The Sixth Sense and Death Cab for Cutie's We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes

I enjoyed mixing movies and music so much, I'm going to do it again.

I was in college in the early 2000s. It was still the heyday of home video rental. Netflix wasn’t even a DVD delivery service let alone a worldwide streaming phenomenon. Someday, the world will only know the name Blockbuster as an avatar for an era gone by, but there were dozens of brands with storefronts filled with VHS and slowly but surely DVDs in those days. Some offered free popcorn with rentals like my local Star Flicks (???) in suburban Cleveland Ohio. They had varying policies to pad their bottom lines with big fat late fees. As time passes, I hesitate to say that physical video stores made the world a better place, but there’s something a little sad about losing these cultural institutions and all the nuances.

I was into independent everything in those days. I’d been raised in my teenage years on Clerks and Pulp Fiction in high school, so I put a premium on those smaller budgets. Once I got to college and discovered indie music, specifically emo, I was all in on independent things. Even as the streaming movie era was still far off, and the streaming music era hadn’t started yet, we were in the MP3 era. So when my friend told me about this band he liked, I could download a few MP3s for free from their indie label’s website. That’s how I first started listening to Death Cab for Cutie. I downloaded a few free tracks off of We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes from Barsuk Records. I was hooked almost instantly by the understated, yet poignant vocals and lyrics. It was impossibly slow and deliberate at points, but it found a way to drive home the point.

I thought of this recently as family movie night was M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. Granted, this movie isn’t actually an independent movie. A person at Disney originally optioned it and reportedly had a budget of $40 million. It starred Bruce Willis. However, that era of filmmaking was distinctive in feel and many of the non-independent movies from that era feel indpendent. On top of the fact that The Sixth Sense was an unlikely phenomenon. This was a first-time movie from a first-time director who also happened to be the writer. M. Night Shyamalan seemed to come out of nowhere with The Sixth Sense and ended up having the second-highest-grossing film after The Phantom Menace. Regardless of those pesky facts, there’s no doubt that this is a film that feels like all those other independent films, at least in spirit. Pulp Fiction only had an $8 million budget, but it had Bruce Willis too!

On our family rewatch, I was no longer surprised by the twist, but I was once again swept up in all the emotions of the struggles of this little boy and his mother. I felt every pang of fear and sadness that Haley Joel Osment put on display as Cole Sear. I ached for Olivia Williams’ heartbroken Anna Crowe, who couldn’t miss her husband anymore if she tried. The story notes are all there, but it’s in the feel that Shyamalan created on the streets of Philadelphia with his debut film. The soul of his film was there for all to see.

That was the magic of Death Cab for Cutie, too. The lyrics on the page might even make you cringe, but in context with the plinky guitars and soundscapes of the choral vocals, songs like 405 wrap you up in a non-self-conscious hug. “Misguided by the 405 ‘cause it led me to an alcoholic summer, I missed the exit to your parents’ house hours ago, Red win and the cigarettes, hide your bad habits underneath the patio patio patio”

The fleshed-out sentences in Death Cab lyrics were as remarkable as the musical production that flashed in its subtlety, especially “Company Calls Epilogue.” It’s so stream of conscious and lush with imagery, you can’t really cut just a line or two.

Synapse to synapse
The possibility's thin
I'm dressed up for free drinks
And family greetings

On your wedding, your wedding
Your wedding date
The figures in plastic on the wedding cake
That I took were so real

And I kept distance
The complications cloud
The postcards
And blip through fiber optics

As the girls with pigtails were running
From little boys wearing bow ties
Their parents bought them
"I'll catch you this time"

Crashing through the parlor doors
What was your first reaction?
Screaming, drunk, disorderly
I'll tell you mine

You were the one but I can't spit it out
When the date's been set
The white routine
To be ingested inaccurately

This is what I was thinking about as I watched some of the final scenes of The Sixth Sense. Malcolm is speaking to his sleeping wife and the tears started welling up in my eyes.

“I think I can go now. Just needed to do a couple of things. I needed to help someone; I think I did. And I needed to tell you something: you were never second, ever. I love you. You sleep now. Everything will be different in the morning.”

It doesn’t read that well, but if you’ve seen it in context with Willis’ ever-so-subtle and emotional delivery as every pang of emotion is displayed on a sleeping Olivia Williams’ face, it hits you so much differently.

And even moreso, when Cole is talking to his mother about his secret and forces her to believe him in the gentlest and sweetest way imaginable.

Cole Sear: She wanted me to tell you she saw you dance. She said, when you were little, you and her had a fight, right before your dance recital. You thought she didn't come see you dance. She did. She hid in the back so you wouldn't see. She said you were like an angel. She said you came to the place where they buried her. Asked her a question? She said the answer is... "Every day". What did you ask?

- Lynn Sear: Do... Do I make her proud?

It’s the same feeling I get from songs like “Little Fury Bugs.” The clarity of the guitars hitting it’s oddly quiet chorus.

There's a look in the faces tonight that's untrustable
As the hope that you'll never return in a while
But you're always on time, so

I love all of We Have the Facts, especially opener “Title Track.” But, there’s only one song that I have to mention and it’s not this one. “No Joy in Mudville” was my favorite song back then, and it’s my favorite song off of that record today. The way it teases you with a build, fails to deliver, then builds again, and finally goes where you expect it to go is Death Cab’s version of a Shyamalan twist for my money. Once again, I can’t find a way to excerpt this lyric sheet.

Last night I dreamt that I was you
I was dressed all in black with dark glasses and attitude
Such a pose I could simply not hold
Through days in a northern town that I had once called a home
And your studies of fringe New York Streets
I was reading the pavement in every word you would speak
To a brownstone up three flights of stairs and it's on

Buying drinks for the poets upstate
The southern corruption tows you down the interstate
And they all said that you were the king
Of a gloomy disruption that surfaced when you would sing
And this town simply cannot begin to compete
So I'm packing my Bullets and Silvertones and heading east
To a brownstone up three flights of stairs and it's on, on, on, on, it's

I could have had my way, this year would bridge '66 again

Trust fund hipsters were casing the room
Chock-full of amphetamines
The overturned kick drum boom
Set the pace with incomparable cool
And if the tempo was lousy it was lost on all but you
And your studies of fringe New York Streets
I was reading the pavement in every word you would speak
To a brownstone up three flights of stairs and it's on, on, on, on, it's

If I could have had my way, this year would bridge '66 again

I haven’t kept up with Shyamalan as much as I’ve kept up with Death Cab for Cutie. This weekend, I’ll be traveling to see Death Cab and The Postal Service, for example. And long gone are the days where Death Cab plays impossible slow. In their middle age (and with Chris Walla having departed the band,) Death Cab for Cutie and its two original members Ben Gibbard and Nick Harmer are much peppier and frenetic to keep their many sellout audiences entertained. When I listened to this indie rock band back in 2000, I never could have imagined they’d become the Death Cab of the 2020s, but I’m just happy everyone’s still here, ya know?

And oddly enough, it’s an easier sell to get my kids to watch a classic film like The Sixth Sense than it is to get them in a headspace where they can feel an album like We Have the Facts. That’s just the nature of the differing art forms, I think. I never dreamed that watching The Sixth Sense would have taken my thoughts here. It was a really awesome trip down memory lane, and as I said goodnight to my kids and they were still talking about The Sixth Sense, it was so gratifying as a lover of art and as a father to know that it is having some sort of impact on them too.

One final thought that I just had that made me laugh. The other movie we watched this weekend was The Meg 2. I don’t think there will be any essays about that one, but I kind of enjoyed the mindless fun of running away from ginormous sharks.