The Village: Shyamalan’s Best Film So Far?
A Review by John David Ebert

When this film came out in the summer of 2004, it was panned by critics and largely ignored by audiences (after, that is, a huge opening weekend). This is ironic, for The Village is actually Shyamalan’s best film so far, and its treatment by critics is a classic example of why we have felt it necessary to create this site. Film critics, by and large, are not literate individuals, and so very often they miss good thematic material. I have noticed a pattern in Hollywood filmmaking in which an established director will take a risk by creating, not a repeat of previous work, but a leap forward into a new sensiblity that becomes too complex for audience tastes, and the director, consequently, is made to feel a buffoon for departing into fresh waters. Neither critics nor audiences want their directors to depart from expectations, for the familiar is comforting, and above all, it does not challenge. Take, for example, John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of Howard Hawks’s The Thing: panned by critics and spurned by audiences alike, the film has now become a science fiction classic and is regarded by many Carpenter fans as his best work. The same thing happened in the same year to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Those films are now widely regarded as classics. And something similar will no doubt apply to Steven Spielbeg’s A.I. and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, both films that did poorly at the box office while containing rich thematic material that was largely overlooked by critics. I predict that in ten years the latter two films will be regarded as classics of a similar kind to Blade Runner and Videodrome.

With Shyamalan’s The Village we have a similar situation. Audiences and critics wanted a repeat of Signs, and indeed, the trailers and posters led them to expect just that, for they featured what appeared to be a remote village under attack by monstrous beings. Shyamalan, however, pulled a more sophisticated maneuvre by doing a 180 and instead produced a commentary on his own work. The so-called ’surprise ending’ of this film, which critics made fun of by claiming that it surprised no one, actually had nothing to do with the sort of O.Henry mentality that they were claiming it represented. The ending, which I will divulge in this review, had more to do with a meta-narrative reflex that enables an artist to step back from, and examine, what sort of thing he is doing as an artist, just as David Cronenberg in his brilliant film Existenz, performed a self-reflective analysis by assuming the persona of a video game creator whose virtual realities were having a disorienting effect upon its participants. Cronenberg, in that film, was having the same sort of doubts about the validity of his work as Thomas Mann was when he wrote Doctor Faustus as a self-examination of the creative mentality of the German mind, sunken into its own romantic wallowing in death and decay.

In The Village, Shyamalan creates a movie set within a movie and then steps back and pulls the curtain aside at the last moment to reveal that the reality he has created is an experiment in manipulation, just as Shakespeare in The Tempest, with the metaphor of Prospero as a magician doubling for himself as playwright, was commenting on the kinds of trickery used by the theater troupe to achieve its effects. Shyamalan’s “movie set ” looks something like this: imagine a society not much different from that of the world described by Hawthorne, in which omens, signs and miracles are everywhere and are looked for in everything. Men speak in the language of dreams and riddles; they pass along fantastic veiled texts filled with strange meanings and glimpses of the very fundament of things. Monsters are real, they live in the woods, and special ritual taboos must be taken not to disturb them. In fact, far from propitiating them, offerings are made not to get them to do one’s bidding, but rather to go away. Dreams are taken seriously in this milieu, and one man’s nightmare, recounted amongst the townspeople the next day, can bring the entire commerce of a village to a standstill.

It is perhaps difficult for us jaded moderns, living in our gleaming urban landscapes surrounded by labyrinths of steel and concrete, to believe that men ever lived this way, but in fact, they did. And the question which Shyamalan’s film at first seems to ask is: in the creation of modernity, how much of what we have gained is an improvement over what we have given up? Is material comfort and protection from starvation an equal, or better, trade off for the recognition of spiritual powers at work in the cosmos? Is a taboo-ridden mentality that becomes so obsessive that it jams up the living of life better or worse than an urban one in which life is so cheap that violence and criminality are expected as of the order of the day?

As the narrative of The Village progresses, we discover that the monsters which the townspeople are so terrified of are actually fake. They are a sort of fairy tale made up by the village Elders like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, but this is a secret they dare not divulge to the younger generation whom they have raised within the town limits, lest their experiment fail. And that experiment, it turns out, involves the rejection of living in modern cities, for the Elders of The Village are exiles from the modern day who have fled back into the woods in order to resurrect an ancient and vanished way of life, like the Amish or some insane religious cult. Life in big cities, the Elders feel, is simply a degradation of the value of human existence, for such a world is one shorn of meaning and significance, in which life is cheapened and human beings are killed in robberies and self-detonations of rage.

Shyamalan, as a filmmaker, is also performing an act of make-believe: He, too, is hiring actors to put on masks and to maintain the fiction of a simulated reality for the purpose of scaring, and entertaining, his audiences. His doubts about the value of what he does for a living are here evinced through the moral equivocations of the Elders regarding the fictions that they must maintain in order to preserve their simulated way of life. But this is only one level of Shyamalan’s complex narrative.

When a girl is sent forth by the Elders to retrieve medicine for a wounded man who is dying of a knife wound, she makes her terrifying way through a forest inhabited not by real monsters, but by a man dressed in a suit determined to scare her to death. Once she has battled past him, however, she steps outside of a fence onto a highway, where we learn that the property of the woods in which the villagers have set up their forest is a sort of special preserve, set apart and protected from the modern world, like a theme park. The idea that the villagers have chosen to reject modernity in favor of a retreat to an archaic way of life is a particularly relevant question nowadays, in which the value of modernity is being seriously questioned all around. Islamic fundamentalists, for instance, are motivated by this kind of hatred of cities, and their smashing down of the twin towers was tantamount to a flat out rejection of life lived in servitude to the dollar bill as the highest ethos. And even within our society, we are finding messages that question modernity: part of the popularity of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, for instance, hinges on this very point, for Tolkien’s work was analogous to a Hebrew apocalypse filled with hatred for life in big cities, condemning the modern Babylon brought into being by the Industrial revolution. And the fact that his film was so immensely popular should be taken into consideration in any accurate assessment of its message, for while the masses who went to see it may have consciously thought they were just going for a good time, unconsciously they were receiving messages of a willed destruction of their very way of life. An illness always requires a willing host: viruses and bacteria are only able to penetrate a weakened immune system, for when the immune system is running like it should, nothing can get through.

Shyamalan’s doubts about the value of his work as an entertainer should be put to rest, since it is precisely through the medium of popular, crowd-pleasing lowbrow art that the psyche of our civilization is processing the great themes of our time. They come up, like dreams, all by themselves, and weave themselves as messages into even the silliest works of entertainment. That The Village failed to please a mass audience may have something to do with the complexity of its message: return to a spiritually archaic consciousness, or continue with a soulless, empty and pointless existence within our megalopolises? Nobody wants to mull these things over consciously; they would rather have our artists and filmmakers take care of that for them, even if they too are mostly unconscious of what they are doing.

Since these are the kinds of questions that Shyamalan raises in his film, I fail to see how this is supposed to be a trivial work, as critics have maintained. This is a thoughtful film, carefully crafted and multi-layered. Perhaps the critics should go see it again, or else pick up a few books and learn something about the history of human consciousness. It is Shyamalan’s best work so far, and promises more to come. Unless, that is, he becomes so discouraged by the reviews that he decides–as I’m guessing he probably will–to remake The Sixth Sense or Signs in order to keep the money flowing.

He’s right: modernity is confusing.