A “Perfect” Community

The movie The Village shows the struggle to create a “perfect” community in a fallen world (directed by M. Night Shyamalan [Touchstone Pictures, 2004]). The movie depicts a Puritan-like village set during the eighteenth century. There are clear moral boundaries, respect, no crime, and an Amish-like innocence toward life. We eventually learn, however, that the village is not an eighteenth-century community but an isolated social experiment set in contemporary society. The elders of this community each carry a story of how evil in the world has changed their life. They created this community as a society better than the one that hurt them. They thought sin and evil could be controlled and forgotten by constructing a community not corrupted by the modern world. The younger generation of the village did not know about the outside world, and that helped maintain their “innocence”—or so they thought. Even though the village grew and there was little doubt of its peaceful nature, one of their young men tried to kill another man. Because of this character’s jealousy, an assault was committed in what seemed to be a “perfect” community.