The Beautiful Community and Brutal Scapegoating in The Peasants

Spoiler Alert: This text incorporates spoilers for the movie The Peasants.

“Love comes and goes, however land stays.”

It’s not precisely the form of recommendation a lady expects from her mom on her wedding ceremony day. However that is late Nineteenth-century Poland and we’re in a conventional agrarian village the place farmland is coveted and marriages are brokered; the place women and men until the soil and supply grist for the gossip mill in equal measure; the place peasants drink vodka prefer it’s water, work themselves to the bone, and dance collectively until daybreak; the place the cycle of the seasons and the liturgy of the Catholic Church bind the folks collectively and bear them ceaselessly right into a future that appears very very like the previous.

As a result of the land stays, the village stays, and solely those that root their lives into this “holy soil” will flourish. Anybody with their head within the clouds is headed for hassle.

Magnificence within the Painful and the Sordid

The Peasants (Chłopi in Polish) is a 2023 animated historic drama written and directed by married filmmakers DK and Hugh Welchman. The film is an adaptation of Władysław Reymont’s Nobel Prize-winning Polish novel which was printed in 4 volumes (Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer season) between 1904 and 1909. As a local Pole, DK Welchman learn the novel in her teenagers, however it wasn’t till she listened to it years later, whereas portray frames for her first movie Loving Vincent (2017), that she felt stirred by the story. This time round, “it touched me far more deeply,” she said. “[I]t’s actually like one thing painted with phrases, and [I] thought it’d be the right alternative for our painted animation model.”

The Welchmans’ painted animation style is one-of-a-kind: working in studios in Poland, Lithuania, Serbia, and Ukraine, 125 oil painters recreated 40,000 frames from the live-action shoot whereas 100 digital painters made one other 40,000 frames utilizing Photoshop. At about 5 hours per body, this might have taken one individual a century to perform. In contrast to conventional rotoscoping, nevertheless, these artists weren’t tracing over movement image footage; they have been portray on canvas from scratch.

Władysław Reymont was a member of the “Young Poland” modernist motion (1890 – 1918): the model of the e book and the work from that period are life like, with hints of impressionism and romanticism. The Welchmans borrowed explicitly from this custom for his or her animation, together with 36 direct (visible) quotes within the movie of Polish work, alongside different well-known works together with Millet’s The Gleaners (1857), Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665), and Van Gogh’s Noon-Rest from Work (1890), making a sensation of aesthetic déjà vu.

Though the movie is animated, it’s not for kids, incomes its “R” ranking with grownup themes, brutal violence, course language, full-frontal nudity, sexual assault, and sensual scenes whose eroticism isn’t obscured one bit by the very fact of getting been painted reasonably than photographed. I used to be reminded of thinker Roger Scruton’s words: “Actual magnificence may be discovered even in what’s seedy, painful, and decayed. Our potential to inform the reality about our personal situation… presents a form of redemption from it.” Artwork can describe what’s sordid in phrases and pictures “so resonant of the alternative, so replete with the capability to really feel, to sympathize and to know, that life in its lowest types is vindicated by our response to it.” The shortcomings, failures, and brutality of the peasants are framed by a form of magnificence that seems like the potential of forgiveness.

This magnificence isn’t solely seen, however heard as properly. The score, composed by Łukasz LUC Roskowski, and carried out by practically 100 musicians from Slavic international locations, is a mixture of Polish folk music, trance, classical, and Slavic mysticism music made with conventional devices, akin to fiddles, tubas, accordions, and singing. The music exemplifies the predominant cycles of peasant life—agricultural and liturgical—that are additional mirrored within the movie’s many dance sequences filled with spinning. The Peasants portrays life inside a circle that repeats traditions and subordinates the rites of particular person human lives right into a broader cosmic and sacral dimension. The love and the lives of specific peasants could come and go, however the land and the village endure.

“Do you suppose I’ve a say in it?”

What’s it wish to be only one half of a bigger complete, particularly if the priorities of the entire differ from your personal? That is the state of affairs of The Peasants’ protagonist, Jagna (Kamila Urzędowska), a younger lady of placing magnificence, inventive dreaminess, and detached work habits. She is usually caught gazing out a window or mendacity within the grass wanting up on the clouds, and he or she skillfully turns what she sees into delicate paper cut-outs that embellish the partitions. 

However there isn’t any such factor as a “single feminine artist” within the agrarian village of Lipce, and Jagna has reached peak marriageability, turning the heads of Lipce’s single (and married) males whereas eliciting envy from different girls. She garners a status for promiscuity on high of her status for laziness; whether or not deserved or not, it’s onerous to say, although most native gossip incorporates a grain of reality.

The older girls speak of marrying her off, however Jagna desires to stay at house along with her mom whereas concurrently making eyes at a person in church—Antek (Robert Gulaczyk), a married father whose starvation for Jagna is matched solely by his starvation for land. Antek’s father, Boryna (Miroslaw Baka), is a rich widower acknowledged because the village’s influential “first farmer.” Boryna, who expects his grownup youngsters to work for him like servants however gained’t give them any land ’til he’s useless, is prevailed upon by the village’s girls to suggest to Jagna. Her mom negotiates the deal: six acres of Boryna’s finest farmland for the lady’s hand. An previous flame, Mateusz (Mateusz Rusin), sees that Jagna is being “bought like a heifer on market day” and tries to speak her out of it, however she is resigned: “If [my mother] tells me to, I’ll. Do you suppose I’ve a say in it?”

Shortly earlier than her engagement to Boryna, Jagna enters right into a torrid affair with Antek. Their connection is one in every of passionate sexual compulsion, not love. There may be as a lot codependency and cruelty of their out of doors furtive couplings as pleasure, and the affair continues even after Jagna marries Boryna. Father and son predictably come to blows over Jagna and the land, and Antek is shipped away, although even this fails to finish the affair.

When Boryna leads the peasants in a insurrection to guard Lipce’s rights, he receives a extreme head damage and Antek winds up in jail. The ladies are left to run the farm themselves, a activity to which Jagna is especially unsuited. Many of the labor is carried out by Antek’s spouse, Hanka (Sonia Mietielica), a hard-working, pious lady who represents the whole lot Jagna isn’t. Shortly earlier than his demise, Boryna palms over his cash and farm to his daughter-in-law Hanka, insisting she boot his untrue bride from the home.

“I’ve had sufficient assist from males already.”

After a couple of depressing months of marriage, Jagna, now a widow, returns to her mom. The village’s married mayor will get her drunk and sexually assaults her, however the villagers blame her for “being a whore.” When Antek returns from jail and seeks her out, Jagna realizes he has performed nothing however publicly shame her. She rebuffs him, after which—in a stark departure from the novel the place Jagna succumbs to ardour once more willingly—Antek rapes her. Males accountable to assist Jagna as an alternative helped themselves to her physique.

Sensing Jagna’s vulnerability to sexual predation and harsh gossip, her previous beau Mateusz presents his safety by way of marriage. “I don’t need assistance from males,” she sighs, leaning her weary head on his shoulder. “I’ve had sufficient assist from them already.” However when she stumbles upon Lipce’s good-looking younger priest-in-training strolling within the woods, and the 2 are noticed chatting collectively, a spark is lit which explodes into violence. (The movie presents Jagna as a sufferer of rumors, whereas in Reymont’s novel she forgets Antek in her new infatuation with the priest and practically succeeds in seducing him.)

The priest’s outraged mom and the mayor’s humiliated spouse rouse the villagers in opposition to Jagna. The one lady who truly has simply trigger for resentment—Antek’s spouse, Hanka—doesn’t take part, having left on a pilgrimage. The villagers’ bitterness over the misfortunes and injustices of the previous yr are redirected at Jagna, the scapegoat whose inventive eccentricity and ethical faults, mixed with false rumors, make her the right goal. 

In responsible cowardice, Antek (who goes unpunished) sides with the group: “I stay within the village; I stand with the village. You need to expel her, then expel her… It’s all the identical to me.” Solely Mateusz stands between the mob and the lady he loves, however he’s no match for them. They spit in Jagna’s face, drag her out by her hair, and beat her. They strip her bare, tie her up, and toss her right into a dung-filled cart. Shouting abuse, they carry her out of the village and dump her—bloodied and fragile—into the mud. Rain pours down, washing away the filth, as she slowly rises and walks away.

What We Owe One One other

Reconciling the priorities of a neighborhood with the preferences of its particular person members is a perennial downside. Justice calls for we ask what the neighborhood owes the person, and what the person owes the neighborhood. What are my rights and what are my obligations? Neither is smart with out the opposite, but the neighborhood and the person are generally pitted in opposition to one another in apply.

The village understood what obligations Jagna owed them: do your justifiable share of the work and don’t be a free-rider; get married and add youngsters to the neighborhood; and for heaven’s sake, don’t threaten marital constancy by sleeping round. Jagna broke the foundations and the neighborhood couldn’t survive steady, uncorrected promiscuity, so that they put a cease to it.

Reymont’s novel ends with Jagna recovering in mattress in her mom’s house, chastened and now not a menace to the village, which returns to stability, well being, and humdrum. She couldn’t change her location, so she had to alter herself. In contrast, the movie ends with Jagna strolling off alone and bare to… someplace? It’s ambiguous sufficient to make you suppose she’s going to start out a brand new life on her personal in a brand new place, which is totally unrealistic for the time interval however fits modernity’s mobility, weak ties, and tendency to wipe the mud of the previous off our ft.

In our present tradition, it’s a lot simpler to alter areas (whether or not metropolis or church), and so we seldom have to take a seat beneath the neighborhood’s strain to form up: we merely transfer on. That’s the draw back of modernity, however the upside is that we perceive what rights the village owed Jagna: to let her stay single or to marry the person of her selecting; to respect using her inventive presents; to guard her from sexual assault and seduction; and to let her study from her youthful errors with out the specter of violence.

Jagna failed the village, and the village failed Jagna: who deserves extra sympathy? The Welchmans turned a thousand-page novel right into a hundred-page script, excising ninety p.c of the story. The ensuing story resembles the unique, however shifts the locus of blame to make the ethical of the story extra palatable to fashionable audiences.

Within the novel, Jagna is swept alongside by her impulses into decisions which can be communally harmful. Reymont sympathizes with the village’s want for stability (it’s known as The Peasants in spite of everything, not Jagna), whereas sustaining compassion for Jagna’s youth and vulnerability. The film, nevertheless, favors Jagna with much less sympathy for the village’s norms and limits. The Welchmans’ adaptation has a #MeToo sensibility that largely absolves Jagna, undermining the truth that a lot of the gossip about her promiscuity and free-riding is definitely true.

Such leanings—of the previous in direction of communal obligations, and of the current in direction of particular person rights—aren’t any shock. The discrepancy satisfied me that the film must be watched and the e book learn in tandem, to forestall us from imagining our ethical “progress” over the previous. We aren’t higher than peasant communities which stigmatized rule-breakers: we simply worth mobility over accountability, and we’ve a unique algorithm that makes heroes out of non-conformists and paints disruption as a advantage.

This angle was bequeathed to us by the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, fashionable liberalism, and America’s founding mythos. We’re liberty-loving rebels who threw off the shackles of a tyrannical monarchy; we’re conscience-driven Luthers who took our stand in opposition to a corrupt papacy; we’re Nineteen Sixties “lifestyle revolutionaries” whose m.o. isn’t preservation of the great however protest of the dangerous (i.e., “sticking it to The Man”). Neighborhood and customized will all the time be suspect in a tradition whose motto is sic semper tyrannis: in our cynicism, we mistake justifiable limits imposed on people for the sake of the Widespread Good with unjust energy exercised for personal acquire (the definition of tyranny).

My pastor as soon as suggested me that I ought to attend to not what I concern most, however reasonably, to my blind spot. If I’m already conscious of one thing, how a lot hurt can it do me? The best hazard is the invisible one, which is usually the flipside of what garners all the eye. Our tradition is obsessive about particular person freedom and afraid of dropping it. In our blind spot is the lifetime of communal connectedness and relational obligation which has been disintegrating for hundreds of years, and which can not exist with out limiting private freedom.

The Sluggish Dying of Neighborhood

Seeing the cruelty with which the village shunned Jagna (a apply which is fortunately uncommon in fashionable westernized democracies and which all of us can instantly acknowledge as horrific) made me surprise concerning the inverse: about the best way our safety of particular person variations in any respect prices strangles our capability to commune. It’s simpler to see and cease the mistreatment of a fellow “half” as a result of we exist on the identical scale: it’s a lot more durable to acknowledge the mistreatment of a “complete” which comprehends us and whose dissolution happens throughout generations. There is no such thing as a surprising second of violent catharsis to witness, and but we’re collectively disintegrating—the trade-off of our option to ensure that what occurred to Jagna gained’t occur once more. (A minimum of not bodily: the rise of digital scapegoating or “canceling” is worthy of its personal essay.)

Communities are dying a sluggish demise of attrition by the hands of expressive individualism. That is demise by a thousand cuts. Every emotional and sensible tether is snipped privately one ghosting at a time, one estrangement at a time, one cross-country transfer at a time, one divorce at a time, one job change at a time, one screen-filled evening at house alone at a time, yet another reframing of selfishness as “self-care” at a time. We’d even suppose it’s regular to be lonely, unable to discover a accomplice, estranged from household, or with extra on-line than “in real life” friends.

Our tradition facilitates a frictionless life reasonably than a linked life: the invisible hand of the Market turns relational obligations into jobs and commodities so we may be separate, personal, and free. “Inconvenience” is a euphemism for having to narrate straight with others in individual. “Effectivity” is a euphemism for chopping folks out of the equation, neighborhood death by a thousand apps.

Our tradition goals to guard us from being abused like Jagna, however the price of extra freedom and fewer stigma is fragmentation. Rootedness makes immorality socially pricey, however we’ve been minimize unfastened. Wendell Berry writes (in phrases that seize the world of The Peasants),

If the phrase neighborhood is to imply or quantity to something, it should check with a spot (in its pure integrity) and its folks. It should check with a positioned folks. A tradition able to preserving land and other people may be made solely inside a comparatively steady and enduring relationship between a neighborhood folks and its place. …For an genuine neighborhood is made much less in reference to who we’re than to the place we’re.

It appears not possible now to stay inside a neighborhood, everlasting, interdependent, self-regulating neighborhood by which our presence actually issues. Not solely does the financial system disrupt this, however such a life would really feel intolerably “inconvenient” with all of its interruptions, obligations, penalties, and limits—the friction of different folks in “meatspace” the place bailing out isn’t an possibility. Our ethical muscular tissues have grown too flabby for such heavy lifting. We find yourself forming disembodied web “communities” of unplaced individuals who like what we like and admire who we’re, however don’t stay the place we’re.

The fashionable topic of liberalism—that’s, the autonomous particular person who’s “free” (i.e., rights-bearing and sure solely by self-chosen obligations)—is a helpful fiction given to us by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.¹ It protects particular person self-interest and guards those that buck social customized, however fails miserably in relation to the upkeep of relationships. What if the price of “being your self” with out compromise means you find yourself being by your self? Does the necessity to “be me” all the time get to trump the necessity to belong?

The dismantling of communities of customized was no accident. John Stuart Mill, a founding father of liberalism, wrote in 1859 that “society has now pretty bought the higher of individuality, and the hazard which threatens human nature isn’t the surplus, however the deficiency, of private impulses and preferences.”² Mill believed the mere refusal to bend the knee to customized was a service to humanity:

Exactly as a result of the tyranny of opinion is akin to to make eccentricity a reproach, it’s fascinating, to be able to break by way of that tyranny, that folks must be eccentric…the quantity of eccentricity in a society has typically been proportional to the quantity of genius, psychological vigor, and ethical braveness which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief hazard of the time.³

This concept has made us victims of its success. Our chief hazard now could be the alternative: normalcy is a reproach. To be a maverick, to be queer, to be your “true self,” to have your distinctive id hallowed by society—this is the brand new regular. “Conventional” has change into a slur, and insurrection (as soon as a software of justice) is cherished for its personal sake.

What can we salvage from pre-liberalism’s communal virtues whereas nonetheless treating the Jagnas amongst us with dignity and beauty? We have now to resolve this earlier than the widespread expertise of we is irretrievably dissolved into one million solitary me’s, or into internet-fueled identitarian teams—a reactionary type of nostalgia—which can be rising as a harmful compensation for the demise of native communities.⁴

Christ as Scapegoat and Bridegroom

The Gospels depict Christ on the roiling intersection of the neighborhood’s ethical requirements, the rule-breaking particular person, and the scapegoat. Christ confirmed particular concern for these communally rejected over sin or illness. He positioned himself between a girl caught in adultery and the lads who sought to stone her (John 8:1-11). He spoke at size—alone—to a promiscuous Samaritan lady (John 4:1-45). He honored a “sinful lady” who washed his ft along with her tears and hair earlier than sanctimonious onlookers (Luke 7:36-50). He ate with tax collectors and sinners who have been socially despised (Mark 2:15-17). He healed lepers (Mark 1:40-45) and the demon-possessed (Mark 5:1-20), restoring the “unclean” to each well being and social communion.

Divine restoration (“Take coronary heart, your sins are forgiven,” “Your religion has healed you”) comes, nevertheless, with an injunction: “Go, and sin no extra.” The grace of Christ, whereas it washes sinners clear, isn’t an ethical move: Christ combines heartbreaking tenderness with insufferable sternness.⁵ The Bible is replete with directions that set neighborhood requirements. As “many components” we’re baptized into “one physique” and due to this fact undergo and rejoice collectively (1 Corinthians 12:12-31). Our private passions could trigger us to quarrel, covet, gossip, and decide, however Christ calls us to humility (James 4:1-12), to look not solely to our personal pursuits but in addition to the pursuits of others, to be of the identical thoughts and have the identical love (Phil. 2:1-18). Christ’s bride, the church, isn’t a person however a communal—and due to this fact inescapably ethical—actuality.

Christ enters into the stress between the neighborhood and its non-conformists by changing into a scapegoat himself. The Holy recognized with the unholy, and let himself be solid out like refuse and crucified by an indignant mob. He did this “in order that he may current the church to himself in splendor, with out spot or wrinkle or any such factor, that she may be holy and with out blemish” (Ephesians 5:25-33). Christ died in order that God’s folks, biblically symbolized as an untrue spouse, would repent and return to His love—not in order that they might be free to go their very own method with impunity. 

Orthodox and Catholics current this thriller of the intertwining of Christ the Scapegoat with Christ the Bridegroom by way of iconography: Iesoũs Christós ho Nymphíos (Christ the Bridegroom coming in the night) and Ecce Homo (“Behold, the Man,” Pilate’s words as he offered Christ to the gang). St. Augustine wrote, “Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber…He got here to the marriage-bed of the Cross, and there in mounting it, he consummated his marriage.”⁶ The second of Jesus’s violent rejection is concurrently a nuptial self-gift: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ beloved the church and gave himself up for her… ‘the 2 shall change into one flesh.’ This thriller is profound, and I’m saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” (Ephesians 5). The Peasants “quotes” these photos in its scapegoating scene as Jagna, who had been carrying a crimson gown till it was stripped from her, seems straight on the viewer along with her bloodied face and haunted eyes, as Christ does beneath (scroll as much as see her once more).

Christ, the sufferer of the neighborhood, turns into a self-offering for the neighborhood. He doesn’t choose a aspect between the one and the numerous (although loads co-opt Him for the aim of “sticking it to The Man” or for rubber-stamping group homogeneity). Christ reconciles the person and the communal by giving us the grace to change into virtuous: solely by loving as God loves can we act justly and provides each other what we owe. No political or financial system can do that for us, as if we might create justice and advantage structurally with out having to change into simply and virtuous personally.

Not the Identical Errors

There are numerous locations to seek out oneself inside The Peasants—because the one within the grip of greed, gossip, envy, anger, lust, laziness, or cowardice or because the one who suffers from the sins of others. Most of us are a mixture of each. This Nobel-prize successful story—stunning, brutal, mesmerizing, and sordid—is worthy of being each watched in its painted glory and skim in its poetic prose. (All four volumes may be learn for free on the Web Archive.) C. S. Lewis cautioned us that the one option to overcome the attribute blindness of the current is to,

[K]eep the clear sea breeze of the centuries blowing by way of our minds, and this may be performed solely by studying previous books. Not, in fact, that there’s any magic concerning the previous. Individuals have been no cleverer then than they’re now; they made as many errors as we. However not the identical errors.⁷

Right this moment’s errors pertain to this relationship of the person to the neighborhood and the best way communities flourish. The Peasants, like all basic literature, doesn’t inform us what the answer is, however reasonably creates a world that makes us really feel the methods we’re getting this proper, and the methods we’re getting it incorrect. “Our potential to inform the reality about our personal situation… presents a form of redemption from it.” Seeing ourselves and our sin with the compassion that an exquisite framing of it affords is step one.

Footnotes

1. The social contract theorists’ conception of human beings is fictional and false as a result of it imagines us in an impartial, autonomous “state of nature.” Apparently, such people should have sprung up from the bottom in a single day like mushrooms: actual people are born as helpless infants, depending on their moms (who’re depending on different adults for assist). The elemental human actuality is that we’re depending on relationships we didn’t select—not that we exist autonomous and free. Liberalism is thus parasitic upon relationships of dependency that folks want to be able to thrive, however that the philosophy itself ignores (and over time, degrades). ↩︎
2. John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, John Troyer (2003). “The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill”, p.197, Hackett Publishing. ↩︎
3. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty (United Kingdom: Longmans, Inexperienced, Reader, and Dyer, 1869), 120. ↩︎
4. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (India: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 401. ↩︎
5. Vanauken, Sheldon. A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy, and Triumph (New York: HarperCollins, 1977), 94. ↩︎
6. Augustine, Sermo Suppositus, 120:3, cited in Jesus the Bridegroom: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told by Brant Pitre, 93. ↩︎
7. Lewis, C.S. Introduction to On the Incarnation: The Treatise De Incarnatione Verbi Dei by Athanasius (United States: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), 5. ↩︎