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The Village: A New Kind of Vision
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Yesterday (5-4-04), Tracey and I went to see M. Knight Shyamalan’s The Village (2004). I’m quite the fan of Unbreakable and Signs. Both movies demonstrate the director’s miraculous skill at reproducing real relationship and emotion on the screen. Oh, the twists in his movies are definitely fun, and this die-hard sci-fi and comic book fan can’t help loving the fantastic premises of his last two movies. What I really love about Shyamalan’s work, though, is the deliberation with which he breathes life into the spouses, children, parents, friends, and lovers of his stories. He refuses the cinematic shorthand used by some to establish connection and deep feeling, histrionic displays of affect or unsubtle and gratuitous physical overtures of affection. The most powerful scenes in Shyamalan’s movies (and they are many) feel less creations than revelations: it’s as if he’s opening a door to a parallel world just like ours but without the sensory overload and distraction. He forces on us the opportunity to listen, to deliberate, and to feel by producing for our observation the most simple and intimate scenes between son and father, or wife and husband, scenes where virtually nothing happens except what most needs to. A passing glance, a clasped hand, a short phrase or single word—these are the building blocks with which he constructs his most moving moments. In an entertainment climate grounded in fast-paced, effects-laden popcorn fare by Bruckheimer, Lucas, Sommers, and others, Shyamalan’s minimalism and slow-paced movies are absolutely audacious. The dramatic crises that inevitably arrive in his movies are not the point; they provide plot resolution and the occasional epiphany, but they do not birth or cement liaisons. The real tale is in the journey; the climax merely reveals given relationships’ previously established strengths.
Shyamalan’s latest film moves to embrace not only the kind of personal ties binding parent to child and journeyman to mentor, as in his earlier movies, but the larger web of ties connecting an entire community. The Village considers a tightly knit, thoroughly interdependent collection of friends and their children, a group inclusive of everyone, including those dealing with physical and developmental disabilities. Given my professional interest in disability studies, this movie had plenty to offer.
Of prime importance, to my mind, is the film’s unrepentant construction of a blind woman as its primary, capable protagonist. Neither gender nor disability lessen her leadership role in the community. Too often, authors and directors prescribe for the disabled character one of a few narrowly defined roles—often, that of a site upon which others have the opportunity to perform acts of pity à la Tiny Tim (whether each character offers such sympathy or not often tells us something essential about their person). In this film, the blinded Ivy does not function as the sentimentalized recipient of others’ care and compassion. She is an able friend, daughter, playmate, counselor and disciplinarian, one who has accepted her disability and adapted. She does not pity herself and is not pitied by others. When she becomes another’s beloved, neither her lover nor father raises the issue of her sight as impediment to a successful and blessed marriage. In this supportive and dynamic—albeit markedly insular—little society, her disability does not define her. Her own desires and her sacrificial love for others constitute the real stuff of her nature.
written August 5, 2004
Posted by Paul Marchbanks at May 12, 2005 10:00 PM