Shyamalan’s classic horror movie captures political mood

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE

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ometimes filmmakers explain politics better than professors. For this political scientist, the fears leading some to want to lock down Americans and others to want to lock out foreigners are best captured by master filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan’s 2004 horror movie, The Village.

Critics panned The Village. It made famed critic Roger Ebert’s “most hated list,” but many moviegoers — including me — disagreed. The Village cost $60 million to make, but raked in nearly $260 million at the box office. The public was onto something, because Shyamalan’s creepy creation captured how fear drives sensible people to act crazy.

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Shyamalan’s eponymous village is a quaint 1800s farming community cut off from the outside world by woods patrolled by unnamed monsters. Village elders regulate everything, teaching children that leaving is doubly dangerous: If the inhuman monsters in the woods don’t get you, then the human monsters in “the towns” beyond will. The Village surrounds Amish simplicity with Lovecraftian terror.

Spoiler alert: The village is actually not a 19th-century religious commune but a 21st-century refuge created by wonderful people victimized by horrible crimes. Fearing the risks inherent to modernity, they created a homogenous utopian community where everyone knows everyone and abides by the same predictable rules. The village has no technology, no stranger danger, and near-total control of behavior.

While outwardly peaceful, utopia has its costs. Without modern medicine from the outside, some die young. The film starts with the wrenching funeral of a child. And it’s hard to find a mate with so few prospects to date. If you have an unrequited love, as at least four characters do, you may see that person every day, for the rest of your life. In the village you stick with the work, faith, and community you are born with. If you do not like your lot, you cannot change it. Perhaps the greatest costs are the frightening lies village elders must concoct to keep the young from leaving.

In the end, a plucky heroine overcomes her own metaphorical and physical blindness, braving the outside world to bring back medicine, saving her wounded betrothed. Perhaps the intended lesson is that to love, we must overcome fear of the unknown.

Minus the heroic ending, The Village captures fears across the political spectrum, even before the current pandemic and related civil unrest. (I say “related” because when you take away their jobs, religious services, and face to face social lives, distressed people embrace social media to spread grievances — sometimes riots result.) Conservatives want high walls to keep out new people who might bring crime or contamination, either viral or cultural. Some might even keep out people, such as Indian-born M. Night Shyamalan. Trump’s cracks about Mexican rapists and Islamic terrorists capture the zeitgeist that saving a single American life is worth drastically curtailing free trade, travel, and immigration, freedoms that helped make our nation both rich and great. Immigration is a complex subject, with likely tradeoffs between business growth and wage growth, and between unity and diversity. Yet at least when judged by the dominant criterion of the fearful, safety, severe immigration restrictions seem apt to fail: Over the long term, they will hurt more Americans than they help.

If the Right wants to wall off our village from stranger danger, the Left limits domestic freedom to protect us from the dangerous social interactions within, from any possible “oppression,” as defined by self-vetted experts. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt show in The Coddling of the American Mind, elite models of parenting now shelter children from even minute physical or emotional risk or discomfort. Challenges once deemed essential to maturation, such as playing with other kids without grownup supervision, we now label “unsafe.” Social media constantly repeat the one in a million times these normal behaviors go wrong, increasing emotional fragility. Accordingly, particularly at the colleges of the rich, higher-education “safety bureaucracies,” such as bias response teams, protect students from the emotional “danger” of discordant words and ideas, whatever their truth. This is the opposite of education, yet these institutions produce America’s future leaders.

Similarly, as Shep Melnick demonstrates in The Transformation of Title IX, politically correct regulators in the federal bureaucracy and on campuses, led by the Obama administration, vastly exaggerate the extent of sexual assault to justify severe restrictions on dating, and on any free speech that might spread “stereotypical” views of masculinity and femininity. They do this notwithstanding the fact that some stereotypes, such as that relatively more men than women want to play sports, are empirically accurate. Leftist fears of sexist contamination eviscerate scientific inquiry and First-Amendment rights.

To be clear, on pandemics and other matters, the fearful sometimes get it right. In retrospect, Trump’s January decision to restrict travel to and from China probably made sense, however much media elites and others (including me) disparaged it. Likewise, the lockdowns championed by the Left slowed the spread of coronavirus sufficiently for hospitals to prepare accordingly, a public-health success.

Yet as a general mood, fear marks a sclerotic society, not a dynamic one. Fear favors judging, not judgment; witch hunts, not inquiries. Beyond a limited period, should we allow fear of something that kills far fewer than 1 percent of us change who we are? A fortress America closed to foreign peoples and goods will come to resemble the stagnant village. The same holds for a hyper-regulated America where bossy village elders indefinitely shutter workplaces and social organizations from churches to coffee shops, those little platoons that make us more connected and less solipsistic.

Will politics imitate art? Will America become The Village? Maybe it already has.