QAA Podcast - Premium Episode 123: Signs (Movie Night) Sample

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

M. Night Shyamalan teams up with Mel Gibson to destroy our podcast with his 2002 alien invasion movie 'Signs'. Jake, Liv, Travis & Julian hold on for dear life as torrents of holy water threaten to capsize the ship. Thanks for supporting us on patreon! Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: http://qanonanonymous.com Episode music by Event Cloak (http://eventcloak.bandcamp.com)

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listener to Premium Chapter 123 of the Q&Nan anonymous podcast, the QAA Movie Night Signs episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rockatansky, Liv Egar, Julian Field, and Travis View.

I'm half Hollywood anti-Semite and half country preacher, so I like my hillbilly elegies with a serving of crop circles. This week, we're tackling another very Jake movie from 2002, Signs featuring Mel Gibson. It involves small-town simpletons, dollar bin aliens, and the brutal murder of an innocent German shepherd at the hands of a culkin spawn. Shot in the age of 35-millimeter film, it looks refreshingly good for a movie we'd cover, and paints a parochial portrait of small-town America with a healthy dollop of condescending stereotypes thrown in for good measure.

Plus, it's really fucking pilled. Signs. Signs was released in 2002 by Touchstone Pictures, and the film was written, directed, and produced by M. Knight-Sharmelon. For those unfamiliar with the name, he was my generation's Alfred Hitchcock, sort of, for a while. What? That's...

Oh, my God. I don't know what that one. Well, that's what he was billed as. You're going to get a fucking roosteroony tonight. You're fine. Oh, boy. Whether it's true. I'm going to hate you alive.

Whether you think it's true or not, the mainstream press and entertainment, you know, world of critics did label him that after his first couple pictures, the most popular of which is the sixth sense. I'm going to be sure. Julian, I can't use the echo. We're actually recording an episode. Yeah, that's unfair to me. who stayed up till 3 a.m. watching this movie twice, which would probably be my 20th time watching it. Fine, fine, fine, fine.

Signs is Chamalon's fifth film and stars Mel Gibson, an up-and-coming Joaquin Phoenix, and newcomer child actors Abigail Breslin and Rory Culkin, both who would go on to be very successful actors. The film was shot almost entirely in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It cost $72 million to make and did a whopping $408 million box office gross

with both domestic and international markets. Interestingly, the film is also produced by Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, the team behind Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas's most iconic films, Indiana Jones, Poltergeist. The list goes on. The premise of signs is pretty straightforward.

A retired Episcopalian preacher, Graham Hess, fresh off the tragedy of losing his wife six months prior in a car accident, lives in a big farmhouse with his two children, and a washed-up baseball star brother who moved in to help out after Graham's wife was killed. Early on in the film, enormous crop circles appear embedded in the cornstalks of the family's farm.

A debate begins to swirl around the characters. Are the signs just somebody playing pranks? Or do they indicate something more paranormal? We watch as the phenomenon becomes worldwide and see how each of the characters wrestle with the idea of faith, family, and mortality. On a different level, I believe the film is a good allegory. for how different people go down the rabbit hole. And as I watched it this most recent time, I started to see parallels between the work we do on the podcast

and the actions of each of the characters in the film. As always, I've brought what I believe are the handful of most important and interesting scenes from the film, which will go through chronologically and analyze in both the context of screenwriting at large, filmmaking, as well as how they relate to conspiracy theories and those who become radicalized by them. But before we get into all that, How did you all like the movie?

I mean, he was well shot. It's like, I know. It was kind of, I mean, the whole premise is weirdly absurd. I just don't like the idea of like the thing that sort of this idea that affects the movie, which is that everything that happens in your life has this very specific special meaning. And you have to look for the signs to decode them. Julian? The movie's best understood as a movie about revelations, a psychotic.

Christian fever dream, where at the last minute, people worried that Shaman and Gibson were going over the cliff. We're like, what if we replaced the Jewish people with aliens? Now, Liv, you'd never seen the movie before, right? No, this is my first watch of the film. What were your initial takeaways? Going into it, I was assuming, for some reason I had thought that like whether there were aliens was ambiguous in the film. Okay. And that it was like, you only get brief sightings, is it real? But no, it, it is far more pilled than I had expected it to be.

I mean, it really, it tries to say something, I think, profound about like how people relate to conspiracy theories and the end of the world's, you know, this sort of sociological, but it just is entirely unable to do so. It just very much so falls flat on its face. and just becomes pilled, where it's like, no, the only way that we're going to depict this is all of the bakes become real. Right. Yeah. The majority of the movie is just basically one of those really cheap kind of hallmark Christian movies where you debate faith, except in this case, it doesn't even make sense because they, the aliens arrive, and everyone knows they're here, and you can see them in the sky, and it's pretty much straightforward.

So there's no understand, there's no need for faith in that entire mechanism. But they insist on grafting it on by being like, well, it's probably the end of the world. And then you can see these endless and very boring conversations straight out of, like I said, a Hallmark Christian movie about faith. And do you believe in it or not? Except in the end, it was faith in like the placement of a glass of water and a baseball bat being at the right place at the right time on a wall. It was profoundly scrambled on an ideological level, but also on a basic narrative level.

And just an awful twist, terrible twist. It turns out that they didn't realize they were allergic to water. They invaded a planet, 70% of the surface was water. They were like, fuck. He's stupid as motherfuckers. With all of our technology, we didn't think this through. one of the most basic chemical compositions in the universe

but what if the cornfields were like catnip and they were just so fucking horny they were just like oh god there's so much of it look at all the subsidy created corn my lord I need to flatten Mel Gibson's farm yeah well speaking on the record I hate all three of you because I like this film quite a bit

and I will remind everybody that this is sort of what M. Knight was famous for even in his first movie that That the film has clues, codes to bake, so that by the time you reach the twist, if you had been paying proper attention, the ending was right in front of your eyes all along. Unless you were a young Jake Rockatansky in the theater viewing The Sixth Sense with his father, who turned to me after five minutes into the film and said, Bruce Willis is a ghost. And ruined the shit for me. No way. Because he was able to see what many thought was a pretty amazing twist.

Just five minutes into the movie. I accidentally did that to my parents because they were watching it. This was like two years ago, so I assumed it was like a rewatch. I'm like, isn't it crazy that he's dead? They're like, what? What? Impossible. But that one, the twist there is more interesting.

Yeah, way more. What is the reveal here exactly, Jake? Like, what are the things you're looking out for? In one sentence, give me the awesome, beautiful reveal that you're looking for signs of. Well, the reveal, I mean, The reveal at the end of the movie is things that you believe are sort of innocuous, unimportant, mundane qualities of life. You know, weird habits by the younger girl, you know, intense asthma, you know, in the child. You know, Merrill's failed baseball career.

You know, all of these things that are seen as, you know, maybe negatives are actually the very thing that is preparing them to save the family at the end of the film. And we'll get into all of that. So, wait, so you're saying that the law of attraction and the basic understanding of what faith is, and there are no coincidences, is as cool a reveal as this guy was dead during the whole movie. And if you paid attention. It is not as cool a reveal. I will contend that. Absolutely. I think that overall, the Sixth Sense was a much more interesting and sort of genre-bending version of your sort of average ghost movie.

And scarier, too. Liv, was there any moment in the movie that actually scared you or surprised you any of the sort of creature reveals or anything like that? Just curious. The first creature reveal where he's on, where the alien is on the house, I didn't realize that we were going to like see the alien a bunch of times. So I was like, oh, damn. I have to give it to that scene of the, that's supposedly shot in Brazil, except like one of the children translates his Portuguese for you in the video, which kind of takes you out of it. but I thought that the way they shot it and the way they had Joaquin Phoenix being like

get out of the way kids get out of the way and then they do get out of the way and suddenly you see this big foot like kind of crossing moment with the alien who looks like shit it's like they were like oh no we're going to replace the people in the green suits you know like with the actual alien later

and they're like we don't have enough money just kind of put some ornaments on the green suit the aliens don't hold up this is true and they didn't hold up even I think at the time which was one of the main complaints of the movie. I will say, though, that as personally, as somebody who spent many of his younger years eyes glued to a YouTube video purporting to show a ghost or something, it was, I loved that scene,

and I still do this idea that, you know, so many times when you're watching videos like this, nothing ever happens. And so I did like the idea that there is something there. There is something to bake. So, yeah, that's one of my favorite scenes in the movie. The main reveal in a classic genre sense is the alien. What is it? What does it want?

And all of that is like, it's like the drawing of the horse where it's like beautiful and perfectly illustrated and then becomes like a crude child's drawing. Because there is no interesting answer to that central question at all. It's not interesting why they came. Everything is instantly flipped into a Christian faith conversation, essentially, you know, from this place of real. mystery where they start to reveal the aliens, there's the idea of the frequency that reaches the sky, how the fuck does any of that jive with the actual message, which is God's real and there are no coincidences? And God wants you to defeat aliens, aliens, which means that there's other life in the galaxy. Well, how does God interact with that? He wants you to beat

him? I think it would have been more interesting because it's like, as you said, so importantly related to like faith if it was ambiguous whether the aliens were there. Yes, that could have worked a lot better. Because the point is like faith, you don't need faith to believe in the aliens. You know, they almost killed your kid. The message is, beat the alien to death with a baseball bat because God made that

baseball bat like be behind you at the right time. Well, yeah. And you trained your whole life for this by being a failed minor league batter. Oh, God. That's the real reveal of the movie. God is real, which is, I don't know, I think a little bit more significant than just we're not alone in the universe. Yeah, exactly, but what does God think of the aliens? He's just anti them? Do they have their own gods on their planet? I mean, it's just a whole new set of questions. No, no, Jesus did not

save the aliens. Jesus only saved humans. Okay, copy that. Aliens are going to hell. So the films, what you would call the inciting incident, kicks off when Morgan and Bo, Graham's children, find an enormous crop circle in the middle of their cornfield. It's strange, but Graham is certain there's a reasonable explanation from it. From the jump, it appears that Mel Gibson's character is a man who is driven purely by logic and reason, as opposed to faith. In the following scene, he calls one of his friends

to make sure it's not their troublemaking sons who tore up the field. Look, Lee, I don't even care if it was him. And you could just have a word with him and that'd be enough for me. See, it was strange. Finding the crops that way. The kids were confused by it

And I sure take the strangeness in some way If I knew it was just Lionel and the Wolfenden brothers Messing around, that's all At the movies Are you sure? All right then Thanks for your patience, Lee. Yeah, bye

So right away, you're dealing with this theme of having an easily explainable reason for something that is confusing. Graham says he won't even be mad at the Wolfenton Brothers because if he can pin it on them, that means it's something he can explain to his kids and himself. The quote, take the strangeness away. It was a line that hit me different on this viewing, knowing that that exact same desire is what drives a lot of people who fall into conspiracy theories. You know, you want an easy explanation to explain what, you know, appears to be the unexplainable.

But things instantly get more intense. One of the family's dogs becomes aggressive. The local sheriff had warned Graham about this when she came to check out his crop circle. Other animals in the area had been behaving strangely. It's the first sense we get that there is additional phenomenon appearing alongside the crop formations. Off camera, one of the dogs goes for Bo, Graham's little girl, played by Abigail Breslin. In an effort to protect her, Morgan, who's played by Rory Culkin, ends up stabbing the dog with a barbecue pitchfork, killing it. When Graham returns from showing the sheriff, who's played by Cherry Jones, the bent crops, they find both the kids kneeling over the dead dog.

This is actually a classic conservative trope. My son just killed a dog. I guess I need more faith. But it's also interesting because it is kind of a rule in films that you do not kill an animal. So to have a child actually kill their family dog, I think the filmmaker intended this to sort of raise the stakes, you know, that something must have really been wrong with that animal for the kid to, you know, brutally kill it with this barbecue pitchfork and, you know, be sitting there in front of its dead body, you know,

as he and his, you know, his little sister kind of cry over it. And if you leave faith out of it, there's a good movie to be made of the two kids seem attuned to the aliens, and Mel Gibson grows increasingly suspicious of them because, like, they murdered the dog and, like, they're very pale and weird, but that never comes to fruition. That's where I thought it was going from the first scene. They're very strange about the Crop Circle initially, but no.

But no, alas. My theory is that it's the script that's been like hacked to pieces by a million rewrites. Yeah, probably. And I don't think it had faith in it originally. It just doesn't make sense. Or it was even more full faith. It was either a movie about Revelation that got crippled in the other direction or a movie about aliens that was destroyed by faith.

Yeah, when Mel Gibson signed on, he was like, I'll only do the movie if, you know, it's about God. There was multiple times in the viewing where I asked myself that I even wrote it down as a note. Was Mel Gibson, like, involved with the script? Did he make any demands? There's an outtake where when he's fighting the alien, Gibson refers to it as Judas, actually. So that night, a young beau who is shaken up over the death of the dog is having trouble falling asleep. She's a strange little girl who has a habit of leaving half-drunken water glasses all around the house. True story, I had a roommate in college who did this, but with glasses of milk.

And we used to tell him he was like the little girl in signs. Anyway, he's now a famous stand-up comedian. Bow and Graham have a conversation that highlight the central themes of the film before we get the first real scare, when Graham sees a dark figure outside of Bo's window standing on the farmhouse roof. What are you thinking about? Why do you talk to Mom when you're by yourself? Makes me feel better. Does she ever answer back?

No. She never answers me either. Oh. What? Why don't Bridger and the Wolfing New Brothers are back? It's time for an ass weapon. This is not an intelligent way to approach this. Lee is a friend of mine.

This is his son. Yeah, we'll be doing me a favor. All right, listen. We both go outside, move around the house in opposite directions. We act crazy, insane with anger, make them crap in their pants, force them around till we meet up on the other side. Explain to act crazy. You know, cursing stuff.

Want me to curse? You don't mean it. It's just for show. What? It won't be convincing it doesn't sound natural when I curse. Just make noises then. Explain noises. Are you gonna do this or what? No, I'm not.

All right, you want them stealing something in the house next time? On the count of three. One, two, three. Ah! I'm insane with anger! We're gonna beat your ass, bitch! Again, Mel Gibson acting like he isn't very experienced with being openly enraged. Yeah. It would be extra funny, and he would have actual comedy in there if he just had Mel Gibson finally get out of the farmhouse and run all the way around just screaming the K word.

There are actually outtakes where they let him. The reason why he doesn't swear that much is because they let him off the leash. He couldn't use that footage. His character wasn't even a priest. They had to rewrite it as a priest so he would stop dropping anti-Semitic slurs. Clearly, the beginning of the scene, the conversation where, you know, she's asking, you know, why do you talk to mom? It makes me feel better, you know, is an allegory for God. You know, why does one talk to God if they do not answer back?

And you'll notice as well that even though Mel Gibson sees, you know, this kind of dark figure, you know, on the top of. the roof, it doesn't look human. He still will not give up the idea that it is, you know, Lee's son and the Wolfington brothers. And so, this is just another example of Graham, sort of

almost in willful denial of what is happening around him and on the farm. This is the story of Travis View becoming Jake Rockatansky. It really, it really is. Live as the polter guy's style girl, just very pale and looking at

TV a lot and leaving glasses around and like solving everything at the end of the movie she saves everybody I did when I was when I was younger I did only drink like half of a glass of milk and then I got bored It happens to the best of us premium episode of Q and on anonymous

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Thank you. Thanks. I love you. Jake loves you.