Spoiler Alert – this review will reveal sundry details of the episode.
The fourth episode of the remake involves the effort of The Village’s administrator to sign Number 6 up with a dating service. The theory, one supposes, is that it will help to learn more about 6.
Fortunately, I know of no analogous program in Wisconsin; I have never heard of a city official in our state trying to arrange a dating service appointment for a resident. (There was once a report of a police sergeant from Pewaukee, Wisconsin directing someone to look up the phone number in a police database of a suspect she found attractive, but the sergeant was demoted. She has since appealed the demotion; sometimes desire doesn’t know when to stop, and walk away quietly.)
There’s enough information by now – about two-thirds through the miniseries – to question whether The Village is a real and physical place. It may be real, it seems, only in the way that thoughts are considered real. One might not doubt that a person thinks certain things, but instead question whether those thoughts correspond with the world beyond one’s head.
The residents of The Village have reason to wonder, too: unexpected sinkholes keep popping up throughout the town, large enough to swallow a person.
What to make of the holes? Well, The Village puts out a message over town loudspeakers that the sinkholes are ‘weather anomalies’ and that the best defense is a pig in every home. (Apparently pig breath is believed to improve the atmosphere, and prevent anomalies like sinkholes.)
Now, it’s a ridiculous plan, and one might suppose that I would criticize Whitewater’s politicians and bureaucrats for coming up with similar and absurd proposals.
I won’t, as they haven’t. Our small town’s leaders do not begin with absurd proposals, but with rational ones that are often ill-fitting or contradictory to policy elsewhere, beyond the city.
No one begins with the absurd; we’ve no alchemy here. Those living elsewhere would not find people – or at least no more than elsewhere – casting spells or administering leeches.
In most respects, we’re easily as modern as other places, watching the same programs, music, and films as others do though satellite television, Netflix, and the Internet. There’s nothing different about many of the products we buy.
A rural community is different in experiences and culture, but not for isolation from America.
We’re hardly primitive rustics. On the contrary, if anything, we are too quick to adopt and embrace the same management theories and practices used elsewhere, believing in them even when misapplied. Even believing in them longer than we should, and more deeply than will ever be justified.
Along the way, clear and profound principles are sometimes lost, swept aside for convenience, or distorted. Those principles are not ones of management, but of rights and liberties, of opportunities and prosperity.