The Wicker Man (1973), Sean's review

[Sean]

Another recently finished essay of mine...

The Wicker Man

The 1973 British film The Wicker Man analyses Dionysian intuition and common sense over Apollonian groundless rationality and its delusion and foolishness. It was written by Anthony Shaffer after the 1967 novel The Ritual by David Pinner, directed by Robin Hardy with music by Paul Giovanni, and produced by actor Christopher Lee. It concerns a May Day rite of pagan Scottish islanders and a policeman deceived into investigating a missing girl for his selection in its ritual sacrifice.

A further influence is the 1913 iconoclastic and cornerstone 20th century art music work The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky with its sequence of matching ballet scenes ending in a virginal dance of death. The music is organized under internal impulses of the material rather than external or pre-given structure to provide the sexualized ascent, particularly at the end, of Dionysian visceral imperatives over Apollonian conceptual conceit. The Rite is concerned with pre-modern pagan culture more aligned with human nature, also taking its departure from an ancient Greek fertility festival to the god Dionysus. Of the arts music provides the greatest aesthetic experience through its immediacy and richness of intuitive flow.

The profound critique of film and ballet have each been controversial, the aesthetic affinity towards and interest in such destruction threatening Western culture particularly in the late modern period. Another British film The Devils of 1971 directed by Ken Russell is a related psychological investigation and cultural and religious critique also both ending with the protagonist publicly burnt and having provocative scenes removed against the makers' wishes.

The Wicker Man winds up to the unexpected yet inevitable conclusion of killing its protagonist Sergeant Howie, the dynamics involved in successful artworks issuing from beneath the artists' conscious minds and bringing the best from all concerned in their production. The film was also remade in 2006 as rubbish to devalue the original because of the inability of the commercially significant and democratic majoritarian mindless masses to understand or deal with it- as with other remade films the concern is to trash the past and its higher values and criticality.

Aesthetics is the oldest branch of philosophy and the enquiry into why certain sounds, images and words have their effects is unanswerable in principle- the guiding forces and potentials involved lie autonomously in the intuition and aren't reducible to intellectually perspicuous rationale. However people whose minds have any extension beyond a definition by outward social norms need to find alignment with these subtle imperatives and logic at the basis of life in order to achieve effectiveness and fulfilment, finding unity with the world and themselves.

In this the wider Indian dharmic religions with Dionysian values in contrast to wider Western Abrahamic religions look to full but unaffected relations with the world, the major Hindu god Shiva for instance representing eroticism but also asceticism. He eliminates confused Apollonian relations with both gratification and detachment where the sense of oneself is lost to the senses. Without coordination of the thinking mind with the intuition, the left brain with the right, a person is mistakenly lost in conceptualization and heads for destruction instead of liberation in life. Indeed Shiva's great representation in the nataraja dance of destruction, comparing the film and ballet dances, over the demon of ignorance demarcates the reality of the Self or consciousness by a ring of fire.

Aesthetic dynamics guide meaningful thought and action such that people do things directly because they have an objective need for being done, and not because of intellectual reasoning. Once there is too much thought self-consciousness arises and in fact it's then that mistakes are made. Natural thought and action is only explained in rational terms later that at most parallel the initial intuition; the Self that deals with the world is hidden forever beneath intellectual processes, the seer not that which is seen.

Apollonian culture's prioritizing of rationality is then unconducive to coordination of mind with the conscious centre people already are. Rational means of ratios or relating one thing only to another and not necessarily to objective truth beneath, providing for foolish and laughable results as exampled by Howie. Personal development and spirituality is the union of thought and truth or the individual and universal selves.

The film critiques Christianity as the Apollonian religion and the story compares with Christ's- Howie and Jesus are virgin fools of similar age who get willingly duped into horrific executions via individuals they think they've befriended duly betraying and leading them to the authorities. They take a priggish and interfering stand as a sexually repressed outsider against what they see as the immoral norms of a society that is fine, posing themselves as more insightful that those around them while in fact being tricked and finally mocked when led to their stupid deaths.

Christianity is for the benighted under sway of others treating them as sheep and who benefit from a power relation involving the justification and praise of suffering and death when in there's no reconciliation for the victim and these are commonsensically just bad. The only value is the onlookers' Dionysian aesthetic experience and the rightful dispatching of someone twerpish and far enough from normality for people to get on with their lives.

One of the film's opening scenes is of Howie giving a reading during a church service about Jesus being betrayed, ending with gravely spoken words that the ceremony is '...to show the Lord's death, until he comes again'. This is his first and most serious mistake, reading the words but not making sense of them properly, his focus being on the level of his culture's abstracted intellectual presuppositions rather than directed understanding.

Indeed Christianity's purpose is to stop personal understanding and reflection, keeping the attention blindly focussed outward on deferential relations suiting others. Christianity attacks theosophy and the notion of personal experience and relations with the divine as a threat to its control system and hierarchy, and thus Howie sees Christ in terms of a subject to object relation and essentially separate to him.

He is accordingly deceived and sacrificed, becoming that Christ who comes again which with such rectitude but unworldliness he urged others to consider; indeed his final words at his killing are the name 'Jesu' repeated, for Jesus and Howie's repetition of him. The religion has principles and ideas about spirituality rather than experience of divinity in terms of aesthetic intuition; in church he focuses so intently on hymn singing and holding his book properly that his girl who he won't sleep with before marriage looks at him to get him to acknowledge her. Neil Howie is also a rather soft and indistinct name, unfavourable to real focus and ruthlessness despite his efforts.

Moreover the offering to the pre-Christian Celtic sun god Nuada is for the positive result of producing apples for Summerisle's economy, structure issuing out of Dionysian destruction, rather than the Christian offering for only removing negative sin; the island's name meanwhile reflects the concern for the sun and illumination. The fruit and its failed harvest in the previous year references the forbidden fruit as sex, and maturity of mind from carnal relations, in the Biblical Garden of Eden and the need for non-fruitive action or action based on objective righteousness rather than worldly goals per se.

The Tree of Knowledge of the forbidden fruit is referenced by phallic shaped topiary along with cherry trees with their cherry of virginity. In order to secure sex and all things the attention must retain reference to the Self or truth and their aesthetic dynamics issuing through the Dionysiac. Sex as the core Dionysian expression however is forbidden in Apollonian culture due to its indication and destruction of both the baselessness of conceptual principles and commandments, and power relations built around them.

Howie's end is necessary in terms of primary aesthetic dynamics distinct from any deliberation above, and not merely in terms of a religion relating to itself on a distant island. His naively foregrounded ideas and fixed moral principles of the organized religion and culture he represents contrast with the islanders' practicing their rituals and spirituality themselves free of ministers, and their unstated but fully lived life.

The girl's mother says 'You'll simply never understand the true nature of sacrifice', meaning experience and the unaffected non-fruitive mind that secures all fruit or goals can't be objectified for or reduced to the intellect. The island setting without borders onto other lands also parallels self-referential rather than other-referential processes of mind with their connotations of both external authority and self-conscious or fruitive goal-orientation. Howie's thinking reflects cultural immaturity in terms of loss of autonomy through more developed social contract for the individual and is blindly linear rather than holistic. Moreover the mother's name is May, her involvement in the May Day process making it May's day.

Howie's further chosen a career as a policeman, providing a sense of authority, set of laws to insist on and a uniform, all conferred from without; he crazily tells people he's a policeman and wears his hat when everyone already knows who he is. Howie the detective has nothing to detect in this case however and at most is trying to detect himself through layers of naivety; the islanders are right to deal with him because he fails to see past himself and his ludicrous secondary mental processes by which he relates to the world.

The islanders sing and smile assuredly as the fire takes hold, their medieval song Sumer Is Icumen In or Spring has Arrived organizing their Dionysian experience through intuitive rather than repressive principled means. And in scene after scene Giovanni's superb music cuts off Howie's vapid thinking and surface reactions, reflecting intuition and unarticulated meaning over reason; singing like kissing also stops talk and reasoning and refocuses the mind towards the flow of background fundamentals.

Howie additionally embodies the West's central philosophical project of epistemology to find intellectual grounds to knowledge. This was discredited in the 20th century as impossible in principle, reasoned thought abstracted from experience never leading to knowledge and only interminable theory. Modernity and epistemology developed in the 17th century in a mistaken attempt to swap faith-based aesthetic life for intellectual transparency, relinquishing the relative mind's relation with the absolute, truth or God; the present postmodern condition further emphasizes relativism and disbelief in grounds to reality, transcendent or otherwise.

The islanders in their intuitive culture by contrast know and understand Howie perfectly, and constantly arrange his experiences to test the bounds of his stupidity. The opening words spoken to him on arrival are 'Have you lost your bearings?' and even a girl in the classroom he visits has a beetle in her desk attached to a thread making it 'go round and round all day until it's right up against the nail'. He objects to this but again fails to notice the self-depiction with his circling thoughts and ridiculous search going round for a missing girl, his thinking trapped in a rational circuit of self-justification excised from common sense.

He's given all fair allowance to find his way through but his mind isn't good enough, all as it's never been good enough to find his way through to seduction. He cannot be helped directly however because illumination can only come from within, any attempt at demystification by outsiders on the intellectual level being reinterpreted by existing rationale. Truth, seduction and sex are aesthetic and can't be addressed directly.

His clouded mind makes unwittingly mistakes, for instance pinching his fingers in the lid of a coffin that he's trying without good cause to find the girl in- he feels tension and contradiction but his immaturity is greater and his thinking remains horizontal and principle-based. This contrasts with the islanders' animal head masks representing the locked-on quality of life in the real and natural world and the universality of Self or consciousness beyond superficial personal identity. He marches off searching in every direction except the right one, the vertical into himself; his thought and action skews out irredeemably in his rationalizing framework no matter how psychotic and implausible.

Other mistakes include the letter sent to him in the first place saying that a girl has been missing for many months and asking for his help. Such strangeness and vagueness require many questions to be answered before taking any action but he accepts it at face value and sniffily goes investigating on his high horse perfectionist way; even his fellow officers tease him for his unworldliness and sexual repression and know his outlook is a complete hoot.

He travels to the island by seaplane, reflective of his thought as floating in the sky, wearing a principled and useless bright yellow life vest that makes his cockpit cramped, and then uses a megaphone to speak to a man on the quay when he can hear without it. And later on when the man drops Howie back at the plane, which has been disabled, and pretends not to hear him saying about it not working, Howie gets his megaphone out again, reasoning the man's too far away when he's obviously just ignoring him. Howie constantly deletes his foolishness from his awareness, funnelling everything through his intellectualised scheme and papering over the contradictions.

His phoney decisiveness and wrongheaded efforts at resilience are exampled by his interruption of Lord Summerisle and the school mistress singing an erotic song, throwing a hare towards them that he's disinterred in what he was led to believe was the girl's grave. But Summerisle knows his thinking has no grounds, saying purposefully 'I think that you were supposed to be the detective here'.

Howie crumbles and backs off again, accepting the farcical notion that he shouldn't be bothering others, but indeed he shouldn't as it's nonsense and only his investigation into nothing. With him flattened and sent further down the line to destruction Summerisle returns to the piano and complete understanding that he's not going see the light. And likewise earlier at the sight of naked dancing girls despite his resolution he is confused and callow with a finger squashed across his lips; he's transfixed yet resists being refreshed by the sight as Summerisle suggests.

His questions about the girl are mindless, for instance after suspecting she's been ritually murdered he looks for the death certificate and asks a secretary 'Do you know her?'- it's a tiny community and an absurd thing to say 'Yes of course' and then 'How did she die?', 'I don't know, I don't know anything about her, nothing' and he acquiesces despite a complete reversal, and he goes off again. A phallic hobby horse man who never speaks similarly leads him on and even a young girl who falls out of a cupboard, that he's looking for the girl in, smirks at him- they are justified as long as he fails to see through them.

This is also all as a woman testing a man in seduction where if he asks her questions that he knows the answers to she'll give him suitably daft answers and scare him off in his self-created confusion- he needs Self consciousness not self-consciousness. Seduction is the ultimate test of unselfconscious action and proceeding on underlying potentials not a woman's denials and ruses, which are nullified if the man continues when he should or justified if he doesn't. Women give men a few chances to focus on the ongoing moment rather than wider hazy theorizing then let them go, Howie getting his chances to sleep with a beautiful woman and seeing the light but instead fails to escape his darkness.

Sex and fertility as spiritual illumination and the central expression of internal coordination is an overarching factor in the film, also concerning most of the music lyrics. The rituals include a Maypole phallic symbol with boys around and a stone circle with fire in the centre as vagina and phallus, with nude girls sitting around facing with open legs. A decapitation ritual later takes place at this spot, expressive of losing one's previous head in terms of the total transformation of mind brought by developed sexual experience; there's also a shot of the sun right before it. Thought gains the divine and transcendent absolute reference instead of unconscious relative reference either through sex or through death; the ritual is also preceded by an acknowledgement of the hobby horse. Finally the Howie offering is for the apple blossoms or sexual parts of the plant to bear fruit.

Howie's spiritual moment by contrast is to place a cross as a crucifix on an empty tomb for the religion of suffering, violence, sexual repression and death, and moreover the only violence in the film before the killing is from Howie when he hits the landlord, who gave him his room and meals, with an iron candlestick and steals his costume for the rite. This is for the mythical fool Punch who behaves violently, originating in the 17th century.

Sex epitomizes the mind's basis in the intuition rather than reasoning through its subject to subject relation rather than seeming subject to object relations of outward life, but which are really likewise contained within the intuition and its dynamics. All worldly or experiential knowledge is already structured in consciousness with its self-referral nature, and isn't properly foregroundable or calculable. Sex as the sense-making purified for-itself and hermetic relation then clashes with for-other and ratio-nal Apollonian culture, intolerably exposing the falsity of conceptual frameworking taken as fundamental.

If someone cannot find coordination within themselves in terms of the intellect with the intuition or personal divinity they are condemnable as an offering back up to divinity, here the Son God returned to the sun god; they become part of worship and supplication for the wider good through a realization of their nature as for-other and not an end themselves. Deception is justified as an ineliminable part of life if a fool allows it, all as the great spiritual centre of Hindu Indian culture for instance understands.

Shakespeare moreover outlines several times the question of whether any help or sympathy is due to a fool when being oneself is issue only for that individual. Othello shouldn't believe Iago, Macbeth shouldn't believe the witches, Hamlet should just act, Lear shouldn't lose his judgement of character, Pyramus shouldn't think courtship is difficult. Most of the plays indeed are concerned with deception exposing the loss of the intuition or self-referral consciousness before its return at the end, represented by a king, which Howie is likewise finally anointed as if only as a fool's king for one day.

However the Hindu tradition understands that although it's absurd to speak of a path to oneself for the reason that someone is already themselves, it's highly significant on the practical level and indeed Hinduism's function is assistance with a path. Likewise culture with its unstated presuppositions, as an extrapolation of a religion and its distilled transcendent rather than epistemological reference, provides indirect support for a personal path by normalizing, to greater or lesser extents, core human values.

Summerisle's culture contrasts with the mainland but comprises an internally consistent set of sense-making norms, with the school teaching carnal iconography, pagan medicine and witchcraft. The culture has superior transcendent reference conducive to personal development and fulfilment through its rich integration of social interaction, structured sexuality and spiritual practice. The need for a love partner is recognized and as Lord Summerisle says in connection with the animals that the people relate to, 'not one of them is respectable or unhappy'. Howie is provided with all this and offers of inclusion but resists with irretrievable distain and anger, the truth of his situation easily eluding him.

He's even provided with a book in the library that sketches the forthcoming ritual and Punch in it but he never stops to think with real criticality and it just fuels his indignation and sends him onward until he puts on the costume himself. Whatever degree of consciousness he may be endowed with he has only to drop what he is not and stop falling for simple tricks, but he was never to realize the conscious Self or value within him. He represents Western alienation in the sacred with Christianity's organized mediation, and in the secular with theoretical abstraction in place of holistic engagement with community, sexuality, music and the natural environment.

Howie is deceived but ignorance has no material basis, consciousness always providing a self-effulgent torch in the dark to illuminate the next step to take. It's not necessary to see any further than this in transparent intellectual terms and instead only to sense the emerging whole; truth isn't objectifiable and lack of information or experience is irrelevant in moving forward. The endless sub-intellectual hints, including wicker man bonfire imagery in shops seen alongside pagan symbolism he despises, and people's uncomprehending reactions, bypass Howie and he remains detached from hard reality as lacking his conceptual framing. Hence he gets dictated to rather than aligning and dealing with the real dynamics going on; there is no external justification for getting deceived or making mistakes, life or failure to live life being self-justifying processes.

Howie gets his transcendence but on the wrong and Abrahamic side of an aesthetic line leading to the absolute as torture and death rather than sex and orgasm. For him the perception of absolute value in relative life transforms to a burnt offering where absolute energy stored in relative matter is released to the sun god as light and enlightenment. Instead of his impurities being removed by sexual unity and orgasm that was offered him as the midday sun at midnight in the landlord's daughter's sung lyrics, they are removed by unity with the sun god in terms of Shiva the destroyer and his parallels with Christ as destroyer of himself and the sins of the world.

The tension builds and builds without desisting until they really do burn him, in parallel with seduction building until a couple really do have sex, having focused on the Dionysian reality inhering in apparent Apollonian surface relations. The man holding with the subject to subject relation, and thus the situation's inward dynamics that convert into the physical dynamics of sex, never asks her consent as a confusedly distanced relative object to respect.

Finally the relative mind is suddenly overtaken by the absolute of orgasm, and in the same unstated way the whole film leads inexorably to the execution yet it still comes as a surprise. Moreover a man taking a romantic relationship to be more decorous or relative than it potentially is is paralleled by the events in the main part of the film almost being humorous; sex and truth however are our origins and point of reference. Other connections between sex and death are paroxysmal activity, ineluctable sensation yet uncertainty of where it's leading, wanting but not wanting it to reach its conclusion, the emergence of more layers of tension than there seemed, the shocking end after a build-up, giving of oneself, a transformation of state of matter, and seeing the last of Apollonian rationality overwhelmed by Dionysian reality.

Howie's inability to perceive generates a gap that the islanders correctly proceed in and finally he puts on his fool's outfit and mask and comes to the bonfire of his own free will. He's crazy enough to think they won't recognize him and will take him for the landlord, and that he's deceiving them when instead they're deceiving him. Women prod him with sticks and Lord Summerisle even says in the procession 'You call that dancing?... Play the fool, that's what you're here for!'.

After his betrayal by the girl he emerges out of a hole in a hillside, symbolizing emergence at last into the light, where Summerisle tells him the game's over and his costume is removed. At every point in his investigation he's been faced with situations demanding that he pauses, steps back and considers inwardly, but he never did. He comes in his own way into transfiguring contact with reality that always existed, an inevitable aesthetic process giving the film its strange compulsion.

As he's being carried he screams 'Think what you're doing, think!' but the problem is thinking when separated from intuition or that level of existence bringing the mind in touch with the divine, and the islanders in their focus on reality hum over his uselessness. He's burnt inside the image of a faceless man, in parallel with universal Dionysian consciousness over illusory Apollonian individuality based on ideas or thoughts lying above and distinct from the thinker; being trapped also reflects his Self trapped and unrealized inside himself. Both the straw man effigies of wicker and Howie are destroyed.

The sunset in the background as the film's final image is the small intense core of light in the sky within slowly changing vistas that provides for the world, as sex and truth oversee all experience even if these aren't seen directly; the sunset also parallels the Self setting for Howie without having become the midday sun. The pagan religion as with Hinduism understands the same eternal substrate or Self in us and the natural world extending to the cosmos, along with reincarnation and rejection of the notion of death. Meanwhile the wooden wicker man of the title is unseen in the background and only appears at the end of the film.

The critique of wider Western civilization begins with opening credits thanking the people of Summerisle for their assistance, making a parallel between the audience's and Howie's gullibility- Scottish islands called the Summer Isles exist but they are almost uninhabited. Coordination with truth in Howie begins to rise but recedes and fails before realization, with the implication for the same in the West with its understanding of the film and its great artistic achievements and innovative spirit that rose in the modern period before declining again in the twilight of postmodernism.

Howie and his culture fail the Hindu test to see that a cautious step forward can be taken in twilight for a closer look at a rope that might be a snake, with its phallic reference, and then another and another before perceiving that it's harmless and there need be no deception. Instead of thus coming to his senses and what is actually before him he sides with conceptual imaginings until reality returns and he meets a vengeful death by the senses. The sacrifice takes place just before twilight but the islanders have to take that step forward for him.

Moreover the central Western artwork in many ways is Wagner's 1874 Ring cycle of operas, concluding with Twilight of the Gods as also concerned with deception and ends with groundless thought burnt up in the fire of intuitive or divine knowledge. It leads away from art as a repository for the Dionysiac in repressed Apollonian culture and back to real aesthetic life by dissolving the subject-object relation and confining critical distance within the intuition; Hardy's third film on related pagan themes moreover is based on this opera. The Wicker Man as an Apollonian cultural product made when it was is expressive of the West's cultural sunset just before twilight, all as the sacrifice in it.

[Karl Henning]

You might warn of the spoiler in paragraph 4.  I am glad I had already seen the movie, or I should really have resented that 

[Karl Henning]

"Christianity is for the benighted under sway of others treating them as sheep and who benefit from a power relation involving the justification and praise of suffering and death when in there's no reconciliation for the victim and these are commonsensically just bad."

Keeping an open mind, as ever.

[Karl Henning]

". . . he crazily tells people he's a policeman and wears his hat when everyone already knows who he is."

A flaw in the screen adaptation, then?  Of course, such lines are merely part of the narrative apparatus on the printed page.

[Karl Henning]

"He objects to this but again fails to notice the self-depiction with his circling thoughts and ridiculous search going round for a missing girl, his thinking trapped in a rational circuit of self-justification excised from common sense."

"Self-depiction" is poorly phrased here, the author seems not to understand how that reflexive works  0:)

[Karl Henning]

"Howie's inability to perceive [...]

The irony.

Oh, the irony.

[Sean]

This is a rather dark and slightly lurid tract, I must admit.

No such thing as bad publicity I guess though.

[drogulus]

    An analysis that has the Apollonian rationality of religious monoculture in it doesn't capture what's going on in the film, or on the planet for that matter. I thinks not......it looks like 2 models of death sacrifice duking it out. One had more actual death and sacrifice in it. My view is the purely symbolic one hijacked the Greco/Roman civilization apparatus and has done well with it. The Mediterranean world, on its way to becoming the European world, was a Jared Diamond-y right place/right time affair.

[jochanaan]

Karl, I admire your persistence in reading and actually commenting on this!

Sean, you lost me when you described Christianity as an Apollonian religion.  You obviously haven't been to Pentecostal or African-American church services!

[Karl Henning]

Karl, I admire your persistence in reading and actually commenting on this!

Well, one tries to be a good neighbor . . . .

[Ken B]

Sean, you lost me when you described Christianity as an Apollonian religion. 

You made it that far? I thought I suddenly went blind after the first sentence, but my eyes eventually rolled back down. I stopped there. Why risk permanent harm?

[Sean]

[XB-70 Valkyrie]

Would like to see you analyze up Fellini's La Dolce Vita. There's certainly some interesting Dionysian shite going on in that film (one of my favorites BTW).

[bhodges]

At 4,000+ words, this "review" desperately needs an editor.

(And just for the record, as the kids say, "TLDNR.")

PS, despite the long-winded screed above, the film is quite interesting, and highly recommended.

--Bruce

[SimonNZ]

Four thousand words and no mention of Brit Ekland's gyrating bottom? Did we see the same film??

Your "thinking" is clearly seperated from your "intuition". It follows that you should be set on fire.

[bhodges]

Four thousand words and no mention of Brit Ekland's gyrating bottom? Did we see the same film??

Your "thinking" is clearly separated from your "intuition". It follows that you should be set on fire.

Of course, just when I was going to log off, here comes this comment.



--Bruce

[Ken B]

Of course, just when I was going to log off, here comes this comment.



--Bruce

You bold that and not Britt Ekland's gyrating bottom?
Did we read the same comment?

[bhodges]

You bold that and not Britt Ekland's gyrating bottom?
Did we read the same comment?

Ha! 

--Bruce

[SimonNZ]

Of course, just when I was going to log off, here comes this comment.



--Bruce

(hope I'm playing within the rules with that bit of funnin'. Still getting a sense of what's allowed here)

[bhodges]

(hope I'm playing within the rules with that bit of funnin'. Still getting a sense of what's allowed here)

Well, given the film's premise - er, climax - I think it's within bounds.

That said, I do think this entire topic should be allowed to discreetly atrophy.

The Wither Man?



--Bruce