ABSTRACT
The movie is seemingly set in the late-nineteenth century, in a small community founded by refugees from “the towns.” The movie presented a small-scale society that is peaceful and cooperative, but, at the same time, plagued by violence, social control. Granted, part of the anger here derives from Shyamalan’s failure to conform to a certain genre expectation about the form that must be taken by such plot twists. The most striking thing about the community depicted in TheVillage is that it is egalitarian; there is very little power to go around, sources of authority outside of the council of elders. While individual families seem to own their homes, there is division of labor in the village, one works for anyone else, and much of the labor, such as preparing the village-wide meal, seems to be collectively shared. The Montagnais-Naskapi were further characterized by a flexible division of labor, with male and female roles loosely structured around hunting and childcare.
