M. Night Shyamalan’s The Villlage is a Parable About Life Under George W. Bush
It comes as a shock to many people because the director M. Night Shyamalan basically cheats his audience by making it seem as though the Willis character is talking with people besides the kid who sees dead people. It is a cheat because he knows that this is impossible and he refuses to give that information to the audience.
What I don’t get is why more people don’t pick up on it since even he can’t cheat the audience out of the fact that Willis’ wife NEVER talks to him and yet Willis isn’t smart enough to pick on this. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, watch it again. Watch closely how he frames the Willis character in scenes that leave you with the impression that he has been talking with other people; something the character patently cannot do.
The Village is typically not compared favorably to The Sixth Sense, despite the fact that in reality it is far superior. For one thing, although there is a twist, everything that comes before doesn’t lead to that. And for another, anyone paying attention could pick up on at least some idea of what is really happening. Thirdly, he doesn’t play the cheat game in this one. But The Village is superior mainly because it tells a much better story and has far more profound undertones.
The Village can be read as a parable about life under George W. Bush. You probably don’t want to read much farther if you don’t want to find out what happens in the movie. At first glance, the film seems to be a standard horror film that takes place in some colonial village. It has all the earmarks of a being a film that is going to turn into something equivalent to the short stories “The Lottery” or “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” Something fearful lives in the woods outside the village and it seems as if the movie is headed toward a story that will be about the importance of the scapegoat in society. But it turns into something much more politically oriented, much more contemporary.
Ultimately, it is discovered that this colonial village is not what it seems. Nor are the people. In fact, the setting is contemporary; it takes place in modern times in a world populated by jets and the internet and terrorism. The people who live in the village chose to toss off the shackles and inconveniences of modern times in order to live with the inconveniences of living out of time. They have seen what they perceive as the ugliness of the modern world and they have rejected it in their search for a simpler way of life. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, of course. I mean besides the fact that it can’t really be done. We can’t go back, no matter how hard we try.
In addition, it is unfair to those who didn’t make the choice. In this case, the children of the adults. This presents a problem, of course. How to make sure that the children who grew up in ignorance of the reality don’t try to leave, and thereby find out that a whole other world exists beyond the woods. In order to control this natural desire of the children to explore, the residents of the village construct a horrifying creature to terrify the younger ones. By keeping them ignorant and afraid, they are far easier to control.
Do you see where this is leading? Of course, you are perfectly right to assume that this could work as a parable for any authoritarian society; what makes me think it’s specifically a parable about life under George W. Bush? Because the village cannot exist without also making sure that no planes fly over it. How to explain flying machines to children raised in a pre-technological environment? The village is not just some remote area that the residents randomly chose. It is, in fact, a large area of land owned by a very rich person with familial connections to the leaders of the village. A very rich and powerful person. And that person’s last name just so happens to be, and I hardly think by coincidence, Walker.
As in George WALKER Bush. The Village is a parable that tells how powerful people who have charged themselves with knowing what’s best for everybody else uses manipulation to enforce allegiance. This film, better than almost any to come out in the last five years, shows how fear is the most effective engine for driving people to conformity. The creature in the woods from whom the villagers must be protected is a good, if not great, symbol of the threat of terrorism used by Bush to keep much of America in line with his misguided policies. If you really want to watch a good M. Night Shyamalan film, do yourself a favor and skip the big cheatfest known as The Sixth Sense. Watch this one instead and view it with an eye toward contemporary America.
