I've probably had that feeling more than a dozen times, more so recently, with the cavalcade of content coming out now it stands to reason ideas will feel recycled, or you or someone else is going to think, shit that mofo stole my idea.
I'm not a fan of M Night (I can see why he truncated his real name too, but I feel like this particular choice still makes him a pretentious fuck). I never liked the Sixth Sense, I didn't care it was spoiled for me by bad timing, and I wasn't falling over myself to watch his other films. Somehow, he's had somewhat of a resurgence off the back of a couple of projects, Split being one, which I thought was good but suffered from his arrogance, which has become a syndrome.
I don't think he's a brilliant creator. Stylistically some of his visual work is impressive, but this is the man who took The Last Airbender and turned it into a complete fart of a movie that for all its budget looked like a bad live action TV show. And I loved the original Last Airbender, I still do, but I don't watch it often. I don't even agree with the creators having their own crack at a live action version.
M. Night got too much clout for something stupid: Making cool twists. Great, now you're forever the "Twist" guy. You've got to have one in the bag at all times, and I'm not a twist person. I can't execute them well. If you didn't see something coming in something I wrote, then I did a good enough job. You can just avoid predictability, you don't have to "twist" everything. I'm more an ironic punchline person. So, he gets all this praise but his follow-up work finally illustrates maybe he was overrated. Turns out he also conducted some kind of marketing hoax to promote the Village, which I thought was okay at the time but can see in retrospect it made no fucking sense and wasn't a good movie.
And, of course, due to his success he was accused of plagiarism. And despite his arrogance the accusations didn't stick, which they so rarely do. Because one came down to the "you stole my idea of a dead baby being a doll and that's it, you stole it, so you owe me money". Which is no defense. Maybe these people do know of your movie/book/script, they can say they don't and no one can prove otherwise. I think if you find your unfinished book/script that you know you gave them suddenly being mascaraed as their shit, go for the goddamn jugular and maybe think about who you share your shit with in the future. (I hate sharing stuff anyway but it's good practice to consider what you share with people). But if there's no proof and you are wrong and they didn't know, they can steal your idea. I blame the collective unconscious, and Campbell to a lesser degree, maybe we need to blow up monomyths and come up with something other than the Hero's Journey, it works, sure, but is there another effective way to present a story? I don't know. Just don't think your idea of something is sacrosanct and yours alone, because some ideas aren't that original and it comes down to coincidence - you literally just had the same idea as someone else, and they beat you to the punch, and you're sore. It fucking sucks. Nobody who ever has an idea at all likes to see it stolen in any regard. But we're not talking about patents and trademarks. I'm absolutely sick of worrying about the legalities of creativity in general these lawsuits just annoy me and I'm sort of glad being obscure means I can't be called out. Because you don't see people coming after me when my ideas aren't "successful".
Anyway
it doesn't detract from M Night being an arrogant dick and when he gets
praise, I get worried we're headed for another Lady in the Water. Plus
this series he has on Apple+ looks tasteless as fuck anyway. Oh and
here's a hilarious factoid, he did rewrites on She's All That and
wrote Stuart Little. For his new project, there's just a bunch of
obnoxiously short videos on Instagram. And it's based on a graphic
novel. I don't fuckin know. He's not going anywhere, guess we have to
deal with the Shyamalsance.
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