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1 / Sacred Islands in Modernity: The Prehistory of the Dominant Small Town In this chapter I focus upon and analyze the small town’s ideological form. This formal analysis follows the methodology of Marx and Freud, each of whom privileges form over content in analyzing the commodity form and dream form, respectively. For both Marx and Freud, “the point is to avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of content supposedly hidden behind the form: the ‘secret’ to be unveiled through analysis is not the content hidden by the form (the form of the commodities, the form of the dreams), but, on the contrary, the ‘secret’ of the form itself” (Žižek, The Sublime 11, emphasis in original). The “secret” of the dominant small town, I argue, is that it is a nation form and an island form. To begin thinking about the small town’s form, I want to briefly turn to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004).1 The movie centers on what appears to be a preindustrial village in 1897. The inhabitants of this unnamed village speak with an arcane English dialect, wear clothes that vaguely resemble the style of colonial America, appear devoutly religious , and are wedded to their village. The community’s commitment to a life circumscribed by the village’s physical borders is reinforced by their apparent fear of the outside world. The townspeople speak incessantly about mysterious, threatening creatures called (ironically) “Those We Don’t Speak Of.” These nebulous creatures lurk in the foreboding wilderness beyond the village’s borders. The film’s twist is that the unnamed village does not exist in 1897, but rather in the present, and Those We Don’t Speak Of are not real foes, 22 / sacred islands in modernity but imaginary bogeymen invented by the village elders. The village, we learn, was founded by traumatized subjects who met each other at a support group for people who have lost loved ones due to violent crimes. Spearheaded by a multimillionaire, the group purchased a large expanse of land, surrounded it by a gigantic fence, and hired myriad guards to maintain the borders between an avowed inside (the village) and a disavowed outside (everything beyond the village’s borders). The village is a reactionary island community that cocoons its subjects from an increasingly violent, urbanizing modernity. The “secret” to the village’s identity is its island form. Although the village elders cast the surrounding wilderness as a threatening outside, this “wilderness” is essential to the village’s legibility. The surrounding wilderness is part of the village’s private property and helps create the illusion that the village is an autonomous, contained island community with clearly demarcated borders. The constitutive other of the village, therefore, is not the wilderness; it is modernity. At the film’s end the audience learns that the village is an ideological fiction. However, for those subjects interpellated by the village—the founders’ children—it frames and structures “reality.” If we read the film allegorically (which seems to be Shyamalan’s intent), then how should we read this American village? Are contemporary Americans closer to the village elders, who know that the village is a fictional form yet desire it anyway? Or are Americans closer to the children, who believe that the village is a real, self-contained world? Or do contemporary Americans recognize, ridicule, and reject the village as an obvious fiction? Or is it possible that Americans paradoxically occupy all three subject positions? In his study of violence, Slavoj Žižek writes that the modern desire for the village is “the desire to recreate a closed universe of authenticity in which innocence is protected from the corrosive force of modernity ” (Violence 25). The dominant American small town is a reaction to modernity and, I want to suggest, a reaction to a globalizing U.S. empire. In Shyamalan’s film the elders decide to “situate” their island community in 1897. This desired context positions the village at the edge of the twentieth century and at the edge of the emergence of the United States as a global empire. A year later, in 1898, the United States defeated and assumed Spain’s position as a transnational empire. Spain’s colonies— Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—became U.S. colonies. As exemplified by Shyamalan’s film, the dominant small town is a modern form that gains its legibility by appearing and operating as an autonomous, contained island community that disavows knowledge of, [18.117.165.66...

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