Living in Fear of the World Outside of Your Own

For as long as people have been on this earth, we have told each other fictional stories in order to form a sense of security and a feeling of protection. These stories all offer some sort of lesson, commonly taught in the bible, or in Greek mythology that are suppose to give meaning to our lives when the world lets us down, allowing for humans to stay sane. They could be told to others or just retold in our own heads, and when these protective stories are told to you enough times you start to believe them. Often these protective fictional stories can create strong ideologies amongst people, resulting in them denying what goes on in the real world or simply just not realizing what is outside of their own world concepts. M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village" is a perfect example of a group of individuals who are stuck in their own ideology of what the world should be like. The movie has some great themes, but mainly one theme concerns the stories of protection that are retold in this village from generation to generation.

The village is a community of people engaged in a simple, innocent life, surrounded by a forest that is filled with mystical creatures that the villagers fear but have set up a truce with so that the creatures won't harm them.

The movie starts out with the viewer assuming that the setting is in a pre-modern era probably around the 18th century, in the middle of a vast forest. You then come to realize that the village was set up by a group of "elders" who essentially had something dramatic happen in their past lives due to the cruel society they lived in. These elders retell the stories of the creatures and the forest to every single child that is born into their village, brainwashing them into believing this particular ideology. These creatures are protective figures that are meant to actually save their people from the real danger of the modern world. They believe that modern living is nothing but evil, producing things such as violence, pollution, disease, and industrial death or accidents. The elders create their own story of who founded the village, and also wrote their own morals, rules, and traditions for the village members to abide by and live under. If these teachings are repeated to generation, after generation, then long after the elders die their initial beliefs will become true and the future villagers will live free of modern dangers.

The main character, a blind young adult named Ivy who is the daughter of the head elder, falls in love with another villager, Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) and decides she wants to marry him. Unbeknownst to Ivy or Lucius, another villager with supposed mental issues named Noah (Adrien Brody) is in love with Ivy as well and when he hears of the marriage he fatally stabs Lucius resulting in a serious wound. The elders may believe that their village can keep out all the evils of a modern world, but violence is still something that all humans are capable of, and it cannot be accounted for through fictional protective stories. Lucius' only way to live is through proper medical treatment. The elders deny the proposal of having someone go to the "other towns" which are deemed as wicked places filled with wicked people. Ivy's father, the head of the elders, goes against what the other elders say and allows for Ivy to travel through the woods to get the medicines needed to save Lucius. This is where Plato's allegory of the cave comes in. The village itself is the cave by which Ivy and her fellow villagers are bound to, while the shadows on the wall are the beliefs and stories told by the elders, their own "true world." Ivy is freed from the cave, and travels into the real world, which in the movie is a security building run by park rangers that is actually owned and operated by the elders who started the village.

Ivy gets her medicine and then returns to her village, where she decides to not share what she encountered outside of the forest. She falls into Plato's allegory of someone who is afraid of anything but their own ideology, even after realizing what is outside of what they truly believe. I have to ask, would she of had stronger opinions on the world outside of the village if she wasn't blind? How does a blind person fit into Plato's cave allegory when darkness is all they see on the walls, and there are no shadows. Ivy goes on to keep the village as it is, not speaking of the outside world, maintaining their lives away from the modern disgust, spoon-fed with the morals and beliefs that the elders had made. This film was wrapped around taking risks, breaking away from your ideologies, and then making a decision on what to do once you've broken that ideology; return to your sheltered fictional life, or break free into the real, true life. The love element cannot be overlooked either, because Ivy's love for Lucius is probably the most influential reason for Ivy going back to her village and fictional life filled with protective stories and fears of fictional creatures. Kind of like the lives that current generations live in now, constantly shown and told of what is good in the world, and kept sheltered from what is evil and dangerous. Ivy is blind, and cannot see what is dark in the world because she lives in a world that is constantly dark, therefore she is blessed with being blind to the evils in the world, whether they are real, or fictional.