The Village

[SPOILER WARNING: THIS POST IS ABOUT M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN'S LATEST FILM, THE VILLAGE, AND ANYONE WHO HAS EVER SEEN ONE OF HIS FILMS KNOWS THAT NOT BEING SPOILED IS KEY TO ENJOYING THEM. IF YOU PLAN TO SEE IT, DON'T READ THIS!]

Like most of M. Night Shyamalan's films, The Village is worth seeing. Also like most of his films, it features intensely created mood and environment, some scares, and the gradual but surprise revelation of the film's actual premise. Thankfully it avoids having a ridiculous ending like the one that was so disappointing in his last film, the one with the aliens and Mel Gibson.

This is your last warning...turn back here if you haven't seen the film...

The device for this film is as follows: The setting to which we are introduced is a village which feels like a fairly unspectacular movie version of a pioneer or Puritan village somewhere in the wilderness of U.S. post-colonization history. The village is in the woods, and beyond its very clearly marked boundaries lurk horrible creatures. An agreement between the creatures and the villages means they do not trespass on each other's territory, and this has had the effect of making travel out into the woods into a taboo for the villagers. This is just fine, because the villagers are deliberately avoiding the decadence and violence of "the towns" which lie somewhere beyond the woods.

It is gradually revealed that the monsters are, in fact, the village's elders dressed in costume. The intent of this subterfuge is to create the taboo which keeps everyone isolated in the village. It is further revealed that this is not the 16th century or the 19th century, but early in the 21st century. One of the elders was the son of a billionaire who was murdered over money, and the others have similarly lost loved ones to violence in the present-day U.S. The billionaire's son used his wealth to create an isolated nature preserve with this village hidden within (even to the point of bribing government officials to ban overflights of the area) to have an enclave of peace and civility in a chaotic and violent world.

It seems to me that this village is the United States, both domestically and internationally.

The village is the ultimate gated community. On the outside there is no knowledge that they exist, and within the village there is no real knowledge of the outside, except for the elders. Those outside its bounds are demonized by those within, as either actual demons or people who are violent and corrupt. This is a story of wealthy liberals who deal with an oppressive and violent world by rejecting it, by using their wealth to buy their way out of the violence. And of course this is not just a class project, but also a racialized one -- the village is all white. And just as people who live in real gated communities, this group depends on the continued functioning of the system which generates the violence that they flee in order to remain safe.

The village is the historical United States. The founding myth of this country is good people, the Puritans, fleeing persecution and ungodly behaviour and founding the "city on the hill" -- separate and an example of virtue for the world, supposedly. That imagery resonates through political speeches to this day.

The village is the current United States, in which elites are fairly deliberate in distorting the information available to the majority of people who live here about the world beyond their borders, in order to generate fear and therefore control. However, this way of seeing the film also allows it to be seen as a liberal, anti-war film because instead of sending great violence to encounter the demonized others beyond their bounds, this village chooses to send a single blind woman. In other words, lies from the elite to create fear and control are okay as long as the elite are virtuous, not like those crude, uncultured Bushies that are running things at the moment.

The ultimate lesson of the film is also a strange one. The plot of the film revolves around events in which, even in this homogeneous place, isolated by privilege, and solidly indoctrinated in "good" values, senseless violence (as well as disease and accident) can take lives and create tragedy. Nonetheless, because they have been lucky and the events of the movie have not revealed their deception to the rest of the village, the elders decide it is best to continue. In other words, this enclave of privilege, this dream of isolation that depends on the oppression of others, does not work but it is somehow the right decision to continue on with the experiment.

By the way, I'm not condemning the film for these things. It draws skillfully on narratives that will get a response from middle-class, white America, and others who have been indoctrinated into the worldview with that reality at its centre. What I think is interesting, and what I think will not really make an impression on most viewers, is the ultimate failure of the self-imposed isolation (and the scarcely hinted oppression on which it depends). No matter how far white America runs, its demons will find it -- not the demons that its elites create for it, those phantom images of Al-Qaeda terrorists which have been painted over top of everyone and every thing that opposes domination by Western elites, but the infinitely more complex real people and real peoples that lie beneath those stories (people struggling for national liberation, anti-globalization activists, anyone who is poor and/or of colour and refuses to sit back and take what they're given, at least one pacifist grandma in Boise, not to mention a handful of actual terrorists). In other words, trying to run away does not get rid of those infamous chickens of which Malcolm X spoke; only real social change does that.

[SPOILER WARNING: THIS POST IS ABOUT M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN'S LATEST FILM, THE VILLAGE, AND ANYONE WHO HAS EVER SEEN ONE OF HIS FILMS KNOWS THAT NOT BEING SPOILED IS KEY TO ENJOYING THEM. IF YOU PLAN TO SEE IT, DON'T READ THIS!]