The Wicker Man: The Interplay of Lucifer and Ahriman
Interpreting "The Wicker Man" (1973) as a warning about technocratic regimes in failure mode
I. Introduction
I recently saw The Wicker Man (1973) for the first time, which made for an odd experience because I’ve known the film fairly well for over a decade. I’ve known it entirely through heavy metal and neofolk samples, references, and soundtrack covers. However, I didn’t know that I knew it; I had to discover it gradually. As the film went on, I’d keep asking myself, “Wait, where have I heard that bit of dialogue before?” “Wait, which band covered that song?” and so on, all the way up until it ended, and the end sequence has been so extensively sampled and quoted that I pretty much knew a few of the lines word for word. It’s definitely an odd film-viewing experience when you’ve already heard so much of what’s in it without having known the source material.
When it comes to underground music, The Wicker Man has to be among the top ten most influential films, and I suppose if you grew up during the 1970s-80s in a Christian household yearning for some alternative to the religion of your parents, this movie would make for an impressive display of what a different world could look like. The movie’s visual and musical charms brilliantly set you up to reach the conclusion, Hey, wait a minute, maybe the pagans are the good guys! while feeling insightful and even against-the-grain. And if you look at the user reviews on Letterboxd.com, they all say stuff like, “These wholesome pagans kill a bible-thumping police officer who’s really having a normal one!” and “Christopher Lee? In a Cher wig? I have no choice but to stan!”
But I’d like to focus on a neglected aspect of the film, something I only found one blog post discussing as I was finishing up with this post. I’m talking about the way it portrays the interaction between paganism and scientism. The film means many things to many people, but it appears to be, at its core, a movie about pure reason and pure superstition, and how the former mentality can quickly lapse into the latter. And secondarily, because it concerns the political, it’s a film about how technocrats overseeing their political projects in failure mode can come to swallow the propaganda that they use to deceive others.
II. Brief Synopsis
For those who haven’t seen it and would like to know what the hell I’m talking about (or simply need their memories refreshed), here’s a synopsis with heavy spoilers. A police officer called Neil Howie shows up on an island called Summerisle in the Hebrides because he has gotten an anonymous letter telling of the possible murder of a missing little girl. When he’s there, he’s highly disturbed to find that the island’s inhabitants all practice an arcane form of Celtic paganism with loose sexual morals, which deeply disturbs him, a pious virginal Christian engaged to be married.
He also finds various clues suggesting that villagers plan to sacrifice the missing girl because the previous year’s harvest was bad, and she was the one overseeing it. Here are the clues in the order he finds them:
The Green Man Inn, a tavern and inn where he’s staying, has framed photographs on its wall of all the island’s previous Summer harvests, each depicting some girl presenting a wheelbarrow full of food to the camera… but there is no such photo for the very last one.
The missing girl’s mother claims she doesn’t exist, while her other daughter claims that her sister turned into a bunny rabbit.
Everyone in the local school denies the existence of the girl, but her name is in the school’s registry.
There’s a gravestone with the missing girl’s name on it in the graveyard, but when Howie digs it up, he only finds a bunny rabbit’s corpse.
He does some research and discovers that in old Celtic paganism, the community would sacrifice someone if the Summer harvest went bad during the annual May Day celebration.
And, well, all this leads our hero Sergeant Howie to decide that he’s got to do something. He decides to infiltrate the May Day parade while disguised as a parade-goer (he’s literally dressed as Punch, the commedia dell’arte puppet who also represents The Fool from the Tarot) and save the girl in the nick of time. But when he does so, he learns that the whole entire thing was a ruse — a cleverly hatched plot by the island’s leader, Lord Summerisle, who only made him think that he was saving a girl’s life so that the townspeople could sacrifice him! They did indeed have a bad harvest, but they decided that the way to remedy it would be to lure him into the island and sacrifice him because he fulfills their symbolic requirements — he’s a virgin who also represents the law. And so they complete their plan by throwing him into a giant wicker man effigy, setting it on fire, and watching him die while singing merrily. The end.
III. The Appeal of Paganism
All of this should suggest that the film is pretty anti-pagan. After all, they’re a bunch of weirdos who engage in some zany scheme to kill an innocent man who simply wants to do a good deed. Why, then, did the film influence so many underground artists and musicians, including ones that don’t ostensibly wallow in antisocial behavior? As far as what the movie tells us about paganism, the matter is a little complicated. The movie has a horrific ending, and paganism winds up looking violent and regressive, but the impression that their society leaves on an open-minded viewer also makes the cult seem almost entirely acceptable… except for just that one pesky collective scapegoating thing.
If you were someone dissatisfied with the protestant Christian culture of the mid-70s and you came into the film with absolutely no idea what it’s about, you’d be annoyed by Sergeant Howie, who comes across illiberal and boorish, and you’d expect the ending to be about how wrong he is and how enlightened the pagans are. You’d expect an ending that makes a fool of Howie for the right reasons. Instead, you get an ending that makes a fool of Howie for all the wrong reasons, reasons that would give you pause. I suspect that part of the film’s thrill is that it forces the viewer to decide, “Would I accept such a seemingly enlightened society if the only trade-off is ritual sacrifice?” And for many of the edgier viewers — the ones who would go on to play in heavy metal bands and the like — the answer was yes.
The Wicker Man came out in 1973, right at a point in which more and more artists and musicians were showing disillusionment with the ideals of the hippie movement and evolving away from its ethos and overall style — some bands include Magma, Hawkwind, Black Sabbath, and later, Devo. World events were also dispelling the flower power dream during this time. The 1969 Tate-LaBianca killings at the hands of the Manson family introduced the world to Charles Manson, who appeared to be some sort of deranged right-wing hippie. The 1970s Kent State shooting demonstrated the futility of political protest at the hands of the state. Other hippies were getting increasingly radicalized and violent, like The Weather Underground. And in the early 70s, record labels were signing a ton of hippie-dippie British folk and folk-rock artists searching for the next Beatles, but instead the artists would mostly put out just one or two records before getting booted off due to poor sales. Some of the more interesting ones were quite dark, including Comus (who put out a concept album based on John Milton’s masque about a girl who gets kidnapped by a demon in the woods with intent to rape), Jan Dukes de Grey (whose song “Mice and Rats in the Loft” is a rather demented head-trip about a murderer confessing to a priest), and Bill Fay (whose album Time of the Last Persecution contained plenty of lyrics about the apocalypse, all inspired by Biblical prophecy writings). All three albums came out in 1971.
It was in the midst of all these developments that the film was released, and essentially, it was a product of its time. It was loaded up with hippie music characteristic of the era, so much so that it can qualify as a musical. And although the soundtrack is excellent and idyllic, without a trace of darkness within it, all of the lush imagery it accompanies ultimately serves to buttress a dark conclusion: these nature-loving people, who do indeed resemble hippies, have worked out a system that is ultimately untenable and headed toward darkness and perversion… but like the hippies, their ideals all seem very lovely nevertheless!
As for the film’s creators, they aren’t exactly condemnatory towards the pagans of Summerisle themselves. In the documentary Burnt Offering: The Cult of The Wicker Man (2001), the director Robin Hardy jokes,
The idea that kind of rather happy, singing, loving society could come back — and if the only price was that we had to burn the occasional policeman — [laughing] it would be pretty good!
I don’t think much can be gleaned from this quotation, to be honest. But the screenwriter Anthony Shaffer seems much more sincere in his respect for the paganism the film depicts:
I look forward to a day when we are pagans again. I think we’d have a much better time of it. I think we’d have a lot more fun, but not only fun — a lot more belief, a lot more faith, a lot more immediacy with the things unseen.
So even though the film is designed to make the viewer feel disturbed by the pagans’ actions, the people creating it themselves had some sympathy for their beliefs.
I should also mention that The Wicker Man is one of those films that succeeds despite both main characters being unlikable. Officer Howie is too much of a doofus to be sympathetic, and Lord Summerisle (the guy who orchestrates his death), is a pretentious fop who turns out to be a lunatic. But it succeeds because its style is detached; you’re not asked to like anyone. Instead, you, the viewer, are invited to sit back and watch everything unfold at a distance, playing the role of the anthropologist observing a society as it handles a necessary but unwanted element. Whereas the early slashers that would emerge a couple years later would deploy intense close-ups and jarring camera angles to create a sense of immediacy, Wicker Man is a slow grind, and only at the very end are you really invited to sympathize with Officer Howie, as you get a point-of-view shot from his perspective, burning up as the townspeople sing “Sumer is icumen in,” looking equally disturbing and ridiculous at once.
IV. Summerisle as a Science Project
There is one aspect to the film that I haven’t seen too many people discuss, however, and it’s an implication that perhaps even goes beyond its creators’ intentions. It concerns the island’s leader, Lord Summerisle, his relationship to the islanders, and the nature of the paganism that they practice.
For this discussion, I’m going to rely partly on the novelization of the film, which was written by Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy and came out in 1978. In the first theatrical release, some important scenes were cut, and so Hardy and Shaffer collaborated on a novelization of the film while an American producer worked on re-releasing the film with some of the cut footage restored (though Hardy has claimed he was already working on the book even before the film was first released in 1973). The book expands upon the themes of the film just a bit, it includes all of the cut scenes, and it was written by the filmmakers, so it can be considered canonical.
Now, probably the most important exchange of dialogue halfway through the film occurs when Sergeant Howdy meets with Lord Summerisle to request his permission to dig up the missing girl’s grave. During their meeting, Summerisle provides the backstory for how the inhabitants of Summerisle came to reject Christianity and embrace the Celtic paganism of their ancestors:
In the last century the islanders were starving. Many were emigrating to Canada and Australia. Fishing and sheep brought in a marginal income, much as it does today on our neighbouring islands, but mullet and mutton, so to speak, are hardly the counters of prosperity. Dutifully, every Sunday, the people — Baptist and Catholic, Presbyterian and Free Kirk — bowed as low as their respective religions permitted to the Christian God and prayed for prosperity. But inevitably none appeared. In due course they came to realize that their reward was to be either in the colonies or, as the various priests indicated in a rare moment of agreement, in heaven. Then in 1868 my great-grandfather bought this barren island and set about changing things. He was a distinguished Victorian scientist, agronomist, and free thinker. [He indicates toward a painted portrait of his great-grandfather.] Look at his face. How formidably benevolent he seems, essentially the face of a man incredulous of all human good!
After a brief exchange in which he denies seeing his great-grandfather cynically, he continues with the explanation:
What had attracted my great-grandfather to the island, apart from the profuse source of wiry labour that it promised, was the unique combination of volcanic soil and the warm Gulf Stream that surrounded it.
Another exchange follows, during which Howie notices a number of extremely rare birds flying around, as now they walk through a terraced garden. He even sees a species of bird thought to be extinct. Lord Summerisle explains the motivation in keeping them on the island:
My great-grandfather forbade any mention that we still had ’em here, knowing the last one anywhere else was killed on Eldey Island off Iceland on June 4th, 1844. Nowadays we’d call him a conservationist. But that wasn’t at all his view of himself. He saw himself as a scientist first and foremost. It was a crime against science for any creature, part of the earth’s great inheritance, to be made extinct. It was equally a crime for this island to remain unfruitful when the scientific means to cultivate it were to hand.
You can see some parallels here between him and Madison Grant, an immensely influential American conservationist and eugenicist, now vilified by academics for his race realism and celebrated by white nationalists (who also tend to have sympathy for pre-Christian heathenry). Anyway, Lord Summerisle gets to explaining how his great-grandfather revived paganism:
You see, Sergeant, his experiments had led him to believe that it was possible to induce here the successful growth of certain new strains of fruit that he had developed. And so you see, with typical mid-Victorian zeal, my great-grandfather set to work. But of course, almost immediately, he met opposition from the fundamentalist ministers, who threw tons of his artificial fertilizer into the harbour on the grounds that if God had meant us to use it, He’d have provided it. My great-grandfather took exactly the same view of ministers, and realized he had to find a way to be rid of them. The best method of accomplishing this, it seemed to him, was to rouse the people, by giving them back their joyous old deities; so he encouraged, as it were, a retreat down memory lane; backwards from Christianity, through the Ages of Reason and Belief to the Age of Mysticism.
And apparently it was quite easy to convince the natives:
These islanders needed little urging. My great-grandfather simply told them about the stones — how they, in fact, formed an ancient temple, and that he, the Lord of the Manor, would make a sacrifice there every day to their old gods and goddesses, particularly those of Fertility and Fruitfulness, and that as a result of this worship, the barren island would burgeon and bring forth fruit in great abundance. For an atheist, Great-grandfather had a singularly biblical turn of phrase, don’t you think?
He also, towards the end of the conversation, informs Howie that his immediate father raised him as a pagan, and he is a true believer:
My father went further. What my great-grandfather had started out of expedience, he continued because he truly believed it was far more spiritually nourishing than the life-denying God-terror of the kirk. And I might say, Sergeant, he brought me up the same way — to love the music and the drama and the rituals of the old pantheism, and to love nature, and to fear it, and rely on it, and appease it where necessary.
From all of this information, one can discern a few things. First, Lord Summerisle’s great-grandfather was a staunch technological progressive who was trying to introduce a genetically modified strain of fruit to the island, which required a special fertilizer. He was a GMO guy who would’ve been on-board with Cass Sunstein and his friends had he lived to the present day.
Second, the Christians were actually the ones who felt that Grandpa Summerisle’s hubristic attempt to modify nature was morally wrong. This is interesting because we tend to think of hippie/pagan types as people who prefer everything to be natural and organic while it’s the milquetoast middle-class Christians who mindlessly accept everything that scientific advancement and the marketplace dangles before their eyes. But here, the story paints a different picture.
Third, Lord Summerisle does not share his great-grandfather’s atheism, and he doesn’t even seem particularly fond of him, since he calls him “incredulous of all human good.” He insists this isn’t an insult, but it’s nonetheless a hint that he isn’t on the same mental wavelength as his forebear. He himself feels an emotional bond to what he’s saying about paganism, despite knowing full well that it was initially used as pure propaganda.
V. Lord Summerisle: Scheming Technocrat
Even though he has been fully converted to what was once his great-grandfather’s propaganda, Lord Summerisle still hasn’t lost the ability to herd around the islanders like the sheep they are, just as his great-grandfather once did. He still possesses impressive skill in the management of human capital. Once he reveals to Sergeant Howie that he set up the entire case of the missing girl as a ruse, it becomes clear that he has far more control over everything the islanders do than the viewer could have imagined. He tells Howie that he specifically sought him out and sent him the anonymous letter about the missing girl because he knew he was a virgin and a police officer, and thus he met the criteria that the Summerisle inhabitants would have for the ideal sacrifice to make the next harvest better. The entire search for the missing girl was based on a fraudulent pretext, and the only reason they went through it was that they needed to test him to see if he was the man they took him to be.
Analyzing the sheer enormity of his scheme could seem unjustified, because horror films always must play with elements of the irrational in order to be effective. A perfectly rational horror film in which everything is satisfactorily explained simply doesn’t excite the imagination, and subjecting a typical horror film to this kind of scrutiny is in some sense to miss the point. In this case, the elaborate scheme that we learn has transpired is, in fact, why some people dislike The Wicker Man and find it too ridiculous to take seriously. But The Wicker Man isn’t strictly a horror film, and it contains enough thoughtful elements within it to warrant subjecting its plot to the same “rational” scrutiny that doesn’t work with most horror films. Most horror films, after all, don’t provide a backstory, and when they later do as the franchise inevitably progresses into unnecessary sequels, that’s when they start to suck. But here, we’ve got a well-conceived backstory, and quite a bit of world-building storytelling logic already embedded into the movie. So let’s consider just what Lord Summerisle managed to do with his plan.
First, in order to execute his plot, he would have needed to thoroughly research every police officer’s life story to determine which ones are virgins, presumably by sending some sort of spy. Then, he would need to tell the people in the tavern to take down the picture of the last harvest. Then, he would somehow need to anticipate that Howie would persist in trying to inspect the school’s registry, and thus he’d have to order the teacher to try and stop him when he asks to see it, which she does. He also would need to have asked Willow, the sexy little strumpet played by Britt Eckland, to try and have sex with him just to test his virginity, anticipating that he’d say no. He would also, of course, need to thoroughly instruct any possible person that Howie might ask about the missing girl to say she doesn’t exist, including her own mother and sister. And so on, and so on. But most importantly of all, he would need to know that Howie would try to infiltrate the May day parade, and thus his instructions to the missing girl (who turns out to be in on the plot) would have to be incredibly precise as she lures him to the cliff where he’s burned to death. Moreover, this deviation in the parade’s regularly scheduled activities would be highly risky, because so much could go wrong. Perhaps they were prepared to sacrifice the girl after all… just as a back-up plan!
Essentially, what we learn from the whole conspiracy is that Lord Summerisle is a master psychologist and highly impressive cult leader with a vice-like grip on his subjects. He’s doing things the CIA could only dream of. He has incredibly turned all of the islanders into a perfectly conceived Rube Goldberg Machine, as Sergeant Howie goes through all of the pre-planted “clues” one by one, making pseudo-discovery after pseudo-discovery. But — and this is a pretty big “but” — all of Lord Summerisle’s ingenuity and brilliance is executed in the service of a plan that makes no sense.
As he himself explains to Sergeant Howie, the crops had been successful every year before, but this time they failed, “disastrously so, for the first time since my great-grandfather came here,” and for no clear reason: “the blossom came, but the fruit withered and died on the bough.” This is a rather unusual situation, suggesting a serious problem rather than a mere fluke that a human sacrifice could temporarily gloss over. And the problem almost certainly lies in the very same technology his forebears innovated and maintained, and which he — for whatever reason — has completely fumbled.
Of course, he’s appeasing his subjects by conducting a human sacrifice, and public morale certainly is important for any politician, so the plan does have that advantage going for it. But the many potential problems with this plan completely outweigh the temporary PR boost. This is why, when Howie points out to Lord Summerisle that the islanders might decide to sacrifice him next year when the crops inevitably fail again, he’s taken aback for just a moment. And a bit later, Howie speaks with fairly solid mental clarity when he tells the islanders,
Wrap it up any way you want, but you are committing murder. All of you. Each and every one of you will be guilty! Before the law of the land. Guilty! Your punishment will be a lifetime in prison. Why suffer that punishment for no reason? For there is no Sun God. There is no Goddess of the Orchards. Your crops failed because the strains failed. Fruit is not meant to grow on these islands. It is against nature. True, for a while, due to the science of the laird’s great-grandfather, the fruit grew. But their failure means exhausted strains, worked-out soil, or a quirk in the weather. You must go back to the laboratory for the answer. And back, perhaps, to the true God that no amount of science has yet disproved.
Another possibility is that Lord Summerisle ran out of the artificial fertilizer his recent ancestors had been using — neither the film nor novel explain anything about it — and he had no idea how to create more of it. Impossible to say. But whatever the case, Howie’s point is well-taken. First, if this movie in any way takes place in the real world, the police would easily be able to conduct a forensic investigation and discover that Howie was killed by these weirdos. But even if not, his second point still stands: to fix the problem, you’d have to go back to the lab.
It should also go without saying that the explained events are allegorical: the island’s unique brand of techno-paganism eventually stops “bearing fruit.”
But since this movie is about how reason can rapidly lapse into irrationality, Sergeant Howie also does the same thing himself. After making a series of well-articulated points about how foolish the islanders are being, he increasingly resembles an actual martyr from ancient times — yelling and screaming with all the intensity of a Biblical prophet, even quoting from the Psalms. This transition from reasoned argumentation to divinely inspired raving seems to represent in miniature what the entire Summerisle clan has undergone.
VI. Technology and Christianity
However, there is a major difference between Howie’s descent into irrationality and Summerisle’s, namely that Howie reverts to the same religion whose ministers wisely told the original Summerisle patriarch that his GMO crops are an abomination of nature rather than its man-made complement. Again, it may seem ironic that paganism is what allows an entire population to accept a modern technological development that tampers with nature, while the most devout Christians are the ones who oppose it. But if you take a step back and consider Christianity’s relationship with technology, it becomes a bit more understandable.
Christianity is a religion that forces one into questions concerning technology by its very design. It’s a religion that depends upon both the invention of literacy and the innovative organization of human capital (through convents, monasteries, and the political hierarchy of the Orthodox church), and it depends upon a book that has been preserved for thousands of years, was written in multiple languages, and has undergone an extensive and complex process of canonization — something European paganism could never have achieved. It also contains great warnings about technology in even its earliest myths. The story of Cain and Abel, for instance, is the story of how a brutal fratricide results in God exiling the murderer (Cain), forcing him to found a technologically advanced city with agriculture and metalsmithing, begetting an accursed race.
It is therefore no coincidence that some of the most astute 20th century critics and analysts of technology — Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter Ong, to name a few — have been devout Christians. So whatever The Wicker Man was intending to say, it was quite profound in linking the church so closely with the critique of unrestrained technological use, while showing neo-paganism to be its unwitting accomplice, even as its adherents insist so strongly on being better attuned to nature.
VII. Lucifer and Ahriman
I think now’s a good time to address the title of my post, because it mentions Lucifer and Ahriman for a reason. I’m referring to a theory by the German occultist Rudolf Steiner, who used those two figures as allegories for the contrasting sensibilities of man in various historic epochs. For Steiner, the spirit of Lucifer dominated the Bronze Age, and it was a form of pagan irrationalism that inched progressively toward seeing all things as unified, emanating from a divine light. This sensibility culminated in the creation of metaphysical monism (such as in Platonism, Advaita Vedanta, et al) and paved the way for the Christian revelation. The spirit of Ahriman, however, is a form of crude materialism that will completely take hold some time during the third millennium after the birth of Christ (this one). It strives toward seeing every concrete object and phenomenon as discrete and disconnected — subject to case-by-case analysis, basically — and it sees being comfortable in the body as man’s highest priority. In the middle, between Lucifer and Ahriman, is the age of Christ, in which something of a balance is achieved, with Christ Himself as the avatar of the ideal unification. In this Christian unity, the different forms of wisdom found in Lucifer and Ahriman are incorporated into one’s spiritual being, though not to any excessive degree one way or another. And for Steiner, anyone, even in the age of Ahriman, can achieve this balance with the proper approach to faith and spiritual discipline (which of course his anthroposophy tries to provide).
Most importantly for our discussion, however, Steiner believed that the sensibilities of both Ahriman and Lucifer work together despite being formal opposites. Because Ahrimanic thought is so excessively focused on discrete phenomena and often shuts its findings up into unapproachable containers of thought (such as books, journal articles, or academic jargon), it leaves man’s primal appetites and drives completely disconnected from his rational mind, thus vulnerable to Luciferian influence. So in other words, a specialist with an Ahrimanic focus in one area can be altogether Luciferian in most others, lacking the appropriate balance to give his knowledge a sense of holism and far-reaching coherence. Contrariwise, a person subsumed with the spirit of Lucifer can readily accept Ahrimanic influence, incapable of seeing it for what it is, allowing his entire subjective world to be fashioned by it. And perhaps most concerningly (here I’m making my own observation), deliberate attempts to solve this problem through things like interdisciplinary research can, in fact, exacerbate it, causing a head-first dive into the void of unreason.
Rudolf Steiner was a bit of a kook, without question, but I think he was onto something. And because of my familiarity with his allegory, I’m never particularly surprised whenever I hear about things like organizations and communities that dedicate themselves to rationality nonetheless turning into deranged cults (others have noticed this as well). Very often, the man who speaks with perfect clarity on one topic winds up becoming a guru who more frequently opines on a thousand other topics about which he knows nothing, possessing not an ounce of wisdom to share, yet being praised specifically for this nonexistent wisdom while his real contributions are forgotten. We’re in an age in which this happens frequently, on an individual and collective level.
I think The Wicker Man is best appreciated as an illustration of this interplay between how Steiner describes Lucifer and Ahriman, but with a somewhat unique spin. Lord Summerisle is the heir of a doomed scientific project, but he is also the heir of a lineage that slowly forgot its original purpose and sincerely embraced what it was telling people originally as a lie. As an ersatz politician, Lord Summerisle seems highly “left brained.” He shows an incredible knack for projects that require technical competence, as seen in his plan to ensnare Sergeant Howie, but he lacks any sense of “the bigger picture,” and it’s a sensibility that his entire family slowly lost with each passing generation. The whole Summerisle clan was forced by circumstance to ventilate propaganda among their subjects. But with no clear sense of where the scientific project was headed and what it was all for, they allowed that missing “bigger picture” to be painted for them by the people they were meant to control and the propaganda they were initially using to enslave them. The master dismantles his own house with the very tools he used to build it.
At the same time, it’s clear throughout the story that the island is entirely dependent upon the same industrialized civilization against which its inhabitants seem to oppose themselves. When their GMO crops fail to grow properly, the islanders import a bunch of canned food for nourishment, some with irregular coloring. On his first night at the Green Man Inn, Sergeant Howie spots that the beans he’s eating are canned and tells Willow, after she initially denies it, “Broad beans in their natural state are not turquoise,” to which she responds, “Some things in their natural state have the most vivid colors!” It’s easy to read this as a lazy attempt to dismiss his objection, but I think the retort gives us a clue as to how her own spiritual sensibility leaves her unable to make a principled distinction between the “natural” and the “unnatural.” Her paganism leaves her no less capable of distinguishing between these things than the average Boobus Americanus, chowing down his McDonald’s on a nightly basis. Or, for that matter, all of the social media influencers who exalt paganism and the rejection of the modern world, yet seem to have no problems injecting steroids into their butts.
For all the reasons stated above, I don’t think The Wicker Man should be discussed primarily as a comment on paganism as such. I think instead it should be considered perhaps an unwitting commentary on what happens when technocratic political projects go into failure mode. Paganism, in this story, is a means to an end: a vehicle to show how even the most seemingly sensible people can become prey to the propaganda they’ve told others, not to mention the mental image they’ve constructed of themselves in the process, as destructive and pointless as the wicker man itself.
Yet for all the damning things the film tells us about rational man’s tendency to burn up as he flies too close to the sun, the images and sounds in the film, shorn of all context, convey a different story altogether. It’s one of hope for a better world — the same hope that seduced the Summerisle clan. It’s such a strong sentiment that the whole film, whether intentionally or not, stages an internal conflict between the ideal that these images and sounds serve to convey and the barebones matter of the story itself. When the film’s many legions of neo-pagan fans heard Lord Summerisle tell Howie that he’s “a heathen, conceivably… but not, I hope, an unenlightened one,” there was indeed a whole lot riding on that hope.