Signs
By Spencer Perry
Signs has the core properties of the things that encompassed American life in the year 2001 and beyond. The overwhelming sense of dread, the frustratingly real paranoia, the delusions of danger, and the encompassing hysterics resulting from the fear, and the film was already well into production when the tragedy occurred. This movie says a lot about post-9/11 American life without ever even meaning to and with a lot of viewers never picking up on it.
While the film does feature many flaws within its writing, the actors performances are what sell the picture. Mel Gibson’s portrayal of Graham Hess might be his most empathetic role to date. He is served to the audience as a flawed and very human character, which is unlike many you will find at the movies. There are doubts in his mind and he battles his own rage and hatred every day, but he tries to put on a smile, get through it all, and tell everyone that everything is okay, when he knows it isn’t. While the film is very much an ensemble piece, his position as the head of the family (and the film) cements your belief in the reality of the movie. His anger, his doubts, his fear, his uncertainty, make you understand what he’s going through and put you in the very mindset that he has to think through as a character.
Most alien invasion movies focus on the globalized threat of “the other,” they see this as an opportunity to satirize and comment on man’s inhumanity toward man. The idea of globalized threat is frightening because it signals no hope left in the world, and an outside source cannot intervene on your behalf. Signs surely does touch on this factor within it’s large scale but where this movie stands out from other alien flicks and makes a name for itself is it’s focus on local life, the family unit. The movie starts out thinking about the world after the emergence of the aliens but moves its way into an even smaller corner as the family works and lives on a secluded farm outside of town (and even deeper in the third act when they find themselves cornered in their own basement). The big picture of what will happen to the Earth and all her populace is among one of the first things the Hess family worries about when the Alien threat is considered real, but not long after this realization do they start to shun the idea of the world at large and focus on their single family unit. The most powerful scene that emphasizes this in the film is when the four of them are discussing what they’re all going to have for dinner, which they all perceive to be their last meals.
By harnessing the mindset of American’s fears in times of uncertainty Signs has created one of the most impressively real and unsettling depictions of the American Dream gone wrong. A world that appears perfect from the outside but actually harbors darkness from tragedy must stand up to overwhelming fear that is presented to it without warning. Someone asked me a few months ago if I was interested in seeing a movie about 9/11 and I said ‘No’. I don’t think that anything about that day can really be put into proper dramatization that can then be presented as entertainment, and even if it can I have no interest in watching it. None of us need to be reminded about what happened that day because we either remember it or know people who can tell us about it. Before that discussion I hadn’t seen Signs in many years, and after reliving the fear and paranoia of that time through these characters I really don’t think we need a movie about 9/11.
