Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
It Takes a Village Mindset
Last night I saw a brilliant movie from 2004: The Village, by M. Night Shyamalan. Its brilliance comes from the fact that it spoke to an important universal truth in 2004 and is extremely topical today.
[Spoiler alert] I can’t go too far into the description of the film and a discussion of its importance without revealing surprise elements that make it such a rich and compelling story. So if you want to stop reading now and come back to my post, this is a good time to do so.
The Village is located in a valley in the eastern United States, probably Pennsylvania. It is surrounded by woods. The Village residents are dressed in homemade clothing. They are clearly a close community led by a group of “elders.” There is a timeless aspect to the Village, that only after the secret of the Village is revealed you can recall the lcues that made things not fit a clear place in time.
The Village has an “agreement” between itself and the unnamed things that occupy the surrounding woods. The Village has a posted and marked perimeter and an elevated watch house and alarm bell to give warning if the unnamed things intrude into the Village. The unnamed things are fearsome and the children and youth of the Village have been trained by the elders to stay within the confines of the Village lest they and the Village be attacked and the “agreement” that protects them be vitiated. So there is both an individual and a corporal threat.
As the story begins, the Village is mourning the death of a 7-year-old child. After the burial, Lucious (Joaquin Phoenix) seeks permission from the elders to leave the Village and enter the woods to attempt to reach the Town where he has heard there is medicine he could bring back to the Village that might have prevented the death of the child and could prevent future deaths. Lucious believes that the unnamed things may leave him unharmed in his quest as his heart is pure and they should see he means them no harm. This, he believes, will keep him safe — as these are the highest values of the Village and assure the continued peace of the Village. The elders praise his courage but decline his request.
In the movie, we see the simple romantic lives of the teenagers who are seeking to form their own families in the Village. A love triangle exists between Lucious, Ivey (Bryce Dallas Howard), and Noah (Adrien Brody). Noah is simple and prone to periodic fits. Ivey is blind but courageous and has never let her blindness deter her from play and adventure. Lucious is kind and caring, someone who looks out for others — particularly those less able to fully look out for themselves. The three have been close throughout their young lives, and Lucious and Ivey do not recognize that as Noah has come into puberty that he has formed romantic desires for Ivey. So when it becomes known that Ivey and Lucious intend to wed, Noah attacks Lucious with a knife and leaves him gravely injured and dying.
Ivey is inconsolable. Ivey’s father, Edward (William Hunt) is desperately looking for a way to save Lucious to secure the happiness of his daughter. He asks the Village healer, Victor (Frank Collinson), what can be done. Although reluctant to discuss it, both Edward and Frank know that the only possibility of saving Lucious is to get medicine from the Town. But the elders have sworn an oath to never leave the Village, so Edward — much as he dearly wishes to brave the journey — cannot leave the Village without disrupting the cohesion of the Village. Ivey begs her father to let her go to the Town. Ivey is blind but courageous and has always demonstrated capabilities beyond her blindness.
But there is a difference between courageous and fearless, and Edward must now reveal something that Ivey must know if she is to be fearless: The elders have made up the existence of the ferocious and menacing unnamed things as a means of keeping the children in the Village and binding everyone together under the elders control. In a small building at the edge of the Village the elders keep the costumes of the fanged, spiny, and antlered things in red robes that periodically menace the Village at night to bring reality to the fiction of this menace and maintain control.
Edward shares this knowledge with Ivey in order to make her fearless in her transit of the woods. But he makes it clear that there is real danger in the Town. And it is the danger of the Town, and not the unnamed things, that caused the elders to exile themselves and create a new community in the Village. Edward tells Ivey of the family history in the Town where his father grew wealthy but did not understand the danger of wealth, and was murdered. Crime was rampant in the Town and peace and safety for the elders and their families could only be assured by leaving the Town and creating the Village. And the peace and safety of the Village was secured by creating the fiction of the unnamed things and assuring that the children of the Village, like the elders who took an oath, would never leave the Village.
Ivey leaves the Village in her quest to reach the Town. She is to follow the stream until she reaches a road, and then follow the road to the Town. Edward sends two young men to accompany her no further than the road where they are to remain until she returns. They do not know the unnamed things are fiction. They have been given “magic rocks” to protect them while they are in the woods, but remain so fearful that they simply give Ivey the magic rocks and abandon her.
Ivey is courageous and possesses the knowledge to be fearless, but the strangeness and sounds of the woods are unnerving. As she taps her way through the woods with her walking stick she falls into a sinkhole. She struggles out of it and continues somewhat unnerved. Ivey’s blindness is profound but not complete. She can perceive shapes to some degree but she still relies on touch and interpretation. She senses she is being stalked by something in the woods. We see a figure in the costume of the unnamed thing. Is she projecting this image or is it real? She dodges the creature and then returns to the edge of the sinkhole that she escaped and stands still holding out her arms and inviting attack. As the creature charges she jumps aside and it falls into the sinkhole and dies. We see that it is Noah who has found a costume of the unnamed thing and has pursued her into the woods.
Ivey now freed of her pursuer finds the road and follows it to the Town. But her way is obstructed by some wall with growth all over it. She can find no way around and so decides to climb over it. When she get the other side, she (and we) discover a large paved road and groomed grass between the road and the tall fence she climbed over. On the wall is a sign “Wildlife Preserve.” A ranger in a vehicle has observed her crawl over the wall and approaches her to find out what she was doing in the Preserve. What, up to this time has been timeless — 19th-century society? 18th-century fears? — is revealed to be now, present day.
Ivey doesn’t know anything but that she needs to reach the Town for medicine. She explains her mission to the ranger, who is amazed at the story he hears but is sympathetic. He tells her to stay there while he goes and gets medicine from the emergency supplies at the ranger station. He gets the supplies and returns with a ladder to prop against the tall wall so that she can get back into the Preserve. Ivey makes it back and it appears that Lucious will be saved.
The elders meet to determine whether to reveal the secret to everyone — that the Village was set up in a Wildlife Preserve, that the elders had created a retreat from a modern world of crime and menace to establish a utopian society, that the unnamed things were a fiction to instill fear and maintain control by the elders over the whole of their society. They unanimously decide to keep it secret and maintain their control. Unknown is whether Ivey will keep it a secret and what they may see fit to do if she won’t.
Will Ivey keep it a secret? She possesses knowledge about the fictional nature of the unnamed things the fear of which is basic to the elders’ control. But she has no direct knowledge of the Town. She has no experiential basis to make a decision. She is inculcated in the culture of the Village and the comforts of its rhythms. Her contact with an outsider was limited, but it undercuts the fear of the outside.
Ivey has fierce intelligence but has years of conditioning to believe in the menace of the unnamed things. That is why, while in the woods, she could not entirely shake her fear even possessing knowledge. Because Noah’s attack in the woods was real and not imagined, we are not forced to fully consider the conflict within Ivey between her rational and emotional sides.
The rationale for the Village is not mere utopian nonsense. The Town is a real place with real dangers. A decision must be made as to how to respond to those dangers. The elders opt for exile and a utopian society under their control — a control that is based on a fear of their own design. Could this utopia, or any utopia, exist without control based on fear? Fear of loss is a more powerful emotion than opportunity for gain. Making individual decisions consequential for the larger group is a key feature of utopian ideology. Peer pressure is essential both to conditioning and effective control.
You take the vaccine not to protect yourself but to protect others. You wear a mask not to protect yourself but to protect others. Thus your willingness to take a personal risk is not acceptable or allowable. Consent is not a thing.
That is the mindset of the Village. Can love flourish in the Village? Yes. Is there comfort in conditioning? Yes. And so “slavery” can be made to be seen as “freedom” within the confines of Village life so long as there is no desire to explore the woods or obtain the benefits of the Town.
“Everything in the Village, nothing outside the Village, nothing against the Village.”
Mussolini understood control. Orwell understood Mussolini.
Published in General
Mrs Rodin has always observed that the more “name” stars in a production the lower the quality. But happily, this time, it is not true. Everyone gave an outstanding performance in a solid story and production.
M. Night Shyamalan is a national treasure. His religious background and exposure is very ecumenical. That may have contributed to the decision to have no particular religious outlook in the Village. It is a secular progressive microcosm — sustainable living, commune economy, a community ethic without a deity. Moral behavior is that which serves the Village. Nonconformity is a risk to all and must be avoided.
Shyamalan grew up in Pennsylvania and was likely familiar with Amish communities there. There is an Amish community here in East Tennessee about 20 minutes from me. I frequent their market.
The character and dress of the Village read as Amish, but as previously mentioned there was no express religion referenced in the movie. And because of the Amish lifestyle, the Village could exist in any time period from the 19th century to today.
Twilight Zone is a better and 24 minutes long. “Stopover in a Quiet Town” is a similar plot, but with a better twist.
Most of the problems with The Village would have mostly disappeared if it had been set in, like, the 1930s or 40s instead of in the “present day”. It would have been more believable that a really rich dude could have set something like that up and kept it a secret since the country was still relatively sparsely populated and also because airplanes weren’t nearly as much of a thing yet.
Like, imagine that instead of being a bunch of 1960s hippies the parents had given up on society because of the horrors of WWI and had built the village around 1918. Then years later when the kid gets sick and they send the girl out to find medicine, once the girl gets to town it turns out that it’s actually December 8 1942 or August 9 1945, thereby proving the parents right about humanity’s cruelty but also penicillin’s been invented in the meantime so the kid is cured thanks to the very Science that the parents hate. That sort of timeline would have made way more sense.
A very understated and under rated movie.
Like some other films and TV shows from yesteryears, it helped allow a person to stop and think.
Wish we had more films like it.
In fairness to Shyamalan, the movie actually does suggest what you say. Each of the elders has a box that contains newspapers of the time that described the crimes and troubles from which they exiled themselves. And the photos in the papers do read as the 1920s-1940s. Of course by the time of Ivey’s journey it’s more like the 1960s. The vehicle in the story was a pickup/utility truck style and so was not time specific. But the roadway and roadside grooming was definitely 1960+.
And yes, there is a suggestion that Edward used his father’s wealth to pay off politicians to bar overflights on the Wildlife Preserve.
Well, the critics hated it and maybe you need to be a conservative to truly appreciate its message. I don’t think we’ve seen a movie quite like it since.
Well, it is an interesting story, but I see them as quite different. The notion that you don’t understand a larger reality is the same. But in The Village that unreality is contrived by human actors. In Stopover in a Quiet Town you have an alien godlike entity that has transported humans to a different existence that has been incompetently copied to make those humans feel at home in this new place. It is human contrivance in The Village that (IMO) makes it the more important story. Stopover is an interesting conception but tells us nothing about humans, other than what entertains them. Notice that Stopover was authored by Earl Hamner of The Waltons fame?
While the exact year the movie takes place isn’t specified, the ranger’s office contains an ink jet printer indicating that it’s at least the late 1990s and probably the early 2000s. Also, I believe there’s dialogue that the village was founded in the late 1970s. The ranger’s vehicle is a 1990s Land Rover Defender.
Maybe that’s why some people call him Shamalama-ding-dong?
Shyamalan´s an uneven filmmaker and The Village is a perfect example of the inconsistent quality of his work. It would have been better, as other have noted, to set the story in an earlier time when the credulity-straining “paid the FAA to avoid fly-overs” explanatory voice over would have been unnecessary. Yeah, having the monsters turn out to be people in costumes – and the real monster one of them- that works fine. And if the village had only been a very isolated Amish-style community without any of the fool backstory, that would have been easier to accept as a plot element. My own preference would have been for a period piece drawing from Hawthorne´s “Young Goodman Brown” or similar supernatural horror- perhaps with the village elders finding out that the things they have been pretending exist really do exist.
“While the exact year the movie takes place isn’t specified, the ranger’s office contains an ink jet printer indicating that it’s at least the late 1990s and probably the early 2000s. Also, I believe there’s dialogue that the village was founded in the late 1970s. The ranger’s vehicle is a 1990s Land Rover Defender.”
OK, so I think we have established that the film would have been stronger, a little more coherent and “realistic” had it been placed in the 1950s. But I am more interested in the lie to enforce fear to “protect” against a danger that is less certain than that embedded in the lie.
Good observation.
Yeah, that is definitely true of this film.
I am sensing you might possibly (but not definitely) not be a fan.
As intended, I was disturbed by both the setup of the movie and Ivy’s eventual decision at the movie’s end. To me, it posed a question as to if ignorance is truly bliss. Are the people of The Villiage better off not knowing that they are totally disconnected from modern life and the many advantages it provides…medicine, automation of mundane tasks, leisure time to ponder deeper considerations of life. Of course, modern life also has many negatives as well. We watch Yellowstone and the idea of working as a rancher in such a beautiful land where one could disconnect from modern life seems grand, but (much like the idea that if you live in a small hut in the woods without any connection to the outside world for a month and get some money would you do it), cutting oneself off from the niceties of modern life can mean dying of an infection, or being exhausted because you have to work hard every day just to feed yourself.
At the end that is the dilemma that Ivy faces, though she lacks the knowledge of what she is giving up. She chooses the safe world that she knows turning her back on the wonder that awaits, in part, because she has no clue what actually is out there. I remember the Michael Crichton book Timeline where people have the chance to travel back in time to 14th Century France. One of the characters is so enamored by the period that he chooses to stay. I have a hard time imagining that concept because life in the period was brutal and short (even for the nobles). Now, give me the chance to go 600 years into the future and I would likely take it. But I wonder how many would choose to stay where they were, like Ivy?
I really dug it until about the last 15-20 minutes. I liked Signs very much even if it featured the dumbest aliens ever to invade Earth (you have FTL but can´t think to don a rain slicker? Seriously?) and The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable were terrific.
I had a Canon ink-jet printer in the 1980s. Although if you recognize a particular model that wasn’t available until the late 90s, that’s different.
They might have had overflights in the 1950s too.
The stated reason there were no overflights was the bribing of politicians (presumably with Edward’s father’s money). Presumably that might have been easier to accomplish in the 1950s. Even satellite images available online blur certain “sensitive” areas. Maybe the argument that accompanied the bribe was environmental sensitivity of the Wildlife Preserve? That would have been a timely argument in the 1960s.
That might have been a plausible argument for takeoffs/landings over the Village, but not for overflights at thousands of feet.