The Village: Philosophical Derivatives of the Movie

NOTE: This article should not be read by someone who hasn’t seen the film because it is not a review gives away the movie’s plot twists.

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It is profoundly gripping and engaging to say the least. Any resentment toward the director for making a constant fool of me for the duration of 108 minutes is fleeting. What resonates in my mind is the scope of the director’s imagination and an appreciation of the depth of subjective treasure embodied in M. Night Shyamalan’s latest work.

It is a subjective medium, which really takes away from the whole point of letting someone else tell you what the movie is like. However, the wealth of subjective interpretations of the material, concepts, analogies, allegories and the philosophical derivatives of the story are profound and perhaps worthy of sharing.

One of the first emerging themes from the movie for me is the place of the outcast in society. The somewhat subdued and introverted character Lucius Hunt, represents the curiosity that challenges the norm in a place that is governed by a strict set of rules and the looming threat of unspeakable consequence in the face of disobedience.

1. Let the bad colour not be seen, it attracts them
2. Never enter the woods, that is where they wait
3. Heed the warning bell, for they are coming

Lucious in his affecting and love inspiring naivety, not only senses the undercurrents within the aptly unnamed Village, but refrains from openly questioning the possible reasons for his own somewhat discomforted disposition. He expresses himself through notes to the town elders when somewhat saturated by the eventualities around him always focused on what has to be done to fight through predicaments such as the stealing of livestock and the state of affairs following a death in the village at the onset of the film.

He represented to me the outcast, silenced and stoic instead of hot blooded and aggressive living through the woes of even his own mother wondering “what goes on in that head of yours?”, The character does not openly seek out to challenge the accepted values and norms of the village, but ends up doing so by merely trying to rid his own self of his fears and curiosities and trying to better the state of his fellow man e.g. Noah Percy. Noah, who seems to live on through a dysfunction, perhaps incurable due to the village’s aversion to the towns where banes likes money and crime are perceived to pollute the purity of the human heart.


His ready acceptance of what is perceived as the bad colour and his courage with the belief that there are horrific creatures that will potentially maim him if he oversteps the village boundary, has been the initial cornerstone of the story. A story, at the start of which Lucius, requests the generation gap –ridden elders for permission to cross the woods for actions that are pure of intention.

It is interesting to note what happens to the outcast in villages. They get stabbed, or at best secluded due to the presupposed non-conformance of their beliefs. Beyond reason and beyond any willingness to divulge the potential truths that will challenge the status quo, people like Lucius Hunt are suffocated for their courage yet often relied on when the village is under threat. The most fearless in our midst are often the outcast because they have ventured beyond the system that has been handed down to us from our forefathers.

It was indeed ironic that the very person Lucius was trying to save by fetching medicines from the town in turn ended up stabbing him. But it is difficult to determine who should be blamed. A retard who is simply acting out the causality of his condition. Or the village elders, the architects of the village, who along with blood and sweat in laying down the village have chosen to neglect the fact that such aspirations of personal perfection often rest on the sacrifice of others. Noah Percy’s (Adrien Brody) unmitigated and unmedicated madness represents the price being paid to maintain their utopia.

It is also interesting to note how the movie touches on the anatomy of fear. This, I think is the film’s greatest achievement. To make us feel the stupidity of it all being ‘IN OUR HEAD’ so to speak. We are taken along with some of the film’s protagonists like Lucius Hunt and Ivy Walker into a world that is first believable and then is eventually outstripped of all its myth and secrecy.

But much like Ivy’s character, the fear mongering has taken such a hold on us, that we still have trouble trying to grasp that truth or the ‘idea’ that the fear was man-made too. Despite William Hurt’s character telling Ivy that it was a farce, we are thrown into turmoil at the fact that the father could have been wrong and perhaps the other two villagers are somewhat justified in leaving Ivy alone in the journey towards the town.

But here is where LOVE takes the higher moral ground. It is usually the most fearless who find love in its truest form and then their fear is limited to something bad happening to the person they love and little else. (as Lucius tells Ivy at the porch)

But demons and monsters often breed beyond the peripheries of utopias. Be them Coyotes, the Sinful town-people from the wicked towns they inhabit, or ‘Those we don’t speak of’. The fear and hate mongering is an essential ingredient of the self-sustaining system where human life is often devalued and those that strive to protect theirs and others’ are often the victims of the highest forms of duplicity.

Duplicity even from Sigourney Weaver’s character, who despite knowing the truth about the nature of the village, chooses the very time of his son’s decision to venture into the town to describe to him the horrible end to his father’s life. Somewhat cruel that the elders, having lived in so much fear and victimisation, have only learned to transfer the fears and demons through to the next generation instead of giving them the tools to fight.

And as the movie progresses, we realise that the demons are not beyond the village but internal. In the untold secrets of their own lives that they think are too horrible to share. They protect the innocence of their children out of retaliation of their own snatched innocence.

However just as when William Hurt’s character is talking to the two kids who have supposedly seen ‘Those who they don’t speak of’, he tells them to go to a townsperson so that they will be told happy stories and be made to smile in no time. This denial is the most tragic victimisation the children of the village could ever be subjected to. We, as the audience are again put in a position to make a comparison to what was protected and what was not when Ivy crosses the boundaries of her physical enclosure only so we can witness the emotional and psychological ramifications of her enslavement.

I felt sorry for her talking to that security person who looked at her with pity, bemusement, surprise and estrangement. Where upto that point I had nothing but the greatest admiration and love for the character. It was like the meetings of people from another time.

How do we as a nation feel about what lies beyond our boundaries? Disbelievers, sinners, westerners with inferior ideologies. So many people who possess so many traits that go against our coda. So much fear and hate in such a volume of our people. What would we do to someone who ventures outside our boundaries and tells us people that things aren’t necessarily how we think they are? Can we even allow questioning in our village?

Do we have the emotional and intellectual maturity to maintain our beliefs without labelling those who belief otherwise has blackened corrupt outsiders. Fornicators, imbibers, adulterers!?

What if Lucius went to the towns instead of the girl and came back to tell her there is nothing to fear? Would he be a menace to the villagers’ beliefs in just attempting to amputate the fear that grips the one he loves?

Our true demons are perhaps within us. They are fed by our continual unwillingness and resulting inability to acknowledge the natural existence of our fears, let alone face them. Everyday we have the opportunity to look at the jungle around us and witness the bare branches of trees as monstrous claws or as an existential feature of some our
Environment.

The elders in the Village forget after such a long life of pretence, that the manufactured traditions to preserve the innocence can take such a life of their own, that they themselves fall victim to the loss of personal identity in their quest to escape sorrow. They become mere puppets of their own black boxes.

Ultimately they find it unable to breathe without the sustenance of the lie occasionally glancing at the truth as drug they sometimes need while they live everyday on a diet of poison. Their only happiness lies in their children continuing their way of life because if the children deny them this, their own life becomes meaningless in their eyes. Even death, such as that of Noah Percy, becomes a tool to maintain the illusion of a utopia based on a blissful ignorance and awe inspired by lovers such as Ivy and Lucius gradually takes the form of estrangement. They inturn take the form of the demons as they have nullified the demons that haunted the towns before.

Beyond a certain point in our lives, don’t we owe it to our children to take them to the shed as William Hurt did, and tell them that there is nothing to fear but fear itself?