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The Things We Do For Love
🕑 Added 2021-07-26 11:01:02 +0000 UTC
"It all goes back and back ... to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance on in our steads."
--Tyrion Lannister, A Storm of Swords
One of the most popular myths about American history is the disappearance of the colony at Roanoke Island. The colony’s governor returned from England to discover the homes and fortifications abandoned. The only sign left by over a hundred colonists was the word CROATOAN carved into a tree. We have eagerly filled in the rest; we cannot help ourselves. They assimilated into Native American tribes, or were massacred by them. Maybe they escaped to some secret hiding place where they wait for us. The Lost Colony has been the subject of plays, poems, and Confederate propaganda as well as historical investigations. Every couple decades like clockwork, someone publishes a book claiming to have solved the mystery. Far from lost, Roanoke is revived as needed. Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, a professor of history at UNC Chapel Hill, has argued that the mystery scratches a collective psychological itch: we need to believe that “Native people also disappeared, which we didn’t.” The mythologizing of the Lost Colony, as much as monuments to Confederate generals, is “a monument that has to come down … it’s harder to dismantle an origin story than a statue.”
Roanoke exemplifies a history of absence, in which we simultaneously remember and forget. Every generation is born to the unknown, a legacy from the previous one. Our minds are empty vessels to fill with mystery like water or smoke. There is something in the woods. There is always something in the woods.
The Woods was the original working title for The Village, a 2004 movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. The Village is about the process by which parents transform history into myth for their children, and how that process informs everything from our government to our major motion pictures. In Dr. Lowery’s words, it’s about how it’s harder to dismantle an origin story than a statue. Tangible things can be toppled. The pattern at the heart of The Village is invisible, and so, more insidious. It is the simultaneous fear and desire of the unknown.
As the movie begins, we are informed by a child’s fresh gravestone that the year is 1897. As the mourners sit to a funeral feast, they hear menacing noises from the trees. We are introduced to the village’s routines in montage. They fearfully repress the color red; yellow-cloaked watchmen hold a line of torches against the night.
Some children discover a skinned murdered animal, prompting the first mention of the creatures inhabiting the woods: Those We Don’t Speak Of. Edward Walker (William Hurt), the village teacher, reminds the children that the creatures will not enter the village so long as the villagers stay out of the woods. During a council meeting of village elders, Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) asks permission to break this custom and journey to other towns in search of medicine to prevent more needless deaths. His mother Alice (Sigourney Weaver) warns him of the danger, but Lucius counters that the elders are keeping secrets, seemingly tied to black boxes containing mementos from their pasts.
More dead animals are found, prompting unrest. Meanwhile, Edward’s daughter Kitty (Judy Greer) asks his permission to marry Lucius, only for Lucius to reject her proposal. Lucius later encounters Kitty’s sister Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard) and her friend Noah Percy (Adrien Brody). Ivy tells Lucius that she knows he refused Kitty out of love for her. Noah races off and returns with berries of the “bad color.” Lucius realizes that Noah has entered the woods multiple times and returned unharmed; he further presses his case to the council. He later ventures into the woods, only to see and be seen by one of the creatures. The latter respond by invading the village, though no one is harmed. Lucius quickly confesses and is not punished. Kitty marries another man; during their wedding, children witness more creatures inside the village, and many more skinned animals are found.
Lucius confesses his love to Ivy, and they are engaged to be married. Noah stabs Lucius out of jealousy. As Lucius hovers near death, Ivy begs her father to allow her to go and find medicine in Lucius’ place to save his life. Edward gives her permission, but not before revealing that the creatures are no more than a “farce.” Those We Don’t Speak Of are actually the elders wearing disguises, frightening their children in order to keep them safe at home. Ivy ventures into the woods, only to discover and kill one of the creatures by trapping it in a pit. We are shown that the creature is in fact Noah, who discovered his parent’s costume and is responsible for the dead animals.
As Ivy escapes the woods, the elders open their black boxes to reveal the truth in full: it is not the 1890s at all, but the present day. The elders all lost loved ones and retreated to the supposedly safer world of the past. The village and forest are sealed off from the outside world by a foundation financed by Edward. Ivy obtains medicine from a friendly guard and returns to the village to save Lucius’ life. She tells everyone that she killed a creature in the woods; the elders, knowing it was actually Noah, decide to use his death as a pretense to keep their “silly lies” going.
Critical reaction to The Village was largely negative, and indeed it remains far from a perfect film. Most egregious among its flaws is Adrien Brody’s caricatured performance as Noah. On paper, his character has potential as the jealous third leg of the central romantic triangle, the embodiment of the violence the elders cannot contain. Noah’s attack on Lucius comes after a beautifully underplayed scene in which Kitty tells Ivy she supports her relationship with Lucius despite Kitty’s own previous affections for him. The contrast is clear: one character processes their disappointment, moving forward with peace and love, and another is unable to do so, resorting to violence. But the specific choices used to convey Noah’s mental illness--including crazed laughing and drooling--are such tone-deaf Hollywood cliches that they immediately reduce Noah to a stock character.
Yet the film’s uncommon virtues--its empathy and romanticism, the gorgeous score and color palette, the fluid camerawork and idiosyncratic framing choices--outnumber its failures. Few noticed. By this point in his career, Shyamalan was known for his big twists, and many critics and audience members alike judged The Village purely on that basis. But Shyamalan is not J.J. Abrams, whose “mystery box” format relies on the audience asking questions to which there is ultimately no satisfying answer. This much is undeniable: The Village is not what the marketing suggested it would be. What is it, then?
The film’s opening shot calls attention to our presence. We’re in the middle of an audience, looking at the backs of their heads, as we might be doing in the movie theater. By putting us in the movie, Shyamalan shows us the “farce,” long before he tells us about it. Shyamalan is most frequently compared to Hitchcock and Spielberg, but this visual strategy resembles Kubrick’s in Barry Lyndon, another period piece about the inherent falseness of period pieces:
Everything here is artificial. It’s pre-arranged for your perspective. Movies are lies, “24 lies per second in service of truth” as director Michael Haneke put it. This is an imitation of life, existing only for you to believe in it. You’re watching the villagers watch.
What are they watching? Death. Or rather, grief: death as experienced by the living left behind. If the villagers represent the audience, than this image of a father grieving for his son represents the movie we’re watching. That’s what The Village is: pain, but at a distance, representing the illusions used to cope with the pain. The entire village is an externalized defense mechanism. It is built around preventing this kind of pain. It has failed. The village’s patriarch Edward Walker wonders aloud if they made a mistake in settling here; the dead boy’s father pats his hand reassuringly. “We are grateful for the time we have been given,” Edward declares, a double-edged mantra that cuts deep into the movie’s tangled roots. At first, it sounds like a prayer: even as we grieve, we are glad to have lived at all. But it is Edward who has given his people “this time,” in that he has woven the fabric of another time around them. He’s affirming his own decisions; he’s praying to himself.
We cut from Edward to the kids’ table, where they silently listen. The next day, the kids discover the first of many skinned animals. Edward gathers them in his classroom and asks them who they think is responsible. They respond without a flicker of doubt: “Those we don’t speak of.” It’s a self-negating statement that captures the shell game at the heart of The Village. Everything has been constructed around an absence, a blank spot at the edge of your mental map. Every question has one answer, yet you must never think too hard about that answer, even as you give it when asked. This is fairytale as propaganda, inherited narrative tropes fueling a perpetual motion machine of repression and fear. “Those we don’t speak of” have sharp teeth and long claws, the kids say. We somehow know this, despite not speaking of them! As a teacher, as a leader, as a father, Edward has brainwashed these kids so well that he doesn’t even have to scare them. They scare themselves. Jesse Eisenberg strides to the forest’s edge and turns around. He hears something creeping close, the unknown, the Other, and like any thrill junkie in the audience, his mind does the rest. “They mimic before they attack,” he sputters, shattering the fourth wall of his own life without realizing it. The monster in the woods is a mimic, nothing more. The Other is a mirror for your fear. It was created for you, and it is kept alive by you.
Monsters didn’t kill the boy whose funeral we saw in the opening shot. It was a disease, something more mundane yet also more terrifying. Death is the ultimate curtain call. All masks fall. Edward Walker could buy this land, build these houses, fill them up with children and lies. He can’t do anything about this. Time marches on, and takes us with it. It was that impotence that led him to build the village in the first place, he tells his daughter Ivy. My father was a good man, but he trusted too easily. One of his business partners put a bullet through his head as he dreamed. It’s an image that defines the film, the death of the father to match the death of the son in the opening shot. The Village is a dreamworld pierced violently by reality, as if by a bullet. The brilliance of Shyamalan’s direction is how he fuses form with content. The filmmaking reflects the same process of illusion and disillusionment that defines the character arcs. Walker is like a director lost inside his own movie, his fantasy made flesh. The camera follows unblinking as he unravels his pocket universe to his daughter, taking her step
By step
By step
Into the grave.
They step outside the hermetically sealed borders of the village and the movie named for it. The unknown: a place she was told never to go. By definition, he can’t describe it to her. It’s the end of his descriptions. All he can do is open the door and let her walk in. As he prepares to cut the puppet strings, his warning to Ivy doubles as a message to the audience: “Do your very best not to scream.” It’s a wry joke on our expectations. More than that, though: it’s a sincere exploration of where those expectations come from in the first place. We’re being warned not of a jump scare, but what waits behind jump scares. Our hard-wired impulses about things that go bump in the night have been weaponized and used to control us. It’s the dark heart of images, the invisible hand of power. There were no monsters. They’re costumes. It is “farce.”
But of course it is! We know when we’re watching a monster movie that it’s plastic and rubber, that there’s a person like us in there behind the mask. That’s all period pieces are, too: people wearing costumes. The Village has allowed you to forget that. Now it reminds you. As time passes, the plastic and rubber have been phased out in favor of ones and zeroes, all the more power given to invisible men behind the curtain. Edward Walker’s fantasies seem almost quaint: old-school movie magic barely able to keep pace with our ability to see through it. When I put myself through the prequel to The Thing in which practical effects paying tribute to the original were smothered with crude CGI, I thought of The Village. The frontiers of the Real keep evolving, and there’s no such thing as a neutral aesthetic.
The Village gradually reveals itself as a story about stories. The village elders are familiar with genre mechanics and make ruthless use of them. Their “monsters” are a self-aware jumble, a mixture of rumor and myth. The “time we have been given” is nothing but costumes and props, projected ideas of how a vanished world might have looked. The Village exemplifies movie magic, and then dismantles it.
By exposing the mechanics of narrative, Shyamalan invites us to question how they work. The elders are not only telling a story. They are engaged in narratology: the study of narratives, learning how they work on an audience. The elders have put theory into practice, wielding it as power over their children, imprisoning them in Plato’s Cave. In his Poetics of Cinema, film scholar David Bordwell describes narratology as “a paradigm case of interdisciplinary inquiry,” as narrative infests every area of human society. Narration, Bordwell argues, is like being led through a building; story structure mirrors literal structure. The villagers are living inside a story, one they tell by living it, like Borges’ map overwhelming the land itself. Narrative is so omnipresent for us that it can be difficult to define, like asking a fish about water. Is narrative a sort of grammar, Bordwell asks? The arch, stylized dialogue of The Village is a self-conscious performance, 20th century people trying to act like they’re from the 19th century. It’s a Brechtian distancing device on loan from theater (hence the literal stage that forms the elders’ meeting hall), but within the story, this way of speaking is part of the fictional world the elders are imposing on their children. Grammar becomes narrative.
Or, Bordwell asks, is narrative a series of signs and symbols? The Village fits into this semiotic approach as well. We might analyze the film’s striking color palette along the usual theoretical lines: yellow for fear, red for passion (more on that later). But the elders have beat us to the punch. They’ve deliberately, rather than organically, built their society around signs and symbols, good colors and bad. They’ve set-dressed their world to create a closed-loop of meaning. As Ivy says while playing hide-and-seek with Noah, “there’s no escape.”
That’s because narrative is not a stationary object, as Bordwell reminds us. It’s a set of activities. These activities are both psychological and sociological. On one hand, Bordwell says, stories come from our psyches. We remember and relate events not as they were, but as fluid mental constructions, little movies we play for ourselves. On the other hand, narrative is a social act. It’s a give and take process, more than the sum of its parts. Per Bordwell: “One activity we call storytelling, and the other...well, what do we call it? Story consumption? Story receiving? Story pickup?” It’s something we all do every second of every day, but that’s precisely what makes it so difficult to define. It’s both passive and active. We don’t have a clear language for what the younger generation in The Village are going through. The intangibility of narrative transference is why it works on them so well. It’s also why we think we’re watching a monster movie in a period setting, at first. As Bordwell says, “it seems that this architecture achieves its effects without the audience’s conscious awareness; only experts detect the armature.” The true cage is invisible, because it’s inside us.
In his article “Our Silly Lies: Ideological Fictions in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village,” published in Journal of Narrative Theory, Patrick C. Collier applies Bordwell’s poetics to Shyamalan’s film. Collier specifically cites Bordwell’s narrative framework of fabula and syuzhet, which he adopted from Russian formalists. The fabula constitutes the narrative events laid out chronologically, independent of narration; the syuzhet constitutes the manner by which the narration informs us of events. In short, fabula is what happens, syuzhet is how it’s told to us. Collier argues that The Village “uses a complicated syuzhet in order to place its viewers in the position of citizens who have been deceived by their leaders, then urges viewers to consider whether the deception is justified. And it does so in a narrative that self-consciously foregrounds and exaggerates its own manipulations. The Village, in short, is a film about the withholding of narrative information and the links between narrative and political power.”
Collier highlights one scene that exemplifies Shyamalan’s reflexive approach. Ivy is crossing through the forbidden woods to retrieve medicine for Lucius; her father sends two young men to accompany her. One turns back immediately, terrified of the creatures. Ivy reassures him that they will be safe because her father gave her “magic rocks.” The young man says what we’re all thinking: “why have we not heard of these rocks before?” The suspension of disbelief sustaining the village is falling apart. Yet he still believes in the core myth of the creatures themselves, because that ideology is too strong to challenge. Ivy knows the truth, and lets the rocks fall from her hand after her guards desert her. It’s a shadow on a wall. It’s an “imaginary story with real effects,” as Collier puts it. The border is not designed to keep the Others out. It’s designed to keep the people in. As Collier says, “narrational positions are also political positions” in The Village. When Ivy reaches the edge of her father’s compound, the hedge surrounding it takes up one side of the frame. So when Ivy climbs up and through, it looks as if she’s escaping the shot, escaping the movie itself, as well as the hierarchy of the village. They’re one and the same: mechanisms of control rooted in our love of story.
Drawing from both Bordwell and Collier, I would argue that The Village applies narrative patterns to historical ones. The movie’s dynamic between fabula and syuzhet plays out as a shifting set of reference points. Shyamalan juggles three distinct time periods, which represent three different perspectives. At first, the story appears to be set in the 1890s. This represents the perspective of the younger generation. This illusion never fades for them; Ivy learns the truth about the monsters, but not about the period setting. Within that context, The Village is about the people who fled the industrialized post-Civil War America in search of a vanishing frontier. One character refers to cities as “wicked places where wicked people live.” It was a popular sentiment, arising in waves throughout the 19th century. Fear of modernity inspired revival movements, following in the footsteps of “Great Awakening” utopianism in the 18th century. The Second Great Awakening saw the explosive expansion of Methodist and Baptist churches. The Cane Ridge Revival launched a series of religious gatherings along the frontier. Western New York hosted so many revival movements crossing each other's paths that the region became known as the "burned-over district," set aflame by holy fervor. Adventists preached the immanent return of Christ...only to face the "Great Disappointment" of his absence.
The yearning for spiritual rebirth extended beyond the pulpit. Oberlin College was founded on 500 acres by wealthy sources, a place to escape “the deplorable condition of our perishing world.” Transcendentalist writers escaped to refuges like Brook Farms and Walden. Thoreau lamented the “spawn” and “bugs” of modern civilization. Fuller argued that we must retreat from “distraction” and “imbecility” to rediscover ourselves. Emerson sought “an original relation to the universe,” encouraging his readers to “build your own world.” Yet as with their church-bound brethren, the Great Disappointment inevitably set in. Thoreau admitted that his true legacy was not Walden the physical structure, but Walden the novel.
The titular village fits snugly into this history. It's a utopian project whose isolation is so complete it becomes invisible; it's a Cane Ridge revival that just never stopped. Shyamalan himself alludes to this era as an inspiration for the film: "People left the towns in the 1880s and 1890s because of industrialization, and were fed up with the corruption and the filth and everything starting to happen in the cities and went to go do their own thing and moved to areas that weren’t inhabited..."
But the village elders do not, in fact, hail from the 1890s. They're struggling to recreate that era. We are not bearing witness to the past. We are bearing witness to the present making use of the past, set up from the opening shot positioning the villagers as an audience observing a dead world. The elders actually struck out into the wild in the 1970s, after losing loved ones to violent crime. Theirs is the second perspective within the film, and this context transforms the meaning of their project. The village is now a product of the 20th century, rather than the 19th. Now it smacks of the Social Gospel and Temperance movements, the rise of behavioral psychology, the study of group dynamics. Walker is picking up where Kurt Lewin left off on the intertwining of nature and nurture. He’s a social scientist pushing applied research, trying to test his ideas in reality.
The 20th century context changes not only the philosophy of the village, but also its politics. No longer do the elders seem like members of a utopian or transcendentalist movement. Now they exemplify white flight: the phenomenon in which many Americans, predominantly white, moved out of urban areas to suburbs and exurbs over the course of the 1970s and 80s. The unrest of the late 20th century gave rise to conservative politics built around nostalgia for an idealized America, supposedly easier to recreate in those suburban and exurban areas than in the “wicked places where wicked people live.” The village literalizes this longing for an America that, in truth, only exists in the imagination. Edward Walker set up his compound outside Philadelphia, where Shyamalan himself was raised and frequently sets his movies. The director has said that growing up there inspired him: “My dad chose Philadelphia as the beacon of America ... It’s the American dream, and I’m very aware that I’m a product of that because I had the educational opportunities that my parents provided.” But Shyamalan doesn’t have a purely rosy view of his country. He's also talked about educational disparities in the United States, and doesn't mince words about the ultimate source of those disparities: "It’s racism. Ultimately, and we all have it, a form of it in us, it’s there, it’s in the genetic code of the country..."
Shyamalan frames racism as a function less of individual animus than the baseline structures we inherit, whether those structures are physical, social, mental, or in the case of The Village, all of those at once. Edward Walker doesn’t fit the stereotypical image of a racist small-town American. He’s a well-spoken college professor. But here he is, with his lily-white model village cut off from everyone else. The only character in The Village who isn’t white is played by Shyamalan himself: the park official maintaining the border around Edward's compound. Shyamalan is telling the story of this place from the outside, because whether consciously or not, it makes no room for people who don’t fit the mold.
Edward Walker is a 19th-century revivalist preacher and a segregationist social scientist, but for modern audiences, the most obvious analogue is right there in his name. The Village came out as U.S. President George Walker Bush was seeking re-election. This is the third time period of The Village, the third perspective Shyamalan incorporates into his fairytale panopticon: ours. In a 21st-century context, The Village becomes a movie about 9/11 and its aftermath. It’s the story of a society reeling from violence, structures that seemed strong suddenly seeming weak. The society’s leaders overcorrect and instill rigid paranoia in their followers, so fixated on fear of the Other that they allow internal problems to spread. The elders’ color-coded ideology is a reminder of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, but it also evokes the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded terrorism alerts. The elders keep their secret traumas hidden away in black boxes, like those in airplanes designed to survive a crash. They have retreated into a fictionalized past in an attempt to save their children from that grief. As Thucydides said, “the people made their recollections fit in with their sufferings.”
Shyamalan discusses this perspective along the same lines as that of the 1890s: "It came from the feeling that the world is a scary place right now and [a] desire to go back to simplicity ... It’s all about how to protect your innocence from getting hurt by the “creatures” in your life; the desire to protect your children from going into the unknown. If these “creatures” have hurt you, you don’t want them to hurt your children and the younger generation may be willing to risk that." The mutability of the metaphor is the point. The specific meaning of the monsters changes with perspective. If it's the 1890s, then the red-cloaked creatures could represent vengeance for the uprooting of indigenous peoples, without which this land wouldn't be open to the elders in the first place. Thoreau would agree with this interpretation: “...for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our Government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more?” But if it's the 1970s, then the Other outside the border represents the elders' fear of the urban crime from which they fled. The meaning changes again seen from the perspective of the 2000s, in which the creatures represent the fear of terrorism. The true horror isn't in any one of them, but in how easily they blur together. It's the horror of history. The Village is about the 1890s, and the 1970s, and the 2000s. It's about that which changes its face, as if behind a monster mask, but never dies.
Among the more popular notions in the Calvinist frontier stew of the Great Awakening was a three-stage process to finding salvation: conviction (in which you acknowledge your sinful nature), conversion (a new awareness of the truth of Christ), and consolation (a constant testing of one's faith). It's eerily echoed in Kurt Lewin's unfreezing-changing-refreezing model for organizational change. Then and now, spiritual or secular, we believe we can perfect ourselves, no matter the cost. This is the bridge the elders crossed. As Kent Jones wrote in Film Comment about The Master, another journey to the heart of American myth starring Joaquin Phoenix:
"...America is a story of forgetting and eliding, cherry-picking and remolding the past, conflating ideas and notions and isolated gestures and grand movements swirling through the informational ether and rewriting history according to desires and projected outcomes, powered by the dream of breaking through to the other side of neurosis, reality, life, inhibition, or the space-time continuum ... long after the great religious revivals and reforms, after the land has been tamed and settled, the railroads and cities built, the gold mined, the oceans of oil tapped and the fortunes of the Carnegies and Dohenys and Vanderbilts made and ensconced in legend, a mounting standardization, desperation, and rancidness has set in, and another war has left men shattered. The only conceivable frontier is within: the liberation of the self from routines, possessions, and habits of mind, whether they’ve been inculcated by trauma or affluence."
So The Village takes apart genre from within, exposing how its artifice mirrors that of our history. But deconstruction can only take us so far. We know what The Village is not. Back to my question from earlier: what is The Village?
It’s a love story.
Shyamalan himself identified The Village as a period romance, heightened by suspense elements. He tips his hand in this direction early on. Two girls are sweeping up a porch. They spin, they laugh, and then they stop dead. The camera drops with their faces to find a red flower growing, glowing like they were a moment ago. They drop their brooms and snatch it up; the camera follows their feet, scurrying so nervously, all dancing forgotten, fun buried with the flower, a red heart clawed into the earth like a grave.
It’s an extraordinary scene in a single shot, collapsing all the film’s political, psychological, and narratological ambitions into a series of silent gestures. We were playing our roles. Then it emerged, from the earth, inside the borders, spontaneous and uncontrollable, red and terrible and red. The bad color: the color of blood, the color of passion. We summoned it. If we bury it, maybe we can forget it was ever there.
After the initial wave of animal killings, Kitty Walker asks her father if they may speak of more pleasant matters. He says it would be a relief; anything but the endless pretense of control that is his life. So she tells him something that’s out of his control. “I’m in love!” The words of liberation every parent is taught to dread. Kitty loves Lucius Hunt, and tells him so in an embarrassing torrent of words, in contrast to his silence. Lucius doesn’t trust his own voice. When he comes to the council meeting to ask permission to leave town, he reads from a prepared statement. When he confesses to having entered the woods, he does so by passing a note. This reflects his alienation from the world the elders have woven around him with words. He is able to stand with his back to the woods longer than anyone, because he senses these are “just children’s games.” Cultish rituals with no meaning, sacrifice without guarantee of rebirth. As he grows up, he’s starting to realize that he doesn’t actually know what’s out there. He wants to find out for himself.
But Lucius is also silent because this is a romance, a story about repressed passions becoming unbridled. He must be brought out of himself. Kitty can’t do it. We don’t even see him speak words of rejection; the movie cuts to her sobbing, her heart plucked out of the ground and buried. It is only now that we meet her sister Ivy, the film’s hidden protagonist. She sings to heal her sister’s pain; the camera pulls back slowly, tenderly, to find their parents watching. It mirrors the opening shot, the pain at a distance. Someone’s always watching.
When Ivy next encounters Lucius, she tells him she knows why he rejected Kitty. Ivy is blind; Lucius used to hold her arm and escort her around the village. Then one day he stopped. Ivy even pretended to fall one day in his presence, a performance in the name of love like those of their parents. Still he did not hold her. “Sometimes we don’t do the things we want so that others won’t know we want to do them.” The personal is political. Lucius’ repression of his feelings for Ivy is downstream from the elders’ repression of the modern world and all their suffering therein. Ivy's words resonate with Lucius; he repeats them to his mother Alice, saying that Edward Walker hides his feelings for Alice along with the town's secrets. How does Lucius know that Edward loves Alice? "He never touches you." After Edward sends Ivy to fetch medicine to save Lucius' life, he bursts in on Alice. "I've sent for help!" The faux-1800s diction has fled his voice. His movements are jerky and wild. He's stopped playing for the camera; he's himself again. He loves her, and she loves him, but their repression is so complete that their love can only manifest as him sending his daughter to save her son. They use their children as proxies, first for the innocence they lost, now for the experience they forsook. "It is all that I can give you," Edward whispers to Alice. They step close. They pull back. It's too real.
The love between Ivy and Lucius is that red flower fighting to survive. It's the only real thing in their lives. Their clothes are lies. Their words are lies. They struggle to articulate emotions they have been unprepared to handle, because their parents are terrified of the potential consequences. They articulate those emotions anyway, expressing which their parents cannot. Their parents put on masks and invade their own town in response to Lucius stepping into the woods. It begins as the most blatant horror sequence in this ostensible monster movie: horns blare on the soundtrack, Lucius hides from one of the creatures, and Kitty dashes for the cellar. But not Ivy. She’s standing in the open doorway. Lucius is out there, and she knows he’s going to come make sure she’s safe. She knows that so deeply that she throws safety away. She extends her hand outside, through the invisible veil, welcoming, open, like the boys with their back to the woods, seeing how long they can last before the stories break them from within. Ivy does not break. Kitty insists that Lucius got inside safe somewhere else, that Ivy’s risking all of their lives for nothing. "Don't let them in," Kitty whispers, the primal power of their parents' bedtime stories at work. She believes in fairies, and claps to keep them alive. Ivy believes in Lucius. I know you will come. And so he does, grabbing her hand just before the creature does, pulling her inside to safety as the strings and camera swirl dreamily around them.
This hand imagery, classically romantic in its evocation of intense intimacy, returns the next time the creatures attack. Ivy reaches frantically into a crowd, and Lucius' hand emerges to hold hers and lead them both out of the fray. Shyamalan also focuses on Ivy's hand when she discovers the truth about "those we don't speak of." Their love is as tangible as the monsters, and more real.
When Alice extends her own hand to Edward, he will not take it. He's terrified of letting himself love, for to love is to lose. But what kind of life will there be here for Ivy and Lucius, if they're left with nothing to lose?
Lucius comes to visit Ivy one night. They sit on her porch. Lucius' face takes up the far left side of the frame; Ivy's face, the far right. As they whisper excited confessions of love to each other, the fog fills the frame in the background. We're tensed and waiting, sure that all that space is being left blank for a reason, sure that a monster is about to emerge in between them and tear them apart. The monster never comes. This isn't a monster movie. This is a romance. The real story, the only real thing, is what’s right in front of us: two human beings who need each other because they know they are living a lie, and cannot seem to explain it to anyone but each other.
I like to think there was a "monster" out there in the fog, Edward himself in his second skin on the edge of vision, staring through his mask at his daughter experiencing everything he thought he could deny her. The next generation isn't even looking for the monsters anymore. Only at each other. They have forgotten fear, and so defeated it. Their love is freedom: the only free thing here in the heart of this self-cannibalizing American Experiment. The puppetmaster watches his wizardry made obsolete by love. That’s how he justifies letting Ivy step beyond the borders. "The world yields for love. It kneels before it in awe." It was only because the elders loved so deeply that they were so shattered by grief. That same power has come around again, like spring after winter. They have worked so hard to deny it in their children. Now, at long last, they let go.
Collier argues that the film falls short in its final moments. After thoroughly deconstructing the village, Shyamalan shows us the elders re-committing themselves to it, covering up Noah’s death to keep the stories going. For Collier, this is a disappointingly reactionary move, preserving a status quo that seemed on the brink of destruction. I think it’s a bittersweet ending in keeping with Shyamalan’s decision to frame the elders tragically, within the context of a romance rather than a thriller. They became nigh-literal monsters not out of malice, but grief and fear. “Heartache is a part of life. We know that now.” While the story belongs ultimately to Ivy and Lucius, the elders' journey resonates as well, as William Hurt himself argued:
"It says a lot about community, it says a lot about fear, it says a lot about how parents want to keep their children loved and safe. How we are valiantly trying to find lesser fears with which to prevent greater ones, and how we carry those scars with us and they reinvent themselves, and we can actually work through them in this amazing, audacious way by continuing to accept the ultimate risk, which is to create your culture as you see fit."
Their loved ones died in “the towns," in The Real. In the movie’s final shot, the elders decide that they will die here in this make-believe village, in “the time we have been given.” It’s too late for them to leave. As we saw with Edward and Alice, they’ve been acting so long they don’t know how to do anything else. They thought that if they played their roles perfectly, they could keep the real world at bay for their children. But their children have to die somewhere, too, and it will only be here if they choose to stay. As the elders stand silently, you can almost see them flatten into the background, become oil and varnish, a living mausoleum, ghosts in borrowed clothing. Maybe, just maybe, we can buy ourselves a little more time.
The Village was filmed in a field just off Cossart Road, as it winds through the rural Pennsylvania township of Chadds Ford. Like the elders, Shyamalan built a “village” there. Unlike them, he walked away from it. One visitor to the set described what it was like to watch the village dismantled: “After the movie wrapped, the field where it was shot was returned to its original state. Everything constructed for the set was torn down. It is just a field again.”
