It was the fact that babysitters are so hard to find and so expensive, coupled with my unwillingness to shell out money to be disappointed by M. Night Shyamalan again, that kept me from seeing The Village until now.
I have ambivalent feelings about Mr. Shyamalan, who is in many respects a first-rate filmmaker, but who tends to slap on twist endings that make you groan. (And I have to say that I love a good twist. Shyamalan’s problem isn’t that he has twist endings, or that I now always expect twist endings from him. It’s that he has such stupid twists that rtend to trivialize all that has gone before it.) So I wanted to see this film, even if not in a theater.
Pepper Mill latched onto the twist really fast. I had heard rumors of it. The reality (I already noted there were spoilers) is that the Village isn’t really in the 19th century, but in the 20th, run by idealists who apparently have unlimited funds. Young people are kept from exploring by fear of “Those we do not speak of”, who live in the woods and who show up every now and then as red-cloaked pig-monster things. They’re just costumes as in African Ordeal/Manhood siocieties. All that’s missing is the Bullroarer.
But the damned society isn’t really self-sufficient. The late 19th century society, as depicted, relied on a lot of manufactured goods – all that industrial loom cloth, that glass, the smelted iron. For god’s sake, all the oil that’s used in the lamps to supposedly keep the pig-things at bay. No 19th century society could afford to be so profligate with their oil.
Pepper suggested that it was during the raids and drills, when the townsfolk are hiding from the pig-things in their hurricane cellars that the goods are brought in. But that makes no sense – there aren’t any roads going to the Village, and I can’t see it being airlifted in. Nope. It’s just a fable.fairy tale/fantasy. I can’t help thinking that , when they reveal the subterfuge to the first generation to grow up in the village, they’re going to really beat up their elders.
But thinking about this brought up another society that was living beyond its technical means without any visible means of support – the Planet of the Apes. Both the original 1968 film an the Tim Burton remake depict societies that, while not highly advanced technologically, still seem too backwards and underpopulated to support the level of comfort they do possess. People and apes who are barely making it in a farming culture don’t have the luxury of research scientists and museums.
So what if the village in Planet of the Apers is hjust another Village – an experiment of sorts kept going by an outside agency. That would explain not only the high standard of living, but also The Forbidden Zone, just like the creature-infested woods in The Village. The desert is a much better barrier than a thin strip of woods, especially when you throw in those great hallucinations of fire walls and giant statues, as in Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
The question, then, is who is responsible for keeping this experiment going. It has to be the Mutants. It’s their mental power that produces the illusions. In fact, most of what James Franciscus and Charlton Heston learn from them could be illusion. There are no ruins of New York City. The Mutants aren’t horrible, radiation-scarred survivors of an apocalypse (c’mon – it’s been ages since the last nuclear war!), and there’s no doomsday bomb. They just went through all that rigmarole to “put down” the rebellion of the apes that threatened to break out of the enclosure. But the experiment is back on track now.
It also explains that ludicrous fiasco of Taylor travelling several light years and ending up on the earth – they weren’t creative enough to come up with a realistic scenario when they tossed him into the mix, so they went with the first idea they had. It explains why Mark Wahlberg can’t land a spaceship, but his chimp can, too.
