I will defend the city of Philadelphia/until the day I draw my last breath/go birds/so I am ethically obligated/therefore/to wholeheartedly espouse Philly’s native son/filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan.
Unfortunately/M. Night Shyamalan can’t write dialogue/and I am not optimistic that this state of affairs/is ever going to change.
I suppose peaking after your first film/must feel a certain way/but that is no excuse for creating the monstrosity/that is 2008 cinematic atrocity/The Happening.
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Lying in an institutional hospital bed/at the second public hospital in the entire United States/founded in Philadelphia in 1791/ by womanizer Ben Franklin/go birds/I watched The Happening as the sphygmomanometer tightened like a fist/and the pulse ox beeped a rhythm/and the baby in my womb entertained herself/by continuing to kick my bladder.
It started in parks/said Mark Wahlberg wonderingly/as I thought to myself/how my first baby nearly died/before even having the chance to be born.
My doctor said I have a special-needs placenta/that doesn’t always do its job/my doctor said not to worry/but that’s also what they told Zooey Deschanel/during a gaping plot hole in The Happening.
Have you ever wondered what it’s like/to have your body deliberately plotting/to kill the precious human being/you have spent 40 whole weeks/attempting to keep alive?
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I stared out the window/at the Philadelphia skyline/go birds/while they began to prep me for surgery/and question if it might be the case/that I just wasted the last two hours of my time on this Earth/watching M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening.
I know what’s causing this. It’s the plants/says a bit player in the film/effectively summing up the entire point of this debacle/in less than 10 words.
Let’s go to the OR/chirps my nurse/like I’m not about to have a 6-inch needle stabbed directly into my spine/like there isn’t a chance/my daughter might not get to draw a breath.
After nine months of fetal monitoring/and hypertension/and intrauterine growth restriction/and the unimaginable discomfort that is hyperemesis gravidarum/I lay on the operating table with my husband in tow/and send up a silent prayer to the God in whom I don’t believe/that the surgeon will not find meconium while evicting my daughter/like they found three years ago with my son.
Five more minutes/I urge my placenta/and then you can tap out/Just hang in there/I beg my reproductive system/while my arms are strapped down and my body grows numb and someone I desperately hope is not an intern ostensibly slices open my abdomen.
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It can’t be ten minutes later/that my husband is cradling our tiny-but-healthy baby girl/whom I looked forward to having in my own arms/the second I stop shaking uncontrollably.
And as I languish in my hospital room later that night/and the feeling returns to my legs/I think about how John Leguizamo abandoned his daughter/in the first hour of The Happening/and how no amount of poorly-written dialogue/could justify those events actually taking place/because now that I’m holding a daughter of my own/it would take inhuman strength to pry her away.
M. Night Shyamalan really cannot write dialogue/but as the sun rises/and the oxytocin starts to flow/I am nothing but grateful for this Philadelphia-based Director/who always casts himself in his own films/like he’s Alfred fucking Hitchcock.
Because I love my city/go birds/and I love Western medicine/and I love the University of Pennsylvania healthcare system/that has just safely delivered my child/so all is finally right with the world.
Except for 2008 cinematic atrocity/The Happening.
— SHANNON FROST GREENSTEIN
Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) resides in Philadelphia with her family and cats. She is the author of “Through the Lens of Time” (2026), a fiction collection with Thirty West Publishing, and “These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things” (2022), a book of poetry from Really Serious Lit. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee.