what is generally referred to as toxic masculinity. However, that is a vast oversimplification. Toxic masculinity is just one of the many masculinities that is present in the world today. Masculinity, just as all other racial, gender, and social groupings, is a construct that helps to create the identity of its members. A crisis of masculinity, or more broadly, any identity crisis, is caused by the feeling of loss of belonging to a group that was previously a part of your social identity.
Different masculinities are created by different norms and beliefs, but modern American masculinities almost always involve the expectations of strength, confidence, and the ability to protect others. M. Night Shyamalan’s follow up film to Unbreakable, Signs is ostensibly a movie thriller about an alien invasion, but on a deeper level it is about loss and how such loss can lead to identity crises.
Signs is about a father, his two children, and his brother who are living in the shadow of loss as an alien invasion begins. Mel Gibson plays the father, Graham Hess, who recently retired from being a minister after the death of his wife in a tragic accident, which is flashed back to from Graham’s point of view throughout the movie. These flashbacks should add depth to his character, but became annoying by the third time they were used and enraging by the sixth time. His children are Morgan, who has asthma and is played by a twelve-year-old Rory Culkin and Bo, played by a five-year-old Abigail Breslin, in maybe the best performance of the film. His younger brother, Merrill is a failed minor league baseball player, who no longer knows his purpose in life and has moved in with his brother, is played by Joaquin Phoenix. When crop circles appear in their field, the family is alarmed and call their local police officer, played by Cherry Jones, but Graham refuses to believe it is anything supernatural despite several odd occurrences around their farm and news reports of similar crop circles appearing across the globe.
This movie doesn’t have a twist, which is a little disappointing, but it does have one of the coolest monster reveals ever, despite the actual aliens not being all that scary. After more strange occurrences in town, the family goes home and watches the news, which includes a home video of a Brizilian birthday party where people are inside freaking out and for almost a minute the camera does not yet actually catch one of the aliens and then one just casually strolls by their window. It is very effectively scary.
Soon after, Graham receives a call from the man, Ray Reddy, who hit his wife with his car, killing her, played by none other than Mr. M. Night Shyamalan. Reasonably, he thinks that’s pretty weird and goes to investigate. After an odd exchange with the fleeing Ray, Graham goes into his house where he trapped an alien in his pantry and in another piece of brilliant screencraft, we are shown the alien only in the reflection of Graham’s knife, which is all he sees as well. When the alien tries to grab him, Graham cuts of its fingers and gets the hell out of there.
At home, he decides to barricade the family inside the house and make everyone their favorite food for dinner. What results is a harrowing scene, where the family gather for dinner and Graham becomes enraged by how no one will eat the food and end up screaming and crying in what is really the emotional climax of the film. Then, the aliens try to get in.
After several close encounters, and Morgan suffering a severe asthma attack, the family spends the night safely in the basement. In the morning, the radio tells them that the aliens have left and then cautiously go upstairs to retrieve Morgan’s inhaler. Then, through yet another awesome shot, this time a sinister shot of a reflection on the TV, it is revealed that an alien, who is of course the one from the pantry, was left behind. The alien grabs an incapacitated Morgan and injects him with poison before Merrill hits it in the head with a baseball bat, which weirdly, the dead mom appears to have predicted with her dying breath. Also, they have to throw water at it because I guess aliens melt or something when they touch water. This shit is honestly too crazy for me. Through some movie magic about his lungs being closed (because that totally wouldn’t mean he was dead…), Morgan survives and Graham begins to believe in god again. An unnecessary flash forward shows him putting on his clerical collar again. Faith is restored, hurrah!
While I am no fan of the actual plot of this movie, which I think is contrived and boring, I am a big fan of the inventive cinematography and at least intrigued by the characterization of the family and the relationships between the adults and children. When the movie begins, both Graham and Merrill seem to be totally incapable of taking care of themselves, much less the children, and, in fact, throughout the movie, the children are shown making the hard choices and showing much more maturity than their father or uncle.
This is supposed to show the audience that these two men have just been totally emasculated by their losses and present uncertainty. Graham has lost his wife, and with her, his faith and job and understanding of the world. In her death, he has also failed to protect his wife, one of the key tenets of masculinity discussed above. All of this loss and uncertainty has led to his diminished masculinity, which has led to a weakened identity for himself, which has led to more uncertainty. And so the vicious cycle rages on until he is able to regain his faith and protect his children. Merrill has lost his baseball career and with that, his sense of purpose, and confidence, which is again a key tenet of modern American masculinity. Towards the beginning of the movie, we see him contemplate signing up to join the army, showing us just how unsure of what to do with himself he is. So for him too, loss, especially of identity, has diminished his masculinity.
By the end of the movie, both men end up more confident and less lost and ultimately more secure in their masculinity than they were at the beginning of the movie, so it is a happy ending for all! But especially for M. Night Shyamalan, as this is still his second highest grossing movie, only bested by The Sixth Sense, which is truly, a much better movie than Signs ever could be.
