M. Night Shyamalan’s latest moral distraction
The strikingly timely pop-song lyric “You should tell little kids they live in hell now” applies to M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, a pop-concert/serial-killer hybrid. The lyric’s assessment of our current cultural mess comes from Morrissey’s as yet unreleased album Bonfire of Teenagers. Live concert performances of the title song and others have been available on YouTube for more than a year, and their resonance undercuts Trap’s exploitation of the zeitgeist.
Trap posits an inane world in which firefighter Cooper (Josh Harnett) escorts his middle-school-age daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert for Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) where federal agents improbably set up a sting operation to catch a serial killer known as “The Butcher.” It’s typical of Shyamalan’s past illogical nonsense (The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village, Unbreakable) in which reflections of the real world are merely an excuse for rattling current superstitions.
Shyamalan has described Trap as ensuing from the question “What if The Silence of the Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?” That dreadful notion seems even more crass following the recent terrorist threats to Swift’s European tour. Thankfully, Morrissey’s song contradicts both Shyamalan’s and Swift’s questionable commitment to escapism.
While Shyamalan features his daughter Saleka as the concert’s pop star performing her own songs, his narcissism matches Swift’s vengeful diaristic noodlings — nepo baby Saleka emulates the ego of the world’s most pampered feminist. Stadium fans mimic the robotic, mesmerized sing-alongs of Swifties, proof of pop’s dulling, conformist influence. Shyamalan misses the basic fact that it’s not fathers but mothers who are more likely to accompany their daughters to Swift’s sermons and nod along approvingly — or that the inherent threat in much Millennial pop culture lies in the dismantling of family and social virtues.
Morrissey keyed in on such tragedy when he based “Bonfire of Teenagers” on the May 22, 2017, bombing of the Manchester Arena by Islamic terrorist Salman Abedi at an Ariana Grande concert. Abedi killed 23 people, but Shyamalan takes a slam at the suburban nuclear family through Harnett’s criminally insane patriarch — an early plot giveaway, saving a later, ludicrous Shyamalan trick ending.
Shyamalan plays us cheap, but Morrissey’s livid, lyrical response to these times comes through in the lines “And the silly people sing ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’/ I assure you I will look back in anger till the day I die.” Where Shyamalan dillydallies, Morrissey provokes, describing the horror of innocent teen death: “Oh, you should’ve seen her leave for the arena / Only to be vapourized / Vapourized.” The final word refers to what Morrissey has called “England’s 9/11.” The closing line, “Go easy on the killer,” disdains the excuse-making of “Islamophobe” liberals.
Shyamalan is incapable of cinema that is both intellectually stimulating and a cultural critique. The many scenes of Saleka performing tell us less than Brady Corbet’s audacious, probing Vox Lux, a great pop-star/serial-killer hybrid. But Shyamalan has bought into today’s appalling celebrity machinery, the same disingenuous propaganda that makes critics and skeptics suspect that the Taylor Swift phenomenon might be a CIA psyop.
His concert scenes lack the spectatorial genius — the total illumination of every detail and its meaning — in Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes. De Palma examined the quagmire of entertainment and politics, ambition and ethics and treachery in a world still haunted by the reality of political assassination yet hidden by propaganda and celebrity fever.
There are many forces aligned against the citizenry — from Taylor Swift to D.C.’s Kalorama to the J6 Select Committee to the George Soros–sponsored district attorneys across the nation, all deserving satire or condemnatory rejection. (Morrissey satirized this “hell” in the Bonfire track “Sure Enough, the Telephone Rings.”) Brady Corbet got near revelation; Shyamalan is not even close.
When Capitol Records executive Michelle Jubelirer reacted to Morrissey’s social critique and, through an excess of left-wing caution, refused to release Bonfire of Teenagers, Morrissey observed, “This news is perfectly in keeping with the galvanic horror of 2020. We would be critically insane to expect anything positive.” Whether he meant his record-industry woes, Covid lockdowns, or the suppression of comment on America’s stolen election, that realization of horror is exactly what Trap is designed to distract us from.
