I must admit, before I started this course, I was not entirely convinced that films had narrators. Obviously, they have a narrative, but I wasn’t convinced that a narration requires a narrator. It seemed like a literary concept that was being tacked onto a medium where it didn’t necessarily apply. Of course, there were times when a film had a very definite narrator, with a character talking in voice over or to the camera. But was the way that a film shot and arranged also the work of a narrator. I would have said no.

The further we go in this course, however, the more I find that notion challenged. I must concede that there is a narrator. Like most books, the average film narrator is unobtrusive, operating through conventional mise en scene and editing styles to express the story as simply and clearly as possible. What we have in The Sixth Sense, on the other hand, seems to be one of the best examples of an unreliable film-as-narrator I can think of.

This is obviously what Lavik is talking about in his article, although I do not believe he ever goes so far as to evoke the idea of an unreliable narrator. As he sees it, it is a well-crafted movie designed to conceal it’s twist. But I wonder if it’s necessarily narrating from the perspective of someone trying to play-up the twist. I think a strong argument could be made that the film’s narration strongly allies itself with Malcolm, and that the parts we don’t notice are because he doesn’t notice them. I might be overanalyzing things though.

Incidentally, I noticed that Lavik points out that in certain respects the fabula does not hold up, because when you really think about it, how could Malcolm have not noticed no one was talking to him, or that he couldn’t move chairs. I feel like that is addressed, somewhat cryptically. I noticed that during the dinner scene, which I suspect everyone who’s ever seen the movie more than once focuses intently on, Malcolm begins by saying that lately he can’t keep track of time. I think this might be a clue that Malcolm is not necessarily there all the time. Given his rather fantastical nature as a ghost, it doesn’t seem so preposterous to suppose that Lavik is making a mistake in assuming that Malcolm exists when we see don’t see him. I feel like that sort of explanation covers up a good number of potential plotholes (for example: how does he get to the basement, if he can’t even open the door? Maybe he just ends up down there.)

Speaking of assumptions, I’d also like to discuss the paratext a little. I would say that probably among most movies released in the last few years, this is probably the most notorious for its twist. At this point, it would probably be nigh impossible to see this movie without knowing the critical detail that Malcolm is dead. I was watching this with my friend Stefan, who had never seen the film before, but knew about the twist. He was in fact rather obnoxious about pointing out all the ways it is obvious that Malcolm is a ghost.

While discussing the film with him, I asked him about other twists he knew about, particularly ones he had seen coming. The most stunning to me was that he claimed he had seen the ending of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd coming. For anyone unfamiliar with that book, it contains perhaps the biggest use (abuse?) of the unreliable narrator: in the final chapters, the narrator who has been chronicling the murder investigation is revealed to be the actual murderer, having elided a couple important details while remaining truthful. The idea of the narrator being the perp seems so out of the realm of possibility that I am amazed that Stefan was able to even suspect him. There are certain assumptions one takes into a film (or a book), and although Stefan insists he probably would’ve seen it coming, I suspect that assuming that the main character is alive is deeply ingrained enough that the twist would’ve worked for him.

Which brings me back to him watching the film. He just could not get past the fact that Malcolm is dead. And although that information was obviously in my mind, and colored my reviewing of the movie, I was also able to watch the movie and appreciate the inaccurate fabula on its own terms. I never forgot that he was dead, but there were still certain baseline assumptions I couldn’t override. For example, when I saw the scene where Malcolm breaks a window at his wife’s store, I remember scoffing a little at how extremely unsubtle he was in his retreat. It was only a couple hours lately, while mulling the movie over, that I realized that, even though I knew he was a ghost, I was not treating him as such, and went on assuming that people would have seen him, even though obviously they did not.