The Happening: Modernity and the Event
The year 2020 is playing out like a bad disaster movie. A global pandemic, nationwide civil unrest, murder hornets, a presidential election that forces a choice between the lesser of two evils . . . This prolonged atmosphere of tense uncertainty is punctuated with peaks of panic (to say nothing of grief and outrage) and reactive attempts to regain composure through absurd means of control (I’m looking at you, toilet paper stockpilers!). Everywhere people are either seeking answers to the question of when things will go back to normal or settling into the unsettling possibility that they never will. What has become evident, however, is that we don’t know more than we do know, and this unknowing helplessness exacerbates our fears.
In this light, our situation is not unlike the 2008 apocalyptic thriller The Happening. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan, The Happening scored an abysmal 18% on Rotten Tomatoes and was called an “incoherent and unconvincing trifle” by critics. If 2020 were up for review, I think it’s fair to say that it would probably receive a similar rating. But beyond the superficial similarities between The Happening and 2020, examining one in light of the other reveals something profound about the modern response to the horror of the insensible.
The Happening stars Mark Wahlberg as a guileless high school science teacher and Zooey Deschanel as his amorously errant spouse, whose marital troubles play in the background of unexplained waves of mass suicides wreaking havoc across the northeastern United States. The couple, joined by a friend and math teacher (John Leguizamo), his daughter, and others, make their way from densely populated New York City towards more rural areas of Pennsylvania to try and escape the affected zone. At first, the cause of the mass suicides is thought to be a large-scale, synchronized, bio-terrorist attack. But it is eventually theorized that plant life is responsible. Seemingly as a defense mechanism, plants in highly concentrated human areas are releasing an airborne neurotoxin that causes humans to kill themselves.
It must be acknowledged that The Happening is an objectively bad film. The blue-sky background in the opening credits looks like a Windows XP screensaver circa 2001. Notwithstanding its A-list actors, the awkward dialogue and odd directing choices make it feel more like those classic disaster B-movies that likely were its sources of inspiration. Shyamalan himself has admitted that the film has an inconsistent tone. Indeed, the dreadfully frightening realities of suicide, environmental crisis, terrorism, and displacement are juxtaposed with the patently absurd. In one scene, for example, Elliot (Wahlberg) verbally rattles off the steps of the scientific method to find a viable solution in the midst of acute crisis. Who actually does that? Despite the gravity of its content, it’s nearly impossible to take the film seriously.
Paradoxically, however, this absurdity is at the heart of what makes the film profound. In a nutshell, The Happening depicts our impaired ability to grapple with that which fails to make logical, rational sense.
The initial wave of mass suicides is repeatedly referred to in the film as “the event.” In Philosophy and the Event, Alain Badiou defines an event as something that transforms what was declared to be impossible into a possibility. Killer plants are the most obvious referent for the previously-unthinkable-possibility in the film, but Badiou’s concept of the event also cashes out in the film’s other minor events and themes. For example, from an evolutionary-biology standpoint, suicide is an unthinkable possibility—as complex organisms imbued with strong instincts of self-preservation, it makes no rational sense. Likewise in matters of love, being faced with an opportunity to cheat (even if it’s just eating tiramisu with Joey from work) is an event that brings to light a possibility that was always already there within the context of a monogamous commitment, but perhaps was invisible or unthinkable before it actually happened.
Construed in these terms, the event bears a resemblance to a category of the monstrous. According to Derrida,
A monster is also that which appears for the first time and, consequently, is not yet recognized. A monster is a species for which we do not yet have a name, which does not mean that the species is abnormal, namely, the composition or hybridization of already known species. Simply . . . it shows itself in something that is not yet shown and that therefore looks like a hallucination, it strikes the eye, it frightens precisely because no anticipation had prepared one to identify this figure.
As Derrida’s formulation implies, the reason why a monster cannot initially be understood is because its very existence either runs counter to accepted order (e.g., scientific, mathematical, religious) or lies outside available discourses of meaning. So if the event signals something unexpected, it is precisely because it is beyond our horizon of what is possible, reasonable, or sensible to expect. In other words, current paradigms of sense and sensibility foreclose the possibility of the event, which is why we do not expect it.
For this and other reasons, The Happening strikes me as a decidedly modern nightmare. To explain what I mean by that, it is necessary to give an idea of what I mean by “modern.” Modernity was shaped by the ideals of the Enlightenment. These include the belief in the preeminence of the faculty of reason in human beings; moral autonomy and political individualism over and against subservience to orthodox religious and imperial doctrines; and the expanding influence of reductive naturalism in the sciences as the basis for the discovery of new knowledge. Further, the notion of progress was also central to Enlightenment thinking, specifically in the form of a historical narrative of the development of Western society. Within this teleological conception of time and history, Enlightenment thinkers saw themselves as actively taking part in the transformation of humanity from its primitive origins to a more advanced state. This transformation in part entailed the dispelling of traditional, faith- and myth-based, or superstitious, supernatural beliefs, as most European societies began to follow the path of secularism and disenchantment that sociologist Max Weber calls “rationalization.”
However, modernity’s realization of Enlightenment ideals gave rise to its own internal conflicts and dissonances. For one, the modern obsession with its own self-perceived newness—that is, with instantiating a complete and desired break from the outdated traditions, beliefs, and customs of the past—is directly at odds with its enmeshment in a teleological narrative of historical progress. We can also question whether the Enlightenment’s ideological transformation constituted a true replacement of former values in favor of new ones. In their influential book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer, for instance, argue that Enlightenment ideals subscribe to their own myths—such as the myth of instrumental rationality—and prop up repackaged orthodoxies of technocracy and commodity-fetishism. Likewise, Nietzsche criticizes moderns for using reason and science to dethrone religious and spiritual authority only to replace them with similarly metaphysically groundless notions of absolute truth. And although modernization brought about a vast increase in the amount and depth of specialized knowledge, the modern age struggled to integrate the fruits of this knowledge into the service of practical concerns of everyday life. On this point, Adorno, in Negative Dialectics, highlights the irony with which modern societies, developed from the foundational principles of the Enlightenment, actually shift away from their humanist tenets toward alienation and dehumanization: “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant.”
According to film scholar Robin Wood, horror films often represent collective cultural and societal nightmares, informed by the desires, anxieties, and fears which a given culture or society dictates must be repressed: “One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its re-emergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror.” Thus, I offer that The Happening represents, in return of the repressed fashion, the above-mentioned conflicts that riddle the modern project.
First, it distorts the modern desire for radical renewal. In the words of Paul de Man, “Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a true departure.” The Happening presents this desire to wipe out the past in the form of the nightmarish event, the mass self-extinctions that root all attention firmly to the present moment and a new, albeit uncertain, future. The gerund in the film’s title (“happening”) reinforces the focus on what is present, current, trendy—which is to say, synonymous with “modern.” And yet, answering this modern desire to break with the past and hurtle toward the proverbial “end of history,” the film implores us to be careful what we wish for.
Second, it dramatizes the failure of the modern project to use reason and science to conquer nature and the unknown. Two of the main characters are a science teacher (Wahlberg) and a math teacher (Leguizamo). Both science and mathematics are ways of transforming the world’s chaos into coherent order and logical principles. As such, they represent the achievements of the Enlightenment’s Scientific Revolution, providing comfort and security in the face of the unknown. Both characters, however, act like total idiots. The probability theorist goes on a surefire suicide mission to find his (probably already dead) wife, and the scientist turns into a foolhardy Romantic caricature. For all their rational, analytical prowess, both characters are unraveled by forces (like love) that are monstrously unquantifiable. The film suggests that despite modernity’s best efforts, something is always remaindered in the process of scientific inquiry, data collection, and categorization, for which viable knowledge and rationalization cannot account.
After the event, Badiou says, begins the labor of its truth process—the work we must do to come to terms with, understand, communicate, and incorporate it into our existing structures of meaning. Granted, by the end of the film, the truth we take away is something to the tune of “Plants! Killer plants!” But even so, this is still presented as just a hypothesis, an attempt to explain something that is a long way away from being completely understood. In the end, we are still haunted by the incomprehensibility of forces within everyday life that manifest sporadically around us.
Near the beginning and the end of the film, one line is repeated verbatim: the happening is described as “an act of nature, and we’ll never fully understand it.” When our attempts to rationalize, codify, and make sense of insensible forces fail, one remaining option is to repeat the absurdity. If we cannot alleviate our anxiety with understanding, then we can at least take comfort in the familiarity of repetition.
This is where I think The Happening has something to offer us in our current crisis. With all our “good sense,” we are hardly better at operating rationally to stop the spread of a global pandemic, handling senseless violence, understanding what motivates people to vote against their own interests, or acknowledging our current ties to historical legacies of exploitation. It is a warning not to make ourselves comfortable by perpetuating the absurdity of the insensibility all around us.
Katherine Kurtz is a horror enthusiast and philosophy doctoral candidate at Villanova University. She is writing a dissertation on monstrosity as it intersects with aesthetics, feminist theory, and popular culture.
