It makes sense

Does it really matter? He has come so far with his first major movie, and The Sixth Sense is in formidable company. A lesser hit at the box office, the Kevin Spacey starrer American Beauty, a family drama from the American suburbia, is, going by pre-Oscar forecasts, competing with the critically acclaimed Al Pacino-starrer The Insider, an expose of establishment corruption set in the murky arena of tobacco industry, for the most glittering of statuettes on the D Night at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. But the company he keeps itself is an honour for a first-timer like Shyamalan. He is competing with directors like Michael Mann of The Last of the Mohicans and Heat, a filmmaker of spectacular sophistication. True, the Academy has a special fondness for period pieces and movies like The Silence of the Lambs make it only once in a while on the big night. Also true, the academy has a special fondness for, to borrow a famous critical judgment, the “shallow masterpiece”.

The fundamental truth is that Oscar, Hollywood’s Nobel, is the paramount prize in pop culture, which defies borders and national paranoia. No night out there without the American sense in the market. So M. Night Shyamalan is worth celebrating. Indians are inclined to celebrate him for that two words which protect his middle name, for his Indian origin. But Shyamalan is an American boy made in America, made by America. We think the greatest achievement is when the filmmaker graduates from Bombay to Beverly Hills.

Shyamalan is not an ethnically transplanted success. He is an insider in his cinematic education, in his aesthetics. His nights are darker in Philadelphia. Still, we are proud to claim him. Indian words are a rage in the international lit mart. Let the Indian images also spread, even if that Indian, as in the case of M. Night Shyamalan, is purely biological and ancestral. In The Sixth Sense night has no nationality, but the ghost has.