Haley Joel Osment) explains to his divorced, single-parent mother (Toni Collette), ‘They only see what they want to see’. The spectral twist in the narrative of the film is that Cole's observation is no less applicable to those of us who are watching the film. We too are ultimately shocked by Dr Crow's death because we too see only what we want to see!

Shyamalan, who does double duty as screenwriter and director, is a master illusionist. He understands that if you supply even the slightest detail of a desired version of reality, your audience will supply the rest. Wishes dictate what is seen; denial keeps the undesired at bay. Shyamalan keenly grasps that the latter corresponds with our collective denial of death, while the f