Just when everyone was hoping I'd forgotten about it
This may be incautious of me, since I haven't had dinner yet, but I've been turning and turning this over and want to be done with it. I have a bit at the end tying criticism into Fortean experience, if anyone gets bored and wants to page ahead.
Anyway, I believe Fitz has made an error of fact when he says that the adults don't talk about whether moving to the village was a good thing for the children. Almost the first thing we hear Ivy's father say is "It's times like this that make us wonder whether we did the right thing in settling here," or words to that effect. He and the other elders* talk about whether or not to come clean almost the whole time Ivy's gone - but they talk about it obliquely, and take out their little boxes to remind themselves of why they came, and in the end declare that Noah has "made their stories real" and vote not to end the deception. They *don't* talk about it properly (which makes it subtext by definition), but it would have been out of character for them to do so. These are people who simultaneously run away from their fears and keep them in little boxes in the living room. An open, frank discussion of their folly and its consequences is beyond them. They have already paid so much for their refuge that they can't bring themselves to admit that they *were* wrong in settling there and the experiment has failed; and therefore, like all cowards, must keep on paying long after a brave person would be free and clear.
* (I wrote "adults," first, and though this is technically untrue, all their offspring, even Lucius and Ivy, remain dependent and infantalized long after they should have grown up.)
Also, knowing the truth about The Ones We Don't Talk About didn't make that scene any less scary for me. Considering what we know about them at that point, Ivy's being attacked by one is a *worse* prospect - think about it! I was also prepared for a cinematic trick, learning that the entire walk through the woods has been a rendition of Ivy's blind perception of her surroundings and she has encountered a bear - which, thanks to the ignorance her elders left her in, she has no choice but to visualize as a familiar monster.
Fitz is quite right about the depiction of Noah, though (I'm sure you're so relieved to hear it
) and I wonder whether, in this character and in Elijah/Mr. Glass in Unbreakable, Shyamalin is expressing a distaste for the drastically different, possibly one that he is not aware of himself - or that he keeps in a box in the living room and never looks at.
Anyway, I don't expect to convince Fitz or anyone else who didn't like it of the movie's merits. One thing I've noticed is that, if you didn't enjoy a work, finding meaning in it is very difficult indeed; whereas, if I let myself dwell on works I enjoy (even Good Crud), meaning starts popping up like rain lilies after a thunderstorm. I am fond of saying that we make our own meaning when we encounter a work, and have been troubled for a long time about the extent to which it is possible to say anything truly relevant to the actual work. I think that, when we watched The Village, I had a good experience and Fitz had a bad one, and everything we have to say about the movie is post hoc justification of our reaction.
This would explain why so much of what people who disagree with us say about a text sounds so nonsensical. Even when people are discussing books with the text in front of them to reference, they can say things which sound as though they never looked inside it. This gets worse when you can't check your source. I believe Fitz has made an error of fact; but it's just as likely, in the greater scheme of things, that I have exagerrated or misread scenes as it is that he has forgotten them or minimized them into insignificance.
This does not make the discussion pointless - or need not, unless we let it. The process of analysis can only tell us so much about what the author thought - but it can teach us a great deal about what *we* think ourselves.
And here we come to the relationship between Fortean phenomena and literary criticism, which I hope a few of you at least don't consider completely ivory towerish. The thing is, we structure our lives on narrative models - especially in a forum like this one, with its emphasis on, first, sharing experience in story form (whether newspaper quote or IHtM) and afterward, analzying it, adding new stories to it, and analyzing the new narrative created by the addition of new experiences. The experience is what it is. It happens, without regard to narrative conventions, our previous experience, our belief systems, or our needs. Our job is to incorporate or reject the story; which is a text analysis job.
I could talk at great length, working out what I think/feel about that, but anybody here who wants to can easily prompt me to come back and do so, by picking up the conversation at that point. I'll leave y'all to think about that, if you care to, and extract any useful matter it may contain; or to blow it off as academic posturing, if that suits you better.
And I would be really, really interested in seeing what a viewer of *The Village* who hadn't previously read *Running Out of Time* thinks of the book, when reading it afterward.
