Listening to voices

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"Along with many others, I was blown away by the twist at the end of The Sixth Sense. For two hours I'd snickered at the artiness of the compositions, at the way Bruce Willis's character was so ludicrously alienated from the world that he had no spatial relationship with anyone but the freaky kid. And then: Kaboom! Talk about using a critic's jadedness to pull the rug out from under him! Shyamalan was still a showman back then, before he began to fancy himself a shaman -- or is that shyaman? Now he just writes dead people." -- New York magazine critic David Edelstein.

Edelstein, by the way, really shows his cynical colors in the opening line of his review: "In the absence of a neurological disorder, a filmmaker who boasts about hearing voices is either scamming the congregation or has come to believe that the universe revolves around him." Uhm...hello? There hasn't been a visionary/creative person in the history of this planet who hasn't heard 'voices.' This list includes the guy in the apartment next door, Thomas Becket, Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Allen Poe, Honore de Balzac, Yeshua of Nazareth and David Edelstein.

The reason Edelstein is a good writer is that he listens to his voices and goes with what they're telling him. That's how the process works, and yet Edelstein thinks anyone who openly talks about voices is boasting or "scamming" his audience. That's not very perceptive. The voices I hear (and it's probably the same for everyone) are always little whispers. They never poke you in the arm, but once you understand their pitch and tonality and precisely how they sound, there's no missing them.