I got my Sixth Sense right!

Spoiler WARNING : If you have not seen M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, please don't read further. Its a wonderful movie and you must see it.

Way back when the movie came out on the (Video) CD, I rented to watch it on my Desktop. I was using that crappy Windows Media Player to watch movies as I didn't know any better. The Media Player used to hang in the middle of the movie. That was a usual problem for which I had a standard solution. The problem was scratches on the CD. My solution was to eject the CD out and clean it and put it back in and continue watching the movie from the point it was broken. If it didn't work, repeat the same thing each time advancing the time a little bit so that I didn't miss much. There were times when nothing could work and I ended up watching parts of a movie.

As I was watching the movie The Sixth Sense (Nope, I didn't see any dead people!) it got hung couple of times at different points in the movie. So I did what I always did, making sure (I hoped) that I didn't miss much. Towards the end of the movie it happened again. This is the scene in the movie where Bruce Willies comes home to see his wife watching their wedding video. The whole twist in the movie is in that 2-3 minutes, when he realizes what he is. I tried cleaning the CD and the best I could do was start it from 2-3 minutes later when it looked like something dawned on him and he seems to have accepted it and looked like he was saying good-bye to his wife. The movie ended very soon after that. I thought of it as a movie with interpretive endings, which intentionally doesn't have a clear ending. My interpretation (on the basis of what I seen) was that he finally realizes that he can't save his marriage and the kid convinces his mom that he could really see the dead people. I know it doesn't make any sense, I thought the same thing then - it doesn't make any sense, completely unaware of what I have missed.

The reason clearly I remember the details is that,soon after, whenever some of my friends in college got together to watch a movie, this movie's name came up inevitably. Only myself and just this other friend had seen it by then. My friend said this movie has a great ending and (I clearly remember him saying) we should not discuss further so that we don't spoil it for others. He assumed that I knew the ending. Being the brat I was, I used to always tease others who had not seen the movie by repeatedly saying that I would spoil the movie for them. Eventually they got around to watch the movie and said it was really an awesome ending. For some reason I didn't show interest in discussing it or caring what they really thought of the movie.

After seven years, I finally got to watch the movie in my quest to watch all the movies ranked in imdb's top 250. I sat through the movie remembering my friends and long gone college days. Then, I was shocked to see what I always thought the ending was not. I couldn't wait to email my friends and tell them. Only one of them seemed to understand and said that it would have been hilarious if I had went ahead spoiled the movie to others back then with what I understood, only to have looked like an idiot. Others thought I was stupid to see the movie any other way.

I am not surprised by how stupid I can think or how ignorant I can be. The things that hit me hard are - How, through out seven years since then of watching, talking and discussing about movies, this one was never touched? How come The Sixth Sense was never part of those long hours of drinking when everything that ever was and ever will be was theorized and argued over?

At least, I got my Sixth Sense right!