The Sixth Sense

Note: I think I might know a few people who haven't seen The Sixth Sense, but there can't be many. As few as they are, I think I know fewer people who don't know the "secret" to The Sixth Sense. If I do, they are certainly under the age of 18, and I probably have them in class. If you have read this far and realize suddenly that you have both never seen the film and don't know the secret, well, then I'm amazed. I urge you to stop reading this film and see it immediately, and I urge you to talk to other human beings more often. The statute of limitations has long since run out on the secret to The Sixth Sense, so frankly I think I am doing you a favor by advising you that this article contains massive spoilers (to the extent that this movie can still be spoiled), and not just revealing the ending outright.

And with that:

Comcast has a habit of showing crappy movies in its "Free On Demand" section. Some of its current titles include, The Bobby's World Movie starring Howie Mandel and Jack, one of Robin Williams' worst ever films - and that is truly saying something - and something called Zombie Strippers, which now that I think about it actually sounds kind of awesome. Every once in a while though, there is a diamond in the rough, and this month it was The Sixth Sense. This was a movie I loved in high school but honestly haven't thought about much since. It doesn't quite some relevant in the way that some other movies from around the same time never stop seeming relevant. By comparison, American Beauty beat it out for the best picture Oscar that year (1999), and I am sure that some aspect of this movie have come up in casual conversation, oh, five or so times during the past year. While it certainly has the more enduring catch phrase - "I see dead people" - I doubt The Sixth Sense matches that. But seeing it on my Comcast free on-demand list, I started to think about it - and inevitably, I decided to watch it for the first time in ten years.

M. Night Shyamalan reminds me a little bit of Nomar Garciaparra. And I don't think it's that they both have ridiculous names, although that may be a small part of it. A bigger part is that both of them peaked at around the same time, were insanely popular for relatively brief stretches, and then anti-climatically plunged into the depths of semi-obscurity. Of the two, Shyamalan was by far the bigger one-hit wonder. By 2000 he had already put out the follow-up to The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, which seemed awesome to me when I was eighteen but which I realized some time later, was actually kind of stupid. He released the modestly successful and exciting Signs in 2002, followed by The Village in 2004, a movie that Roger Ebert called "a colossal miscalculation." I saw The Village in theaters on the same day Nomar was traded from the Red Sox to the Cubs. I am not making this up. Nomar had enjoyed a longer shelf life than M. Night - including an unreal stretch from 1997 to 2000 that included one Rookie of the Year and two batting titles, but by 2004 he seemed curiously irrelevant to the Red Sox' fortunes, overshadowed by larger stars Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz. Just as I don't think about The Sixth Sense much - or hadn't, before my most recent viewing - I don't spend much time thinking about Nomar's glory days any more. At least not in the way I still replay Pedro Martinez' and David Ortiz' brightest moments in my head.

 See the resemblance?

Baseball fans forget how good Nomar was in his heyday - and movie buffs forget how good The Sixth Sense was. Bruce Willis, whom we may have been used to hearing scream "Yippie-ki-yay!" and "Geronimo!" prior to this movie, conveys a deep and unwavering sadness through, and Shyamalan is willing to take his time showing as how deeply troubled he is - we suspect by the traumatic event that takes place at the very beginning of the movie. Everyone raved about Haley Joel Osment's performance when this movie came out - and with good reason. Through no fault of his own, Cole Sear is a profoundly creepy kid a normal kid buried inside. Why do these ghosts pick him, of all people, as a confidant? We don't know, and it's never explained,  but spend the entire movie hoping that they will leave him alone for god's sake.

Willis' character acts as though he's dead for the entire film (and at the end, we find out there is a very good reason for his behavior), but so does almost everyone else. Take the mother at the party who has never heard of Chuck E. Cheese, or the kid who after watching Cole perform a lame magic trick says stoically, "I want my penny back," or the sober doctor at the hospital, played by M. Night himself. When Willis' character watches an emotional guest on his old wedding video, the effect is almost jarring. It is to the movie's great credit that it maintains its emotional focus, while presenting to us character after character who is either literally or figuratively dead

Holy crap... this is him?

It's hard for me to think about a time when I didn't know what happened at the end of The Sixth Sense. I think I was blind-sided when everything came together in a swell of music and flashback from throughout the film. I remember that my first thought originally was, "How can he be dead? Didn't I see him talk to people?" No, I didn't - I just saw him in the same scene as people, not really interacting with them. The anniversary scene is one of the keys to the film. Dr. Crowe, Willis' character, comes to dinner at a fancy restaurant and sits down at a table in a restaurant, where his wife is waiting for him. He is already apologizing for being late. The bill comes, she takes it, and she walks off in a huff. Of course, our interpretation of this scene completely changes at the end when we realize she is beside herself with grief - not anger or impatience.

Like any work with a great twist ending, The Sixth Sense forces us to go back through the entire movie and ask ourselves how we could have missed what seem like obvious clues. When people read Of Mice and Men, they wonder how they didn't pick up on the foreshadowing of Carlson euthanisizing Candy's dog. When people see The Crying Game, they wonder how they could have assumed that that short-haired androgynous person was female. When people watch The Sixth Sense they are bound to ask how they could have possibly assumed Dr. Crow survived the fatal shooting at the beginning of the film. But good foreshadowing gives us hints about what is going to happen - it doesn't tell us outright. And it works at its highest level when we can only recognize it as foreshadowing after the fact. We are tempted to slap ourselves on the forehead and curse our own obliviousness. But they point isn't that we are stupid - it's that the authors are smart.

[Why am I writing about The Sixth Sense, you may ask. One of the lists that inspired me to start this blog was the AFI's Top 100 Films list, which was published in 1998. Ten years later, the AFI updated the list. At #89, off came Patton and on came The Sixth Sense. Is The Sixth Sense the 89th greatest film of all time? I'm not sure about this, but I'm willing to call it one of the most memorable movies of the 90's - and I saw a lot of movies during the 90's. Love or hate the movie - and I've never met anyone who hated it - you have to concede that "I see dead people" is right up there in the pantheon of Great Movie Catchphrases from the 90's - right up there with "Show me the money!" and "Life is like a box of chocolates."]

Roadside America

Anyone who has to drive from DC to anywhere north of Philadelphia knows that traffic on 95 north tends to be brutal. After sitting in traffic around the Delware Memorial Bridge for the seventeenth consecutive time, I finally decided I had had it  - and that I would be boycotting 95 for the rest of my life. Since that point, about two years ago, I have taken to using the interstate highways that go through Pennsylvania. And it was in this way that Roadside America first piqued my interest. The signs for Roadside America begin just before the exit to the town of Shartlesville, a small village whose name suggests that it couldn't possibly be anything but. Prior to my stop at Roadside America, I hadn't spent much time in Shartlesville - but if the billboards in the surrounding area are any indication, the town is known for Pennsylvania Dutch food and gifts, sheepskin jackets, produce stands, and Roadside America.

It's rare that I feel like stopping to look at roadside attraction during a trip between NJ and DC; my plan is usually to hurry home as quickly as possible. But when I saw the entry for Roadside America in 1000 Places to See Before You Die in the USA and Canada, I knew that I wouldn't be able to resist much longer. The temptation to check off the entry in my book was simply too great. So this past Sunday, during my drive back to DC, I decided to make the long-awaited stop. Housed in a building with windows looking only into a gift shop, Roadside America immediately presents an air of mystery. I knew from the entry in 1000 Things that I was about to see "The World's Greatest Indoor Miniature Village," but in a way, I wish I hadn't known. There is just something oddly exciting about a building with an ambiguous name, that promises only "More Than You Expect." After paying a grizzled old woman more than I expected ($6.75 for adults), I was permitted to enter the door leading to the main event. This was less a "Miniature Village" than a "Miniature Metropolis." To look at the landscape in front of you is something akin to looking at all of Berks County, Pennsylvania on Google Earth. It is a mish-mash of trains, mountains, trees and buildings - and people and animals. I've been describing the whole scene to people as a "toy train village," but this is about as inadequate as calling Philadelphia a "train city." Yes, there are trains. There are also many other interesting things that have nothing to do with trains. In fairness, the exhibit cheats a little bit by using mirrors to make it look roughly four times its actual size - but its actual size is still significant. As 1000 Things notes, the village is richly detailed, containing "10,000 trees and countless other tiny touches." A complimentary pamphlet identifies many of these details, but as it turns out, this is mostly just for the diehards. After politely looking up each of the points on the pamphlet, I decided it was probably a better idea to admire the work as a whole, and to find my own details. One of my favorites that wasn't in the pamphlet: the men and women in the Luray Caverns section of the exhibit (in its own special corridor) are dressed in their formal attire.

Roadside America is an anthropological artifact from a culture that did things like wearing suits and dresses on a voyage into an underground cavern. But the beginning of the exhibit, which suggests that the village is going to a recreation of Pleasantville, is just the tip of the iceberg. The village is in effect a pageant of the most romanticized pieces of American culture. Around the bend from Pleasantville we come to the old frontier, where by pressing a little button, you can make the old blacksmith hammer away at the old anvil, or make a line of cows trot one by one into some sort of building with no windows (What could it be?). Only here do we find an airstrip on one side of the town, and a covered wagon on the other.

The cynic in me wants to find something in Roadside America to mock - but I'm not sure it's possible. This is an irony-free zone. The entire village is unabashedly patriotic and god-fearing (a picture of J.C. himself, spreading his arms in blessing, is projected onto the wall once every half hour.) People who mock It's a Wonderful Life aren't funny - they are jaded, bitter individuals and I feel sorry for them. The same goes for anyone who would dare say a discouraging word about Roadside America.

Signs on walls of R.A. politely discourage running. And yet during my entire trip to the village, three kids - two girls and a boy, all red-headed - were running amok as their ineffectual father screamed, "Stop it!" (Do parents in the greater Shartlesville area just spend every weekend taking their kids to Roadside America? "Come on kids! We're going to see the fake zoo again!") I'll grant that this was annoying - but only until I looked back at the people of the village, doing good work, reading their bibles, minding their mothers and fathers. Children here were incapable of disobeying - just as parents were incapable of yelling.

Crisfield

Since I'm originally from New Jersey and not Maryland, I assume that I don't have in my possession a lot of facts are assumed to be common knowledge. For example, I had never heard of the city of Frederick until I started working here, and I knew little more about such popular vacation destinations as Ocean City and Bethany Beach. There are just certain places I had no reason to know anything about until I moved to this area four years ago - in the same way that I wouldn't expect the average Potomac native to have any reason to know anything about Point Pleasant or Seaside Heights. Recently, it's occurred to me that I really should learn a little more about Maryland. Yes, I live in DC and yes, conventional wisdom says that DC is more interesting, but I do spend about half my day in Rockville - sometimes more. And I am moving outside of the district - although still within the limits of the Beltway - in t-minus two months. So perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea to explore the state a little bit. I like both crab-cakes and football after all, and as I've been told, that's what Maryland does. So, having a wide-open weekend a few weeks back, I decided to consult my handy 1000 Places to See in the USA and Canada for tips. An entry on "Crisfield and Smith and Tangier Islands" caught my eye. It is billed as the "Timeless Corner of the Chesapeake" and the bottom of the entry highlights early September as the best time to visit, for something called the "National Hard Crab Derby and Fair." "Things come alive during crab season, when the docks are busy and crab-packing houses along the waterfront do a brisk trade," explains the book's author, Patricia Schultz. She had me at "crab season." I grabbed a friend (Is it odd that I have friends who get excited about a weekend at the Nationals Hard Crab Derby and Fair?) and we were off.

From the road, I texted my friend Nick to tell him where I was heading, and I figured that, as a Maryland lifer, it would probably register with him. It didn't. "Where's that?" he texted back. Crisfield, it must be said, is far away from everything. It is remote in a way that I never realized any part of Maryland could be. From the district it is, according to Google Maps, a three hour and fifteen minute trek. It is over an hour and a half away from Easton - and Easton is far. The drive covered miles of nondescript state routes and tended to remind me, oddly, of rural Ohio, where I have also spent what seems like a full days of my life driving on nondescript state routes. Somewhere near the hamlet of Fruitland, the road tapered into a very tight two lanes and I figured that it was about merge into someone's driveway. "Take. Ferry," my GPS said, as if she had been expecting this all along. And so I waited patiently at a stop sign for the ferry - a barge, roughly the length of three cars - floated up to the shore of the body of water before us. Once on the ferry, the driver (captain?) encouraged us to get out and stretch our legs for the duration of the five-minute voyage. "Where ya from?" he asked in a friendly accent that couldn't be described as anything but Southern. DC, to him, might as well have been near Tulsa. He implored us to get a bed and breakfast for the night, rather than brave the long trip back home. "It's too long fer one day!" he admonished us.

Crisfield itself was not the New Englandy, colonial, quaint town I was expecting. There is decidedly practical feel to the main drag. Yes, there are scores of crab houses, but they are next to auto parts stores and Subway and CVS. Crisfield does not look like Rockport, Massachusetts - which is fine. Rockport, Massachusetts is certainly a beautiful town, but I can't walk around it without the distinct impression that no one actually lives there - at least not year round. People live in Crisfield: pot-bellied guys in shades and Orioles jerseys, groups of high school kids wearing the purple and yellow of Crisfield High School (home of the Crabbers), old women with salty, wrinkled faces, who have been coming to the Crab Derby for a long time.

The Derby is less a tourist attraction than it is a special occasion for the locals. And, to the residents of Crisfield, crabs are not a food for special occasions. A BBQ tent behind the bleachers provided most of the food for the event, so the smell of dry rub - not Old Bay - accompanied the scene. So much for my vision of what constitutes an authentic Eastern Shore experience. I skipped the pulled pork in favor of the beer tent - taps of Miller Lite were housed in a truck, parked behind the main bleachers. I was sure I had misheard when after asking the woman manning the tap for two beers, she responded - with a straight face - "That'll be two dollars." Clearly we were not in DC any more - in any sense. As much as the price of beer signified to me that I was in the presence of a different culture, it couldn't compare to the event itself, which was at once quaint, wacky, and oddly riveting.


A boat-docking competition works like this: a motor boat pulls up to the center of the bay, which on this day resembled an arena. (It was flanked by two long sections of bleachers on one side and a hotel with many balconies on the other. On the open side of the bay, a row of boats held as many spectators as both the bleachers and the hotel balconies.) An official (and he was official - dressed in what looked like a park ranger uniform, complete with the hat) fires a gun into the air. The boat runs a few feet and then swerves into a quick uniform. Using the momentum from the turn, it then backs up as quickly as possibly into a "parking spot": four wooden poles. One of the members of the crew (there are three total) ties a rope around each pole and an air horn blows to signify that the boat has been successfully "docked" - or "parked," as the landlubber in me wants to say.

What is the appeal to this competition? By means of comparison, think about heading into town for the big annual parallel parking competition. Yee-haw!

I think that park of the appeal is that certain people find it appealing. Admittedly, this seems like circular logic, but it's true. I don't have much of an appreciation for soccer, yet I still enjoy the World Cup in some sense, because I enjoyed watching other people live and die with what they were seeing. Sports are mostly interesting because of the emotions attached to them, and there was certainly no shortage of emotion at the New York bar where I watched that final Spain vs. Netherlands match. The same was true here: I have no real emotional reaction to three men very quickly lassoing four polls so that their boat will stay put, but - and I mean this with no condescension whatsoever - I love that other people do.

The meal was followed with an entree described on the menu at the Olde Crisfield Restaurant and Crabhouse as an "Enormous Crabcake." It was predictably both enormous and delicious.

I'm happy that Crisfield is one of the 1000 Places to See Before You Die in the US and Canada. With no disrespect to the Rockports and Bar Harbors and Myrtle Beaches of the world (all of which have their own clear and widely documented charm), Crisfield is a real place, with real good crabs, real cheap beer, and a real odd sport to call its own.

[PS - 1000 Places to See Before You Die in the US and Canada presents a bit of a problem in the way it documents Crisfield. Because it lists the town along with Smith and Tangier Island. I am fairly certain that to check it off completely would be cheating - and yet I can't help but feel that my adventure deserves more than one third of a check. I have not been this confused since reading only one third of Dos Passos' USA Trilogy, and trying to decide on an appropriate notation.]

The Big Checklist

It had never occurred to me until a few weeks ago, but it is absolutely true: My life is, to an alarming degree, governed by a series of checklists. I guess I've sort of always been vaguely aware of this. What other conclusion can you draw about a guy who, at seven years old, was able to recite all of the presidents in order? I knew that at ten years old, what hooked me on baseball was not the peanuts and crackerjacks, not the home-runs and strikeouts, but the batting line-ups. Nine members of the team, each in their proper place: nothing could have made more sense to my third grade brain. (Ask me the lineup fielded by the Red Sox at the first major league game I attended in 1991. I remember it down to the starting pitcher, Tom Bolton.) At around the same time, my favorite book was probably James and The Giant Peach by Roald Dahl but a close second was probably The Big Book of Animal Records, a quasi-reference book for children, richly illustrated with busy two-page spreads featuring the 100 Heaviest or 100 Fastest Animals all, improbably, cohabiting the same environment. I got this book as a Hannukah present from my second cousins when I was about eight and I think my parents took it for granted that it would gather dust in the basement - only, it didn't. As well as I remember the talking grasshopper from the James and The Giant Peach, I remember that the tortoise lives longer than any other animal on earth. Shocking, isn't it?

But I don't think I was conscious of the role of lists in my twenty-eight-year-old life until recently. My friend visited my apartment for the first time and, after browsing around the bookshelves commented, "Wow, you are really into lists." As proof he directed me to the many "Best of" and "Top 10" style books I owned. I had to concede he was right: I have a ton of them. At the moment, sitting at my desk, I am within eye-shot of the following titles: 1000 Places to See Before You Die, 1000 Places in the USA and Canada to See Before You Die, 101 Baseball Places to See Before You Strike Out, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, and two Washingtonian Issues: "DC's Best Restaurants" and "DC's Top Bars." On my internet browser, I have bookmarks for AFI's Top 100 Films and Modern Library's Top 100 Novels. Adorning the bulletin boards of my classroom (I'm a high school teacher), where other teachers have motivational posters or pictures of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, I have "Mr. Barron's Top 25 Movies" and an unusual list I became fascinated with at some point last year: 100 Best Last Lines from Novels.

When I have a free weekend to take a road trip, a free couple hours to watch a movie, a free hour here and there to pick up a novel, I immediately consult one of several lists. Is this behavior compulsive or neurotic? I'm not sure, but I'm relatively certain I'm not alone in my fascination for lists. I have no statistics to back this up, but I always see stacks of 1000 Places to See Before You Die when I enter Barnes and Noble - sometimes alongside spin-offs that I don't own (but should own), containing lists of must-experience-at-some-point movies and books and symphonies. So here is my proposal: whenever I cross any item off of any of my aforementioned lists, I plan to document it here along with an account of my personal experience with it, and perhaps an answer to the question of whether in my opinion it deserves to be on the list. In many ways, this is a blog for the indecisive. A quick search for DC Food blogs reveals dozens of hits. Same with blogs about books and, predictably, blogs about movies. This is a blog about all of the above.

Start Blog. Check.