What's, um, "Happening"?

I was, for a time, rather fanatically devoted to M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. I still enjoy the movie. I see it more as a love story than just a mystery-thriller, and it has often deeply moved me. I like Shyamalan's previous work, too--The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs all had their merits. The Village was interesting in concept, well-acted, and well-scripted except for some stilted dialogue at the beginning. The story was provocative and intriguing, and content-wise, the film was acceptable for anyone old enough to handle some tension, jump scenes, and one act of violence.

Then Lady in the Water came along, a movie that seemed better fitted for the children's story it began as than a film marketed to adults--except that the interposition of a scary wolf-like creature made it unacceptable for young children. The movie was confusing and rather poorly-conceived, and seemed to make little effort to engage the audience in a convincing fictional world. I mean, three apes show up at the end to kill the bad creature.

Now there's The Happening. I haven't personally seem the film, but according to Plugged in Online, it is essentially a horror-film rendition of An Inconvenient Truth. Shyamalan was quoted in the same review as stating that the original cut of the film would have received an X-rating--or even been banned in the United States. Some editing took it down to a tidy R for sanitized occurrences of gruesome suicide, like a man getting his arms torn off by a lion.

Shyamalan has never done this before. Sure, his other films were intense, but they were not gruesome. Every other movie he's made has received a PG-13. I'm not against all R-rated movies--I own several--although I'm always mighty curious to know exactly why the R was given, because it's a mixed bag. It can mean simply some intense violence, like The Last Samurai. Or it can mean The Departed's 237 F-words. But coming from Shyamlan, this is weird--editing down the gore from a sure-fire NC-17 rating? Evidently he also throws in some crude sexual slang to top things off. And the reason everyone is getting sawn into mincemeat, or whatever, is because of man's inhumanity to...the environment.

The question du jour, then, is what in blue blazes is Mr. Shyamalan up to, and why?