Trick or treat? `Sightings' & other special issues. (Media).

What is it with those amber waves of grain? Three months after M. Night Shyamalan's Signs wrung a parable of doubt and faith from a cornstalk-spiked scenario, the Showtime Network is airing Sightings: Heartland Ghost, a similarly themed movie that begins with a brooding close-up of wheat. A clunky tale about a lapsed Catholic TV producer whose encounter with a haunted house weans him from his materialist worldview, Sightings (airing October 27 and 30, in time for Halloween) is as hollow as a jack-o'-lantern when it comes to artistic merit. Nevertheless, by virtue of its subject matter, it makes an interesting coda to the musings about belief and cynicism that (to indulge in a pun) cropped up in the culture during and after the launch of the fabulously popular Signs.

Based, according to Showtime, on real events, Sightings spins out the story of a young family who realize their Victorian house in small-town Kansas is haunted by a ghost. Room temperatures plunge; the couple finds their son's teddy bears stationed in a sinister Stonehenge-style circle on the nursery floor; and--in a scene that's perhaps the highlight of the show--a guest is attacked by a poltergeist-propelled stuffed duck.

Despite the obvious danger of undermining their real-estate investment, the house owners call in a documentary crew from a TV show that reports on the paranormal. Heading up this technologically savvy team is Derek Mulroy (Beau Bridges), a jaded, hyper-rationalist producer who feuds with his more open-minded field director (Nia Long) in spates of leaden persiflage. "That's the problem with you lapsed Catholics," she bristles at him at one point, "You throw the mystery and wonder out with the holy water."

As absurd as the stilted dialogue--the scriptwriters have even stooped to the line "Seeing is believing!"--are the visual sequences that convey reality from the point of view of the ghost: periodically, while the soundtrack lurches into an eerie screech or rumble, woozy shots of an elastic pale-blueness fill the screen. Evidently, the supernatural dimension resembles a cross between a rubber band and a bottle of Windex.

Painful as such moments are, they may profit the film buff who saw Signs, or Shyamalan's acclaimed breakout movie The Sixth Sense, since their very shoddiness emphasizes the effectiveness of that director's craft. Sightings over-explicates its story's context: where one creepy ghost's-eye-view shot would do, director Brian Trenchard-Smith (whose credits include the film An American Leprechaun in Vegas) supplies a half dozen. What makes Shyamalan's movies spooky--and what made the astonishing narrative gimmick in The Sixth Sense possible--is his parsimony with frames of reference. Visually, his camera often maintains a tight focus that gives viewers no chance to gain their bearings--you're never sure what's lurking off to the side or behind you. And narratively, the films can dwell so intently on their protagonists as to convey no reassuring testimony to a broader reality beyond the story, no comforting world-as-we-know-it.

A media development that did provide some context for Signs, as last summer drew to a close, was the August 26-September 2 U.S. News & World Report, a special double issue on hoaxes. Timed to follow the release of Shyamalan's movie, and featuring a 1999 British crop circle on its cover, the issue might have served as a textbook example of how entertaining a special-themed magazine can be. Arguably, the joy of a magazine lies in miscellany; drifting from cover to cover, from a book review to a news story, to a freewheeling think piece, say, a reader has a chance to delight in the diversity of existence. Theme issues, by contrast, can feel portentous and intimidating--every year the New Yorker fashion issue casts a pall over my existence--and while the slight tingle of excitement they generate may delight advertisers, theme-issues can furnish hours of misery to editors, who feel pressured to supply comprehensiveness and perspective.

Whether or not such unhappiness plagued the folks at U.S. News, they succeeded in producing a diverting smorgasbord of articles, complemented with intriguing sidebars and historical photos and illustrations, profiling hoaxes through the ages. After reading about the original Ponzi scheme, the philosopher's stone, nineteenth-century libel about freemasons, the forged Hitler diaries, and other scams, one was left marveling at the scope of human determination and ingenuity--the kind of ingenuity and willpower that led a duo of British pranksters to spend years flattening grain into eerie-looking crop circles.

Given the harm that many of these hoaxes inflicted on the gullible public, the reader might not have felt quite like echoing a relevant maxim from another recent cultural artifact about belief and unbelief: Galileo Galilei, the new opera by composer Philip Glass, with libretto by Mary Zimmerman, Glass and Arnold Weinstein. "Man's mind, with all its inventions, must delight the mind of God," opined one of the characters in the opera, which played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in early October. Certainly many of the hoaxes described in U.S. News are undelightful. But, reading about the inventions of hoaxers did leave one with a certain wonderment that colors a subsequent immersion in Showtime's Sightings.

Perhaps more awe-inspiring than the dorky ghost story (even if it's true), are all the man-made inventions and natural occurrences surrounding this cable-channel viewing experience: the fact that the dorky ghost story can bounce up to a satellite and down to my television set; or that an e-mail sent by the Showtime publicist will arrive on my computer screen; or that my eyes can assemble fragmentary images into a moving picture. And, while we're at it, let's not forget to admire the fact that the writers of Sightings managed to smuggle the word glossolalia into the script.

It's not all that far from appreciation of this business-as-usual to the sentiment expressed in that old-chestnut Hamlet quote: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

And, by the way, Horatio: what are you doing in that wheat field?