‘The Village’ Still Has Questions To Ask
Michael Koresky begins his 2004 essay on M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village with a question: Is allegory in American cinema dead? Koresky, perceptive in his diagnosis of the post-millennium American audience as a stunned and stunted one, entertained the possibility that a literate Hollywood cinema was waning because few adults in the country read. Twenty years later, I wonder if there’s also the added element that allegory is difficult to swallow, at once too obvious and too subtle, nothing we haven’t heard before and nothing we want to hear again.
It’s a dangerous time for a critic, in the wake of an event as seismic as a presidential election, to engage with art when people are trying to inject meaning into cultural objects that don’t have any. This impulse is understandable; most reactions, as I’ve seen people reassure one another online, are understandable in the wake of a traumatic return to a worse status quo. But even that characterization, trauma, feels false, hyperbolic not because there is no threat to what is coming, but because the therapy-speak that saturates so much discourse does everything but engage with, even combat the thing that occasions trauma. To endeavor to create a substantive allegory out of the social and political elements that cause so much distress at a given time, whether the so-called Trump era or post-9/11, seems foolish, naive, but these are the same descriptors that have stalked Shyamalan’s career from the very beginning.
