The 1973 Wicker Man is Just Like the Nicolas Cage Remake, Only Brilliant
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch and then write about in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Since I was diagnosed as autistic earlier this year, I’ve had a tendency to see pop culture through the prism of neurodivergence. I started writing a column about it called Autism in Entertainment. Like many of my projects, it was launched in a fever of excitement and anticipation; then, my chaotic neurodivergent brain helpfully suggested that I pursue eight or nine other projects that I will similarly abandon at some point instead.
When you’ve got autism, ADHD, and bipolar 2, it can be prohibitively difficult to get the hell out of your own way. The urge to self-sabotage is always there, imploring me to aggressively pursue the messiest and least successful course of action.
I’m fascinated by the way autism is depicted in entertainment. There is, at the very least, a riveting documentary to be made about the subject.
But I’m also intrigued by stories that relate very directly to my personal experience as a late-diagnosed neurodivergent adult.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that 1973’s The Wicker Man is both a stone cold horror classic and a beautiful metaphor for neurodivergence.
In The Wicker Man, Edward Woodward, who you might know from his starring role in the television program The Equalizer and his supporting turn in Hot Fuzz, plays Sgt. Neil Howie.
He’s a quintessential outsider who believes in playing by the rules, legal and religious. The stern shamus has devoted his life to finding and punishing people who break the law, but the unyielding dictates of the Church are equally important to him.
Early in the film a ravishing, clothing-averse beauty played by Britt Ekland throws herself at the increasingly apoplectic stranger. He demurs on the grounds that he does not believe in sex outside of marriage. His faith must be incredibly strong to resist a temptation like that.
The Wicker Man opens with its protagonist flying to the island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a little girl. He’s leaving the world that he knows, a world of rules and order, where no one is more respected than a police officer or man of the cloth, for a bizarre realm with rituals and traditions he does not understand and finds threatening.
When you’re autistic, the world can feel like a big party that you were not invited to and don’t want to attend. That’s the devout cop’s experience on Summerisle. From the beginning, something is irrevocably off. The people here all sport the knowing, smirking expression of someone enjoying a private joke at our hero’s expense.
The people of Summerisle do not share Neil’s belief. Badges mean nothing to them. To them, the only authority is Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee).
Lee plays the creepy cult leader as a sexy hippie with very warped ideas about the world. His big hair is a thing of beauty, and his outfits are flamboyant and extravagant.
The Wicker Man follows Neil as he traverses the mysterious island looking for the missing girl or her corpse. The residents are spectacularly unhelpful. They do not share his reverence towards the law and the Church. The outside world means nothing to him. Neil is greeted as an unwanted, uninvited visitor by women and men who appear to be in a perpetual sexual favor.
Neil pursues chastity as a form of godliness, but the island he finds himself on appears to be one giant fuck fest from the outside and the inside as well.
Because he still clings to the adorable delusion that laws and rules mean something in Summerisle, Neil never stops trying to assert his authority as an officer of the law. He never stops failing.
I watched The Wicker Man through the prism of my recent autism diagnosis but also within the context of Nicolas Cage’s remake, which is legendary for all the right and wrong reasons.
Neil LaBute’s unintentionally hilarious and iconic desecration of this material feels less like a proper remake than an unintentional parody where everything that is ridiculous about the legendary original is ratcheted up to comic levels of frenzied hysteria.
Woodward follows a nearly identical arc as Cage’s obsessed copper in the little-loved remake, only the film and the actor both find a tricky tone that never devolves into camp.
The Wicker Man is a film of great and terrible beauty. The scenery is gorgeous, as are the young women with dark secrets.
The Wicker Man is a masterpiece of atmosphere and inference. There’s almost no violence until the very end. Instead, director Robin Hardy cultivates a mood of free-floating dread and suspicion.
Neil knows that the whole damn island is directly or indirectly responsible for the girl’s disappearance, but he can’t get anyone to care about the missing girl, let alone help him find her. He is an innately solitary figure doomed to be an outsider wherever he goes.
Neil is so rigid and puritanical in his thinking that he cannot conceive of a belief system outside of Christianity. For him, there’s Christianity, and then there’s evil. Anything that falls outside Christianity qualifies as the work of the devil. That includes everything that goes on in this horny hell, this pastoral nightmare.
Everywhere Neil goes, he is inundated with lurid imagery and people in the act of sexual congress. At one point, Neil learns many, if not all, of the island’s dark secrets in a fairly shameless info dump, but otherwise, the film feels little need to explain the mystery at the film’s core or to provide a context for all of the WTF images that litter the film, giving it the aura of a nightmare you want desperately to wake up from but cannot.
Neil LaBute’s remake bewilderingly, if predictably, made the bad guys women as part of a career-long commitment to lazy misogyny.
The women in The Wicker Man are wicked, wild, and sexually uninhibited. Sex is an animistic force taunting Neil and his rigid ideas about fidelity and chastity. Their unabashed carnality mocks his buttoned-up Christianity.
The Nicolas Cage version of The Wicker Man was one for the ages that earned a place of prominence in the pantheon of camp classics that are so bad they’re great. The original The Wicker Man, in sharp contrast, is one for the ages in that it is a classic horror film and a formative inspiration for Midsommar.
Midsommar is actually a much better, more faithful reboot/reimagining of 1973’s The Wicker Man than Cage’s widely mocked remake.
I’m glad someone chose this film. I got to fill a hole in my film knowledge and see a movie that’s just like a Nicolas Cage movie I’ve seen repeatedly, except that it is legitimately great as opposed to a hoot and a half.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn't cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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