Thoughts on “The Village”
Written by Dhes of Yuggoth Tuesday, 12 May 2009 20:32
Can a movie be all bad if it makes you think? Dhes of Yuggoth (her pen name) devotes her thoughts to this question...
Although M. Night Shyamalan’s
The Village has been gone from theaters for some years now, I have finally
gotten around to watching it. Many of the reviews at the time of its release were
scathing, and several venerable critics renounced it as utterly laughable. I therefore
fully expected to roll my eyes at the thing and afterwards fling it aside like so
much ridiculous tripe. But I wanted to see for myself exactly what they were talking
about before rendering final judgment on the matter. What I saw was indeed a flawed
piece of film, but, much to my surprise, I found it impossible to toss aside. Indeed,
I wanted then to even love it, but I found that impossible, too. It has found a
strange little niche, it seems, in that shadowy grey area between forgettable nonsense
and sublime cinema.
The movie left me with something far deeper and more profound than it should have, and therein lies its quasi-redemption. Buried in the mud and the dross is a nugget of philosophical finery, something to turn over in my head for a time. Any movie that can accomplish this has a measure of value which makes watching it worthwhile.
In The Village I saw an allegory for many of the movements we see in the world today. In it I saw something akin to the religious communities that seek to turn back the hands of time to a simpler era: home schooling, isolationism, gated communities, compounds and more. All of these are ways to limit what can reach us and our children in our lives, what can touch us, and therefore, what can harm us. At the heart of each are issues of control, fear, and the desire to feel safe from a world gone mad. When feelings of insecurity rise, so too does the desire for more and more extreme solutions — heartfelt, but drastic.
The Village is the
story of Covington Village, a colony created by its elders where they can be free
to pursue their hopes and dreams and preserve innocence and hope for their children.
It seems the most noble of causes, and indeed, colonization has been an answer to
previous generations who sought to leave the rest of the world behind in search
of a better life. In the 17th century, those seeking religious freedom
traded the sorrows of persecution for the hardships of forging a new life in a new
land that has since become the United States. In the 18th century, this
impulse continued as the colonies expanded and gained independence. There were still
new worlds to conquer, and in the 19th century, those who tired of the
harried pace of city life in the East struck out for the untamed West. But, now,
where else is there to go? No worlds are left to conquer, but colonization somehow
manages to continue.
Innocence and Hope
The elders confessed they wished to preserve those two qualities which they themselves no longer seem to possess, or at least not in any of their purer forms: innocence and hope. Filled with cynicism about whether they or their children can or even should endure in the modern world, they fled, naively believing they could leave it all behind. But they were not obliged merely to establish their colony, but also to create an entire world containing terrors that the outside world is no longer gullible enough to believe.
To escape the horrors of a modern world fraught with modern problems — murder, rape and sorrow — Covington Village traded them for another set of horrors: the powers of evil primeval lurking in the forbidding forest which surrounded them. This façade had to be carefully cultivated and maintained so that the power of fear would consistently overcome the power of reason. Superstition over logic. Childhood over the estate of man. They lived in a state of arrested development, hiding like frightened rabbits from sorrows, rather than standing bravely up to face them. They passed their cowardice on to their children, but thankfully the results were mixed.
These self-inflicted horrors were bogeymen that the outside world has long since grown out of, childish fears that adults put away with their toys and trappings of youth. But in Covington Village, they were not put away. They were horrors which for them became as much a part of life as the kidnappings and murders and rapes which, most regrettably, are a part of ours.
What is innocence? We describe children in such terms, for they do not yet have sufficient experience of the world to know how it works. We view those years with a remembered wonder, as we see the wonder shining in children’s eyes. We know it to be fleeting, and for its evanescence, we treasure it. But innocence, beneath all its starry-eyed marvel, is essentially ignorance. With the increase of knowledge, innocence is gradually worn away. We trade one for the other as we grow older so that we may become adults and go out into the world, wiser and more capable than the children we once were.
Ignorance and Darkness
What could ever come of living continually in such a childlike state? True, the children of Covington Village grew up completely ignorant of the darker parts of the modern world, of the kidnappings, the child predators, and “Stranger Danger.” But they did grow up knowing the darker parts of their own world, the forest-dwellers who would prey upon anyone who violated their borders. Those We Do Not Speak Of are harsh and unforgiving, but it seems they possess a strange sort of reason. In the outside world, the dangers the children face are very real and the monsters are not just stories and costumes. In Covington, the dangers are contrived and manufactured to keep the citizens docile, unquestioning, and filled with just enough fear that they don’t dare to venture into the world the elders fled.
In their carefully cultivated terror, the Covington colonists clung to one another, and everything the community did, it did as one. They ate their meals together at long tables outdoors, consciously evoking the imagery of the Puritans’ fabled feasts of Thanksgiving. Cooking was done communally as well, in large outdoor brick ovens and huge cast iron kettles over fires. Conformity seemed absolute and unbending. All were essentially alike, as though they all formed one big, happy family. On the surface, it seems charming and delightfully antiquated, but in truth, where it should have been warm, I found it more chilling than all of Those We Do Not Speak Of combined. It was life as it had never been, and in it was no room for anything that deviated from the constructed norm, or, really, anyone who was different. Fear and fear alike.
The two most respectable
citizens, in my mind, were Ivy Walker and Lucius Hunt, not just for their differences,
but because they possessed a bravery and iron will not even the elders could claim.
They succeeded where elders had failed. They were what the elders could not be.
In the case of Ivy and Lucas, fear, cowardice, and isolationism did not take sufficient
hold. This created ripples of unrest in the community. Lucius wanted change, to
venture beyond the woods and seek contact with the outside world, so as to enrich
their own and bring it aid. While the others in the village quivered like blobs
of human Jell-O, Ivy and Lucius focused instead on what needed to be done and did
it.
Lucius saw the sorrow of August Nicholson over the loss of his 7-year-old son to illness. Perhaps, Lucius reasoned quite sensibly, someone beyond their borders might have had the medicine that could have saved the boy’s life and spared Mr. Nicholson his suffering. His plea to the elders, painstakingly written by his own hand, showed not only his intelligence, but also, sadly, the state to which education had deteriorated in the colony. The lad’s mind was bright and keen, but his compositional style was stunted at an elementary level.
In the outside world, he might have had the chance to attend a university, as his intended father-in-law had done, but trapped as he was in this isolated world of fear and ignorance, he would never know that opportunity. Bravery he had to spare, and could have done a world of good if only he’d been in a place where it could have been possible.
Ivy’s case was sadder yet. She possessed nerves of steel, unlike most of her fellow villagers, and will that surpassed anyone’s. Daily she demonstrated herself to be more capable than most of the others, by her father’s observation. The others were in no position to disagree. She was blind, and even with such a disadvantage she managed to outshine them all. The village doctor knew modern medicine, but because the villagers had locked themselves away from the modern world and had sworn never to return, he could not save her sight in her childhood.
Daniel Nicholson had died of an illness modern medicine could have cured. Noah Percy appeared to have some sort of developmental disorder, if not a form of mental illness, either of which might have been better managed with access to proper facilities. He showed a worrying level of aggression towards others and a lack of any meaningful understanding of the consequences of his actions, but he was viewed as an innocent and not a person to be concerned about. Getting the help he’d needed might well have prevented his violent acts. Lucius Hunt faced an infection from the filthy knife that Noah used to stab him. Modern facilities could easily have managed what was, in their self-imposed primitive surroundings, a much graver situation.
Tragedy and Triumph
In these tragedies, Covington
Village found a measure of defeat. They sought to escape crime, yet the human emotions
and jealousies which are inherent in any society found them anyway, deep in the
woods. They wished to escape sorrow, but loved ones must eventually leave us, no
matter the cause, and the pain of loss can never be escaped. August Nicholson had
ample cause to learn that for himself. In throwing out those things they viewed
as evil, they also threw away the good things modern life has to offer: advanced
medicine and medical facilities, the compassion that does persist, knowledge, educational
opportunities, and the chance to take this sad world and try to make it a better
place by staying in it and making a difference. But in their fathomless but selfish
sorrow, they came to feel there was no human good left in the world, and fled in
order to find it again in themselves.
In Kevin, the young ranger whom Ivy encountered on the other side of the wall, was a compassion and kindness she did not expect, because she had always been taught that in the outside world there was only wickedness. The encounter touched them both, for I am convinced that Kevin would have given her the medicine she wanted even if she had not pressed her father’s pocket watch into his hands. He was touched by her bravery and urgency, and she by his unexpected humanity. There’s an irony in her blindness, for she ultimately possessed clearer vision than any of the others, even her father. She saw the folly of the creatures, for she knew they were a contrivance to keep the village tractable, and she knew they could be killed. She saw compassion in the world she was raised to think was evil. And I am sure she saw the limits to the supposed virtue of their isolation, for it was in the medicine from beyond the forest that all her hopes were suspended.
Safety in Money
The elders considered themselves driven into a muddled sort of historical preserve, where a false nostalgia for more innocent times reigned. However, it was their own fear and sorrow that drove them to do as they did, and it took the considerable fortune of Mr. Walker to make it a reality for them. This, of course, is one of the greater ironies of Covington Village, that money should be so necessary to the establishment and maintenance of a community where money was abolished right along with every other evil. In truth, it took Mr. Walker’s considerable fortune to enforce the sanctity of Covington’s artificial haven. There, they taught not only their own true fears, but also a new, entirely fabricated fear to their children. Those fears kept the villagers imprisoned within their minds, their homes, and their own lands. Their children would never learn of murderers stalking the streets, but neither would they eever sample the good things the world has to offer. They would never see an exotic tropical fish swimming gracefully in an aquarium, gaze in wonder at the enormous skeleton of a dinosaur in a museum, wander through the stacks of a great library, or taste the subtle bouquet of flavor in a tea from the other side of the world. Isolation may keep out the bad things which hurt us, but it also keeps out great ideas that shape the world for the better. It denies us the art and the wonders that are the highest marks of civilization. Where such things are possible and yet denied, our children are robbed of that which may well change their lives and improve all our tomorrows.
The Taint of Terror
Covington Village did not live a life of freedom. They lived a life of terror. They sought a utopia, but it was one built on fear. In that fear must rest the seeds of their own inevitable destruction. No matter how idyllic life in such a place can seem when the times are good, those good times are always disturbed. Bleeding into their pastoral idyll was the underlying terror that it only existed at the mercy of Those We Do Not Speak Of. Terror taints everything it touches, no matter how pure it was meant to be, and therein is the notion of safety destroyed, at the very heart of it. The idea of living simple, rural lives is appealing in this harried and heavily-machined world. But, if the cost is rationality itself, what can the net good be to the people who must live in it?
“We are grateful for the time we have been given,” says Mr. Walker at the start of each communal dinner. I often wondered if that was truly the case with the denizens of Covington Village, and indeed of many of the people in this outer world beyond the forest. It seems to me any gratitude for the brief span we have to live falls short without the bravery to take on the challenge of facing a world of adversity to make the most of that time.
Laughter has long been considered the mortal enemy of fear, because laughter banishes fear. Noah, for all his apparent madness, was in his way wiser than the others, for he would laugh and clap his hands joyfully when the woods sounded with the howling and blood-chilling cries that the villagers knew to be the calls of Those We Do Not Speak Of. The others quaked with fear, but he did not fear them. The rest, no doubt, had to be taught to discount his reactions as meaningless, that he simply didn’t know any better. Fear, they were taught, was good, and it would keep them safe. However, fear never does. The safety it gave them was no better than the safety afforded prisoners by the stone walls that confine them.
Can a Movie be Bad if it Makes You Think?
Ultimately, I wonder if it is in our enfeebled society’s best interests to completely dismiss this movie. It mirrors too much of our world and our ways of not really dealing with it. It carries too much truth, too much wisdom and too important a philosophical nugget to discount it entirely. Yes, much of it is ham-fistedly contrived, over-the-top and unsustainable, but so what if it is? Too much of it shatters reality, but how much of that is a mere distraction from the hidden depths in the story? Does it say something deeper that Those We Do Not Speak Of look like a school child’s primitive art project? What is really meant by how brittle the society is which lives in that muddled version of the past? Is this just bad filmmaking, or is it really a product of our times, making uncannily keen and incisive observations about the human condition and the shortcomings we possess in a manner too subtle for many to see? If this is the case, what do we intend to take from it? And if it is not, then where is it written that we cannot see something greater in a thing than was ever meant by it, if doing so causes us to examine ourselves and our path in such depth? And can anything that causes one to think in such terms really be a bad movie?
For myself, I do not feel that it is. It is pure fable, in its oldest sense. And I do believe there must still be a place for such things, even in this jaded world.
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