JDC Burnhil
“Eventually the secret of Those, etc., is revealed. … It’s a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It’s so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don’t know the secret anymore.”
(Roger Ebert, Review of The Village, 2004)
In most tellings of The Rise and Fall of M. Night Shyamalan, The Village (2004) is treated as Where It Started to Go Wrong. The cause, according to these theorists, was the great success the auteur director had had with films that incorporating a “twist,” such as The Sixth Sense (1999) and Unbreakable (2000); the effect was that he got cocky and made a film around a twist without realizing that twist was “witless.”
After studying the film and many viewers’ responses over many years, I’ve come to a different hypothesis. I believe that the dislike expressed for the “twists” (of which there are really three, not just one) is what doctors call “referred pain” – pain that is caused in one location, but felt in another. The actual cause of most viewer dissatisfaction is a set of much subtler missteps – coincidentally, also three in number.
A summary, though not the expected one
My explanation starts with a summary, but please note carefully, it is not a summary of Shyamalan’s film. Rather, it summarizes an imagined version of the film, from which all the twists, and anything that would have too heavily implied the twists, have been edited out. (One wonders if Roger Ebert might have preferred this version.)
In 1897, the small farming village of Covington exists isolated from the outside world, effectively imprisoned by mysterious bipedal creatures in the encircling woods (referred to by the village inhabitants as “Those We Don’t Speak Of,” from here on just “Those” to us.) Young villager Lucius is determined to find a way he can get past Those, so he can go to “the towns” beyond the woods and return with much-needed medicine.
When Lucius is stabbed by his disturbed age-mate Noah, however, Ivy – the blind daughter of the village’s leader – takes up Lucius’s effort. Receiving secret information about Those from her father (offscreen), she sets out on a road of trials – trials including abandonment by her sighted escorts, punishing weather, treacherous terrain, and finally a frightening encounter with one of “Those,” which is bested when Ivy tricks the charging creature into a lethal pit that had almost killed her earlier. She reaches the town (offscreen) and returns to Covington with the needed medicine.
If we watched this version of the movie, we would likely describe it as a nearly perfect example of the Hero’s Journey in a folk horror setting. Indeed, an entire essay could be spent simply exploring the ways in which Ivy’s journey matches the various formulations of that mythic pattern, from Ivy’s initial opposition to the journey (refusal of the call) through the help from a mentor (Edward, her father) through to the return with a boon (the medicine to save Lucius).
But that analysis is not our chosen purpose – not least because, outside our imagined “twistless” version, the notion that we are watching a hero’s journey is demolished by the first-revealed of those infamous twists. As those familiar with the film already know, the information Edward imparts as a “mentor” is the big secret that Those – the creatures in the woods – are nothing but costumes used by the elders, with the intent of maintaining an illusion that the villagers are imprisoned, thus ensuring that the younger generation remains as reluctant to visit the outside world as their parents.
Edward offers his tears as he apologizes for the “farce” of the creatures, but he offers no explanation – besides a reference to the elders’ “heartbreak” – for why such an elaborate scheme was ever put in motion. This is the first of what I deem Shyamalan’s actual missteps: not the twist, but Shyamalan’s failure to commit to that twist.
It is legitimate misdirection to focus the first half of the film on the younger generation, on their hopes and fears and plans, and then abruptly reveal that the elders are the real protagonists – as all meaningful knowledge, and thus all true agency, has been reserved to them. But we would expect the focus to then shift to those true protagonists – what were the elders trying to do with their elaborate self-imprisonment scheme? Why was the stabbing of Lucius such a blow to those aims, in a way that other deaths were not? What do the elders intend to do?
The problem is, Shyamalan cannot afford to actually answer those questions – not at the time when the audience is impatient for them. The answers are coming, but they are being reserved as a surprise. All that can happen in the Covington scenes is for the elders to talk in code that by design does not make clear what the strongly held convictions are that make the argument so intense and meaningful for them.
Meanwhile, we keep watching Ivy on her journey. Poor, brave Ivy is not one degree less heroic than she was in the “twistless” version, but now we know we are not watching a hero’s journey; it is the journey of a pawn that has been granted permission by its chessmaster to cross the board. Ivy is a wonderful character, and there is no doubt she would take on the world for love – but she isn’t taking on the world, only a tiny microcosm arranged by the elder generation.
This is the big misstep. Shyamalan wants it both ways: he wants to stun us by pulling back the curtain, but then instead of letting us get a good look behind it, he hopes the curtain can recapture our attention.
Of course, the element which disrupts everyone’s plans and understandings – those of Ivy, the elders, and the audience – is the appearance of one of Those, the creatures we were led to believe never actually existed except in folklore. Ivy quite reasonably concludes the folklore must then have been correct. But the elders and the audience discover the real explanation: completely unbeknownst to them, the disturbed Noah has for some time known about the sharp-clawed costumes they wear and has been using them to commit animal mutilation. Now he has slipped out of the confinement he was kept in after the stabbing and has taken one of the costumes; it is Noah who menaces Ivy in the wood and falls to his death in doing so.
If we had any confidence that the elders’ unrevealed plans justify the deception they’ve perpetrated on their children and the agency they’ve thereby taken away, it is surely shaken by the actions of Noah – and, to their credit, the elders’ self-confidence does seem shaken. But shortly we get to judge for ourselves, as Ivy reaches the end of the road to “the towns,” and the final two twists (summarized here in the interests of brevity) are revealed to us.
The elders who founded Covington had all suffered the loss of loved ones to violent crimes in the outside world. They believed that, in isolation from the outside world, they could create a more “innocent” way of life immune to such things. The cruel irony of Noah’s multiple violent crimes is now made clear.
The remaining twist? The elders were so desperate for the imagined protection of an “innocent” way of life, they didn’t merely give up the outside world: they gave up a century of progress. The year is not 1897, but 2004.
This twist leads to one of the most striking scenes in the whole film, as the appearance of Ivy, for all intents and purposes a young woman from the nineteenth century, upends the assumptions of Kevin, a modern twenty-something park ranger who until today believed the “wildlife preserve” he patrols to be only that.
Unfortunately, it also leads to perhaps the film’s worst scene, in which Shyamalan plays a cameo as the ranger’s apathetic superior, who drones on at length about how secret payoffs that came to light a few years previously are why planes never fly over “the preserve.”
It’s the film’s second big misstep. The film is most successful when viewed as a fable, as a folk horror tale of those who thought great sacrifices to Innocence would result in its protection. Constructing the plot such that the audience instead asks questions like, “Hey, why doesn’t X spoil the illusion?” throws us out of that optimal viewing stance; it’s a bad tactical decision even if it proves successful for the specific X of “airplanes overhead.”
The third and worst misstep of the film similarly involves a plot hole papered over in a poor fashion. The performances of Shyamalan’s professional actors are so good, however, that it can take years (I speak from experience) to spot that the plot hole even exists.
The scene of the “papering-over” takes place after Ivy has confronted her father and pleaded for his permission to travel to the towns for medicine. Afterwards, Edward has an intense discussion with his wife, in which she keeps insisting that he must not go to the towns, as all the elders took an oath to never return there. After several repetitions, he catches the loophole: Ivy is not an elder. She never took their oath and is not bound by it.
But allowing Ivy’s journey surely violates the spirit of his oath, as does revealing to her the “farce” of the creatures. Will it outrage his fellow elders any less that he found and exploited a technicality rather than simply saying “I did what needed to be done”? It seems illogical to think so.
The plot hole thus exists: why doesn’t Edward make the trip to the towns, with or without Ivy? No one is in a better position to ensure that all stages of the journey happen in such a way that it preserves the elders’ secrets and illusions.
The audience may not consciously spot this plot hole, but I believe that on some level viewers do notice and are bothered by the question: If Edward accepts that circumstances finally justify departing from the village’s policy of isolation, why give the task to a blind girl? “Because she actually wants to, and I do not want to,” is not an answer that should come from a respectable leader.
Fixing the missteps?
I freely acknowledge, in introducing this last section, that I could be wrong. I have already gone out on a limb in speculating about “here is what I think really bothers audiences”; clearly it is even more dicey to suggest “these two changes might have significantly alleviated that dissatisfaction.”
Nevertheless, my purpose is simply to say, “this is what might have been,” not to suggest that someone else in Shyamalan’s place would have spotted these options and taken them. We are only applying hindsight. We are trying to keep our proposed changes as minimal as possible, and keep as true as we can to Shyamalan’s intended messages for the movie.
The first fix would be simply to edit down much of the speech he makes as “Jay” in the ranger station scene. It serves more purpose than simply papering the “planes” plot hole: it contrasts people like the founders of Covington, who at least took some action in response to the horrors of the modern world, with those like Jay, who not only choose apathy but smugly congratulate themselves on the wisdom of doing so. But Kevin could tune out the majority of Jay’s self-interested lecture and the same point would still be made.
The second fix, unfortunately, is not so easy, now that William Hurt (who played Edward) is no longer with us.
Earlier, I gave my opinion that the film’s biggest misstep was presenting the technicality of “Edward took an oath but Ivy didn’t” as the justification for sending Ivy on the journey instead of Edward.
My proposed fix is to insert a scene after Ivy asks permission to make the journey to “the towns”, in which we see Edward himself preparing to make that journey. We see that, as a good leader does, he intends to take responsibility.
And then we see him fail. Whether he suffers a full panic attack, or merely overwhelming anguish, we see him realize that whatever emotional wound “the towns” left on him has still not healed. He cannot make the journey as he is.
For Edward to then send Ivy instead becomes the act of a responsible leader, not a fig-leaf so he can say he adhered to “the oath.”
Let’s return for a moment to the “twistless” version of the film. In the first half of the movie, Lucius is visibly built up as our expected protagonist, which includes Edward consoling him after he missteps by telling him “You are fearless in a way that I shall never know.” Ivy proves to have the same fearlessness; she takes up the torch started by Lucius, when he has become incapacitated. In our twistless version, we can regard Lucius and Ivy as a joint protagonist.
Of course, we then discovered that Lucius and Ivy and in fact all their generation had been deprived of true knowledge and thus true agency. That caused us to conclude that the true protagonists were the elders – regrettable in light of how little action they took.
But what if the elders, too, lack true agency? If the twenty-something years they spent hiding away from the specter of the modern world left them actually incapable of rising to its sudden challenge, as would be demonstrated by Edward in our imagined scene?
If that is the case, then a powerful thematic note is sounded. Just as Ivy stepped up to “take the torch” from Lucius, when Lucius was incapacitated, so too we can look at both Lucius and Ivy as taking up a torch on behalf of the incapacitated elders. Despite their having chosen an unwise path, we can believe the elders thought they were doing best for their comrades and children. For the youth to then go where the elders cannot, and to do the needed things when they cannot, makes a powerful statement.
I cannot, of course, speak for Shyamalan on whether that statement meets his vision. It’s possible he would reject my proposed fix entirely. Perhaps he wanted the film to end exactly as it does, with the younger generation – no matter how brave and selfless and loving – trapped by the deceptions of their elders, who, despite the proven limits to their wisdom, still reserve to themselves the privilege of making the decisions and the knowledge needed for those decisions.
Yet I suspect that Shyamalan intended a more positive ending – one where, even as we recognize how much harm came from the elders’ “farce,” we can understand it as a sincere attempt at protection, a misguided expression of love. Seeing that the wounds which drove these people to desperately retreat from the world still have such power a generation later lets us temper our judgment with compassion.
Finally, it puts a note of extra hope in the suggestion Edward makes in the film’s final minutes, that the elders might indeed choose not to continue Covington. It suggests that, whatever healing eluded the tormented elders for a generation, it may be coming at last, learned from the example of their children. That makes for a powerful ending, of which – who knows? – even Ebert might have approved.
JDC Burnhil is a writer with an MFA from Emerson College who resides in New England, possibly even aboveground. He is a contributor to the volume Somebody, Save Me! of the long-running “Superheroes and Vile Villains” fiction anthology series. Among his many interests are folk horror, theological fiction, Italian gialli and American slashers, and the theory of fiction writing itself. While he has a website, he is much more active on Bluesky. Burnhil has previously written for Horror Homeroom about the ‘fawn response’ in folk horror.
