Were the Pagans That Bad? Wicker Man Film Analysis

 

In keeping with tradition, I'm going to be a little contrarian and a little controversial. This is a look at the symbolism in the Wicker Man and how the cult-like people of Sumerisle compare and contrast to the protagonist and his religion. This is MOSTLY a defense of the pagans, up to a point, which we'll get to by the end of the video.

Pagans, or heathens, were names given to the country people who had not yet been converted to Christianity, and who believed in the Old Gods. These people were very close to nature with its cycles and bounty, a particular fascination and reverence to the Sun and how it provides life, and the sowing and harvesting of food, thanks to the benevolence of the gods. Much of what we know of the pagans today was provided by potentially hostile sources, Roman writers who didn't approve of the pagan behavior and considered them barbaric.

In the movie the Wicker Man, a Scottish policeman arrives at a remote island after receiving an anonymous missing person tip. Straight from the get go he gets push back from the island inhabitants, who demand he gets the local lord's permission to disembark onto the island. They also push back against the missing person inquiries, claiming not to know who the girl in the photo is, and sometimes to bizarrely claim she doesn't exist or that she died but not in the way the officer thinks. The officer's encounter, as well as our encounter as the audience, with the people of the island is bizarre to say the least. The officer is a fish out of water in this town, who he sees as barbaric, outdated, and unchristian. Every single inhabitant is immediately against him, but he pushes on, despite multiple warnings he's dealing with a potentially dangerous group of people who all seem to be entranced in a cult-like religion. The symbols of the religion are all over the place for the officer and us to see.

Symbolism is everywhere, starting with watchful eye on the boat, with more than the eye watching the sergeant when he attempts to leave the island later (the masks). The Green Man is a mythical creature that symbolizes rebirth, particularly in the spring time as new plants are born, so it's image is of a man covered in green leaves. It's imagery can be found as early as the ancient Romans. It's a popular name for British pubs, but is an important one in this movie as some of its main central themes are about death and rebirth. On graves of people, trees are planted, and on the branches placed their preserved umbilical cords. The tree represents a rebirth. As one woman explains it, when people die, they become apart of nature. The May pole. It's just about May Day and Howie observes the children dancing and singing around the May Pole. The song they sing is about the cycle of birth and rebirth, a feather in a bed, on which a man and woman may a child, who grows, and whose grave is planted a tree, on which a bird lays and egg to become a bird that gives its feathers for a bed. The maypole symbolism itself is described by the school teacher as a phallic symbol. This is not the only sexual symbolism. The girls nearby dance and jump naked over a fire with hopes that the god of fire makes them fertile.

The symbolism is not limited to the pagans, as the costume the policeman wears is Punch, or the Fool. So he is wearing his own fool costume. He is foolish to mess around with these people, and a fool in their eyes for disbelieving their way of life. There is a strong juxtaposition between many of the beliefs of Howie and the Sumerisle inhabitants. For instance, the very free attitudes about sexuality of the townspeople compared to the very strict blocking and repressing sexual feelings in Howie, who is a virgin thanks to his religion demanding he must go through a ritual first, marriage, before he can have sex. However, there are similarities between the religions. One worships the Sun god, the other the Son of God.

The movie brilliantly puts Howie's meeting with the lord until the second half of the movie, leaving him and us, to explore the strangeness of the island first without any explanations. We the audience are just as much bewildered and disoriented as Howie. We see what appears at a distance to be a typical Scottish town, but when you get a closer look it is anything but. Symbols everywhere, weird differences in the way children are brought up, dancing over the fire, a hyper-sexuality among people of all mature ages, a welcoming of sexual taunts that we would consider lewd behavior. Death rituals being so different in many ways, but similar in others, which I'll get to in a minute.

Lord Sumerisle finally gives us the history of the island and mercifully gives us some clue about what is really going on. The lord's grandfather bought the island which was mostly barren volcanic ash, and planted new plants and developed a new way of allowing vegetation to grow in the harsh climate, but giving the laborers the old way, praying to the old gods, which had the benefit of giving them the pleasurable life, free of religious persecution and some of the societal restraints of a typical Christian community.

Watching a Christian pray to a deity for things he wants is not much different than the pagans praying to multiple deities for the things they want. The Sun worshiping is similar, though it has different names, Son of God, as opposed to the literal Sun the pagans worship. The Green man mentioned earlier even adorns some European Christian churches, thus proving the two religions share some ideals and some of the exact same symbols. It seems people of all religions understood the importance of a good crop yield to the health of a community, and did what they could to hope and pray for a good harvest, whether to pray with good intentions or to ask deities for help. Look at the death rituals for both, one consumes the flesh and blood of their human deity and that's not talking about the pagans. Putting someone's umbilical cord on a tree is strange and disgusting to us, but we as a society preserve bodies for display after death, and to me that's not much different, and personally I think it's just as off-putting observing a dead body as observing any other preserved body part.

And what Sergeant Howie doesn't realize, is just how he looks to the pagans. Think of it if the roles were reversed and a pagan from some far away land was trying to get by in a Christian community. He is pushing his beliefs on everyone he meets and demands they all bend to his worldview. At every step, he demeans and attacks the people he comes across as having such a backward view, but he never once considers that he might be overbearing and pushy, and that he might be wrong about some things. The pagans didn't seem so intent in trying to change Howie, but to defend their beliefs, whereas Howie would like it if every single person there convert to his own religion, and to pray to what he says in the one true god.

In the end, is it so bad to be different? What are the differences between the prayers of a pagan and a Christian? For both is it not good intentions and meditation? Meditating is scientifically proven to work, when we think good thoughts, good things happen. And by the end of the movie, the townspeople all get together to have good intentions for the upcoming harvest, and they get together around a big fire to pray together and roast marshmallows. I'm... kidding about the last bit, but I'll leave you to watch the movie to find out what happens.

But, this is important, while my defense of the pagans stops at the word roast, our knowledge of the Celtic pagan human sacrifice ritual comes from a single sentence by Julius Caesar who references an early writer who may have written about the pagans in bad faith, no pun intended, and actual evidence of these sacrifices is actually slim to nil. We really don't know if they actually sacrificed humans or not. What we do know, is that throughout history thousands and thousands of pagans were in fact burned alive for their beliefs, so there's that.

To summarize, the Celtic pagans may have burned people based on flimsy evidence, however over 100,000 pagans themselves were burned alive based on strong evidence. So if you take out the actual wicker man, were the pagans on Sumerisle really that that bad?