Just as it’s possible for viewers to like a film for the wrong reasons, it’s also possible for viewers to hate a film for the same. Thus, the case of The Village, the most misunderstood, but also most justifiably ridiculed, film of the year. M. Night Shyamalan has built a career on his films’ surprise twist endings, so that when The Village hit the audience with its “secret,” it was a groaner of such magnitude that it dwarfed more serious flaws. Because let’s face it—as a political allegory The Village is utterly useless. Shyamalan compares America’s current fear of the Other, the Muslim world, to that of children frightened by manufactured bogeymen. Even if the Bush Administration craftily uses fear to push its militarist policies—and it does—the fact remains that terrorism is very real. To deny it as an illusion is to deny an increasingly extremist global reality. The project becomes even more muddled when Shyamalan reveals the aforementioned twist: the colonial American setting is actually a sham designed to protect a trauma support group’s children from the dangers of the modern world. By conflating an imagined colonial credulity of the past with a complex, imperialist present, Shyamalan neglects the overwhelming contradictions of contemporary politics (isn’t at least part of the problem not that we’re scared into ignorance, but that we know and still don’t care?) at the expense of an admittedly stunning moment of self-reflexivity for a mainstream Hollywood film. Even so, why must an attempted political statement be bedizening with such bells and whistles? Audiences were disappointed by this denouement, but that’s not the issue—Shyamalan’s reliance on twists is nearly fetishistic, and his acquiescence to an expected trademark betrays a troubling self-indulgence. At least in Dogville von Trier had the vision—and courage—to build everything up to strip it down to the bare essentials of confrontation. While I hate to turn to everybody’s favorite reference point for The Village, there’s a reason such things gain currency—Shyamalan’s failure is ultimately a two-hour, beautifully shot episode of The Twilight Zone. At least Rod Sterling’s television series was progressive for its time. The Village is worse than reactionary—its vagueness, not universality, makes it completely irrelevant.

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