The House with the Swing

There is yet another seemingly unconnected scene in this movie where Night takes up on unfinished business against the feminists who gradually took over the education system starting 1970, as they also took over the "Nuclear Family" as "ordered" by Germaine Greer in her Bible to the Sisterhood in 1970, The Female Eunuch.

We see he gives our couple an "issue" of "responsibility" and I will cover that in detail in another post, but here he returns to the poet Robert Frost, whose "Waspish" has been written on the blackboard by Elliot to effectively explain the whole basis of the movie.  But here it is Frost's more famous poem Birches.

To get the vibes, it goes like this

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

[ ... ]

I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. 

So Night invents 2 boys that are the exact opposite of Frost's boy.  They are overweight from lack of exercise and as products of their education start to lecture Elliot on how a man "must take responsibility in marriage", this being one of the main dogmas of the Sisterhood, so the stage is set, but here is the closing of the poem.

I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Once at the house Alma asks what sort of tree it is and Elliot says he thinks a Maple, so we get the clue right there that this tree is important, albeit for practical purposes the tree must have horizontal branches so a Maple is substituted and an actual swing is used instead of a boy "swinging a Birch".  Next clue is a cracking noise and the question is asked of is it safe to swing, and of course the boys have ignored the swing and it is the girl who is doing the swinging.

The boys go to the windows and start to get obnoxious, yelling out "pussy", which is exactly as Night has created them, ie like the Nerds who can't get girlfriends he creates in Signs.  And for their sins he has them shot, and you will note these are the only characters who don't suicide [or be part of a suicide as with Jeep].

We are left with the question of just who was it inside who did the shooting and I would be betting on Robert Frost [his ghost] getting his revenge for just how far the American Beauty has departed from the America he left in the 1960s, probably taking back his words of  "That would be good both going and coming back".

I figure if he was to be plonked back down in the American Beauty of 2001 [same as Dave in 2001 A Space Odyssey] he would have changed his mind on  "Earth's the right place for love"

The Theme

As mentioned in the Summary, this movie takes the Unknown Unknowns mantra of Rumsfeld HAL [with GW Bush as the Monolith] and has a bit of fun with it by putting J Doe in the path of TERROR [aka Horror].  Or as FF Coppola has Kurtz say in Apocalypse Now "Horror has a face and you must make friends with horror or it will become your enemy".

Here is Otto's Notebook entry on Unknown Unknowns

As the world tried to point out to J Doe with War in Iraq, it is totally dumb to start a war based on something you "don't know that you don't know", but if J Doe WANTS a war then HAL will always GIVE him a war, despite his usual demands [as we see in this movie] that he MUST be given an explanation for everything [especially if it is making you kill yourself].

So first bit of cunning of M Night S is the top text on blackboard, ie about bees and "attributed to Einstein", to confuse it with the other better known [and more applicable] "attributed to Einstein" which is:

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Then, under the bees quote is the APPLICABLE quote for the movie, but teacher never gets to it as the PROBLEM starts before the explanation.  That quote is:

"On glossy wires artistically bent,
He draws himself up to his full extent,
His natty wings with self-assurance perk.
His stinging quarters menacingly work.
Poor egotist, he has no way of knowing
But he's as good as anybody going."

We are then shown how J Doe the egotist reacts [badly] once things go wrong, ending up with an Einstein facsimile on TV warning that J Doe has been GIVEN  a warning but TV anchor convinces J Doe it is "business as normal"

Summary

The Happening is yet another movie by M Night S that attempts to get J Doe to come out of his Apathy Closet and THINK about things he SHOULD be thinking about [and not about how well his IPad flips from portrait to landscape mode].  That is to say we are talking to Mick Jagger Syndrome

In The Happening M Night S is examining what Americans refer to as TEOTWAWKI and the psychology that goes with all "over-prepping about Unknown Unknowns" on the one hand or "denial" on the other.  So he presents a scenario where the Earth is revolting [via the plants in a "Day of the Triffids" type scenario] and trying to save itself by taking action.

As a shock tactic to try to break J Doe out of his apathy he "majorly" speeds the whole deal up so that "cause and effect" events that might take 10 years or even 100 years to cycle, happen in an instant.

What this does is essentially replicate the "TV War" of Vietnan, or 9/11 on TV scenario where the audience is essentially looking at themselves, and wondering what they would do in that situation.  Further, he sets the stage of this whole Happening being a Science Experiment by the clever juxtaposition of the hero from classroom teacher to "up to his ears in it".

I will explain my own thoughts on these many clever sequences in individual posts.