The Village film analysis

¶ … Village": Utopianism gone wrong

The Village" has many of the trappings of a common horror film. It presents a complex, mythological society that is torn between two warring factions, namely the members of a human village and a race of people the villagers call Those We Do Not Speak of, a kind of alien, wood-dwelling community. Ostensibly, the Village was created as a kind of protective, shielding device for the community of humans. By showing the failure of this enclave to protect its residents, the film demonstrates how almost all societies have a danger into falling into such stark divisions, the kind are manifest throughout the film, namely a division between persons perceived as insiders and those deemed to be outsiders, beings living beyond the pale of normal society.

The stylistic design of the Village recalls that of early Puritan societies in colonial America. The men and women wear simple, stark asexual clothing and even speak in flat, communal phrases to indicate their lack of personal and intellectual differentiation. The beginning of the film illustrates a funeral, a common communal ritual, followed by a plain, simple meal that is consumed together, because it is produced together. Even the foods consumed by the community recall that of the most common of American rituals, that of Thanksgiving, and the first part of the film is filled with happy scenes of barn dancing and other nostalgic images of early America, to contrast with the building horror and suspense of the later half.

The film suggests that through the erasure of individuality, the actions of this seemingly pleasant but ultimately threatening divided world actually sow the seeds of its own destruction. The community hopes to isolate itself from fear, violence, and want. The level of strictness by which the community's laws and prohibitions are enforced, although they may be discomforting at times, initially provide a kind of structure and comfort to freedom's threatening, discombobulating force.

This attempt at constructing a utopian society, however, is doomed to failure. By creating a society that is entirely communal to isolate the community's dwellers from want, personal happiness is impossible. Moreover, a society that attempts to structure itself entirely upon keeping fear at bay is a society with no real culture at all. Virtually every rule of the society is designed to highlight the division between the forest dwellers and the persons who live in the community. For example, the community is kept vigilant by the sight of a watchtower. Red, the color of the people of the forest (and also a color associated with red-baiting in American society) is entirely prohibited from the community.

What is also limited, within the framework of the community is sexual desire. The teenagers of the Village feel particularly stifled by this constant watchfulness. By constantly trying to police the safety of this created world, the community creates a society of younger people who cannot grow and function normally. A society that attempted to banish want and fear in the form of alien invaders instead creates a new generation of young people who feel alien within its enclaves as the creatures of the forest, because their natural, human desires to seek freedom cannot be realized.