The Village: more on Orwell, The Noble Lie (spoilers)

This article is in continuation of the train of thought I had while writing the first part of the Final Fantasy X articles.

Table of contents

• Themes
  • The outside threat
  • The Noble Lie(s)
  • The Orwell connection
• Footnotes

Themes

The outside threat

The villagers are haunted by an outside threat known as 'Those We Do Not Speak Of'. While later revealed to be merely a phantom enemy concocted by the tiny elite of the village, a mentally disabled person with affections for the blind village girl eventually takes on the persona of the hooded monsters and critically wounds her boyfriend. Are the elders at fault here for giving rise to a real threat? Are they not holding their own youth back by keeping them from breaking through the village's facade?

The Village starts out inauspiciously enough – a typical Shyamalan fantasy tale where the people of a small rural society have been taught never to go into the woods surrounding the village because there are unnamed monsters lurking there. The village elders have told their children this is part of a truce between the inhabitants of the village and ‘Those We Do Not Speak Of’ (the nickname for the unnamed monsters) – they do not enter their forest and in turn they will not attack the village.

It later transpires that these monsters are make-believe – not real. Their sharp claws, hedgehog-like spiky fur and red hoods are all part of a costume donned by several village elders at times to strike fear into the hearts of the children if they break the rules that were laid down to them (namely, not to enter the forest).

The deception on the part of the elders troubles Edward Walker’s conscience, and he eventually lets his blind daughter in on the dirty secret of the elders. But the deception doesn’t stop there – the children inside the rural community have been taught to believe that they are living in the year 1896 – the late 19th century.

However, when the girl is instructed by her father to wander into the woods and enter outside the village to fetch a medicine for a dying friend, the viewer finds out that the film actually takes place in the present, and it’s 2004 instead of 1896 as she has been falsely informed^[1].

But seeing as she is blind, she is not made aware of this – once outside, she encounters a park ranger patrolling the road. She asks him for the prescribed medicine she was asked to get by her father.

The Noble Lie(s)

It turns out that the village is in fact a sequestered community in the middle of a wildlife preserve purchased with one of the elder’s family fortune. The village’s elite – the elders – met each other during a grief counseling clinic and eventually made the conscious decision to shelter themselves (and their children) from the outside world.

In order to maintain the perfect utopia they had created, they had to tell their children ‘lies’, ‘noble lies’, if you may, that would shield them from outside influences.

• Tell them there is a massive threat outside – nameless, grotesque monsters that will only attack them if they wander too far outside the village.
• Tell their children they were living in the late 19th century – this would seem plausible as the village elders paid off the government to make their wildlife preserve a ‘no-fly zone‘. Hence, with no planes flying over the village and the village children only acquainted with basic rural tools and technology, it would not dawn on them that they were living in an industrialized world.
• The village elders would keep the children ignorant to the reality of the situation and instead uphold the myth they had perpetuated instead – for their own good, or so they would tell themselves.

The Orwell connection

The concept of a collective consciousness is promulgated in 1984 - whatever the ruling party inside Oceania decides - whether it be the censoring of a previous factoid or the elimination of the vocabulary, everyone else in the society must conform. Those who don't, like Winston, are labelled 'mentally deranged' and re-educated to the point where they no longer have any individualistic thought patterns.

O’Brien to Winston: The law of gravity is nonsense. No such law exists. If I think I float, and you think I float, then it happens.

This is a classic line from George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four. Inner Party member O’Brien tells the torture subject Winston that reality is only what is inside the mind. Further, through electroshock therapy he disrupts his neural pathways and ‘re-educates’ him into obediently believing whatever Big Brother tells him. Therefore, if BB tells him that Newton’s Law is a Goldsteinism and therefore false, then Winston will cognitively follow suit – it’s what the collective party wants to believe that is important, not so much whether there is any truth to it.

While not as oppressive as the iron-clad Thought Police in Nineteen-Eighty Four, the village elders do deem it necessary for everyone inside the village to collectively buy into the perpetual terror threat myth that the nameless monsters represent. The firebrand elder, Edward, at one point tries to persuade his fellow statesmen to tell their children the truth about the village and its concocted reality. Regrettably, at the end they all decide against it – even himself. The girl, even though she has been allowed to leave the village and enter the outside world, is none the wiser for it – since she is blind and was not instructed by the park ranger that she is living inside a cocoon. This ending seems to mirror Nineteen-Eighty Four’s – in the end, nothing is changed, the deception continues, and what’s more, the rebel comes to love Big Brother^[2].

Footnotes

1. ^{[^]}In several other dystopic stories, the hero/heroine is not entirely sure what the current date or time is.

In small clumsy letters he [Winston] wrote:
April 4th, 1984
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
George Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty Four

In The Matrix, the collective computer system in control of The Matrix has rewinded the clock back to 1999 – the peak of human civilization. The real date is estimated to be closer to 2199, but as Morpheus, the Winston-esque character in the movie points out, nobody can be sure of that.

2. ^{[^]}The Orwellian overtones of The Village were not lost on many bloggers. This writer sees parallels between Animal Farm and Shyamalan’s movie, while another points out the story’s indebtedness to Plato’s Republic:

I’ve heard that this idea is close to what’s called Plato’s “noble lie” – that a society can be based on an untruth if that untruth sustains a “greater good”.

Link: – http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/813667/animal_farm_and_the_village_anyone.html?cat=38 (Associated Content: Animal Farm and The Village: Anyone Notice the similarities)
Link: – http://heightstodepths.net/index.php/2006/10/13/the-village/ (Heights to Depths: The Village)
Link: – http://www.wiseupjournal.com/?p=140 (Wise Up Journal: Farce: Control of the Village through Terror)

Final Fantasy X / X-2: Part 1 (spoilers)

There is so much to cover in Final Fantasy X/X-2, that one article alone cannot possibly do it justice. So here is the first in a multi-part special on the two games. It may help to read the Zelda article first to understand some of the concepts and theories talked about in this article.

Table of contents

• Themes
  • The Noble Lie, terror and Orwell
    • Perpetual crisis
  • Yevon and Shintoism
  • Unrequited love
• Footnotes
• Links

Themes

The Noble Lie, terror and Orwell

When the truth becomes a liability, should it be swept under the rug and be branded as false instead? Plato, Nietzsche, and Leo Strauss would argue it should - but if truth can not be quantified, then what does that mean for society? Can a society be 'just' if it is based on lies that a tiny few have concocted? In George Orwell's 1984, the ruling party in Oceania, Ingsoc, makes truth itself obsolete by constantly rewriting history and debasing the language itself.

Several people have offered differing interpretations of Final Fantasy X’s storyline. This blogger sees in Yevon an institution that follows Plato’s – and later, Leo Strauss‘ – doctrine to a tee: that the vast majority of the populace need inspiring, larger-than-life heroes and myths to function in society, for lack of their own frame of reference. That some of these beliefs may not be based on truth does not matter according to this rationale, for certain people are more privy to truth than others – the ‘Noble Lie‘ as it is known.

The writer then draws comparisons between The Dark Knight and Final Fantasy X, seeing in the former basically a Straussian neoconservative tale where the (mostly perpetual in the real world, as astutely observed by the writer) threat of terrorism leaves the vigilante Batman with no choice but to break the law, going so far as to spy on the entire population to find the Joker’s whereabouts. When Batman’s exemplary attorney sidekick and Gotham’s last great hope, Harvey Dent, turns evil when half his face is burned and his girlfriend is killed by corrupt elements of commissioner Gordon’s policeforce, Batman decides to uphold the ‘Noble Lie’ and turns the dogs loose on himself. In short, he allows himself to be blamed for the murders committed by Dent to preserve his [Dent's] legacy, even though both Batman and Gotham police commissioner Gordon know the ugly truth. Hence, according to the movie, truth does not really matter, and ‘truth’ must be constantly redefined and reinterpreted by self-appointed ‘wisemen’ to uphold societal order. Orwell, meet Plato.

Similarly, in Final Fantasy X there is also a looming threat – Sin, an apocalyptic monster that can destroy entire cities in the bat of an eye. Yunalesca, one of the founders of the religious institution Yevon, has long since decided that a ritual sacrifice of a summoner and her guardian each and every twenty years is surely preferable to finding a real solution to getting rid of Sin that might never be attained – because the former gives people ‘hope’, whereas in the latter society might disrupt altogether because of chaos. Conveniently, the institution that Yunalesca represents is also the one enforcing this noble lie on the populace through their own religion. (L Ron Hubbard’s “The way to make a million dollars is to start a religion” comes to mind)

Perpetual crisis

Spirans face a constant threat from Sin, the whale-like creature leaving a trail of destruction in its path. Yevon's leadership, instead of working on a way to stop it, have become so numbed by the misery wrought by Sin that they in turn have become indifferent to happiness and instead welcome the suffering Sin brings with it, and actively try to perpetuate it whilst putting on a faux altruistic show to an unsuspecting public

Worse, Yunalesca’s ritual guarantees perpetual strife – as is later revealed in the game. After a brief moment of peace and prosperity, Sin eventually comes back to life and returns to terrorize the inhabitants of Spira. Thus the problem is never truly fixed, the people are always in a state of crisis, in danger of losing their lives every moment. And for that reason they will always flock to the state for support, not realising that the state had a hand in this perpetual cycle of destruction. The symbiotic bond between this vicious cycle and the feeding of the state’s own power structure grows ever more strongly – for without Sin, there would be no need for a religious institution such as Yevon. Hence, Yevon’s priority becomes not so much to stop Sin, but to stop anyone from really stopping it.

This brings to mind the Israel-Palestine conflict – currently a hot topic because of the recent turmoil. It has been reported by UPI correspondent, Richard Sale, that Israel initially founded Hamas in the late ’70s as a counterbalance to Yasser Arafat’s PLO^[1], the latter which posed a threat to Israel’s foreign and domestic policy at the time. Recent reports indicate that at times, when Israel wanted to strike down a peace deal, they would get one of their operatives inside the organization [Hamas] to strike at Israel, thus voiding the peace deal talks under the banner of ‘national security’^[2].

A common thread is evident here: keeping people in a perpetual state of crisis, terror, fear and bloodshed, while the leaders, clearly implicated in the proceedings, keep the populace ignorant as to the real machinations of the conflict out of self-interest. George Orwell’s 1984 explains this governing structure quite succinctly in the ‘book-within-a-book’, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. Even the Bin Laden-esque Emmanuel Goldstein turns out – depending on your interpretation of it – to be another cog in the Ingsoc political machine, or perhaps the founder of it all. Winston, secretly hating Ingsoc and therefore engaging in thought crime and rendering himself an enemy of the state, makes the false assumption that Goldstein must be the good guy in all this because the inner party focuses so much of their time demonizing him, when in fact Ingsoc uses a purported opposition leader (who may or may not even exist) to sniff out ‘thought criminals’ as well.

Yevon and Shintoism

San, Princess Mononoke's titular princess, has to stop an inconsequential queen from killing the rainforest, which threatens to upset the entire ecosystem. Tending to the environment is a common theme in Final Fantasy VII and X/X-2; more importantly, it is the one central theme that connects the two worlds (Gaia in FFVII, and Spira in FFX); more on that in a later article

Final Fantasy X’s religious themes seem to be a personal commentary on Shintoism, once Japan’s native state religion. Like Yevon, Shinto is a nature religion at heart – similar to the Gaea hypothesis. Its teachings (as far as it has them) instructs people to live in harmony with nature.

Unlike other religions, there is no central God to worship – everything, living to inanimate, has the potential to be a ‘Kami’ (a spiritual God – Shinto’s equivalent of ‘gods’). Japanese folklore features tons of Kami – ranging from mountaintops to rivers, from foxes to birdmen, and so on. To name but one example, Mount Fuji is considered to be a ‘Kami’, and is heavily featured on corporate logos in Japan.

While it is not big on taboos and dogma (on the contrary, Shintoists are pretty open to any religion, and usually incorporate it into their own – most religious people in Japan are both Buddhist and Shintoist, and the distinction between them has been muddled somewhat), it is very ambivalent on technology that could be potentially destructive to the environment. Hayao Miyazaki, the famous anime film director from Japan, seems to base almost all of his films on the concept of technology threatening to destroy the environment.

Likewise, Yevon tells its converts that Sin, the apocalyptic enemy that roams Spira and continuously destroys entire towns or cities, is man’s punishment for its use of machina – warfare technology, which is considered sacrilegious according to Yevon scripture. The institution then uses this belief to impose a strict ban on machina. This brings to mind feudal Japan, where the lower castes of society were not allowed to have any weapons or martial skills bar the samurai.

As the story progresses, you eventually find out that the leadership of Yevon does not take its own scriptures too seriously – and often employs machina to its own ends or stages conflicts with the aid of groups that are diametrically opposed to Yevon’s beliefs. This comes as quite the shock to obedient followers like Wakka and Lulu, but as no great surprise to Rikku, the Al-Bhed girl in the group’s party.

Al-Bheds are the heretics/outcasts of Spira’s feudal society. They do not adhere to Yevon’s religion and are not afraid to use machina. Because of Yevon’s ban on machina, however, all knowledge pertaining to how machina works has been lost. This entails that the Al-Bhed can use pre-existing machina, but can not develop their own or enhance it. Needless to say, Al-Bheds are shunned by the predominantly Yevonite society – and to add to the segregation, the use of machina contributes to the [Al-Bheds] having swirly green irises – more on that in an upcoming article.

Unrequited love

Yuna, the game's Shinto shrine maiden, makes heavy sacrifices in her quest to defeat Sin: emotionally (at one point she even considers an arranged marriage if it makes the people of Spira happy, thereby going against her unrequited feelings for Tidus), spiritually (finding out her faith is based on falsehood, the ritual killing of her Aeons saddening her deeply), and physically (the Final Aeon ritual, if enacted successfully, would have resulted in her death and that of her aeon - she has been raised from birth to be prepared for this self-sacrificial act). But in the end, nothing is as painful to her as losing her love interest when the threat of Sin has been subsided - by opening up her feelings, she has allowed herself to be emotionally scarred

When Final Fantasy games delve into the metaphysical realm, western gamers tend to tune out, missing the forest for the trees and either not getting the message at all or disregarding it entirely as inconsequential [to the main plot].

It appears that western gamers’ minds, moulded by years of Jungian archetypes observed in other mediums such as movies and television, have come to expect nothing more from stories than archetypes of good and evil, with different shades of grey inbetween. Likewise, they don’t seem to react too kindly to sad, reflective, non-conclusive endings – though it might be argued that the 40+ hour investment it takes to finish the game brings with it a certain entitlement to an emotional payoff.

Final Fantasy X, unfortunately for them, ended on a tragic note. Tidus recognized that in order to save Spira [and the ones dear to him], he had to sacrifice himself – because he is a partially imagined construction from a dream of the Fayths, that basically keeps them alive and prevents Spira from ever escaping out of its destructive spiral.

Yuna is not quite ready to part with her true love yet, so his departure comes as a massive shock to her. Her refusal to ’send’ Tidus – which seems to go against much of Yuna’s character seen previously in the game, where she merely does what is asked and expected of her – emphasizes this. In the end, eternal peace has been attained at the expense of great personal sacrifice, and a heartbroken Yuna is left with the unenvious task of pacifying [and uniting] Spira’s disenfranchised inhabitants.

Near the end of Final Fantasy X, Yevon as an institution starts to lose its grip on society and people grow ever more disillusioned with it. It isn’t after several Yevon priests start to expose the corruption going on within Yevon’s inner circles that the populace becomes so disgusted with Yevon that it disassociates itself with religion altogether.

This is not unlike Japan post-WWII. Emperor Hirohito, claiming to be a living ‘Ikegami’ and descending from Amaterasu of Shinto lore, was forced by the Americans to give up his divinity claims. The combined shock of the two atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the atrocities committed by their country in the war caused the Japanese populace to blame religion for their ignorance and proceeded to drop their faith altogether.

Shintoism has never really fully recovered its popularity percentage before the war – the current generation prefers Japan to be viewed as a secularist country, though there is still a significant percentage of people in the country that practice Shintoism/Buddhism. It’s not uncommon to see Japanese businesses holding religious Shinto ceremonies to coincide with the announcement of a new product line – be it cars or videogames.

Post-X, Yuna decides that she has sacrificed enough, hangs up her summoner’s robes and joins Rikku’s renegade outfit – modern-day pirates on the lookout for spheres^[3].

Much of the demand for spheres comes from a want to explore and document Spira’s history, this knowledge being obfuscated for so long by Yevon.

The spheres in the game can hold audio-visual information (much like a hologram), and even pass emotions and ideas from the previous owner to the new one.

Footnotes

1. [^]The original article is no longer available on United Press International’s site, so make do with this transcript on the Information Clearinghouse.

Link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10456.htm

2. [^]There are a plethora of similar articles, but here is one of the most recent ones.

Link: – http://www.daily.pk/world/middle-east/8827-cia-mossad-infiltrated-muslim-organizations.html (Pakistan Daily: CIA, Mossad Infiltrated Muslim Organizations)

3. [^]Editorial commentator Pauline Chan is critical of what she sees as an unsuccessful attempt to bridge the gender divide. While simultaneously lauding Yuna’s attempt to ‘liberate’ herself, she is not sure adopting skimpy clothes and joining a ragtag ‘Charlie’s Angels’ group is the best way to go around it.

Truth be said, the marketing campaign did seem to focus on the girls’ sex appeal.

Link: – http://flux.blogs.com/gamedesignandculture/2008/09/final-fantasy-x.html

Links

Link: – Cronotica – The Dark Knight’s Willing Deception, or Die Truth Die