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• 2/21/2010 3:27 PM Beth Zoeller wrote:
  The Village is a film about a group of families who live set apart from the world. They are overseen by a group of elders who propagate fear of the outside world by spreading stories of monsters that indwell the forest surrounding them as well as through stories of the violence that permeates the outside world. This fear keeps the families together in the town. However, after the death of a child to sickness one citizen of the town, Lucius, requests that he be allowed to leave the village to seek out medical supplies so no other children would die. His request is repeatedly denied and while that is taking place he admits his love for a woman in the town, Ivy, who is blind, that he has known all his life. As they announce they will wed, Noah, who is apparently mentally delayed reacts by stabbing Lucius. Ivy receives permission to leave the village in order to seek out medicine for Lucius, and is also revealed the truth about the monsters in the forest. She travels to the nearest “town” which is actually a guard for the animal reserve that she resides at, and on the way unknowingly kills Noah who is dressed as a monster.
  
  The Village shows a town ruled over by fear. In watching the film you shown only glimpse of the whole picture and it is your job as the viewer to try and put the puzzle together. The neurological functions of attention and memory were a part of the movie watching. The viewer’s ability to attend to the minor details presented in the movie is very important. I remember while I was watching the movie feeling that it was odd that when an adult, upon encountering the children who had discovered the mutilated animal, felt the need to encourage their fear of some unmentionable monsters. This detail became important later on when we discover that the elders propagate the fear of the outside in order to keep everyone together in the village and “safe.”
  
  Memory was also important while watching the film. In the film each of the elders at some point share about a traumatic, violent history when they lived outside of the village. These stories were all shared at different times and when put together laid the foundation for why these families have found each other and chosen to create a world of their own, where they will be protected from the violence they believe surrounded them in the outside world.
  
  As for the characters in the film, it is obvious that they have been conditioned since infancy to fear: the monsters, the color red, and the outside world. This fear is engrained so deeply into the children that even after being told the truth, Ivy remains terrified of the monsters.
  
  The song Your Hiding Place relates to the movie in that it is a song of a people suffering through pain and grief and how they can handle the pain. In the movie, the characters go to an extreme to hide from the pain they have suffered via violence by attempting to create a world that is free of it.
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• 2/21/2010 6:32 PM cathy lazarus wrote:
  The Village/Cathy Lazarus/Cognitive Psychology
  The movie depicted a group of people who chose to try to create a safe community to raise their families away from the crime and violence of reality. Those who originally established their “utopia” had all experienced tragic events in their lives such as losing someone dear to them due to violence. They had hoped that their exodus from the modern world would keep them and their families safe; unfortunately, this was not the case as the movie so vividly portrayed.
  I was able to relate the following concepts of cognitive psychology to the movie: Noah, appeared to have a cognitive disorder, possibly autistic disorder. He was verbally impaired and had inappropriate behavioral social interactions with others. He did not seem to be able to fully comprehend the consequences of his actions. Many of his cognitive functions were not developed in relation to his chronological age.
  The young lady in the movie, whose name I can’t remember due to the lack of retrieval cues in my semantic memory, had a visual impairment. She was able to see colors of certain people’s energy or aura emanating from their bodies. The impairment of her visual sense seemed to allow her other senses to become heightened. The acuity of her hearing, sense of presence, touch and smell were enhanced as they helped to compensate or the visual impairment. The thalamus plays a major role in this functioning. She was able to feel the presence of Joaquin Phoenix’s character without seeing him visually. She seemed gifted with a highly functioning frontal cortex able to allow her the problem-solving skills to find her way out of the foreboding forest without the use of her eyes. Her emotional intensity (compliments of her amygdala/hippocampus network) seemed to lead her way as her deep love and concern for Joaquin’s character helped her to overcome her fears.
  The community elders had such tragic episodic memories stored in the hippocampus region of their temporal lobes that they chose to escape reality by burying those unpleasant memories deep within their temporal lobes where no unpleasant cues in their illusionary safe environment could trigger these memories to erupt to the surface. At least this is what they had hoped but the reality was that unpleasant things happen even in the best of environments. Environment is only part of the equation and the other factors, including genetic predispositions to physiological and psychological disorders entered into their environment causing unforeseen difficulties and hardships.
  These elders took it upon themselves to offer their children a limited vision of the world. They confined these children in a world invented by fear and used this emotion to contain these youth in that small limited space both geographically and intellectually. These children would have limited cognitive experiences causing them to be at a great disadvantage should the utopian community someday integrate into the world at larg
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• 2/21/2010 6:36 PM cathy lazarus wrote:
  community someday integrate into the world at large, possibly out of necessity, due to it’s limited resources as was demonstrated by sending a visually impaired child in search of unavailable medicine in order to save the life of her lover. Perhaps even her own vision impairment could have been treated or even prevented had the elders not chosen to lead such an isolated lifestyle.
  Your Hiding Place song relates to the movie in its relation to finding a shelter from the pain of life’s ups and downs. The elders in the movie felt it was their utopian society. The young lovers felt it was within each other’s hearts. I think everyone can find a place within himself or herself to find the strength to combat many of life’s undesirable events. Many find their safe place with their families and friends. There you can find love (a place next to your heart), someone to help wipe away the tears (help you deal with the pain), and find happiness once again (often through laughter together). A hiding place is where one feels safe and secure. Often it is our own home.
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• 2/22/2010 11:46 AM Jordan Davis wrote:
  The village is a film about a bunch of different families who had different traumatic experiences happen to them, so they decide to section themselves off away from the real world where they can not be affected and can live a safer and simpler life in a bubble. The Elders use fear to keep people from exploring out of the village and discovering the truth.
  I think how the movie relates to course is by the demonstration of different cognitive parts of psychology. I feel that problem solving; creative thinking, decision making, memory and the effects of stress on the brain all pertain to the elders of the village. They problem solved their probable of not feeling save in the world by sectioning themselves off, they used creative thinking to keep the people of the village from leaving by inventing the creatures, and the effects on memory from stress applies because from the stress of losing their loved ones had an drastic influence on them leaving society completely. Representation of knowledge, also applies to the elders, they represented their knowledge of the monsters as fact to the population of the village and it was representation of authority.
  I feel that the song hiding place relates to the movie the village, because they both represent hiding places. The songs hiding place is more of a emotional mental place with barriers as personal defense mechanisms, compared to the village in a wildlife reservation, with physical walls.
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• 2/22/2010 12:34 PM Aurora Nuno wrote:
  The Village is about a small community of people who reside in an isolated part of the woods, which is named Covington Woods. The people that live in the village are portrayed in attire and living conditions that of the 19th century, so when viewing this film, I thought that the setting took place during the 19th century time period; however, I learned the truth at the end of the movie. All families within Covington Woods have been told to never venture outside of the village woods because dangerous creatures exist out there that will harm them. In reality, the creatures were just a myth created by the elders of the village who wanted to maintain everyone in their “safe” and “non-violent” world. The truth is uncovered when Ivy Walker, who is blind, is determined to go to the forbidden woods in order to get medicine for her love Lucius. The dangerous creatures were in fact the elders dressed in costumes, which Ivy learns from her father. The elders that formed Covington Woods previously lived in the city in which each experienced a traumatic event that affected them greatly. Hence, the elders met at a counseling center (support group) in which the idea for the Village was established in order to keep their families protected.
  In thinking about how this movie relates to the course of neuropsychology, I think emotion and memory are the primary components, which somewhat represents the limbic system. Fear was the main element that the people of the village experienced as a result of the elders planning, which is associated with the amygdala since this part of the brain deals with fear responses and memory of fearful events (e.g. animals killed at the village, marks on the door by the “creatures,” red flowers). The hippocampus plays a part in that the long-term memories of the elders (e.g. violence) led to the formation of the village. Also, these painful memories were never forgotten because the elders kept newspaper clippings and other information from their past in a locked box. Also, Ivy Walker had to depend on the senses of hearing, touch, taste, and smell since her vision was impaired. These senses are attributed to the temporal and parietal lobe. The people from Covington Woods accepted the beliefs from the elders and only attended to the things that supported their beliefs in the creatures. No one ever really thought to investigate more about the “creatures” from the outside woods, until Ivy and Lucius. I’m sure there are other areas of neuropsychology that are linked with the movie, but I think emotion and memory are the most significant.
  The song “Your Hiding Place” relates to the movie in that the hiding place for the elders was Covington Woods. All the pain and heartache experienced was hidden in the village. The village can be seen as a place of shelter for the elders. The people from the village wanted a place that they could hide from all the danger, pain, and violence seen in the urban world, which was found in Covington Woods.
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• 2/22/2010 3:01 PM Ashley Grando wrote:
  The movie The Village is about a town of people who believe that monsters are holding them inside their town. They have returned to primitive lifestyles without technology. The star female decides to return to the town to get medicines for her boyfriend. She finds out that the elders of the town were acting as monsters to protect themselves from crime.
  This movie related to the course because it showed thinking inside the box. Even though there were not borders holding the individuals in the town they refused to leave the town from fear of the unknown. The elders of the town removed themselves from civilization to create what they believed would be a life without crime, even though a member of the town ended up doing a crime. The elders fear of life outside the walls made them create new fictional fears for the people of the town.
  This movie exemplifies that our world is our perceptions. The perceptions that others create and share and the perceptions we create individually. The monsters were not real but the fear they created in the individuals became real. The only individual in this movie who went against the norm was the leading male actor. He was willing to face fear to do what he felt was right.
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• 2/23/2010 12:52 AM sean wrote:
  The movie, The Village is about a small isolated township where its habitants are closed off from the rest of the world. The small unassuming village seems idyllic at first, that is, until the story unfolds a darker side to this seemingly picture perfect society. The town’s elders have a sworn pact with each other; to never leave the town, or divulge the secrets of what lies outside its borders. The villagers live in constant fear from tales of creatures that lurk in the woods just beyond the town’s perimeter. The fear of these creatures is so overwhelming that the people don’t even speak of their name. The villagers practice ritualistic behaviors in the hopes of dissuading the unknown creatures from harming them: they wear mustard yellow robes while watching the border of the town. The color yellow is supposed to convey peace, in the hopes of protecting the wearer from harm. Also, the color red is considered bad, because it’s believed that the creatures are attracted to it. One member of the village, Lucius Hunt gives in to his curiosity and courageously ventures into the woods outside the towns border. The night of his return, the creatures come into the village and wreak havoc, killing farm animals and leaving red marks on the villager’s front doors. This is a clear warning to stay out of the woods. The truth about the village is reviled to Ivy (lucius’s blind girlfriend) when tragedy strikes, and Lucius is seriously injured and in dire need of medicine from the outside world.
  
  Edward (Ivy’s father) confides to her, and reveals the truth about the village and the creatures in the woods: that there aren’t any creatures in the woods, and the creatures are really nothing more than the village elders dressed in costumes. Ivy can now enter the woods and seek medicine beyond the village borders without fear, but she in not to reveal the locality of the village nor is she to divulge its long held secrets to the rest of the villagers. Ivy ultimately finds the border that surrounds the village and is picked up by a park ranger who gives her medication and helps her return to her village. The village is actually located inside an enormous wilderness preserve. Aside from the elders, the rest of the villagers are completely unaware of their geographical locality and they have no awareness of their time period.
  
  The village elders were all victims of violent crimes, and the idea of constructing the village came to them as a way to live a life that was innocent and non-violent, and ultimately a better place to raise their families.
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• 2/23/2010 12:54 AM sean wrote:
  Cognitive principals that were demonstrated in the movie:
  Perception: the people of the town had little or no perception of time and place. They were not aware of date and time; also their perception of place was really restricted to the small village they resided in. Encoding: We see visual encoding in this movie; the village elders made the color red a taboo color, and yellow a peaceful color. The visual encoding process helped with controlling the villagers by instilling an element of fear. Awareness: The village elders made everyone acutely aware of their surroundings and the confines of their village. No one was to venture outside the towns borders. Emotion: By evoking episodic moments of fear in the villagers, the elders maintained harmony and control. Creative thinking: The whole premise of the village was constructed on elaborate creative thinking skills: Develop an isolated village devoid of time and the outside world; concoct fear mechanisms for control purposes (the creatures in the woods), visual cues or markers (the color red), and prorogate legends and myths through oral interpretations, in order to instill confidence in the controlling party.
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• 2/23/2010 12:45 PM Christianne wrote wrote:
  A group of people “The Elders” created a safe haven world taken place in an Amish setting, who experienced some type of trauma in their past life by loosing someone close due to the hands of crime (this stored in the episodic memory retrieved and stored in the hippocampus and temporal lobe). Yet kept a secret box to be a constant reminder of why they chose this way of life. The Elders use fear as a type of control to put into the towns people and this conditioned them to automatically fear seeing the forbidden color. The fear was implemented by a monstrous image wearing red (this takes place in the episodic memory seeing the color red) also mutilating animals. The Elders worked fervently to keep their world free of sin or reality which in turn human behavior is not always affected by ones surroundings but by physiological and psychological attributes as well. This also limited the towns people psychologically and resourcefully not being allowed to make their own choices.
  The cognitive psychological observations I noticed in the movie, Noah being mentally challenged had little speech and abnormal communication skills. Noah was conditioned to be aware of the bad color but not sure why. Ivy who had so much passion and love for Lucious, I believe her right frontal lobe, the emotions were very strong. Ivy showed stronger senses to make up for her blindness. She sensed people’s presence and could see the aura around them. The auditory cortex very sensitive than normal, detecting noises and the direction from where it’s coming from. Ivy was able to trace steps very well, this occurred in the fontal lobe, the memory and the logical area being able to think quickly during a threatening moment and being able to trace back her steps. Ivy was allowed to seek outside medical help for Lucious maybe because her being blind would not allow her to see the temptation as well as the benefits.
  This movie showed an unfortunate event because a group of people chose to sacrifice innocent people trying to escape reality
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• 2/23/2010 12:54 PM Christianne wrote wrote:
  In regards to “Your hiding place” A place to go in your heart represents the love Ivy had for Lucious and the desire her father had for Lucious mother. The tears are the pain Ivy felt for Lucious and also painful for Ivy’s father who suppressed and hid his love for Lucious mother as well as the crime that was done. They found laughter within each other as well as security and safety because of the closeness within this world that was created. Is it possible that Lucious and Ivy showed a boldness for the next generation to freely express oneself not hide it.
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• 2/23/2010 3:44 PM Tanya Jackendoff wrote:
  The Village is a film about an isolated community who lives fearful of some mysterious creatures who haunt the neighboring woods. The townspeople have a pact with the creatures, so long as no body ventures into the woods, the creatures will stay out of the village. However, as it turns out that the creatures are not real, but fabricated by the towns elders to keep the villagers from venturing out from their town. The town, which for all apearances is set in some historic puritanical American era, is exposed to exist in modern times.
  
  The movie can be related to cognitive psychology in several ways. For one, it is highly demonstrative of the workings of perception. The elders, for example, percieve ways of the past as superior or emotionally/physically safer than modern societies. They had all experienced some trauma in their former, more modern lives, and the effects of that stress appears to have skewed their perception of reality. It also shows how the effects of that stress contributed to their decision making process and led them to live lives out of touch with reality, and to justify thier lies to future generations with in the community.
  
  Also, the villagers percieve the imaginary threats as very real. This is aquired through social conditioning and the human tendency to view things in binary terms, which leads individuals to find patterns in things when there exist none. In this way,unrelated events will be deemed the consequence of the mysterious creatures, and taken as proof positive of their existence.
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• 2/24/2010 7:10 AM Colin Normington wrote:
  The movie The Village is about a group of adults who meet at a counseling clinic and bond together over the shared experience of losing a love one to a traumatic and violent crime. These adults, who in the movie are known as the elders, decide to pool their resources to create an experimental utopian society deep in the woods of an animal preserve that they have purchased. In order to escape from modern society, where violent crime is a part of life, they agree to assume the lifestyle of an Amish-like community in early 1900s. The elders decide to trick their offspring into believing that the year is 1897 and that they are living in a 19th century village instead of modern times. The elders are motivated by a desire to live in the more peaceful and family center lifestyle of those times. In order to perpetuate this myth, and to keep the younger generations from venturing outside of the preserve and into the real world, the elders pretend the village is surrounded by evil and deadly creatures that react violently towards the color red. The elders’ offspring are told that they must never travel outside of the village or risk being killed by these make-believe creatures. Ironically, a violent crime does befall this community when a young man with a mental handicap stabs another young man, Lucuis, in a jealous rage because Lucuis becomes engaged to a woman that he is in love with. This young, blind woman, Ivy, must leave the village to seek medicine to heal her fiancé. In order for her to successfully get to the medicine the main elder, Ivy’s father Edward, must reveal to her the truth about the make believe creatures in the forest and risk Ivy discovering the larger truth about the entire utopian experiment.
  The most relevant principle of neuropsychology demonstrated in the movie was the use of fear to control the village inhabitants from leaving the village and learning the truth about the world. How fear is processed by the brain is summarized below. The image of the mythical creatures in red would induce in the villagers the flight or fight response, also called the "acute stress response," which is the first stage of a general adaptation syndrome that regulates stress responses in humans and other organisms.
  In a potentially dangerous situation, the hypothalamus signals the adrenal glands to begin secreting the hormones norepinephrine and epinephrine into the blood. These hormones, in turn, produce energizing effects on the body, increasing heart rate and directing blood and oxygen flow to energy-demanding cells throughout the body. This prepares the body for action, enhancing the likelihood of survival.
  
  Essentially, all areas of the brain and their functions were evident in scenes from the movie. The scene where Ivy tricks the creature into falling into the pit involved the structures of the forebrain, which is responsible for high mental functions.
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• 2/24/2010 7:12 AM Colin Normington wrote:
  In particular, the cerebral cortex which is the seat of higher mental processes and the ability to reason and solve problems, was used by Ivy when she thought of a way to capture the creature. She remembered the experience of almost falling into the ditch herself, which involved the hippocampus. She then took that experienced and created a plan to trick the creature into falling into the pit by moving out of the way at the last moment before it pounced on her. Her thalamus was also essential to executing her plan because it is the gathering point for sensory input, where information is combined and relayed. She had to feel the roots of the toppled to tree with her hand to know that she was in the right spot. Plus, Ivy had to listen for the creature’s approach to know when to jump out of the way.
  
  The song, Your Hiding Place, relates to the theme of the movie in that the community was the hiding place for the villagers who sought shelter and protection from the creatures. The song also addresses a hiding place where people seek protection and shelter. Instead of a village, the place is in the hearts of loved ones who can provide comfort during difficult emotional times.
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• 2/27/2010 12:30 PM Conrad Gill wrote:
  Hidden Village
  
  WARNING: Reading this blog will give away the clever M. Night Shyamalan twist and ruin the film for potential viewers.
  
  Things in “the Village” are not what they seem. There is something in the woods surrounding the village, something the villagers do not speak of, or at least they refer to the things in the woods as “those we do not speak of”. Yet, ironically, those they do not speak of are mentioned quite often throughout the film. And it turns out that the reason that those they do not speak of are spoken about so much in the village is because those they do not speak of are fictitious creatures created by the village elders in order to control the young people of the village, but not merely for power as many religious sects have done in the past, but to protect the young from potentially real dangers that lurk beyond the village in the real world. At some point in the film it is also revealed that each of the town elders had experienced some profound tragedy in their lives or had just become so disenfranchised with the evils and chaos that exist in modern society that they retreated to the solitude and quiet simplicity of the village. Then, in order to keep their children from wanting to venture beyond the confines of the village, the elders developed the myth of the monsters in the woods.
  
  In the village we see the phenomenon of selective attention occurring, where the young people’s attention is being diverted by the elders’ imaginary creatures. The theory of selective attention suggests that people can only process certain parts of their environment by cognitively ignoring other parts. For example, in the village, there should have been lots of environmental cues, such as airplanes flying overhead, which should have revealed the truth of their existence. By constantly reminding the young people in the town of the monsters in the woods with scary noises, and elaborate costumes, the village elders were able to create enough distractions to interfere with the young people’s ability to properly process and accurately encode information about their environment.
  
  It has also been theorized that an individual’s arousal levels are directly correlated with selective attention. In other words, the level of stress an individual might experience due to specific stimulus may cause that individual to focus primarily on that stimulus, thus ignoring other less stressful stimuli.
  
  By creating such distractions in the village, the town elders were able to precariously control the young people through fear of perceived threat. Also, by keeping the young people in a constant state of stress, it was easier for the elders to keep the youngsters in the dark (unaware) concerning the facts surrounding what they perceive to be reality.
  
  http://www.csun.edu/~vcpsy00h/students/arousal.htm
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• 2/27/2010 12:32 PM Conrad Gill wrote:
  Your Hiding Place:
  
  Like the person(s) in Dr. BLT’s lyrical content, the people of “the Village” had their hiding place as well, but in a more literal sense of the term. The term “hiding place” in BLT’s song seems to be a metaphor for the storage of unpleasant thoughts in one’s mind or a sanctuary in one’s mind away from the pain and sadness in his/her life. Hiding places may be useful as temporary shelter from an over abundance of stressful stimuli in one’s life, but it would seem a fragile structure to enclose one’s self in for any length of time. Not even the third pig’s seemingly impervious brick house can withstand the stress of the Big Bad Wolf’s onslaught of persistent huffing and puffing. Eventually even the brick house is blown down and the frightened little pig is left helpless and vulnerable to the wolf and its insatiable appetite.
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• 2/28/2010 1:27 PM Michelle Wagner wrote:
  The film, The Village, is a story about a small town in the middle of the forest that was started by a group of individuals who wanted to escape from the big towns where they once lived. Each individual had experienced their own horrific event that occurred in the town which effected them greatly (i.e. the murder of one's father, the rape of another's sister, the beating of one's mother, etc.) causing them to leave due to fear. This group of people raised and brought up a whole village under the misconception of false tales of monsters throughout the forest and superstitions, and had everyone believe that the towns were comprised of evil. Once a member of the village falls ill due to a stab wound, it is the first time that someone in the village is compelled to venture into the towns to find medicine. The movie relates to the course of Cognitive Psychology in many ways. Since the entire village is deceived from the day they are born w/ false tales of the area in which they live, they are raised to fear the unknown and to take necessary precautions to avoid certain situations, as they do when protecting themselves from “those they do not speak of” (a.k.a. monsters in the surrounding forests). The originators of the village instill these beliefs which cause fear in the members of the village to keep them from venturing out of their safe haven, enabling them to keep the village going w/ several generations.
  
  Members’ of the village decision making and problem solving who believe in the false tales seem to always assess whether a situation is safe or not, even in the comforts of their own home & village. They believe in bad colors (red) and good colors (yellow), believing that red berries for example, are a symbol that will attract the monsters or they see it as a sign that the monsters may be near or something negative is soon to come. When venturing through the forest on the way into the town, they wore yellow cloaks, to protect them from any evil. They also exhibit magical thinking, as evidenced by carrying ‘magic rocks’ to help keep them safe. The entire village lived in fear, stress and paranoia, again, all encoded by the elders to ‘protect’ the village from the realities of the real world.
  
  I was glad to see a bit of rationality in Ivy’s father, when he allows her to venture into the town to try to obtain medicine for her dying husband. This must have been extremely hard for him, as it shows he had to negate from his normal mental processes which usually involve coming to an irrational decision. If they had proper medical care in the village, the stab victim would not have fallen so close to death, and perhaps Ivy would not be 100% blind, and perhaps Noah’s intellect could have risen just a bit if exposed to more education that they would have received in the towns. I was also surprised to see how modern the town was, evidenced by the type of truck the ranger was driving and his uniform.
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• 2/28/2010 1:30 PM Michelle Wagner wrote:
  (continued)
  
  The movie focuses on the village throughout, so it is finally exposed how long the village had to exist as they’re clothing and whole existance seems to stay in a generation long ago.
  
  The song, Your Hiding Place, relates to the movie as the actual village is the townspeople’s real life hiding place. In the song however, it speaks of laughter and a place you can go more in your mind. A positive place that can be created if you’re feeling down. As opposed to The Village however, it is not just a place in one’s imaginary mind, but an actual place that they have built to truly escape from the real world.
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• 3/1/2010 11:10 AM Caitlyn wrote:
  For the majority of the movie, “The Village”, you are lead to believe a small town is entrapped, unable to leave their barriers because of an outside source. This outside source is known by the villagers to be dangerous and referred to as “those we do not speak of”. If they abide by the barrier, they will not be harmed. As the movie progresses, a villager is hurt and in need of certain medications that the town does not store. The wounded villager’s lover is set on a mission to retrieve the medical items. As she leaves the town, the audience discovers they are living in present day America but residing in an atmosphere of the early 1900’s.
  Their purpose of creating such an environment is to bestow innocence back in the human mind. However, based on the movie it can be debated whether certain human acts are born within us. For example, the character… Is displayed to have a mental illness. He is not able to comprehend on the level of most people his age. Like a mind of a child, he could be seen as a source of innocence. However, he is brought to an act of violence upon another. And so we have to wonder, if this person was raised and developed in an environment so protected then how could he invoke such an act? Regardless of his upbringing is he just born a killer?
  
  The elders were trying to create a place they could hide from the evils in society. Which is alluded to in the song by BLT called “You’re Hiding Place”.
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• 3/2/2010 5:25 PM April MacPherson wrote:
  The village was a very interesting movie that threw seemingly endless twists and turns throughout the plot. The movie takes place in a lush green village, where it looks as though the time takes place in the 1800’s. The people in the community seem happy and content with their surroundings and resources. Word gets out that one of the fellow members of the community wants to venture outside of the village to obtain medication. This stirs controversy because it is forbidden to leave the territory because of danger of “those we do not speak of”. The elders warn that stepping outside of the boundaries will provoke the “bad” people to do terrible things. When one of the main characters gets stabbed by a mentally ill resident , his blind fiancée is determined to leave the village to get him the medicine he needs to save his life. After getting approval from her father, one of the elders, we learn that on her discovery there is no bad people, and that they are actually living in a modern world. After a harsh journey she is able to retrieve the medicine from a park ranger to treat her future husband.
  The are many psychological functions that I can think of when analyzing this movie. Perception is the first thing that comes to mind. The elders have successfully convinced their village that this is real life. They live their lives in an extremely different fashion than the rest of America, but because they are not allowed to see the outside world this is all they perceive to know is true. Fear also plays a crucial role. If these people didn’t have a fear of the outside world than they probably would not be able to preserve the lifestyle that the elders created for the village. Fear is so much engrained by the elders that they are taught to fear the color red, as it is thought of as a bad color from the people on the outside. Memory also plays a defining role in the big picture of this film. The elders had such horrible memories of their lives beforehand that they sought to live a life where no such pain or wrongdoing could exist. There was also a mentally challenged man who seemed to have autism, and the female lead who although could not see, was able to perceive colors as a way of visualizing things.
  “Your hiding place” seemed to relate to the movie on many levels. The elders created a hiding place to get away from all of the cruel mishaps that society has to offer. They created a place that was safe and enabled them to shelter their children from the evil facts of life. The song demonstrates that you can have a hiding place within you, one that makes you laugh or feel good. Basically you can have that hiding place within you, instead of building a village.
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