"The Undateable"

I am envisioning a new M. Night Shyamalan movie. Its title will be:

THE UNDATEABLE.

Our hero is a loner, with few friends and family around. His name is Dan.

Dan is seeing a psychiatrist for his problems. One Wednesday, as usual, he gets into the doctor's office and waits for his turn. The doctor tells him that he is "working on a new cure." Dan becomes intrigued, for sure. More to come next week, he is told.

Dan's visit to the doctor's office on next Wednesday is brief. At the end of their session, the doctor gives Dan a flyer for a talk the doctor is planning to give that night. ("It is part of the cure!" the doctor says.) While walking to the elevators, Dan notices a beautiful woman talking to the doctor. She has a red dress and walks on high heels. Dan tries to block his thoughts about how he never ends up with someone like her. Thought stopping is a Cognitive Behavioral technique that supposedly lifts the patient's mood. Dan does not believe in its power. But he follows it anyhow.

Dan shows up at the talk. It is only him and the beautiful woman, and there is nobody else in the room. They wait for the doctor for about 20 minutes. The doctor calls Dan and says, "there has been a family emergency, I cannot make it to the talk tonight."

"Well, that was a waste of time!" says Dan to the beautiful woman. She agrees. They keep on talking a bit more, about their common doctor and life and everything. They agree to see each other again.

One thing leads to another, and they start dating. Everything is amazing at first, passionate nights, long walks in the park, etc. They share the same values, they have similar interests. Dan revamps his life, he buys new cologne, new clothes, and goes to the pharmacy to stock up some condoms. He talks to his doctor about his new interest, he omits the fact that she is also his client, of course - no need to rock the boat, he thinks. But: "I told my doctor where I met her", he says to a friend of his. "I am sure the doctor knows it!" He even thinks that his doctor's cure may just be old-fashioned matchmaking... But then he figures the doctor would not do such a thing on the grounds that it would not be ethical for him to match up two of his patients.

A few days later, Dan and his girlfriend meet at a coffee shop. They talk about their mutual doctor, and whether he matched them up intentionally. The girl does not think so, either.

After a couple of days, his girlfriend deserts him. No phone calls, no messages, nothing - no word anywhere. After she does not show up for their date, Dan calls his girlfriend's number - he hears, "This phone number has been disconnected." He goes home and emails her, thinking that maybe she got spooked because of the serious direction the relationship was heading, she will surely respond in a few days he reckons. Nothing happens. He decides to go where she lives, he had only briefly seen it from a distance a while back. The house is all boarded up.

In the meanwhile, Dan's friends and family contact him, wanting to meet his girl. "At least send us some pictures!", they exclaim, after hearing his excuses. He decides to send a few with her in it. Looking for the pictures he took, he notices that some of them were deleted from his computer. How could that be? She is in none of the remaining pictures. His desire to know the truth now becomes unbearable.

He goes to the coffee shop they used to go. He asks the clerk, "Do you remember the last time I was in here? Do you remember the girl near me? Did you happen to see her by any chance?"

The clerk remembers his visit to the shop but does not remember seeing a woman near Dan.

He rushes into his apartment. He frantically searches for the box of condoms in his room; he sees that the box had never been opened. Was he imagining his relationship? Was he, undateable?

Did he have an alter ego that kept his other self guessing? Did she never exist?

"I am going crazy, I need to see you!" Dan says on the phone, to his doctor. "See me first thing in the morning," the doctor says. Dan cannot sleep at night.

In the morning, he asks his doctor the dreaded question: "Do you see a female client just after me on Wednesdays?"

"The last client I see on Wednesdays is YOU!"

He talks to his psychiatrist (Played by Samuel L. Jackson) a bit more about what happened (or what didn't happen). He listens to him carefully and asks: "Do you remember when I told you I was going to try a new cure on you? I hypnotized you that day and tried to make you feel like you were already in a relationship. The thought process was that you would start acting, well, for the lack of a better word, cool, and I thought that would draw other people towards you. But it seems you made up a relationship in your head, and this apparently happened despite the fact that you do not have any previous psychotic episodes in your medical history. For my talk, only you showed up - I called all my clients that night, and you were my only client in there. When you told me you met this person at the venue of the talk, I thought she was just a stranger who dropped in because of her curiosity."

Everything makes sense all of a sudden for Dan. Then again, nothing does.

After concluding that this was an imaginary relationship, Dan undergoes a serious psychiatric treatment with heavy doses of anti-psychotics and anti-depressants.

The next screen comes with a sub-title, "3 years later." We see our hero talking to another gorgeous woman. This time, he is recording his conversations with her, in case he needs to prove himself that this was real. While they are talking, the camera zooms at the recorder, shows the insides of it, the uneasy string tremolo increases in volume, and finally, we see a spark inside the recorder - it goes bust.

Next screen reads: "Written and Directed by M. Night Shyamalan."

Here, I would like to point out that the audience at first will probably think that the doctor fixed his clients up intentionally (Since the doctor was shown talking to her; and Dan and she were in the same room waiting for the doctor to speak) as opposed to her being completely imaginary.

As usual, Mr. Shyamalan in this movie sheds light into the existential problems of human condition with respect to relationships, in the form of a fairy tale. If one imagines a relationship, is it still real? Is it real if one cannot prove it? Where do we draw the line between the provable and the absurd? This movie does not have the answers to these questions, but I suspect it is pointing at the right direction.

P. S. By the way, for those of you who are wondering, M. Night Shyamalan is the clerk that sells Dan condoms.