Usually I learn about things like this long after they’ve actually been and gone.
This is happening later today! But sadly that’s no better for me. My car failed her MOT this week, and anyway, I’m stone cold broke, as usual.
I found out ahead of the event on this rare occasion ’cause I’m on Johnny Trunks’s email list. He pointed me, along with all his mailing list readers, here. That (a Guardian piece on his and various others Wicker Man stuff) was an interesting read.
I saw The Wicker Man circa 1990, living with Goldsmiths College student pals, in Sarf Laudanum. Thanks, Brennan! Those were not happy days, alas. But then so few of my life have been.
Feeling, as ever, compelled to be candid, I was blown away by this oddball movie. And for much the same kind of reasons the Grauniad article eloquently articulates.
Whilst on one level – indeed, this is how it was perceived at the time (when it flopped!) – The Wicker Man might be an excruciatingly cheesy B-movie horror flick. But on another it struck me – and has evidently struck many others the same way, in the years over which it’s gained cult status – as a paean to lost pagan traditions. Traditions that have been replaced with others, just as cruel and outlandish, yet here in the UK very po-faced (post-protestant conformity!?)
Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle has some terrific lines on this theme, including a little soliloquy – included in the clip above from which the quote – (delivered outside The Green Man Pub at night), as re snails stand in for Ash Buchanan and Willow, the Landlord’s daughter:
‘I think I could turn and live with animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do night lie awake in the dark, and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick, discussing their duty to God. Not one of them kneels to another, or to his own kind that lived thousands of years ago.’
He also mocks Sgt. Howie’s anger over ‘false biology’ (that Rowan could be transformed into a hare, or girls become pregnant jumping over bonfires) with a riposte about the ‘parthogenesis’ of the Immaculate Conception (or Deception, as I prefer it).*
Being part of a zeitgeist like this – feeling the love for The Wicker Man – albeit a slightly underground/alternative one, doesn’t sit well with me. I like to feel apart from the stream, be it the mainstream or even a more cult-ish little tributary.
* I the terrific Life of Brian, Monty Python make the suggestion (most likely highly blasphemous, to the devout) that the immaculate deception is one of the cheekiest and or best/worst excuses a young Jewish bride might choose to give for getting knocked-up by a Roman ‘occupier’! Let’s say there is a human individual who was the origin of or basis for all the subsequent Jesus (or whatever his original Jewish name was) rigmarole, modern science strongly suggests that a real human – be he apprentice carpenter, centurion, husband, ‘trick’, or Ernie, the fastest milkman in the west – and not The Almighty, was the father.