Introduction

Having been showered with both praise and strong criticism during his career, M. Night Shyamalan's rollercoaster reputation as a filmmaker is described by Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt as "The Fall and Rise of M. Night Shyamalan." Although all ten of his plot twist films provide epiphany moments at their climaxes, only some capture a pragmatic cinema aesthetic that provides reasoned, satisfying closure (Kennedy). The weaker box office and negative public responses to his mid-career films may contain his trademark plot twists, but they lack a sense of control over the narrative; in other words, they lack a pragmatic, rational rhetoric delivered by the protagonists.   

Identifying what differentiates his successful versus unsuccessful films warrants a close examination of his themes – a dive into cinematic detail as part of exploring the aesthetics that I engage in this study. At the center of this discussion of aesthetics in recent decades has been the exploration of pragmatic aesthetics, which centers on the applicability, or rhetoricity, of audience reception and interpretation. Shyamalan's recent work demonstrates the role of pragmatic promises as a reason for the ongoing evolution of social priorities, audience tastes, and the turn towards millennial-focused politics rather than the methodical patience of aesthetic form providing solution to social troubles in and of itself. Whereas his early successful films draw upon classical heroics – fighting ghosts and aliens – his later films deal with themes that are concerned with corporate corruption, a concern of younger audiences (see Perkins).

Richard Shusterman argues that pragmatic aesthetics have become increasingly important in the philosophy of art due to the growth of scholarship focused on form and persuasion. To consider a pragmatic aesthetic of cinema, then, we must identify themes and logical processes that are presented in a narrative. According to Shusterman, "What standardly characterizes aesthetic experience and artistic objects is the presence of form" (7). Applying this thematic interest to cinematic form, we can discover the aesthetic pragmatism, or lack thereof, in the cinematic career of Shyamalan. To state it another way, as we identify the contrasts of explicit practicality versus its absence by tracing both the public reception and plot details of his films in relation to the presence of aesthetic pragmatism or not, we can see the ways in which they portray the same demonstration of epiphanies but differ in the presence of solution content. The pragmatic elements of his well-received films display rationality and order in the climactic scenes that accompany explicit orations of action and meaning in the plots' exigencies, or the "relationship of the individual to society" through "cinematic realism," thus allowing differentiation between his successful films and those that were rejected by critics (Sperling). As Richard Janney argues, "Cinematic discourse is filmmakers' main expressive vehicle and primary form of communication with, and influence over, film viewers" (85). I make the case that this differentiation is evident in the presence or absence of a pragmatic aesthetic in Shyamalan's plot twist films, capturing the evolution of pragmatism as an explicit rhetorical practice in cinema.  

To this end, I borrow from Lisi Schoenbach's optimistic treatment of pragmatism. As Max Weber argued that while "works of art exist," he asked the question, "How is their existence meaningful?" One way to explore the meaning of works of art is by assessing their treatment of social circumstances. Following Weber was John Dewey's case that the aesthetic experience is one of structure, of logical order. Discovering the function of discursive structures is part of the internal aesthetic form in movies, or what David Bordwell describes as a film's "specificity," which provides "cues" that can be "found" in the picture but also "cover the entire film" (107). Ultimately, encapsulated exigencies in films are resolved by explicitly pragmatic answers in the script. Thus, directly or indirectly, Shyamalan's movies parallel and address social issues through their explicit cinematic oratory. However, his films that lack rhetorical structures were publicly rejected, which, I argue, is due to the absence of pragmatic solutions amid their respective social exigencies.

Rhetoric and Aesthetic Pragmatism

Janney identifies the pragmatic logic of cinema as "the discourse of mise-en-scène, cinematography, montage, and sound design used by filmmakers in narrating cinematic stories" (85). With cinematic form taking such an authoritative role in audience reception (see Burgeon; Lorenc), the storytelling process operates as what Lloyd Bitzer called the rhetorical situation, or the moment in which the persuasive opportunity becomes vividly apparent between text and audience.

When cinema aesthetics work as prescribed action, they operate as "embodied intensities," where narrative and script display the heightening of human emotion and therefore open opportunity for audience reception (Mailloux 3). Just as storytelling is a calculated process that considers audience as the barometer for successful transmission, Robert Danisch makes the case that "from its beginning" pragmatism has entailed a "commitment to communication and rhetorical practice” (xiii). This assertion borrows from rhetorical forms' earliest conceptions, as Aristotle argued that to rhetorize is to ornament. Ornamentation planning and execution amid the display of ideas, such as in cinematic narrative, take on that aesthetic appeal. 

The need to understand visual culture as persuasive becomes a priority for exploration of the aesthetic process of narrative, in which the human "expressive impulse" is more than just the linguistic offering in "expressive discourse," meaning that visual and sonic aesthetics offer appeal beyond the wording used in storytelling (Crucius 69). These planned and executed production elements surround and ornament the pinnacle scenes of rhetorical pragmatism. According to Janney, "in film, as in speech, visual metacommunication does not simply exist side by side with linguistic content but actively complements and modifies it in every shot" (94). Thus, an entire cinematic production can be understood as a pragmatic opportunity, with each piece of the production building toward a transference of the prescribed audience reading.

Cinema Aesthetics as Logical Pragmatism

With pragmatism's already present roots in aesthetics, the process of aesthetic transference to the audience follows an appeal toward logic as the audience's use of solutions demands an applicability of ideas demonstrated in a narrative, or a prescribed system of logic that is encapsulated within a narrative. A pragmatic logic is implied in the nature of communication because "communicative intentions are intentions to produce some response on the part of the addressee," including that of a movie audience (Lazzarabel and Korta 4). As Karl Aschenbrenner argued, “the comparison between logic and aesthetics is historically the first methodological principle of aesthetics” (63). Similarly treating the history of pragmatism's difficulty in finding appeal, Robert Danisch calls for the display of knowledge that would guide community problem solving. Still, the ultimate goal of a pragmatist's rhetoric, both initially in the need for aesthetic form and in logic with the need for application, comes with interest to "fix or change some aspect of the world (including us), not merely to accurately describe it" (Stroud 360). In doing so, a patterned aesthetic in many of Shyamalan's films allows that process to unfold as receptible to audiences due to actionable order that appeals to ideological priorities.

The opportunity for narrative cohesion creates a "traditional organization of social life" that offers "the comforts" that come from pragmatism's appeal for obtaining closure (Bida 53-54). In other words, Shyamalan's successful films, such as The Village, as Aleksandra Bida describes, demonstrate pragmatist narrative closure. In contrast, Shyamalan's The Happening is comfortless in its incohesive conclusion, becoming a "nightmare" of a production in which "rationalization" in the plot is absent (Kurtz). Shyamalan's successful films satiate the craving for closure, reason, and comfort, which C. Carter Colwell calls the "happy horizon" in cinematic conclusions (39). Despite Shyamalan's mid-career flops containing his common and expected plot twists as part of his formula, they nonetheless bypass this pragmatic dream of orderly closure, which I argue is an absent rhetorical discourse that offers exposition during exigent moments of these films.

The Rhetorical Interlude as Pragmatism   

We can identify, analyze, and observe social commentary in the aesthetic display of rhetorics of redundancy by analyzing rhetorical interludes (see Yergensen; Yergensen and Scott). These are explicit orations in film scripts in which the outcomes of character problem solving and pivotal plot changes are spelled out by the filmmaker. In contemporary filmmaking, Alexandra Ksenofontova describes this process: "All scripts respond to the need of planning or preparing for something else" that will emerge, such as exigencies that demand and imply the need for answers that guide action (2). Shyamalan's successful movies are sensical and relatable. Audiences often crave this pragmatic rationality in narratives that provide closure and comfort. 

Rhetorical interludes readily display pragmatism, what Schoenberg argues is manifest in habits of heroic opposition and radical rupture addressing exigencies. Both heroic opposition and radical rupture to narrative trajectory bring about satisfying solutions for didactical applicability from narratives. Importantly, these two themes are evident in Shyamalan's films that do possess interludes amid their plot-twist moments. Focusing on the rhetorical interludes embedded within Shyamalan's screenplays, his first four plot twist films exhibit explicit rhetorical moments in which monologues capture both the exigencies of characters and the respective contexts of social issues surrounding each film. The power of repetition brings "intensity" to a narrative, allowing for a cinematic climax, which simultaneously celebrates the solution prescribed in an interlude and clarifies its priorities (Bazzanella 243). Further pushing a pragmatic applicability as these rhetorical interludes are evident in the increasingly dramatic elements of his first few films, they each are repeated by the same characters in later, more elaborate moments of need, such as how Signs' second use of its interlude utilizes an intensified orchestral score whereas the first version was delivered without a score. 

Shyamalan’s use of redundancy recycles the social messages demonstrated in the protagonist-performed and character-altering epiphanies in his early films. This process takes place as cultural texts offer rhetorical explication as didactics for the audience (see Mujerlu et al.). The redundance of interludes illustrate the weight of social messages in offering order, as they recount specific dialogue from scenes that previously established characters' exigencies. These are  the "pragma-rhetorical" observations of a "cognitive rhetoric" operating within the narrative (Larrazabal and Korta 6). Through redundancy, these rhetorics offer impact that reverberates in the relationships between protagonists and audiences through their explicit practicality. 

Specifically, Shyamalan's first four plot-twist films representatively tap into and address these issues that establish uncertainty, thus operating as rhetorical order where the orators in his films represent and respond to disorders in their given plots. This process allows his films to operate as solution rhetorics, which Graeme Turner describes as "a social practice" where we can locate solutions that speak to our cultural tastes (3). Adding to Turner's description of the pedagogical function of film as a way to examine social issues, I spell out how explicit demonstrations of redundant rhetorics have a "practical" function, or an applicable intimacy, in their structures (Bazzanella 243). Michael Moore calls this repetition in narratives a "poetic device" in which "ornamentation" and "figures of speech will dominate," thus providing aesthetic form that further intertwines cinematic production and rhetorical practice (158).
 

A Rhetoric of Redundancy as Pragmatic Order 

Shyamalan's first film that depicts a plot twist, The Sixth Sense, utilizes the classic and famous tagline – "I see dead people" and captures the expansive 1990s Goth culture and its fascination with death (Miller). The famous statement, delivered in the middle of the film by the character Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) when he informs his psychologist, Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), that he sees dead people "all the time," leads the disbelieving Malcolm to diagnose Cole as mentally ill. In what I am calling the interlude scene, the cinematography moves incrementally closer to Malcolm's face as Cole describes to him his predicament of being haunted by the dead, situating Malcolm as the recipient of Cole's interlude. Later, at the end of the film, Malcolm is subsequently placed as the recipient of the epiphany, thereby enacting the emotional response and application of wisdom as Cole's interlude returns as a voiceover while Malcolm – and the audience – shockingly realizes that he was killed in the violent opening scene of the picture. The scene borrows from intertwining previous shots in which Malcolm appears to be interacting with other characters, but in which, as Cole's speech is recited, Malcolm never interacts with other characters, showing how he is oblivious to their lack of recognizing his presence. Further, in the process of his epiphany, increasingly troubling music controls the scene as Malcolm realizes that he is haunting his wife, Anna (Olivia Williams), with his presence in the house (see Figure 1).

 Figure 1

The heightening scores at moments of revisited interludes in Shyamalan's films supplement the character reactions to these interludes and the implied solutions to social ills in the ideologies prescribed. These "persuasive elements of music are created through redundancy" (King and Jensen 17). Whereas in the first delivery of Cole's interlude there is no dramatic music to accompany the words of either Cole or Malcolm, in the subsequent revisiting of the interlude, and at the film's end, the wording is situated as voiceover and heightened with orchestral scores. This dramatic soundtrack supports the display of Malcolm's emotional turmoil and physical difficulty, as the earlier spoken interludes take on specific meaning for him to move into the afterlife.

Through the process of performing and offering realization to character and audience, order is established as the mystery of the plot is initially without an oratorical promise up to the point of Cole's mid-movie oration, not yet coming full circle to evince Malcolm's own personal problem: Anna does not talk to him when he arrives home – the domestic setting where "everyday experience would seem to be an effective rhetorical tactic" for a pragmatist logic to be unveiled (Stroud 368). With Malcolm manifesting uncertainty, from which Cole provides heroic intercession for the relational strain, the film provides concrete, full closure to relational difficulty, which is simultaneously satisfying through the abrupt solution provided at the end of the film. Cole's voiceover functions as exposition during Malcolm's disturbing epiphany, bringing understanding to the doctor with his previous unsolvable estrangement from his wife. These sequences of realization and problem-solving in the mind of Malcolm continue as Cole describes how the ghosts "don't know they're dead" and how "they only see what they want to see," enabling Malcolm to view objects that he had blocked out of his view before the interlude is revisited, specifically a door that he could not open, his gunshot wound, and his absent wedding ring. These objects exhibit how Malcom has "only [been] see[ing] what [he] want[ed] to see."

In Unbreakable, the hero David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and villain Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson; identified in the sequel as Mr. Glass) operate as a duality of good versus evil, emerging out of the gothic horror themes of the 1990s that mixed the dark and shadowy plot with superhero solutions (see Bria). Elijah's interlude describes David's superhero capacities, saying that David is "[s]omeone who doesn't get sick, who doesn't get hurt like the rest of us. And he probably doesn't even know it. The kind of person these stories [comic books] are about. A person put here to protect the rest of us, to guard us." This charge, accompanied by a base-driven score that implies seriousness, causes David to later embrace his superhuman strength and ability to sense danger, which, ironically, allows the seemingly harmless Elijah to avoid David's detection because Elijah wears gloves. In the Shyamalan twist at the end of the film, Elijah recites his previous speech to David that highlights how evil and good are intertwined, which serves as a call for David to take on his role as a crime-fighting superhero – a display of pragmatic storytelling's heroic opposition to challenges. Danisch describes this kind of plot resolution as "a desire to find practical arts to guide deliberation and judgment, and a belief in the power of individuals and communities to influence the course of social and political affairs" (2).

Utilizing a rhetoric of repetition in Signs, the 2002 film was released amid the growing American religiosity during the George W. Bush presidency, which was a time of "systematizing of religious faith" amid the "remembered trauma" of the September 11 attacks, and contributed to religious "schematic interpretations" in "the media" (Sofair 57). The rhetorical interlude scene is presented as the grieving former pastor Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) makes sense of his newfound religious-less life after losing his wife Colleen (Patricia Kalember) as he tells his younger brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) that "this is the end of the world" when aliens invade Earth. Being disturbed by his older brother's new cynicism about divine protection, Merrill responds with a request that his brother deliver a religious speech to him as they watch the television, asking, "Can't you be like you used to be? Give me some comfort." Having comforted his brother with a description that faith gives people "hope," Graham resorts back to his skepticism about God, yet once again reciting the illogical and random statements that Colleen says to him as she dies after being struck by a car. In this scene, the shade from the darkened room behind them grows increasingly dark, covering Graham's face more and more, as he begins to look like a shadow figure to his brother while he speaks. His voice becomes increasingly somber as he declares to his brother, "There is no one looking out for us, Merrill. We are all on our own," leaving Merrill disturbed at the realization that Graham’s faith in God is gone. 

At the climax of the film, when the family is confronted by an alien in their home, the rapid and aggressive violin suddenly pauses as the camera focuses on Graham's face. At this moment, the shot quickly transitions to the previously shown flashback scene in which Graham, dressed in priest attire, approaches the dying Colleen, and hears her words that seemed random at the time. Yet, during the culmination interlude scene, Graham has an epiphany that Colleen's words are instructions for how Graham can defeat the alien. Following this moment, the musical score begins to climax again, prioritizing the "embodied intensities" of the narrative as Graham's previous question to his brother is repeated: "What you have to ask yourself is, what kind of person are you? Are you the kind of person who sees signs, sees miracles? Is it possible there are no coincidences?" (Mailloux 145). The script's recycling of Graham's earlier interlude is delivered as a voiceover as he remembers Colleen's statements, which in Graham's epiphany come to be understood as prophecy on how to defeat their enemy.  Her specific words – "Tell Merrill to swing away" – become Graham's epiphany about what was happening to Colleen in her dying moment: she was foretelling him how to save the family from the alien invasion. The pragmatic solution suddenly processes logically in the mind of Graham. Thus, the Shyamalan world brings the character back to his faith as the interlude changes meaning when repeated amid an exigence, which ruptures Graham's doubt as to why life events happen. Signs’ reverberations about the necessity of religion to provide social order amidst exigencies and the applicability of this form of redundancy to a regular audience are described by Moore as adding "a strong element of populism" to the storyline (156). 

The assumption that the politically powerful's actions have hidden motives is illustrated in The Village. The observation of social disorder in the plot – a violent attack in a small village – leads to the plot's growing demand for order, which Moore highlights following Sigmund Freud as a fixation on finding order when panic and desperation are present due to the need to "preserve" things that are being lost (129). Nonetheless, trust in authority's structure is secured through pragmatic rhetoric, captured in The Village's rhetoric of guise as the leader of the elders, Edward Walker (William Hurt), delivers a final speech focused on the opportunity to continue their lies to their children in the concluding moments of the film.

Whereas Walker initially seems to be losing control of order in the village with the lies he tells the youth about the village's enemies in the woods, he later pleads with the frustrated elders as he sees the children struggling after the crime: "I cannot look into another's eyes...It is too painful. I cannot bear it!" (see Figure 2). With disorder in place and being told by his fellow elder, "You have jeopardized everything we've made," Walker speaks of a future where other children will need to continue their lies: "Yes, I have risked. I hope I am able to always risk everything for the just and right cause." He then declares that he is working to "protect innocence." With words that dismiss his own guilt – and without causing further disorder during a political season of distrust in leaders at the time of the film's release in 2004 (see Morin and Milbank) – Walker's first oration establishes an opportunity for himself to ensure a sense of innocence at the end. 

 Figure 2

In the film's final scene, Walker speaks again to the elders, inviting them to utilize a second tragedy as an opportunity to create a new sense of fear that enemy monsters outside the village intend to harm them and, in the process, create an increased level of anxiety that can be dispersed within the community. The impassioned diatribe captures how "cinematic discourse" is "analogous to the body's metacommunicative role in face-to-face interaction" (Janney 94). The scene's emotional intensity, accompanied by the characters' performed expressions of confusion and worry, empowers the elders to continue to establish order and obedience, even as Walker further speaks to the two elders who lost their son: "We will tell the others he was killed by the creatures. Your son's death has made our stories real." Responding to Walker's plea, the elders slowly stand in a demonstration of support of the new lie as their adopted method for re-establishing order in their village, allowing for a collectively renewed commitment to protect their mendacity, leaving the rest of their community in the dark and limiting their freedoms in the name of protection. With Walker's passion, he exhibits the aesthetic logic that operates as more "artistic" than as "a rigorous science of aesthetics" (Aschenbrenner 63-64), where he justifies concealing truth in order to ensure order. The unexpected opportunity that emerges from a convenient death allows the elders to continue to protect their community from the outside world. While less shocking as a plot twist, the utilization of tragedy to assure continued order allows for practical solutions that the elders take advantage of: to lie in order to ensure communal survival.

An Abandoned Rhetorical Form
with Lady in the Water and The Happening 

Although Shyamalan's Lady in the Water and The Happening follow the common Shyamalan plot twist pattern, both fail to provide the discursive problem-solving and cohesive rhetoric that the other films possess in the dialogue of their scripts. Being broadly disdained by critics, both films struggled at the box office in comparison to Shyamalan's other films, demonstrating by their absence the necessity of explicit direction being delivered in the most dramatic moments of Shyamalan's plot twisting riddles (see Orr; Delahaye). The ending of Lady in the Water is without a rhetorical culmination altogether, with the last words being the simplicity of defeating a monster by "staring into his eyes." Similarly, the ending of The Happening does not offer any strategy for defeating the poisonous trees that are attacking humanity. Instead, in both films the horror continues without reason for their attacks or a prescription for conquering enemies. As a result, the characters in these pragmatist-less films fail to offer rhetorical details for action. These two movies may have plot twists, but they are without logic accompanying their playout, making the twists directionless and without readily available solutions for interpretation. Maria Belodubrovskaya describes this lack as "plotlessness" where "theme replaces story as the driving force behind narratives" (169). Both pictures build toward climactic twists in which the revelation of Shyamalan's stories are painstakingly shown, but lack oratorical pleadings for action or perspectives that could offer emotional support for the viewer.  

Manal Shalaby describes this absence in Shyamalan's Lady in the Water as a postmodern fantasy in which characters and exigencies remain distant from inviting the audience to care. Both Lady in the Water and The Happening sidestep the necessary verbal instructions within the narrative not only to introduce and establish the weight of the plot twist but also to sidestep the offering of a toolset, practically or ideologically, within the circumstances surrounding characters’ exigencies. As a result, these two films miss what would be cohesive plots with reason to care for and invest in characters' victories. More specifically, the broken formula that could have been bolstered with rhetorics of solution would also include closure and transcendence for characters. There is no prologue or presentation of character transcendence in either film. Further, the enemies in both stories are not monsters but abstract displays of nature as manifested in trees, birds, water, and wolves. These breakages from Shyamalan's earlier pattern offer no build-up or verbal description in terms of how to interpret the plot twist, contributing to a lack of a pragmatic resolution in which audiences learn something.

Return of Rhetorics of Order  

 
The Visit utilizes the explicit rhetoric of a nurturing familial relationship amidst the unexpected threat of losing loved ones as two children, Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould), discover in the film's twist that their real grandparents are missing, reflecting the contextual timeliness of haunting narratives concerning missing college students (see Devereaux) and the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (see Ashton, et al.) in the months before its cinematic release. Masquerading as the grandparents, dangerous asylum patients killed the real grandparents, causing turmoil for the children's mother, Loretta (Kathryn Hahn), in her estrangement from her mother and father as closure for the broken family is never provided.

In the pattern of shaky, home footage style horror that brings an increased sense of "reality" in the plot, the film is seen through the experience of the two children (Sayad 43). In the final scene, the rhetorical interlude is delivered as aspiring filmmaker Becca films Loretta's retelling of her damaged relationship with her parents. Loretta changes tone from vulnerable timidness to authority in volume and assertion as she charges her children to avoid familial rifts that would lead to regret, instead offering an internal resolve to preserve moments when goodbyes could bring comfort and assistance. This interlude is accompanied by a soft piano score as the camera moves closer to Loretta's face. She describes the personalities and quirks of her parents, complimenting them: "my mother thought I was better than Olivia Newton John" and "my father was a gentleman." She then proceeds to describe a long-ago physical altercation with her parents, her stubbornness in refusing to reconcile when they pursued a reunion, and in a tearful illustration of regret, she charges her daughter, who enters the shot, "Please, don't hold onto anger, Becca. You hear me!" (see Figure 3).

 Figure 3

The film's culmination – with a somber score accompanying the handheld camera technique – constructs an intimacy with the audience, preparing them for an interlude that is colloquial in wording, but which also situates the film as utilizing a personable aesthetic (see Danisch). The wording of a rhetorical interlude is given its seriousness with its mise-en-scène and emotional score. This visual and sonic force comes after the simplicity of Loretta's desperate embrace with her children and is followed by shots of them with their own estranged father as a tender piano score accompanies. These production supplements empower Loretta's own story to allow her to alter the trajectory of her childrens’ lives in a heroic opposition to her own previous bitterness, offering a rhetoric of warning and fear concerning the irreversibility and inevitabililty of death.  

In Split, James McAvoy plays Dennis, a dangerous man with multiple personality disorder, mirroring the growth of mental health awareness and diagnoses in the United States at the time (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). McAvoy's most threatening personality is the Beast, a character with superhuman strength who exhibits a sense of "winner take all" in his insults to others, and who has abducted teenage girls, leading to the mass search for them as subplot to the Beast's growing power. At the end of the film, the Beast delivers a charge to his would-be final victim, Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy), about her ability to survive as a demonstration of her acquired evolutionary superiority. After locking herself in a steel cell, Casey fires a gun repeatedly at the Beast, which is followed by his confident response as he walks toward her, "Can't you see I'm not human?" Arriving at the cell, he bends the bars as he screams ravenously, but he is immediately tempered as he sees Casey's wounds from cutting herself when she faced depression earlier in life. Laughing, he pegs her as superior to his other victims: "You are different from the rest. Your heart is pure. Rejoice!" In a state of emotional euphoria, he tells her, "The broken are the more evolved," followed by a more subdued repeat of his previous statement to her, again declaring that she should "rejoice."

Walking away, the personalities of McAvoy's characters speak to each other in a back-and-forth dialogue between two mirrors. Delivering a more detailed and disturbing lack of order, the Beast and his fellow personalities pride themselves in declaring, "We trust in him [the Beast]. He'll protect us. Look at what he can do. Let him show the world how powerful we can be." At the end of the film, the disturbing realization that a human-evolved monster exists is narrated as a newscast describes the atrocities of the Beast watched by onlookers in a diner. As a group of women discuss what they are seeing, a woman states in reference to the villain Elijah in Unbreakable – Shyamalan's superhero film released sixteen years earlier – "This is like that crazy guy in the wheelchair that they put away fifteen years ago, and they gave him a funny name, too. What was it?" At that moment, the camera moves behind her to reveal, unexpectedly, David Dunn (Bruce WIllis) from Unbreakable. In his quiet demeanor, David answers her question, "Mr. Glass." The camera then lingers on David as he realizes his next task will be to answer the threat of the Beast. In the final shot, David takes a deep breath and a slow drink from his coffee cup. Then he stares downward as he realizes what he faces. His response provides the pragmatic answer for order in the past as he is the only human empowered to fight the Beast, and the plot's call for him to provide order again in a pending battle with the Beast is foretold in the then-upcoming sequel, Glass. 

With his sense of superiority that the Beast demonstrates at the end of the film, he declares his intentions to use violence over less-evolved humans, the orator for the interlude in Split is a monster to fear. Utilizing Charles Darwin's survival of the fittest as scientific authority, the Beast's oratory and actions demonstrate the heightened fear, and the film's rhetorical interlude serves as a rhetoric of warning, a practical logic of pursuing survival, and demonstrating visual culture's "slow shift from expression to persuasion" (Crusius 70). Responding to such an undefeatable threat, David Dunn's arrival, with his superhuman strength, brings the pragmatic, closed-narrative comfort of forthcoming order as his arrival is the heroic opposition to the Beast's seeming invulnerability. 

Interludes as Exposing Corruption 

The emergence of the millennial generation, its heavy use of social media, and the capacity to organize as a "cumulative aesthetic" brings an alteration of pragmatism by introducing the need for social resistance to authority that is accompanied by commitment to social changes based on notions of idealism (Higgins 102). Helen Fox describes this need for justice as millennials' highest vocation, in which social justice and organized public resistance have become a defining characteristic of the generation. These adjustments come with a focus on "intersectionality" in the use of media and popular culture, social media, and educational philosophy to end what Ange-Marie Hancock describes as the "Oppression Olympics" of the past. 

The third film in the David Dunn trilogy, Glass, brings the climactic battle between David Dunn and the Beast, orchestrated by the mastermind terrorist Mr. Glass. After all three men escape the confines of a facility that protects the world from their superhuman strength, Mr. Glass delivers a voiceover oration to prove to the world the existence of superhumans. As the Unbreakable trilogy operates as one story, the Beast's mid-story oration in Split, about making sure the world knows about his power, is responded to in Glass by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), who works to suppress public knowledge of superhumans, and is further opposed by Mr. Glass's voiceover at the end of the film in his commitment to expose superheroes to the world.

Before Mr. Glass delivers his voiceover, Staple emotionally asks, "What have you done, Elijah?" This question is followed by her screaming at the realization that he is exposing the world to the truth that superhumans exist. In a pattern following both the presence of cancel culture and the social media world's offering of quick and explicit exposure to corruption, the display of speedy justice is captured in Mr. Glass's declaration, "Belief in oneself is contagious." As a reverberating contemporary pursuit of unearthing cover-ups (see Tengs), he continues to declare the defeat of powerful foes, "Whoever these people are...who don't want us to know the truth, today, they lose." Although Mr. Glass speaks about the public realization of superheroes, his language simultaneously works as resistance to those who hide truth from the public, which allows the arrival of order through a rhetorical voiceover.

The contemporary appeal for exposing corruption is also illustrated in Old in which the plot twist focuses on the discovery of how to speed up time and thereby conduct long-term studies of the effects of medications on patients, coinciding with the contemporary discourse of distrust about Big Pharma corruption (see Posner). The film's villain is Warren & Warren Pharmaceuticals, a research corporation that allows quicker and easier use of medication because they have been tested on people over the period of thirty years, a setting that allows the company to have long-term results in only twelve hours. As part of the plot twist, Old's sense of reason and ordered comfort against the enemy arrives with an oration delivered by Warren & Warren's leading researcher, who praises his team for finding results quickly. Rather than the rhetorical culmination in the film operating in conjunction with the Shyamalan twist at the end, his speech at the culmination operates as explication, itself being the twist. He openly exposes the shared sense of guilt but also of the necessary sacrifices of victims of their studies in order to save more lives in the process of having immediate results on medications that address ailing illness. As he praises both his team and their findings to make sure others around the world could take drugs long term, the researcher attempts to offer dignity for the characters who experienced disturbing traumas and deaths as the research subjects. He reads their names and tells their stories one at a time, such as their treatment of character Patricia Carmichael (Nikki Amuka-Bird):

One of this cohort, uh, was a woman with epileptic seizures. Her name was Patricia Carmichael. She suffered debilitating seizures her whole life. Nothing could help her. The medicine we gave her when she arrived turned out to be the exact mixture. She didn't have a seizure for eight hours and seventeen minutes. Sixteen and a half years. We cured her of her epilepsy. We'll now fast-track trials, make that medicine, and share it with the whole world. Every single person that needs it.

The lead researcher is presented as empowering pharmaceutical research in the search for medications that should hit the market as soon as possible, presenting but critiquing medical consequentialism (see Smajdor, et al.). His rhetorical offering is laced with an attempted dignity for the challenged reputation of drug companies, despite the possibility of ethical lapses in their methodology. Although the company's actions allow violence, confusion, and secrecy to exist in the process of medication testing, solutions to hard problems are also discovered, and a mission of destiny and purpose is evident in a central statement of his oration: "Nature made that beach for a reason...Warren was meant to find it on their research expedition. We were meant to test medications in one day instead of a lifetime." The twist of the story and its display of contemporary politics is the consequentialist ends justifying the means. In this portrayal, the researchers see themselves as reluctantly making difficult decisions for the greater good. The sacrificial experiments of the films' characters allow the rescue of others' lives in the future through Warren's disturbing research.

Shyamalan’s Old softens the blow of ends justifying means – with the argument that it will save more lives. Others are sacrificed in the process of scientific planning. The film's explicit script oration is a pragmatistic responsive to social confusion, thereby offering a closure via understanding of the perspective of Big Pharma. The duality of perspectives regarding the wealth of pharmaceutical companies is recognized because the researcher's speech is delivered with concern and reverence for victims, despite the blatant violence of what they put their subjects through. The weight of the speech's justification offers decisiveness during cultural and social unrest, which Weber captured long ago in his description that we find closure from those who "searched for answers with passionate devotion" to the cause of finding practical solutions that will ensure "order." 

Conclusion 

Shyamalan's use of redundant interlude scenes in his early films connect protagonist realization to audience enlightenment through pragmatic, logical solutions as well as order and closure. These interludes also provide cohesion between timely social contexts and plots that address social confusion. The writer-director's more recent return to using these oratorical structures again engages viewers with emotionally satisfying, reassuring plot resolutions. This re-found clarity has resuscitated his reputation as a filmmaker. 

With the advent of social justice appeals for younger audiences, Shyamalan's rhetorical interludes operate more recently in films such as Old as idealism in addition to pragmatism, utilizing a pattern of "themes that resonate with the cultural moment" – the zeitgeist of each age – while challenging "traditionally upheld American values" due to "mistrustful attitudes toward the State" and such corporate entities as Big Pharma (Castrillo 191). These changes in screenwriting emerge from the increasingly "direct interactive storytelling" that is the result of the rapid and influential nature of social media responses to film (Ogle 3).

Shyamalan recognizes audience evolutions: "A new generation is discovering my movies" (qtd. in Shoard). He deserves credit. As a storyteller he rediscovered and adapted his formula, knows his audience, and continues to evolve. Thus, whatever viewer need may arise, a pragmatic aesthetic is often discernable for the storyteller who is interested in audience tastes. At the heart of that taste, for Shyamalan, are rhetorical interludes that accompany and give meaning to his plots. 

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