A Rousseauvian Village?

Fear, Hope, and Property in Practical Arcadia

M. Night Shyamalan’s 2004 film The Village.

Two young women sweep a porch. They are dressed in simple, modest clothes. They are conspicuously healthy. Their hair is tied back neatly behind their heads, their faces unadorned by make-up. Around them children wash dishes, a woman tends to livestock in a pen, and a group of men and women work cooperatively in a greenhouse where flowers and vegetables are grown. 

As they sweep, the young women pirouette, making their ankle-length dresses swirl around them. For them, this work is clearly not drudgery. This is pleasurable labour. The young women, like the other young people we encounter in the opening scenes of M. Night Shyamalan’s excellent 2004 film The Village, are not disgruntled by having to perform the menial tasks assigned to them by their elders. On the contrary, they are content; they are quite obviously having fun. 

We know that the eponymous villagers are not averse to flowers. Attuned to beauty, we have seen how they grow them themselves for the sake of aesthetics alone (the village is a community of goods. They produce what they need and want, neither buying nor selling in external markets). Yet, when the young women spot a wildflower growing on the edge of the porch a look of grave concern descends over their faces. In haste, they uproot the flower and conceal it quickly under a pile of earth. 

We soon learn that it is not the flower itself that dismays them. It is the colour of the flower. The flower is red—“the bad colour.” The village, it turns out, is not as utopic as it at first appears to be. The colour red attracts “those” who the villagers “don’t speak of.” Namely, the meat-eating creatures, with large claws, who live in the woods which border their tiny community. 

The village, we soon discern, is located unpropitiously. More akin to monsters than animals, the man-eating beasts wear red cloaks and their howls and groans can often be heard from the settlement at Covington, Pennsylvania. Fortunately, as the schoolmaster explains to a class of terrified children after a pig’s carcass is discovered outside the schoolhouse, those they “don’t speak of” have not breached the villagers’ borders for many years. A truce has been struck between them: the villagers do not enter their woods, and they do not enter the villagers’ valley. 

Not surprisingly, the villagers remain perpetually vigilant all the same. They take precautions to maintain the peace with their fearsome neighbours and guard against unprovoked attacks, sending sentries out each night to occupy towers on the edge of their territory. 

Here, in short, joy and terror intermingle, hence the alarm caused by an otherwise beautiful object: a seemingly innocuous flower.

The date, we are led to believe, is 1897, and, going by the dress, manners, and technology on display in the film, there is no reason for the viewer to question its veracity. What we are offered in The Village is a vision of arcadia, arcadia, to be sure, distorted by the presence of evil, but arcadia nonetheless. In their equality and simplicity, the villagers are magnificent. The film is at once both a thriller and homage to a pastoral way of life, a kind of reactionary manifesto. 

As a portrait of equity, uprightness, and innocence intact, The Village is, at times, electrifying. To the Christian anarchist or Bible communist, it is, surely, what Battleship Potemkin or Reds is, presumably, to a Marxist, a romantic portrayal of theory in practice. The text, however, from which Shyamalan takes inspiration—and here I merely speculate—is somewhat surprising. The Village is modelled on Jean Jacques Rousseau’s “Constitutional Project for Corsica.”

Rousseau, as many have recognised, is an ambiguous figure. There are two Rousseau’s, a conservative Rousseau as well as the more familiar Rousseau the liberal. Invited to draft a constitution for the newly liberated Corsican people, who, until 1755, had been governed by the Republic of Geneva, it is the conservative Rousseau—the Rousseau who prefers particularism to universalism tried and tested methods to efficiency, and quality of life to the number of material goods we possess—who undertakes the assignment in 1764. 

Rousseau asserts that no other people are “so fortunately disposed by nature to receive a good constitution.”An isolated, agricultural people, just like Shyamalan’s villagers, the Corsicans are “poor but not needy.” Guided by a “spirit of equity,” they are just and humane. The chief difficulty confronting the Corsican people is, on Rousseau’s interpretation, knowing how to stay as they are.

Having the good fortune to be beginning at the beginning, Rousseau argues that the Corsicans must “take steps to prevent degeneration.” Thus, first of all, they must make equality, already substantially present on the island, “the fundamental law” of their constitution. The Corsicans, in short, must remain agricultural. 

According to Rousseau, cities are a site of corruption and inequality, a place where a people “loses its morals, its laws, its courage and its freedom.” Commerce, accordingly, must be avoided at all costs. It is not money that makes a people rich, he claims, it is the happiness and respectability borne of simplicity. The less money “circulates within the island, the greater its real prosperity will be.” Stay sequestered, Rousseau counsels the Corsicans, free from the temptations and trickery of foreigners. Corsica should savour its self-sufficiency. 

The same ideological narrative plays out in The Village. For example, when a young villager on sentry duty is asked by the capable and curious protagonist, Lucius Hunt, if he ever “thinks of the towns”, he responds mechanically: “The towns, what for? They’re wicked places, where wicked people live.” 

Similarly, Ivy Elizabeth Walker, the blind daughter of chief elder, Edward, is instructed by her father: “You do not know money. It is not part of our life here. Money can be a wicked thing; it can turn men’s hearts black, good men’s hearts.” 

The agrarian communism observed by the villagers keeps them peaceful, patient, and robust. They are almost a paradigmatic case of the Rousseauvian vision. Yet, contrary to Rousseau’s advice, fear rather than hope is the principal instrument of government deployed by the elders at Covington. 

Those they “don’t speak of,” we learn eventually, are a contrivance, a device hatched by the village elders to preserve the new way of life they’ve created. It’s not 1897 at all, it's 2004, and the monsters are entirely fictional. 

The village elders are refugees from the city. Escaping the nihilism and violence of twentieth-century urban America, they left in the hope of building “something good and right.” Yet, having succeeded, fear has come to predominate in their small and cohesive community. 

The Village is, indeed, in many ways, a remarkably pessimistic film. On the whole, the young people portrayed in it are weak. Raised in a culture that actively promotes the common good, the youth are not so much virtuous as merely free from vice. Rarely tested, they rarely fail. However, when they are confronted with real moral predicaments many crash, letting one another down. 

The village elders may be communists, comparing capitalism to madness, but they are conservatives too: they believe still in natural inequality. It is only those like Lucius and Ivy, the “strong ones,” who are ultimately fit to lead—the rest must be monitored and guided benignly, hence the general mood of surveillance within the community and the cynical fantasy foisted upon the young by its elder, founding members.

Embracing principles of hierarchy and leadership, based on age and ability, the film is also keen to stress the destructive nature of the passions. Profoundly unutopian in spirit, when the village idiot stabs Lucius in an act of love-induced jealousy, in the background of the shot there is a wheel; it cannot be reinvented is what Shyamalan is telling us. Desire is ineradicable, and, unless regulated by morality and repression, it is destined to produce disharmony. 

When Noah Percy, the culprit, is detained, he screams and cries and bangs his fists against the door. With its ode to license, liberalism, we are prompted to think, makes a village idiot of us all, overwrought, covetous, and insubordinate. Practical arcadia is, in other words, necessarily, full of constraint and compromise and the Covington villagers, consequently, are sexually diffident and generally custom-bound.

Rousseau, by contrast, was more optimistic. Not for him the notion that sexuality is our Original Sin. Man is born free and merely has to shake off the chains he has acquired over the centuries. In contrast to Shyalaman’s Tory communist reinterpretation of his work, Rousseau is also something of a proto-distributist, advocating in “Constitutional Project for Corsica” a kind of sturdy independence for everyone. 

To depend on others, to lack resources of your own, is to live in a state of unfreedom, he insists. Nonetheless, Rousseau concedes that the success of such a scheme presupposes isolation, even when we substitute hope for fear as the main instrument of government. 

From Thomas More onwards, realist utopians have agreed that, in order to be preserved, something beautiful must be buried away. The peculiarity of The Village is that it is set in the twenty-first century in an advanced Western nation where such seclusion is virtually impossible, hence the resort to subterfuge to make the experiment viable. Subterfuge, however, in Shyamalan’s telling, tarnishes what is an otherwise noble trial in living.

Consensus has it that virtue is hard to maintain amidst temptation. This is true. But there are, of course, real-life communities that show that it can be done. 

Take the Bruderhof, for example, they are Christian communists who succeed in upholding their own strict traditions, where the individual vows to love, follow, and obey the commandments of Jesus and subordinate him or herself to the larger group, whilst participating simultaneously in the decadent and hubristic capitalist society around them. Faith is understated in The Village. They give thanks and they are “led by love.” However, they are not noticeably devout. 

Needless to say, the wrong kind of faith can be destructive to communities. As Max Weber famously argued, Protestantism, with its Lutheran conception of “a calling” and its Calvinistic notion of predestination, has historically “shown a special tendency to develop economic rationalism” with ruinous consequences for traditionalist, non-acquisitive, ways of life. The right kind of faith, however, as the Bruderhof (also Protestants) show, can be immensely beneficial in keeping communities together. 

The Covington elders, in short, concocted the wrong kind of fabrication. Instead of inventing monsters, they ought, simply, to have reinvented—or rediscovered—God.  

What the Bruderhof conclusively demonstrate is that, when people are properly socialised in Christian belief and behaviour, vice has more difficulty in gaining a hold. In The Village, when Lucius and then Ivy request to visit the towns to purchase much-needed medical supplies, panic ensues among the elders. The Bruderhof, by contrast, actively encourage their children to experience life outside of their own communities. Having properly internalised the Christian virtues, they can be trusted to return. 

Inspired primarily by Rousseau, the conceit of The Village, then, is hyperbolic. The larger question, however, remains: although possible, is a community of goods desirable? If Rousseau was right about hope but wrong about seclusion, was he also wrong about economic independence? 

If we consult Pope Leo XIII, the answer is a definite no: private property is what distinguishes us from animal creation. The “brute has no power of self-direction.” It must, accordingly, be within the right of human beings “to possess things not merely for temporary and momentary use, as other living things do, but to have and to hold them in stable and permanent possession.”

Private property is, indeed, consistent with human nature, and it is to Rousseau’s credit that he did not seek to abolish it, but sought rather to distribute it in as many hands as possible. The Bruderhof, however, is an intentional community. Its members elect to be there. Which is to say, they deploy reason in opting to own nothing personally. Covington, by contrast, ceased to be an intentional community when it raised a generation of adults ignorant of their actual condition, becoming a benign despotism instead. 

In some ways, but not in others, the Covington elders should have cleaved more closely to the Rousseauvian script as set out in “Constitutional Project for Corsica.” The rest of us, though, living in organic communities, should probably settle with Rerum Novarum with its defence of property and its exposition of Christian ethics. 

It may or may not be true that the world must become Catholic before it can become just and beautiful and moral, as Hilaire Belloc insisted. But what is perfectly clear is that, in the sphere of morality, the death of God has been mainly deleterious.

The secular religionists of the nineteenth century—along with Rousseau before them—anticipated the demise of social feeling when organised religion ceased to have a function in society. What they did not understand, however, was the importance of “the idea of futurity.” To claim, as Pope Leo XIII did, that, in its absence, “forthwith the very notion of what is good and right will perish” is to exaggerate. Nonetheless, the psychological force of impending divine judgement in determining how we do and do not act cannot be overemphasised.

Towards the end of The Village, Ivy is finally granted permission to pass through the woods to the towns in an effort to save Lucius’ life. Without medicine, her betrothed is destined to die. Two male peers are appointed to accompany her. Not long into their journey, petrified, her escorts turn back, leaving Ivy—unsighted—in the nominally beast-ridden woods alone. Had they been reared in a more pious culture they might not have been so ready to indulge their instinct for self-preservation.

God, it is true, does not simply want obedience. He wants “people of a particular sort”—virtuous people. Yet, for most of us, “right actions done for the wrong reason” might be the best we can hope for.