The Sixth Sense

I have to explain that the night I watched Sixth Sense, it was the second movie of the night. Right before I put in that DVD, I watched a Filipino movie called Forever My Love.

Forever My Love is an odd, moody story of a little girl who can see ghosts, and tries hard to ignore them. That is, until she has to face the fact that she’s dead too . . .

Did I figure out that trick during the movie? No, despite a number of clues, I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t figure out that she was already dead until the end. Then I was upset at myself, and vowed never to be fooled again.

And so I put in The Sixth Sense and began to watch it. Now, I already knew it was about a boy who could see ghosts, and Bruce Willis was his child psychiatrist, but if I’d heard about the final plot twist, I didn’t remember it.

I was bothered by several scenes that didn’t seem “right.” When he was sitting in a chair in the boy’s living room and the mother was sitting across from him and both were waiting for the boy to arrive home from school, it bothered me that neither one was speaking. It was hard for me to believe that a mother with a son going into therapy wouldn’t be talking to the psychologist.

And when his wife doesn’t talk to him at the restaurant the night of their anniversary because (he thinks) he’s late, I thought she must be a really cold *itch. To just get up and leave him like that. If she felt that way, why did she keep watching that videotape of their wedding?

So when we get to the end, and the boy has learned to accept his ability to see dead people as a gift that enables him to help them, and he’s so accepted by his classmates they pick him up in the play and carry him on their shoulders as he’d only dreamed before . . . he doesn’t need Bruce Willis any longer, and so it’s time for him to help Bruce Willis move on too – because Willis is also dead.

I wanted to slap myself! Right after vowing not to be fooled again, I was, and by the same “trick.”

Now I wonder if maybe I’m not supposed to perceive a deeper meaning behind this “coincidence.” I mean, what are the odds that I’d watch both movies on the same night, one after the other?

Very slim. I got Forever My Love from the Asia Center of my public library, which carries a huge amount of Bollywood movies, a fair selection of Chinese movies, some Japanese and Vietnamese, but only about fifteen Filipino movies – out of hundreds of modern Filipino movies available on DVD.

It’s natural that I would pick out the one that was supernatural in character. But why did I want to play it the same night I planned to watch my recently deceased mother’s copy of The Sixth Sense?

I don’t know. Maybe it is just a weird coincidence. Just a trick of my mind, to demonstrate how movies seem to turn off our critical consciousness more than books do.

Anyway, The Sixth Sense is highly effective because the relationship between Bruce Willis and the boy is so mutual. That is, by helping the boy come to terms with his unusual ability, Willis enables the boy to help him, so he can move on to wherever ghosts are supposed to go after they accept that they’re dead.