Flak Magazine: Review of The Village, 08.11.04

My friends, parents of young children, live near a deep, unfenced pond. They tell their children that the pond has a gruesome alligator that likes nothing better than to devour kiddies whole. While there's nothing more biologically ambitious or organized than blue-green algae in that pond, "the alligator" isn't exactly a lie. It's shorthand for all sorts of no!s that might not stick in the head of a 3- or 5-year old. Drowning, infection, parasites, hidden rocks, unstable shelves — however strongly you may feel about telling the truth to kids, only the most dogmatic would find moral offense with this temporary fix. "Alligator!" is journalistically false but metaphorically true.

As a nation, the United States doesn't have a coherent philosophy of what the public does and does not have a right to know. On the many scales by which we judge leaders, truthfulness just doesn't rate. The reality of any important matter tends to be awful, tedious or infuriating, and given how massive and intractable our problems are, demanding the truth from our leaders is like asking, sincerely and with high hopes for enjoying the experience, for a bullet through the eye.

Luckily, we judge our leaders according to how adeptly and entertainingly they lie — their modes of mendacity are what we really choose between in politics. This election year, cinema has been overrun by insincere communities headed by dissemblers-in-chief — not just Fahrenheit 9/11 but The Terminal, Saved! and M. Night Shyamalan's new thriller, The Village.

Fahrenheit 9/11 presents us with a president who led us to war on ragingly false grounds, and director Michael Moore has Bush's cabal dead to rights in every multiplex in the country. But it hasn't tanked his re-election bid — not even close. Why not? Well, for one thing, Americans love a liar who doubles down when everyone knows his hand is a bust. Take Marion "Bitch was smoking crack off her own breasts when I just came in to ask for directions" Barry. Or purehearted romantic Bill "She was having sexual relations with me at that time, but I was not having sexual relations with her" Clinton. And now we have George "Damn WMDs — always the last place you look for them" Bush. There's an aw-shucks, "I been a baaaad widdle boy" quality to all of these proceedings. Not all of Moore's fact-mongering can detract from the American public's love of being taken in.

While the lie is the oldest form of political communication, it has its disadvantages. As a tool for society-building, it's about as useful as cut-rate cement — only use it if you can be sure that the impending collapse will be someone else's problem. Moreover, the out-and-out, take-the-money-and-run lie can fragment even one's own base. Moore's long-term success may be to turn many a Young Republican adrift, looking for a more principed cause.

Moving along to more advanced chicanery, consider Steven Speilberg's The Terminal. Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), Homeland Security despot of the tinpot that is JFK, says very few actually untrue things to his foil, the hapless Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), stuck at the airport without a valid passport to permit him into the city. Indeed, when Dixon's second banana suggests that they oust the man without a country by falsifying an escape attempt, Dixon snaps back that he "will not lie — especially for the likes of Viktor Navorkski!" This, it seems, is a man we could use as a prisoner advocate in Guantanamo.

But our study is of political lies, and Dixon is merely more subtle than Bush, not more honest. It makes sense that Navokski is from an Eastern European nation as the cat-and-mouse game between Navorski and Dixon has everything to do with elisions, verbal traps and feigning freedom. They are in NYC, acting out Milan Kundera. Dixon has all the architecture of control on his side — the commanding heights, the one-way mirrors, the cameras, the plexiglass windows, the pager only he can activate. With these tools, Dixon prods Viktor into trouble without having to say, confirm or confront. Dixon sets up situations for Viktor to lie or run into trouble, but will do no more than push Viktor to the very brink. Dixon preserves for himself the illusion of being an honest man, something that Fahrenheit 9/11 leads you to believe its subjects could not do. All the while, in crisp phrases, rounded tones and reasonable words, Dixon is twisting, twisting, twisting the latest fly into his web.

As we climb into realms of increasingly respectable forms of lying, our penultimate latitude is the platitude, as exemplified in Saved! In Saved!, Pastor Skip (Martin Donovan), the wayward nephew of "Saturday Night Live's" church lady and principal of American Eagle High, tells the kids to pray. He says, and the whole fundie society believes, that miracles happen. God talks to you. God commands you to do things — including, as he has in the Bible, to kill people, even your own family. Using old Greek proverb that "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one deep thing," this is a classic hedgehog community — one good (obedience to God), one text (the King James), one people. Everything else gets filtered out.

Then a challenge to the society comes from within. Mary (Jena Malone), a devout American Eagler, gets a vision from God to have sex with her boyfriend lest he fall prey to his inner temptation: interior design. Mary does what God tells her, because she had internalized all of the things that her fellow fundies had said over and over. It turns out they didn't really believe, and Mary is left holding the bag, alone, rejected.

That's the danger of a leader using the platitude — what you loudly proclaim and almost believe may become the basis for a revolution that will make your true, moderate agenda impracticable. In 2003's Luther, a troublesome little monk nearly destroyed the church he loved simply by asking that it be faithful to its first principles. In prep-school melodramas from Dead Poets Society to Lost and Delirious, culture leaders found the unhappy consequence of teaching powerful words of love and loss. Who would have thought that the polity was listening? Beware of big ideas, ye leaders, even though they're just the best-sounding form of lie.

While we have so far considered dishonesty in politics, it doesn't due to keep secrets about the cinema. There is too much to discuss, and it is too fun. So as we venture into Shyamalan's The Village, let me say: major spoiler warning.

The Village, which presents itself to itself as an agrarian town of the late 19th century, is, in fact, a planned community of the 21st century. A support group of people who had lost family members to violent crimes decided to found their own village. It's surely no coincidence that the benefactor funding the preserve on which the village sits is Elder Walker — as in George Walker Bush.

Despite what the villagers believe, there are no monsters in the woods keeping the townsfolk down on the farm — merely the elders play-acting — but the elders themselves seem genuinely, privately disturbed by new, bloody occurrences in the village at the movie's outset. Unbeknownst to them, Noah Percy (Adrian Brody), the simpleton child of an elder, has found his parents' costume and has begun carrying out the violence and madness the elders imputed to those beasts.

Easy potshots abound, and I'd take a few if I really thought that The Village was a specific satiric attack on W's isolationism, paranoia or false nostalgia. But really, Shyamalan has touched on all the forms of political speech — that is, all the forms of political lies — and tied them together into one pessimistic package.

Is it a lie to frighten the village children with stories of carnivorous monsters, only to later reveal that the same are mere representations of the fears that bind the elders together? Are the constant jibberings about Those We Do Not Speak Of, the byzantine meaningless security rituals or the pseudo-period speech rooted in anything deeper than the stunted rage of people who hace found themselves, like Frank Dixon, tied to a stake for life? Does Noah Percy cry out to the same God as Mary of Saved! and George W. Bush of Fahrenheit 9/11?

Unlike Moore, Shyamalan certainly doesn't seem to call for any change in the political order — those characters who learn the truth about the village don't rise up, at least before the curtain falls. Shyamalan is saying this is the way of the world, the periodic table of political pablum, the leadership we've chosen and come to expect.

The Village is neither about justifying nor condemning its fictional closed society ot the real-life administration it in some ways resembles. Just as The Sixth Sense meditated on those stuck in endless cycles of grief, Unbreakable dwelt on our tragic need for the heroic and Signs plumbed the depths of our faith and skeptisism regarding the unseen, The Village shines light on another basic human truth: our lifelong need for lies, large and small. So, beware of the alligator. And of the person who warned you about the alligator, and of those who would criticize the warning authorities. But, most of all, keep in mind that there is a small, probably intractable, part of each person's psyche that's willfully blind and will shape our every institution. When you want to understand human beings, start, as did Shyamalan, by understanding our ghosts.

— Martin Scribbs (bluerb@yahoo.com)