Not An Alternative

Cole Sear Quote from M. Night Shyamalan Film “The Sixth Sense”

Cole Sear: I see dead people.

Malcolm Crowe: In your dreams?

[Cole shakes his head no]

Malcolm Crowe: While you’re awake?

[Cole nods]

Malcolm Crowe: Dead people like, in graves? In coffins?

Cole Sear: Walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re dead.

Malcolm Crowe: How often do you see them?

Cole Sear: All the time. They’re everywhere.

In this world structured around an infinite number of stand-ins for an object of desire that is ultimately unavailable to us, a sense that death is present in everything we encounter is not unfamiliar. And isn’t this movie, “The Sixth Sense”, just that - an encounter with a death that is staged again for us, for a limitless number of times? We run up against this wall over and over again only to eternally return to the same question. How do we leave a world where death itself has always already been integrated into a (holistic and balanced) system of exchange (where every ending is a new beginning).

Or should we understand Cole’s “they are everywhere” quote to be in reference to something else? A different endpoint? Could there not be another way of understanding the encounter with this movie? Or perhaps even another way of understanding the encounter with other artifacts we come across in this world of The Change You Want to See?