Milton Nacht Schlemiel

Metaphors are very tricky things. Sometimes they lead to a deeper understanding of a subject or idea. Other times they become a roadblock to any kind of interest or concern about whatever it is that you hope to express. Metaphors can be good or bad - not unlike the movies of M. Night Shyamalan.
Let me say at the outset that I have, for the most part, been a supporter of M.'s work. This is in spite of the fact that I had "Sixth Sense" figured out in the first act, then waited for everyone else in the theater to figure out what was happening. That may be why I didn't bother to race out to see "Unbreakable", but I was happy to hear that the storytelling was somewhat left of center, a superhero movie made without tights.
I became a little tired by the time "Signs" came out. I watched Mel Gibson wrestle with his inner demons while the monsters from outer space scratched on the door just outside. Was this a monster movie or a relationship movie? Were the aliens part of the paranoid ravings of a lunatic mind, or were they the externalized fears of a single father who had lost all his faith? I was being asked to care about things at two levels at once, and as an American that just seemed like too much work.
I waited to catch "The Village" on cable and was relieved to find that I had guessed the ending from the blurb I read in "Entertainment Weekly" six months prior. The families of this community represented the United States in the early twenty-first century. Or they were a bunch of scared idiots living in the woods when they should have been teaching abnormal psychology at an Amish university. I was just about done with Mister Night.
This morning I watched the last hour of "Lady in the Water" and I felt as though I might drown in all the symbolic imagery and clever goings-on. Had he chopped and minced his metaphors more carefully, I might not have gagged on them.
But I watched until the end, didn't I? I had to make sure that what I thought was going on really was going on. And that's a lot like life - metaphorically speaking.