(no subject)

[darchildre]

It is May Day - happy May Day! - and, as is tradition, I watched The Wicker Man. (Sgt. Howie died for your apples, after all.) This year, I invited my parents to join me, reckoning that The Wicker Man is extremely similar to the endless string of British crime dramas they watch: a policeman goes to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl and discovers a wide-ranging conspiracy. The major differences are that The Wicker Man has somewhat less violence, somewhat more nudity, and considerably more musical numbers.

I'm not certain that it was a success. It's difficult to tell if my dad enjoys anything, film-or-tv wise, since he refuses to be drawn into conversation either during the movie or afterwards. He didn't spend the whole thing sighing heavily, so I suppose that's something. My mom found the movie interesting but our discussion afterwards was one of those times where it turns out that mom and I are approaching things from a completely different place. We were talking about the Willow's Song sequence and I mentioned that Willow's singing and dancing in that scene is clearly a form of magic - she's casting a spell. Mom looked really surprised and said that would never have occurred to her. I'm having a hard time seeing how you read that scene as anything else. And there are small things that the movie just assumes you're going to understand - the frog in Myrtle's mouth, the eyes painted on the rowboat, the hand of glory, etc - that I guess I picked up somewhere from reading and foolishly assume everyone knows about but of course they don't. Now I want an annotated Wicker Man, with explanatory popups, as well as a bouncing ball singalong version.

I think this was also the only time I've ever watched the film with other people where I occasionally felt I had to say that most modern paganism is not this obsessed with heterosexual sex. Normally, I feel I can assume people know that but, y'know, parents.

Still. Even given that, I love the movie and I love watching it every year. My parents are probably not going to join me next year, though.

Comments

[khronos_keeper]

Fascinating! I watched Wicker Man on the 29th I think. Your mention of the sex-obsessed pagan depiction is something that struck me to on this rewatch. It also occurred to me that this film is pretty heavily steeped in the then-contemporary free-love movement, and borrows from modern mysticism traditions like Crowley's version of Thelema. I also like to think this movie single handedly started the modern "witches in the woods" stories in England.

I'm not familiar with what the eyes on the rowboats might be, though the others I've encountered elsewhere.

[darchildre]

Yeah - the paganism in the film is very much Of Its Time, afaik. (I'm not as familiar with Thelema beyond the very basics, so I'll admit that any references to that in the film very much go over my head as well.) My parents' exposure to paganism (and horror film, tbh) is basically just me, so I feel like I need to clarify things for them occasionally.

Re the eyes on the rowboats: I don't remember where I learned this, so take it with a grain of salt, but I feel like I've read that it used to be traditional to paint eyes on rowboats so they could see where they were going, since rowing requires you to move in the direction your back is towards. So it's another example of the casual pervasive use of magic that pervades Summerisle.