Children of Night.

Man may be in doubt whether to deem himself man or beast, but much of pop culture seems to have figured him -- or at least the male half -- out once and for all. From Maxim magazine to television's The Man Show, adult men are typically portrayed as animals who desire little more than food, sleep, and sex. The "stud," in reality the most pitiable of beasts, has become the archetype of masculinity. Strangely, both conservatives and feminists tend to accept this understanding, and differ only to the extent that they think maleness can be overcome. Feminists recommend extinction, arguing that men should become just like women, whereas conservatives favor domestication, arguing that men need incentives, lacking in an era of sexual latitudinarianism, to provide comfort and protection. Neither side considers that perhaps it is not maleness that is the problem, but its own crude notion of what maleness is.

Happily, however, pop culture sometimes matures faster than the intellectuals. M. Night Shyamalan's recent trio of films (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs), whose box-office success has earned him the honorific "The Next Spielberg," depict men as neither prisoners of marriage and family nor satisfied animals unperturbed by love, death, God, or doubts about who they are. According to Shyamalan, men are very different -- and more noble -- creatures than many today would have us believe.

Perhaps, then, it is necessary that his movies be so unabashedly, even determinedly, lowbrow. They have none of the rhetorical smirks by which screenwriters signal to their fellow Ivy League graduates that, of course, nobody really believes this stuff, before delivering the block- bluster entertainment that the audience expects. The 1990s saw the creation of a new cultural category -- deliberate camp -- as if excellence were neither possible nor, ultimately, desirable. In quiet rebuke of this trend (in some ways, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable were harbingers of the post-9/11 consciousness), each of Shyamalan's movies visits the tropes of popular mythology without embarrassment. The Sixth Sense is about, well, ghosts, who act just as we imagine they do, sometimes leaping out and scaring us, restless and angry but not really meaning any harm. Unbreakable tells the story of two comic-book characters, a hero and villain with complementary super-powers and weaknesses. Signs depicts aliens, naked green humanoids that try to take over Earth and harvest its inhabitants. Even Shyamalan's favorite cinematic devices, such as not showing the monsters on screen until the end, are comfortably routine (while still making our frightened imaginations run amok). He makes movies rather than films, entertainment rather than art, and, just in case anyone misses the point, he names Jaws and Star Wars in interviews as his favorite movies.

This attachment to pop culture is not mere caprice, nor even in the spirit of epater les intellectuels (although, having studied film at New York University, Shyamalan surely knows something about what nettles les intellectuels most). Rather, Shyamalan has recognized that we express our deepest longings through the mythopoetic impulse. As one of the characters in Unbreakable says of comic books, "I believe that [they] are a form of history that someone, somewhere felt or experienced [before] those experiences or history got chewed up in the commercial machine, got jazzed up, made titillating for the sale rack." While some conservatives have, often quixotically, turned to high culture to preserve and revitalize civilization, Shyamalan has turned instead to popular storytelling; he is Alexandre Dumas to their Matthew Arnold. Mindful that Arnold saw high culture in part as a substitute for religion, we might wonder whether Shyamalan has the better of the argument.

Indeed, as many commentators have noticed, Shyamalan's movies treat religion with a sympathy rarely seen in Hollywood. To be sure, they do not betray intimate familiarity with any particular religion, nor do they illustrate elaborate theological truths. Religion nevertheless remains central to Shyamalan's storytelling. In The Sixth Sense, a child psychiatrist has a patient who prays "De profundis clamo Domine" (Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord) through his toy figurines; only when the hero sees that he cannot himself save the child -- so that the child was correct to cry to God rather than man -- does he realize who he is. In Unbreakable, a mother's prophecy that "God has a plan for everyone" turns out to be correct: Her son and his physical and moral opposite become engaged in a Manichaean struggle of good against evil. In Signs, Shyamalan's most explicitly theological movie, an Episcopal priest, after cursing God for allowing his wife to die in a car accident, returns to his calling when he witnesses the reality of Providence. Even the thrills that Shyamalan so expertly produces have a religious significance. The philosopher Rudolph Otto once famously identified "the idea of the holy" with the experience of terror, the mysterium tremendum that tells us that something is out there. Shyamalan sets himself apart by taking that experience seriously enough to speculate as to what exactly that something is. Although his suggestions turn out to be more pagan than Christian, religious believers have responded enthusiastically to Shyamalan's movies because they recognize, as he does, that the truth about who we are is far stranger than what those who would confine us to this small patch of earth are able to imagine.

The central theme, however, of Shyamalan's movies is not so much what this strange truth is (the answers that they provide are, quite obviously, unsatisfactory) but what to do with that truth once we find it. In each of them an encounter with a child precipitates the hero's epiphany. For Shyamalan, as for Wordsworth, the child is father of the man. Unlike Wordsworth, however, Shyamalan does not see children as symbols of natural innocence; rather, their superior insight torments them and makes them long for the artificial innocence of adulthood. Children know more than the adults because they can imagine more, but they do not have the understanding with which to deal with it. Only when the adult male hero also knows the strange and sometimes terrible truth can the children be delivered from their distress.

Shyamalan shows, in other words, how only with the characteristically male virtues can we cope with the knowledge of who we are. One of these virtues is courage. Children in Shyamalan's films, knowing the truth, become afraid and seek to hide from it, whereas men, equally afraid, can stand up to it. In Signs, the hero learns that an alien, the avatar of his family's fears, is locked up in the pantry. Rather than leave (as most others, including those in the audience, would rather do), he faces the panting, pacing enemy before him and learns how to defeat him. Another virtue is loyalty: Shyamalan's heroes do not flee from their station, but willingly assume duties they may not have anticipated. In The Sixth Sense, for example, the hero teaches the child that he must serve others in order to conquer his fears; in Unbreakable, the hero can tell his son but not his wife of his powers because only his son would understand the duties he must perform. The justice of Oedipus, another mythical hero, may have undone him, but Shyamalan's men are vindicated by their virtues.

In this respect, his movies turn out to be unwittingly Christian. Ezra Pound once described Christ as a "mate of the wind and sea," a flinty savior unafraid to drive men out of his house, thereby reminding us that the Christian savior is decidedly masculine. In Shyamalan's movies, as in the Gospels, with great strength comes not brutishness but responsibility to serve and protect others, and, as in the Gospels, this theme makes for not only great storytelling but profound truth. In telling the story once more, Shyamalan has done all culture -- high and low -- a great service.