The Village is weighing heavily on my mind.

August 2, 2004

Ah, Monday, time to start another week. Thankfully, I don’t have my boss nipping at my heels anymore, as we finshed one project on Friday, and the second one got pushed back until next Friday so that we could finish testing here. Huzzah! Although I should mention, however, that despite one project being “finished”, it got borked at the final moment by the company we’re working for. We submitted our final version of the software to them at 3:08 PM on Friday. By 3:30, they had sent us a helpfile to use in the software, which required us to recompile the software and send it back out. Two problems, however: the helpfile they’d made (complete overwriting my own, I might add, though I don’t feel bad about that since I didn’t write it from scratch) was ten times as big as the one that was previously there and it completely broke the help functions of our software.

Like all Windows programs, our software has the ability to let you hit F1 on any screen and bring up the help text relevent to what you’re looking at. Because this company didn’t make the softweare that way, there are help buttons on every screen of our software that don’t work, and hitting F1 results in an error message. And lastly, the reason why their helpfile was so much bigger than ours was because they put lots of screenshots in theirs. Including screenshots of the installation procedure.

That you can only view AFTER you’ve installed the software and gone through the procedure.

I mean really, how dumb is that? So we shipped it to them in the broken form because that’s what they wanted, and we’ve gotten no instructions to fix it. So they’re pretty much left with a functional piece of software with a lot of rough edges that were fixed until they stepped in. The other software we’re making for the other company is coming along much better, and testing is going much more rapidly now that their website is up and running and I have someone helping me with testing. That makes all the difference, let me tell you.

So without work weighing on my mind, I had a pretty good weekend. I vegged out for a bit and watched my TiVo. I had lunch the Old Spaghetti Factory on Saturday with my Mom, sister, old babysitter, her husband, and their new baby. I went and saw The Village (more on that in a bit). I helped some friends of my sister’s move.

OK, about The Village. It’s gotten mixed reviews, from horrible to wonderful, but I lean somewhere in between, more towards wonderful than horrible. My friend Amanda said it was a waste of money, but I disagree. I thought it was one of the most poignant movies I’ve seen all year, and I’ve written a long, full-of-spoilers extended text at the end of this entry. Where it says “Click here to continue reading” is the link you click on to read the rest, though I should warn you, only read it if you’ve seen the movie or want to be spoiled by knowing the ending. Let’s just say I was less than impressed with the ending, but I felt that the morality and lessons I pulled from it were more than worth the price of admission.

So yeah, back to work I go. This is a short entry because I spent most of my time writing about the movie. I don’t have much to say for you non, er, Village people out there right now, so read on if you’ve seen it or if you don’t care about learning the ending. Until next time, for the rest of you.

Like the headline-grabber (and inventor, apparently) Farenheit 9/11, The Village is a lesson in the power that fear has over a populace. When those in power create enough fear, uncertainty, and doubt (henceforth referred to as FUD), the people who look up to them can be made to do just about anything. The FUD flavor-of-the-week in the United States right now is terrorism, though not too long ago it was Communists, before that Nazis, before that Jews (yes, we used to be quite anti-Semitic, too, though it wasn’t government sanctioned like the other three I mention), and so on. When you convince the people that there is something out there that they must fear above all else and provide enough evidence of such, then they will fear that more than they would rationally fear something standing right in front of them.

What you can’t see CAN hurt you. At least as far as you know.

I knew what the ending was going to be in the movie about halfway through, not because it was the only logical ending but because I hadn’t seen M. Night Shyamalan yet. He likes to put himself into his movies somewhere–in The Sixth Sense he was a doctor caring for Cole, in Unbreakable he played a suspected drug dealer, in Signs he played the man who hit Gibson’s character’s wife and later trapped the alien in his pantry–and since I hadn’t seen him yet throughout the town, that meant he was elsewhere. And an Indian man wouldn’t fit too well into a late 19th century setting, no matter what town it was. That meant modern times lay outside the forest. The other possibilities I had considered were that werewolves lay in the forest, but that seemed like a trite and unoriginal idea, and I’ve very glad that M. Night decided not to take that route.

In any case, once I knew what the ending was, the reasoning behind why the creatures were there was extremely simple–just to keep people out of the forest. If you tell someone not to go into the forest, particularly a child, they’re going to anyway. The character of Noah demonstrated that perfectly, though he didn’t really know what he was doing. The constant presence of the creatures in the forest, unseen or seen, meant that at least on the the elders was “patrolling” the forest at all times. After all, Lucious entered the woods without anyone seeing–at least he thought not–and the elders felt it was time for a lesson after that. When Noah entered the wood, they likely left him alone because they knew the same fear didn’t lie in him. He was a liability to their little scheme, and they couldn’t afford to approach him in costumes. Any other villager, if they’d caught a glimpse of red among the trees would have bolted back into town as quickly as their legs could take them, but Noah was clearly pleased by the creatures somehow. It’s possible he may have even known, somehow.

All the other experiences of the villagers was likely fear. The boys on playing the game on the edge of the village hear sounds in the woods, and automatically they become the creatures in their minds. Lucious hears sounds when he enters the woods, it must be the creatures. I can’t tell you how many times in my life when I have something on my mind I think that a sound, a shadow, even a smell bring that fear immediately to the forefront of my mind if it’s not already there. Heck, after I saw Signs I could barely sleep because the slight little noises of the house kept me awake and reminded me of the aliens from teh movie invading the house and trying to take the main characters. I knew it wasn’t real, but even so I was still very frightened. I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in that state of fear my whole life.

But the fact remains that what the elders did is very similar to what leaders prefer to do in real life. They show you the dangers of something (dead animals left around the town, deaths blamed on the creatures, Communists who want to overthrow the government, terrorists who want to destroy your way of life), proof is exhibited of the existence of the fear (the creatures venturing into town, leaving marks on the doors, confessions of Communists and their plots, terrorist attacks on US soil), and then all that has to be done from that moment on is the very mention of the boogeyman and everyone is quaking in their shoes. Indeed, that’s what happens in real life.

After September 11th, the US government got away with a lot of things in the name of fighting terrorism, primarily stripping of civil liberties. Suspects, non-suspects, the whole US population, everyone suddenly found themselves under a magnifying glass for the purpose not of identifying terrorists but for the purpose of CONTROL. When a place crashed in the Bronx a coupel of months after September 11th, the first thought in everyone’s mind from here to Florida was “terrorists”! By that point, we were so scared of terrorists that it was our first thought. After all, they had in the previous few months killed 3,000 fellow Americans in a horrifying way and we had been reminded of it on a daily basis via the news.

Now here we are close to three years later, and while the government is still pointing into the darkness and screaming “those-who-shall-not-be-mentioned!”, we the people are beginning to raise our eyebrows and say “Where?” We get vague, non-specific reports of terrorist attacks that may happen somewhere, but we’re not told where, when, or how, which only results us being afraid without being told why. We see additional armed guards on the streets protecting major finanhcial institutions, and we automatically think “Well they’re there for a reason guarding us” as if terrorists are waiting in the shadows across the street for the changing of the guards. And we see our troops fighting in another country while the government says “We’re now safer from terrorist attacks” when the country who we’re fighting in had no ability to threaten us nor did they take part in any terrorist attacks.

The control is slowly starting to slip, and soon enough someone is going to be standing in a watchtower, ringing a bell and warning us that the creatures are back; they’re slipping into our village in the dead of night and leaving marks on our doors. Midn you, I’m not saying that the US government was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, but they’ve certainly made good use out of them.

So in the end, I felt that the movie was very well-made, had a few suspenseful moments, a pretty predictable ending, but the lessons in morality and fear were the most poignant things I’ve learned all year.

Posted in Geekery, General