The Village
Our team went to see Shyamalan’s ?The Village? today. Some reviews have already discussed the obviousmetaphors in the movie.
One set of allusions which seem to have missed the critics, but which seemed fairly obvious to me, were the allusions to Lucifer/Prometheus stories. The two protagonists’ names, ?Lucius? and ?Ivy? should be a strong clue. The story of an omnipotent ?father? who creates a ?garden? for his children to be sheltered in, the elder’s comments about ?we kept our innocence?, the character named Lucius who doesn’t buy the warnings of danger and wants to ?help the people?, the elders making apologies about how ?it will all be OK? when they talk of removing the protection and having the children go out into the cold world, and the list goes on and on. Even in the original story of the garden, the elders speak in plural as ?we?, and the ?deception? used to stop the children from tasting of the forbidden is as much to protect the elders as to protect the children. The name Lucius also evokes the thought of ?Lucius Trust?, an organization founded by Alice Bailey, a Luciferian who often spoke of purple auras.
Running with these allusions makes the movie all the more interesting. For example, did Lucius actually recover? Or, what is the movie saying about the expulsion from the garden? At one point the elders believe that innocence has been lost, but it turns out that the ?deception? and therefore the innocence, is protected in the end and the residency in the garden is retained. This in itself is a very interesting twist.