The Wicker Man: A Critique of Society’s Fear of Difference
“In a mad world, only the mad are sane” – Ran (1985)
Sergeant Neil Howie, a devout Christian, arrives at a remote island named Summerisle to investigate the puzzling disappearance of a young girl named Rowan Morrison. Through Howie’s enervated and obfuscating experience at the island, director Robin Hardy discursively critiques fundamentalism and religious dogmatism.
Premise and Cinematic Style
The Summerisle anchors its belief system and livelihood in a certain pantheism wherein the sun, the moon, and nature are venerated; practices that are elementarily different to the Christian spectrum of beliefs. Director Robin Harry, Cinematographer Harry Waxman, Paul Giovanni, and the music group Magnet devise a subversive cinematic language wherein the subject of the film is rather stern, however, the style of portrayal casts lighter shadows.
The preludial sequence of the film opens with a church congregation led by Neil Howie in a brief sermon, “I have received of the Lord, that which also I delivered onto you. Now the Lord Jesus, the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread. And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘Take. Eat. This is my body which is broken for you. This do in remembrance of me.’ And after the same manner he also took the cup, when he had eaten, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. This, oft as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread, and drink this wine, you do shew the Lord’s death, till he comes again.”
An airplane limpidly steers over the mountain ranges and tears through the abyssal waterbody. The sonic companions- orchestral organ, horns, and iconoclastic female vocals transition into classical English folk music that commingles with a set of consistent images throughout the sequence. The rich image and sound organization in this sequence take off as an alarm awakening the viewer’s unsettlement, mutating from disquietude to delight, and lands as a warm, breezy lullaby. The Wicker Man introduces the protagonist, his identity, and disposition; followed by a brief sequence of uneasiness communicating directly with the viewer that soon transitions into a subverted narrative that unfolds through the protagonist’s experience, however spoken to the viewer solely from the director’s perspective.
Disparity and Dogma
Most of The Wicker Man is Sergeant Howie briskly striding through the town investigating the disappearance of Rowan Morrison and constantly being bombarded with disparate moral, cultural, and religious facets on the island. While alienating and startling the protagonist, these facets are rather juxtaposed in their style of portrayal- warm, humorous, and fuzzy.
In one of the very few night scenes, Howie kneels and prays as he prepares for sleep; right above him, the landlord’s daughter (addressed as Aphrodite) performs (the word perform is used because of its ritualistic characteristic) intercourse, the band beneath musically translates the dichotomous scene in its comprehensiveness. Lord Summerisle’s soliloquy encircles the material fruitlessness of theological activities and human belief systems, drawing comparisons with the indiscriminate and pragmatic animal life.
Such superimposition of meaning through the form is ritualistic and consistently present throughout the film. The subversive style of ludicrously and indolently displaying its characters and portraying implicit and cultural use of music provides the director’s perspective, wherein the protagonist is alienated, but the viewer is not. However, through the alienation of the protagonist, the director rolls out his themes.
The next morning, Sergeant Howie, scorching in the estranged surrounding, goes to a school where a group of kids bask in a ritualistic metaphysical hymn about sex and reincarnation. He trades into the classroom witnessing the students and teachers discussing the ritualistic hymn; he would call it ‘degeneracy’ and ‘indecency.’ What is of dire saliency is that Howie is more fearful than disgusted, a fear not out of displacement or perturbance but out of blasphemy.
Several semantic differences exist between Howie and the other characters- what a churchyard is, how funerals proceed, what comes after death, etcetera. Howie is in a primordial state of disbelief; from the food he eats, the store he visits, and the kids he comes across, he is an extra-terrestrial wanderer on the island. On his quest to find Rowan Morrison, Sergeant Howie learns that the crops have failed and her life has been sacrificed with the belief that the crops will not fail come next year. An important detail that will reflect upon a pivotal theme of the film towards the end.
Robin Hardy’s sequence construction, editorial choices, and use of location are quite emblematic. The adamance with which the natives abide by their religion baffles Howie. He resides in an inn that has guests who incessantly drink and dance. There’s sexual moaning percolating the walls and the vapors of explicit folk music seep through the floor of his room. A symbolic representation of culture for one and profanity for the other.
Fear of Difference
The Wicker Man formidably emphasizes constructivism, which can be simplistically defined by two principles, (i) Knowledge is constructed through human activity, (ii) Individuals create meaning through their interactions. The foundation of the collective consciousness of Summerisle is owed to their social conditioning. Through this film, Robin Hardy comments, on a universal scale, on the indoctrinatory nature and volatility of moral extremism.
The island follows a sort of pantheist religion, and although most sources label it as paganism, the term paganism is just another form of otherization with respect to its empirical relevance. Contrariwise, Robin Hardy does not portray the people on the island as the Other. It is Sergeant Howie who looks through his Christian lens that engenders his distress and discountenance.
Every character on the island has a twofold role. Apart from just being characters that interact within the film, they also perform as thematic models through their cheerful and insouciant behavioral tendencies. They function as exposition for the viewer, with respect to a disparate belief system, thereby deriving a quantifiable parameter of positing Howie’s beliefs and disposition. When a character explains an idea, and Howie reacts to it, it’s an overlapping venture that posits his ideological stance, thus tidily shaping the themes of the film.
Reiterating and borrowing the meaning behind the dialogue from Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, “In a mad world, only the mad are sane,” Robin Hardy portrays the metaphysical and ideological fallacies that germinate into distinctive belief systems. Not suggestive of absolute insanity but the relative nature of it. What is culture, ritual, and religion for Summerisle is sacrilege and blasphemy for Howie, who believes the island to be full of sinfulness, degeneracy, and irrationality. The director neither glorifies nor antagonizes any character in the film, hence ruminating over the above-mentioned relativist tendencies for the decided and accepted spectrums of normality.
Climax
The Wicker Man’s climax is of much significance, for not only does it encircle the ideas in the film but creates another circle attached to the bigger one, however thematically as important. Sergeant Howie perceives that Rowan is not dead, that she possibly will be sacrificed on May Day to the Gods in the hope that the crops would blossom in the next harvest. However, when Howie finally finds Rowan and tries to rescue her, he learns that he was lured into it, for it is he who is to be sacrificed, a person of sanctity and free will.
He tries to abscond but is eventually burned as the organ and trumpet swell and the natives erupt in their soaring elegiac anthem. To circle back to the first scene of the film, Howie recites a verse from the First Epistle to the Corinthians quoted at the beginning of this essay which insinuates the unfolding of the Last Supper, that practice of consuming food, i.e., to continue to exist, must be carried so in the remembrance of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the director not only alludes to the themes discussed above, of disparity, dogma, and consequential fearfulness but also that such forms of extremism mirror one another in their aftermath.
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