The field goal attempt is good. The score is now Old Gods, 125, Hebrides Islanders, 2. The referee will be decapitated at end of the game for acknowledging the safety suffered by the Old Gods at the end of the first quarter.
The Old Gods will be penalized for playing an American game on Scottish soil.
The Wicker Man (1973) is a story about the dangers of religion, particularly those that clash. Policeman Neil Howie has to travel to Summerisle, located in the Hebrides, to follow up an investigation of a reported missing young girl. His arrival happens to coincide with an ancient ritual celebrating the Old, or Celtic, Gods, and Howie, a Christian with some strong beliefs of his own, is outraged to discover the islanders are following the Old Gods. Naked children perform rituals, adults are copulating in the fields, and all manner of old-fashioned Christian wickedness seems to be occurring. Even Howie’s position as a policeman seems to draw more amusement than respect.
And that investigation? It’s not going so well. Did the girl exist? Does she now? Is she now in trouble?
Feeling both frustrated at an investigation which runs into dead-ends and jokes at every turn, and a little fraught from the earthiness on display, Howie finally meets with Lord Summerisle in order to arrange an exhumation of a certain grave, a procedure which yields nothing but a dead rabbit. Angry at what he considers a crude joke, Howie learns of the upcoming ritual celebration wherein the islands wear full costumes for the celebration, and becomes certain, from certain remarks he overhears, that the missing girl will appear at the ritual.
And be sacrificed.
And so Howie goes down the rabbit hole, assaulting an islander and taking the man’s costume. Once he’s reached the ritual location, he’s right: little Rowan appears.
She’s not in trouble.
She’s just playing a role.
And Howie finds that, yes, there is a sacrifice to be made.
And the Wicker Man? He’ll be presiding.
It’s Howie’s stiff-necked belief that he’s superior to the islanders because of his Christianity that leads him to disaster. But the islanders themselves have a problem. They had turned back to the Old Gods long before when they had observed their Christian leaders could do nothing to save their crops, and had in fact left in a panic. A sacrifice to the Old Gods that fateful fall, and the next season the crops succeeded.
But now, decades later, the crops had failed; rather than sacrifice one of their own, Howie would fill the role. But Howie has one other important contribution: His shout to Lord Summerisle that he’ll be next when the crops fail again. And Summerisle’s rebuttal No he won’t! is, really, quite impotent.
They might. That is, sacrifice Lord Summerisle.
The Gods, Christian or otherwise, don’t walk among them, demonstrating their power and reassuring the islanders. The islanders can shout into the maelstrom invocations of power, they can try to bribe those inchoate powers which supposedly imbue all with life, with their mad little gifts.
But, in the end, chaos is chaos. Howie may win out, or Summerisle will dominate. But that only speaks to the limitations of humanity, the happenstance that is part of Nature.
And so the movie ends: dark with humanity’s failed vision, so failed that the islanders don’t even realize it. There are no winners, all are losers. All praise Whoever. Because such powers are egotists ….
Effective and surprising, it’s a neat little horror movie, appealing to honest motives and running into humanity’s inherent limitations. The inner animals emerge, to reveal their recognition that to survive, sometimes one must stop at nothing.
And that’s something to gnaw on.
