The Lady in the Water: Storytelling and Hope

The Lady in the Water is a complex and sophisticated story about stories and storytelling. The pre-credits sequence is a primitive oral tale, complemented with cave-painting-like animation, detailing the allegory at the heart of the film: humans live by stories and die by war. A long time ago, the story tells us, sea nymphs inspired humans with stories; one day humans left the sea side to go conquering and fighting in the mainland, gradually losing all contact with the sea nymphs. War is the opposite of storytelling, the state of non-communication, where we cease listening except to our own voices and seek to destroy when we hear the Other. In modern society, as Shyamalan seems to see it, we're perpetually in a state of war, because we don't listen to one another's stories nearly enough.

So begins the film's story with the arrival of a sea nymph, named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), sent amongst humankind to inspire them once again. The water in which she lives is not the rolling sea, but the swimming pool at an apartment block. The people she is to inspire are not senators and poets, but ordinary residents of the apartment block. She isn't quite sure why she's there herself; all she knows is that once her mission is done, she'll be swept away by a giant eagle. Fortunately she's able to enlist the help of the block's super, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), a meek, kind, somewhat defeated-by-life sort of man. As he tries to help her, he grows to know all the residents of the block much better, looking within them for their cosmic significance in the "grand story" of Story. Some of them prove important, some not so much; but they all become involved in Story's life and hold together as a unit in their mutual dedication to helping Story fulfill her destiny.

The epic tale Story herself brings into the lives of these people isn't itself so important. The main plot, about gathering the right people together to hold back the "Scrunts" (dogs made of grass that try to eat Story) and summon the eagle, is almost throw-away epic fantasy. This central story exists to unite the denizens of the building. Of course, all the characters must believe in the importance of Story's story--and it is indeed important within the narrative--for its chief effect to occur: the realization that everyone's story is important and interconnected with everyone else's to form a greater, cosmic story. The epic story is present, on the allegorical level, as a stand-in for cosmic destiny. Story's inspiration, ostensibly to inspire a man (played by Shyamalan himself) to finish his political manifesto, is most importantly the unseen effect on everyone, inspiring them to listen to and engage with one another.

As Shyamalan constructs the film, with its sequential investigations of individual apartments and the variations on theme he develops (for instance, the obsession of several tenants with language and communication), the influence of Rear Window is undeniable. In an age of homage, however, Shyamalan surprisingly rebukes Rear Window for its distance from others, its lack of sharing, its idly curious interest in the lives of others. At the same time, Rear Window at least shows the innate interest we have in the stories of others. The protagonist of that film, Jeff, does save a woman from suicide and uncover a murder, after all. Lady in the Water, however, is Rear Window from the inside. There's no Jeff watching from a cold distance, spying comfortably; we don't get to watch from a distance. Shyamalan's camera sweeps us through the corridors and up the stairs in an early sequence, as Heep leads a tenant to his new apartment, passing other tenants and being brushed by their lives along the way--the man who works out only half of his body, the woman with the cats who has a door mat for every day of the week, and so on. Heep replaces Rear Window's Jeff and is easily a superior human being. Heep gets involved in these people's lives, superficially at first and, with the presence of Story, in depth.

Everything about human life is a story. Serious philosophers have advanced the theory that what makes us human more than anything else is our storytelling abilities, our construction of narratives. Our very personalities, they tell us, are self-narratives. We relate to one another by our stories about ourselves, about each other; through our collective stories, myths and histories, bedtime stories, fairytales, or even idle gossip. We have stories about our country that tell us what it stands for, stories from religion, stories about our family. There's no sense in which we're starved for stories, but there is a sense in which we're deprived of someone to listen to our stories. One tenant calls Heep to her apartment to fix the plumbing only to send him away when her husband reveals it was fixed in the morning. She must have known. But while Heep is in her apartment, she's able to tell him some (rather over-informative) stories about her husband's bathroom activities as we gradually dolly backward to the bathroom. She called Heep because she needed to tell a story and he's always around to listen.

Heep's knowledge of his tenants is, however, superficial when we begin. He introduces the cat lady to the new tenant (a film critic), suggesting they'll get along. During the next tour through the block, trying to locate the writer Story is to inspire, we find out Heep was right and the critic learned she once wrote a book. Heep hadn't known. This story of the cat lady's life just never came up. Looking for the writer leads Heep to discover the rich albeit ordinary lives of the people in the block. Once he finds the writer, he has to find a "symbolist," a "healer" and a "guild", so he again tours the block, finding out more about these people, becoming surprised with the depths of their lives. A poignant scene gives us Heep's own backstory, a story nobody in the building is supposed to know. The film continually shows us that everyone has stories that are important. Most important of all is perhaps the bedtime story a Korean tenant knows, revealing piecemeal the legend of the sea nymph. The more this tenant tells bits of the story, the more she warms to the Westerner and becomes willing to reveal more.

Not only do people have stories, but most of the people in the block, and Shyamalan himself, are obsessed in some way with communication and language. The Korean tenant, for instance, is unable to speak English. She must communicate, somewhat reluctantly to begin with, through her daughter Young-Soon. This slows the scenes down, but gives them a poignancy and allows us to focus on the power of communication to cross language and culture. One scene has Heep passing a cellphone back and forth with Young-Soon's mother so Young-Soon can translate between them. There is a man who is a master of crossword puzzles. A group of slackers try to invent a viral term ("blim-blam," as it happens) with moderate success. Story herself, not permitted to speak of her world, is introduced to oblique ways of communicating, such as touching her ear to say 'Yes.'

The sense of the interconnectedness of these people and their stories is fostered by the film's unusual style. Shyamalan frequently has the background or even the foreground blurred, while activity takes place on another plane. This was used and perhaps abused in Sergio Martino films back in the '70s. Shyamalan uses it more artfully. A butterfly lands on a woman's shoulder in the foreground; Heep is blurred in the background. The image seems to tell us the butterfly is connected to the woman. We learn later (a mild spoiler, I'm afraid), that the butterfly is connected to Heep. In another sequence, Young-Soon tells Heep more of the sea nymph legend, her head blurred in the foreground while Heep is focused. However, we learn Young-Soon has importance in the sea nymph legend herself. These set-ups are of course intentional, revealing our ignorance of the interconnectedness of stories, the blurred and fuzzy as much a part of the story as what is sharp and in focus. We're all connected without knowing it and we're unaware of our own significance. Stories told in some scenes return in later scenes; a phrase uttered once can be casually re-used; seemingly throw-away information becomes important later. The apartment block, like the world, is a web deeply interconnected through communication. As the film progresses in this way, fewer blurs occur.

The film might strike some as the height of contrivance. What are the odds, for instance, of someone knowing the legend of the sea nymph just where a sea nymph shows up? There are reasons for this sort of contrivance. For one, the apartment block is clearly intended as a microcosm. Moreover, Shyamalan displays a strong sense of destiny throughout the film. Story is able to reveal the future of different people, how many children they'll have, when they'll do, and so forth. This apartment block is thus a sort of chosen place for the fulfillment of Story's destiny. One also just has to accept the fantasy elements for the sake of the beautiful message they contribute; if we were less cynical, we might see past the contrivance and just enjoy what it reveals about communication and the need to talk to the people around us. Sometimes the stories we need really are just under our noses.

Another moment of some contrivance is the presence of the film critic. He's a man who has dedicated his life to studying stories, albeit in the cinematic medium. Shyamalan depicts him as a man who watches films as a job. He's weary of stories. He doesn't believe in the possibility of a new story. He is perhaps more monstrous than the scrunts, because he can't even see the importance in stories any longer. When Heep seeks his help in figuring out Story's legend, the film critic gives horrible advice and puts Story in danger. This seems like a cheap jab at film critics. In the context of the film, there's nothing cheap about the jab. If someone puts a lot of time, effort, and heart into putting a story out there, how awful is it for a critic to tell that someone her story isn't good enough, isn't important, to tell others that this story isn't worth their attention? In a film about the value of stories, a man who makes a living judging the value of the stories of others is truly a monster.

We live in a cynical age. Shyamalan hardly seems to fit this cynical age. His films have always been so hopeful. The Sixth Sense trusts in the power of communication to reach beyond the grave. Signs trusts in the power of people to hold together in the face of an assault. Compare Signs to a Romero film and one sees how radical Shyamalan's optimism is; Romero's pessimism is more in line with our times. In The Lady in the Water, Shyamalan challenges our credulity when he has his apartment block, almost without question, unite to help a sea nymph get rescued by a giant eagle; but this is consistant with his optimism. Shyamalan really believes in the power of communication to reach others, really believes in the power of stories to affect people and change the world for the better. The Lady in the Water is a fantastically hopeful film and in that hope is so full of beauty. I can be cynical myself, but Shyamalan broke me down. His hopefulness is, as I hope I've demonstrated, not composed of manipulative and glib cliche, but is based upon a sophisticated view of the human spirit.

Where I can't get behind Shyamalan, however, is his view of destiny. The ancient legend that can be followed precisely as instructions to help Story complete her mission, Story's ability to read the future: All of this shows us a world of stories that are already written. Story can read the future of the wrter because his story is already written. A discussion on whether destiny and freewill are compatible--a subject which occupied Voltaire most of his life--is far beyond the scope of this review. Yet, despite the hopeful message of the film, the notion that I'm not writing my story, but it has already been written for me, is uncomfortable. But this is a problem of philosophy; not a quarrel with the film itself.

Where I might quarrel with the film is the arbitrary nature of the fantasy story. Since Young-Soon's mother gives the story piecemeal, the effect is, in some sense, of making the story up as they go along. Perhaps that's the effect Shyamalan desired, the sense of crafting one's own story, making one's own destiny. If that's so, the rules that are created as they go along and the need for everything to be "right" so that destiny is fulfilled contradicts this. Whenever something is supposed to work and doesn't, a new portion of the legend is happily uncovered and they can go on. The most arbitrary invention is the guardian tree-monkeys who are supposed to punish offending scrunts, but take their precious time. They're also supposed to destroy whomever sees them, but they neglect that as well. Perhaps Shyamalan wanted to depict the trial-and-error sort of progress we all go through in discovering our individual destinies, taking new paths when old ones stop working. This theme doesn't receive much reenforcement from the rest of the film, however.

As I say, there's no sense in which we're deprived of stories. Books and movies come out faster than we can ever consume them. On blogs, on reality TV, on call-in radio stories are constantly being told. The realization that our stories are all important and interconnected, the ability to listen to the stories of others and see their importance, is what we're missing. One can never have too many stories or know too many people. The Lady in the Water reminds us to be more open to the stories of others and to love stories, to be less cynical about the stories we hear, including its own story: I found it to be a deeply moving film.