The other night, our partner Kaylin re-watched The Village with us. It's one of our favorite movies for the Hallowe'en season (or any season, really), and we're inclined to think it's the best film that M. Night Shyamalan ever made...especially because his career hit the skids immediately afterwards, possibly because The Village earned a lot of derision for the unlikelihood of "the twist". But Kaylin and I really like the overall story, and are disinclined to think of the big reveal in terms of a mere "twist". In fact, we generally accept the plausibility of the scenario that you see in The Village—which leads to the slightly clumsy "twist" reveal, it's true, but what matters to Kaylin and ourselves is that we can actually imagine someone trying to set up a "Village", in the style of the film. The premise isn't really that ridiculous, especially in the United States, a nation whose colonial culture has fostered who knows however many thousands of "New Edens", i.e. attempts to establish communities built from the ground up to be ideal societies, with perfected laws and superior faith in a better way of life.
And here's where perhaps I should add a cut...
(Major spoilers for Shyamalan's The Village, and talk about planned communities and trauma and a neurodivergent character and other things)
I'll go so far as to assert that The Village depicts something only slightly less ridiculous than a lot of real-life American attempts to found new communities and religious sects along rigidly programmed lines. Of course it's a bit outlandish to posit that a well-connected man could have somehow concealed such a community completely from public sight, in the middle of a wildlife preserve whose name hints that the founder of "The Village" was responsible for creating the wildlife preserve for the specific purpose of hiding his planned community. We're forced to assume that Edward Walker (played by William Hurt), who reveals himself as a history professor, must also have been "independently wealthy" and therefore able to buy up large chunks of land (and to buy off government officials to help preserve the secrecy of his Village.) It's improbable, yes, and so the climactic reveal of the film is perhaps a bit wobbly. But real-life people have done some pretty strange things in the name of building a supposedly perfect new society or new religion...I'm willing to buy that something approximately like The Village could in fact happen. Someone might really try to establish a pseudo-old-timey colony, with social rules intended to account for the colony's total isolation from the rest of the world.
There's a lot that I could say about The Village. It's a thought-provoking film that comments on a lot of serious and relevant social issues. Implicitly the film asks: is it even possible to build a society like this? For people have tried, in different ways, to create societies intended to be fully self-supporting and self-contained, with safeguards in place against both outside incursion and internal discontent. Edward Walker and the other founders of "The Village" think that they've taken sufficient measures to keep everyone content to be where they are; they think they've got a reliable and universal tool for social control.
And that tool is trauma, and retraumatization. The artificial society of The Village is explicitly built around a semi-ritualized fixation on trauma. The founders of this colony were all traumatized themselves; they're all persons who've lost loved ones to violence, and so they decided to build a society in which everyone is ritualistically traumatized into a permanent horror and dread of the outside world and its senseless violence. The only feasible option, it would seem, is staying safe within the protection of the colony and its peaceful ways. Everything outside the settlement's borders—the surrounding woods, "the towns" beyond them—is forbidden territory, chaotic and perilous. "The towns" are where evil people live, and random murders committed; the founders save up their memories of their relatives' violent deaths, and repeat those memories (carefully scrubbed of details) to their children if they get too restless. The woods are where monsters live: taking their cue from local legends about cryptids in the woods, the founders concoct a body of legend about "Those We Do Not Speak Of", with solemn prohibitions and ritual propiations and (every now and again) an explicit monster incursion, with the aid of some impressively creepy costuming, enacted as deemed necessary to reinforce the prohibitions against leaving the settlement.
A lot of this undoubtedly sounds very familiar. Doesn't "Western civilization", still staggering along with "Christian values" either explicitly asserted or given a thin secularized varnish, work overtime to reinforce the notion that life is suffering, and indeed ought to be suffering? Christians use the Crucifixion as a focal point—the Son of God suffered horrible agonies (kept going indefinitely, in countless gory sermons and fictional depictions) hence, in the logic of abusive Christian leaders and parents, you're only making His pains worse by being disobedient or doubtful. But secular leaders also like to emphasize pain and suffering, claiming that it might be wrong to relieve pain, because suffering is "real life" and everyone ought to learn toughness, silence in the face of pain, and gratitude for their meager comforts. Western societies also likes its stock villains of the "Those We Do Not Speak Of" variety—ritualized scapegoats, held up as proof that we need to accept violence and brutality in our society in order to guard against the unlimited chaos and violence of society's designated enemies.
But it all goes wrong in The Village for multiple reasons, but chiefly because one of the children that grows up in this insular society isn't sufficiently afraid. Here we arrive at a problematical element of Shyamalan's movie—a somewhat questionable depiction of a young man who's clearly indicated to be neurodivergent or "tetched" in some unspecified way. Already there's hints that the founders' "Village" isn't prepared to deal with physical ailments—the movie opens with the death of one of the founders' children, at a heartbreakingly young age, which raises the spectre of treatable childhood disease going untreated in this isolated place. The neurodivergent young man, Noah (played by Adrien Brody), presents yet another challenge that the founders didn't anticipate with their optimistic social rules. Noah isn't persuadable the way everyone else is, and he tests the limits of his society's regulations—and "The Village" has no idea what to do with him other than repeatedly punishing him with solitary confinement, piling trauma upon trauma. (Ostracism would be unthinkable in this society, so rather than threatening to toss Noah out, they resort to walling him in.) The settlement has no real place for Noah; he's unhappy, restless, and therefore willing to take radical chances. And that proves to be dangerous indeed, for Noah learns just what "Those We Do Not Speak Of" are really about, and thus he's free to slip his tether completely: the designated monsters no longer frighten him. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I feel as though I've far from exhausted all my thoughts about The Village. I'll say this much more in closing: Shyamalan's depiction of a neurodivergent character in his movie might be a bit dubious, but I perceive a humanity and compassion in The Village that I haven't seen from Shyamalan's later movies where he exploits neurodivergence as a source of ready-made horrors. Split and Glass, which lean heavily upon a truly bizarre and grotesque depiction of DID plurality, have a nasty reek about them that The Village doesn't have.
I think more people ought to see The Village, in fact. It's a film rather like John Boorman's Zardoz that's acquired the undeserved reputation of being incoherent nonsense even though both films are perfectly lucid and make plenty of sense if you take them at face value. It's not really a horror movie exactly but that's one of the film's charms, if you ask me; it defies easy classification.
And then came Lady in the Water, which is unquestionably a misfire...and then it would get worse. What happened to you, Mr. Shyamalan?
~Chara of Pnictogen
