The movie still caught me by surprise even though I suspected the main character to become a ghost at the beginning. Tricks in the movie reassured me that he was still a living human being.
One thing i noticed was that ghosts could physically react with the world. In the movie, a ghost moved a bumblebee pendant, one even opened drawers in the kitchen, and the main character gave the kid a penny, and even shot a whole through a window.
Ghosts even gave the kid scratched and bruised in the movie.
I just don’t get it. Wouldn’t ghosts kill people if they could do all this?
Wouldn’t anyone notice floating objects in the air?
Also, in the movie, at the end it showed how the door to the basement was closed off by a tabled stacked with heavy books.
I take it that Willis’s wife got spooked out when she saw book pages flipping them self and lights turning themselves on in the basement. Maybe thats why she blocked that door off.
If ghosts could interact with physical objects, how do you know I’m not actually dead the whole time? And just communicating with the living through means of the internet.
Well, try making out with Demi Moore while using the body of Whoopi Goldberg.
Maybe ghosts do kill people. The movie doesn’t tell us whether they do or not. It does tell us that ghosts typically don’t realize that they’re ghosts though, so even if a ghost wanted to kill someone he wouldn’t be thinking “Ha ha, they’ll never catch me because I’m a ghost!”
Only if they were around to see it. While there are ghosts interacting with the physical world in the boy’s house, IIRC this never happens when his mother is in the room. She doesn’t see the bumblebee pin float through the air, she only knows that it isn’t where she left it. She assumes that her son was playing with it and misplaced it. Since the ghosts don’t know they’re ghosts they’re presumably not deliberately refraining from moving things in the presence of the living, but the movie suggests that they are drawn to and are perhaps more powerful around people with the “sixth sense”.
If ordinary people do occasionally see objects mysteriously floating in the air, most probably convince themselves it was some sort of dream, prank, or optical illusion. Those who claim to have seen objects moved by ghosts are presumably taken as seriously as people in the real world who claim to have seen evidence of ghosts.
Maybe this thread is as good as any to ask a question about Cole’s ability in seeing dead people.
People who were “not fooled” and always knew that Dr Crowe was dead cite Cole’s line:
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.
as the clue that Dr Crowe is dead, and Cole is subtly telling him (and the audience) this.
My question is, can Cole tell dead people from the living? Do they look “different”? Obviously, the ones with huge gaping wounds are obvious, but what about Dr Crowe? What if he didn’t know Dr Crowe was dead, either, at least right away? Could be.
Dr. Crowe had a huge gaping wound which he notices when he finally realizes his actual state ;). I imagine to Cole he was probably always dripping blood from his fatal gunshot wound.
ETA: It seems like most of the ghosts Cole saw died traumatically, which is perhaps why they continued to have such tenacity clinging to an afterlife. But yeah I imagine in at least some cases they couldn’t be immediately picked out. Which must have made interacting with anyone seem all that much more perilous. Pretty hellish life indeed for a young kid.
hmmm. Good point.
Still, Dr Crowe had to be different than most of the dead people Cole normally sees. He apparently can maintain a conversation, and actually helped Cole. Most of the others are either creepy or violent towards Cole. Though it did seem there were others who were like Dr Crowe as well.
In the scene where Cole and Dr. Crowe first meet, Cole is frightened of him. Upon first viewing (if you don’t realize that Dr. Crowe is a ghost) then it seems like Cole is nervous about talking to a therapist and not sure if he can trust him. But the second time around, for me at least, it seemed more likely that Cole realized right away that Dr. Crowe was a ghost and was afraid of him for that reason. Their conversation about sanctuary seems to reassure him that a bad ghost couldn’t have followed him into a church.
If he didn’t realize that Dr. Crowe was a ghost, he probably would have been even more freaked out than he was. It’s not like his mother told him that he’d be meeting his new therapist today. Dr. Crowe was a stranger who was following him around and kept trying to talk to him – just the sort of stranger kids are told to watch out for.
IIRC, the other ghosts often seemed confused about who Cole was and talked to him as if he were someone they had known in life. Dr. Crowe at least understands who Cole really is, although I can’t remember if we know for sure whether he’d heard about Cole’s case while he was still alive or if he just falls into the role of therapist with Cole because that’s what he was used to in life.
Maybe living to ghosthood to “going beyond” is a continuous spectrum, and most of the ghosts we see are very close to the living border, Crowe even closer.
Movies about ghosts frequently have problems with the issue of physical interactions.
E.g., in Ghost, Patrick Swayze at first cannot touch/move any physical object. He moves thru walls, etc. But he walks on the ground! He even climbs stairs. What is so special about his feet??? Can his feet enter Oda Mae’s body when the rest of him does?
The Sixth Sense doubles down on this. Bruce Willis and the other ghosts can affect physical change, but only under magical circumstances. E.g., no one else can see them do it. Apparently not even the kid for the most part.
I think that people generally now recognize Shyamalan as the king of the plot holes. Before it was just “mysterious stuff”. Now it’s “what on Earth was he thinking?”
The real problem with intangible characters isn’t “how can they stand on the ground?” it’s “Why don’t they go flying off into space?” If they have no mass, there’s nothing there for the Earth’s gravity to interact with, and they’d be left behind as the Earth rolled on without them at about a thousand miles an hour.
The standard fanwank for this is usually that the intangible character is only “standing” on the ground out of force of habit, and they are maintaining their position not because they’re resting on the ground, but because they’re willing themselves to be in that particular place.
Pretty much anything a ghost does is “magical circumstances” by definition, but you’re wrong that they only happen when no one else can see it - especially Cole, who sees it happening all the time in the film. But more broadly than that, the movie is meant to be set in the real world, and reports of ghosts moving objects have been reported by people in the real world forever. In the movie, presumably such stories are factual, as opposed to being made up by cranks, lunatics, and the easily impressionable.
“Why don’t intangible people fall through the floor?” isn’t a plot hole any more than “Why do X-Wings make noise in space?” is a plot hole. It’s a scientific inaccuracy, but at no point in the movie does Crowe’s ability or inability to fall through a floor impact the plot in a significant way.
Also, these are tropes and ideas about ghosts that have been in Western literature and folklore for centuries, and Shyamalan is playing them completely straight in this movie. You can’t really lay the blame for them at his feet, when they’ve been used in exactly this way by countless other writers.
It appears that most ghosts who see Cole try to fit him somehow into the narrative of how they died. The ghost of the housewife sees him as her abusive husband, the kid with the hole in the back of his head thinks he’s his friend who wants to see his dad’s gun, etc. Crowe was killed by a former patient he had failed to help, and so sees Cole pretty much for exactly what he is - a kid who needs help. I don’t think Crowe was in contact with Cole’s mom before he died. For one thing, if Cole’s mom was trying to get him help, she wouldn’t have just stopped when the first psychiatrist died unexpectedly. When Crowe and Cole first meet, it’s some time - maybe up to a year - since Crowe died, but there’s no indication that Cole has seen any other doctors in the period. We also see that Cole goes to some lengths to hide just how alienated he really is - he bribes another kid to meet him on the way to school so she thinks he has friends, for example.
I think there’s room to fanwank some explanation for how Dr. Crowe might have known about Cole before he died. Cole tells him about how he once drew a picture at school of a ghost he’d seen, a man who’d been stabbed in the neck, and how this led to a meeting with the principal where everyone was upset and his mom was crying. He says that since then he’s careful to draw only happy faces and rainbows. Maybe the mother or someone at the school contacted Dr. Crowe around the time of this meeting, but since Cole stopped drawing disturbing pictures on his own no one thought it necessary to bring in another therapist after Dr. Crowe died.
Of course, the problem with this is that it is just a fanwank. I don’t think there’s any “proof” in the movie that Dr. Crowe was aware of Cole before he died, he doesn’t already know the story about the drawing of the murdered man, and Cole doesn’t seem to have heard of him before meeting his ghost. I agree that the tidier explanation is that ghosts (even more than the living) see the world through the filter of their own experiences, and Dr. Crowe’s experience as a child psychologist left him primed to see Cole as a troubled child who needed help. The ghost of the grandmother may recognize Cole as her grandson, but since she’s family she wouldn’t need to rationalize her visits to him the way Dr. Crowe would.
I want to say that Dr. Crowe does have a file on Cole, but I don’t remember if this contains only his own notes (and thus might have been created by him in the ghostly realm) or if it had other documents about Cole. But since ghosts in the movie can move physical objects it wouldn’t really prove anything if it did; Dr. Crowe could have just ghosted into the school office and taken Cole’s records.
IIRC his mom is actually the one who set Cole up with a “buddy” to walk to school with.
Yeah, but he gives him a pop tart every morning so he’ll keep doing it.