LICC - Connecting with Culture - The Village

connecting with culture - the village

The director M Night Shyamalan has a knack for weaving the weird and wonderful into film. He served up the supernatural, superheroes and superstition respectively in The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs - each accompanied by a healthy dose of suspense. The Village is no exception. The story focuses on life in an idyllic rural valley, in late-19th-century America, where villagers live in peace and harmony under the watchful but benevolent gaze of the community elders.

All is not as it seems, however - for here be monsters. In the woods surrounding the valley live dangerous beasts who hold to an uneasy truce with the elders. To maintain the peace, none of the villagers may transgress the boundary between valley and wood. Thanks mainly to the strict observation of rules which help the people maintain a healthy, if fearful, distance from danger, life in the valley is blissfully normal: people marry, raise children and partake in 'Amish' style community feasts.
However, the truce that keeps them safe also keeps them trapped, and the peace is shattered when, after a child dies needlessly from a curable ailment, one headstrong youth decides to head through the woods to the local towns to bring back vital medicines.

The Village is a powerful parody of life today - particularly when it explores our dwindling sense of community in contemporary culture. Shyamalan seeks to uncover what it really is that keeps a community together. Boundaries and rules alone do not provide social cohesion - we all need a bigger picture, into which the rules can fit and make sense. But through this film, Shyamalan, who never ducks the big issues, questions both political and religious authorities who employ fear as a means to secure position.

Do we need to know that we're all answerable to a higher authority in order to find harmony? Or do repetitive reminders that we are under constant threat help us to forge social bonds in uniting us against a 'common' enemy? With the Government issuing pamphlets nationwide on what to do in the event of a terrorist attack, The Village's storyline is prescient. Shyamalan's critique, however, is ambiguous. He offers no easy answers. Life in the village, although fearful, is to be envied for its simplicity and serenity. At the end of viewing this film, then, we are left metaphorically, as well as literally, in the dark. Jason Gardner