Signs · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The thing you carry out of Signs is a glass of water. Half-drunk, left on a windowsill. Then another on the stairs. Then a whole row of them along the kitchen counter, going stale. Bo, the little girl, won't finish a glass — the water always tastes wrong to her, contaminated by something she can't name. For most of the film this is just a tic, a piece of behavior the camera clocks and walks past. Then, in the last ten minutes, those abandoned glasses become the weapon that saves the family, and the whole movie tilts on its axis. The tic was never a tic. It was a placement. Hold that glass in your mind, because it is the key to what Shyamalan is actually building, and to why Gilles Deleuze would have known this film on sight.

Deleuze thought Hitchcock did something no one had quite done before: he folded a new kind of image into cinema, which Deleuze called the mental-image, or the relation-image. In the older grammar — the movement-image — a person sees a situation and acts on it, and the action resolves things. Hitchcock loosened that. What grips you in his films isn't a man doing something; it's a web of relations you are asked to hold in your head — who knows what, which object means what, what connects to what. The spectator stops being a watcher and becomes a third term woven into the film, the one for whom the relations exist at all. Signs is Hitchcock's open heir. The all-strings panic of James Newton Howard's score is a deliberate bow to Herrmann's Vertigo and Psycho; the motiveless siege comes straight out of The Birds. But the inheritance that matters most is structural. Shyamalan made an entire movie out of the relation-image.

Deleuze gave that image three working parts, and Signs runs on all three. A mark is an object sitting inside its ordinary set of relations — when you see this, you expect that. A demark is that object yanked out of its set: the anomaly that breaks the habit and forces you to interpret. And a symbol is the object that quietly condenses the film's whole organizing idea. Watch how cleanly the film sorts itself. The crop circles are pure demark — geometry pressed into corn, meaning nothing yet screaming to mean, an event that disrupts every habit of explanation the Hess family has. The glasses of water travel the other direction: they begin as demark (a child's strange refusal, unreadable) and end as mark, water revealed as the thing that scalds the invaders. And the baseball bat mounted on the wall — swing away — is the symbol, the single object that holds the film's entire wager: that nothing here is incidental, that placement is providence.

That wager is the film's real subject, and Shyamalan is honest enough to state it out loud. Graham Hess, the lapsed priest hollowed by his wife's death, tells his brother there are two kinds of people: those who see a sign and feel watched over, and those who see only luck and feel alone. This is what Deleuze would call a discourse-image — an image that poses a problem it cannot itself settle. Design or coincidence. The film won't tell you which until it forces the choice, and even then you can argue it cheated.

Notice, too, that almost nobody in Signs gets to act. Graham has stopped being an agent — he can't act on his grief, can't will his faith back, can't fight a global event from a Bucks County farmhouse. So he watches and listens, and the film reduces him, and us, to the same posture. The world's invasion arrives secondhand: news murmured from a television in another room, headlights crossing a field, a baby monitor crackling with alien chatter, footsteps walking the roof above the ceiling. These are what Deleuze called opsigns and sonsigns — pure optical and sound situations where looking and hearing are all that's left, with no action available. Shyamalan's signature move is to swap a sound in for an image and let your imagination render the worst of it. The terror is auditory because the family are seers, not doers. And the invasion itself stays an absolute out-of-field — a global catastrophe felt entirely through the keyhole of one farm, present everywhere, locatable in no frame.

What did this do to the storytelling? It made the relation-image into plot. Signs is a machine for deferring meaning and then snapping it shut — a structure where every charged object (the inhaler, the kitchen knife, the half-glasses) is held in reserve until the retrospective reveal recasts the lot as design. That is also exactly the charge against it. When every object is a loaded mark, the world can start to feel authored, rigged, a little airless — and the long argument over Shyamalan, discipline versus contrivance, is really an argument about the relation-image pushed to its limit. The risk of a film made entirely of signs is that you stop feeling a world and start feeling a hand.

The lineage is precise. From The Birds, the attack that is never rationalized — Signs keeps the alien meaningless as an event while making it meaningful as a sign, which is the whole trick. From The War of the Worlds, invasion as a crucible for faith, ending on deliverance. From Night of the Living Dead, the boarded farmhouse, thresholds defended against a horde. What Shyamalan seeded downstream was a brand: the twist not as gimmick but as theology, the promise that the design was there all along if you'd only watched closely.

So watch it again, and watch the edges of the frame the way Tak Fujimoto dares you to — the place where the camera refuses to point. Count the placements. Then ask yourself Graham's question, but turn it on the movie: when you feel the design tightening, are you seeing providence, or a director? And does Signs know those are, finally, the same anxiety?