Headscratchers / The Wicker Man (1973)

• Why does Willow dance naked? Not that I'm complaining - it's Britt Ekland, for God’s sake - but Howie can't see her, so it really doesn't help her goal of seducing him. (As for why he is so affected merely by hearing her sing and slap the wall, I'll let that go since he's a middle-aged virgin.)
  • There is an argument to be made for her making the seduction not just psychological but magical (from her perspective at least), an act of witchcraft, which in some neopagan circles is meant to be done skyclad (naked). Or she's just a nymphomaniac.
  • Possibly she's in the habit of sleeping in the nuddie. After all, Summerisle is a place where people visit the graves of their loved ones without putting their trousers on...
  • In the longer version of that sequence, it is intercut with Lord Summerisle reciting a poem to the audience more or less first-person. It is a trippy and surreal, and should be judged accordingly.
  • The ritualism angle suggested above seems about right. I'd add that if she'd managed to tempt him as far as her bedroom, actually seeing her naked would probably break down any resistance he might have left.
  • It could also be that this is simply Howie's imagining her dancing nude.
  • The extended cut makes it a bit clearer that Willow's role is the island seductress. Lord Summerisle appears much earlier, bringing her a teenage boy who is to lose his virginity to her. The additional scenes show her as one of the few people on the island who's nice to Howie, so it looks like part of her job is to try and seduce him - which is a sign of his purity when he resists the temptation. Summerisle says as much before the sacrifice.
  • I'm not quite sure why Willow is attempting to seduce Howie in the first place, because if he gives in, it proves he's not as suitable of a sacrifice as the people on the island are hoping for, but I guess that's the point; It's sort of a final test. If Howie did give in an open the door, then he would have seen her which is the point. Not to mention, Willow is seen not just slapping the wall but also herself, as if to signal to Howie that she is actually serious.
• Howie says that Lord Summerisle will be the only suitable sacrifice next year if Howie's sacrifice fails. Howie was a suitable sacrifice because he was a virgin, a fool (for coming to the island), and a king (or at least a police officer). In Lord Summerisle's case, I can see how he would be thought a fool (if Howie's sacrifice failed) and a king (or at least a Lord), but is he a virgin? Doesn't seem like his pagan religion would encourage that. And how would Howie know if he was? And even if so, since Lord Summerisle knows the ritual is coming up and doesn't have any religious hang-ups, couldn't he just, ahem ahem, make himself ineligible before Wicker Man time rolls around?
  • It's just that, while Summerisle isn't a virgin, he's the most powerful and influential person on the island. The power of your sacrifice, as I understand it, is about the value of what you're giving up. Summerisle has more value that anyone else in the village and sacrificing him would have the most signifigance.
  • It is explained in the movie that the order of sacrifices is as follows = Animal, a Human Virgin/Fool and the King. If Howie's sacrifice fails (as the sacrifice of an animal did last year) then the next step is Lord Summerisle as he is the equivalent of the king of the island. It’s never said that the King has to be a virgin (which in most pre-Christian societies he won't be, btw) or a fool of course. Also Howie wasn't a King but was there in the name of the King (or rather, Queen) which was one of the requirements aside from virgin and fool (obviously a police officer in a Constitutional Monarchy is, effectively, a servant of the monarch).
• Why doesn't he just kick the door down? It's made of branches. He's bound to get captured right after, but at least he won't be burned to death (for now).
  • I think at that point he realized the hopelessness of the situation. Even if he got out of the Wicker Man, he was surrounded by the entire population of the island, all of whom wanted him to stay in there.
    • Plus, let's say he escaped and the Wicker Man burned without him. Yeah, he'd be saved from being sacrificed, but the villagers probably would have killed him out of pure spite for (in their minds) dooming their harvest.
  • Have you ever sat in a wicker chair? It's stronger than people think it is.
    • When Howie first realises everything was a lie, there are a couple of reaction POV shots of him looking down at a rocky cliff surrounded by the ocean, even if he did escape the wicker man he would either be caught again, jump to his death, or if he somehow managed to escape and outrun the villagers, his plane is still broken so it would take him a week to row back to the mainland (presumably he wouldn't have food or water with him in his hurried an panicked state and would have died rowing back). Even if he did somehow manage to survive and get back to the mainland, it would have meant that someone else (presumably Rowan or Summerisle) would have died in his place.
• Could somebody more familiar with Scotland's legal system tell me just how big of a Jerkass Howie was being? Every time he tried to do anything the villagers would tell him he needed Lord Summerisle's permission, and every time, save for exhuming the body, he said that he didn't, since he was a policeman. I got the impression, given his general behavior, that at least some of the time he was wrong, or at least needed a warrant or something. Did he?
  • This Troper personally saw the movie as having something of an intentional Black-and-Grey Morality. The pagans clearly aren't in the right, what with the Human Sacrifice and all, but it's not afraid of showing the moral ambiguity of the religious protagonist.
  • Once he got there, he became increasingly disturbed by the behaviour of the locals, and he probably had to wonder what kind of society Lord Summerisle was fostering. Since nobody on the island (even Summerisle) was above suspicion, he probably wanted to play things close to the chest as long as he could. For all we know he had a warrant to be there (since the whole island was technically private property). At the very least, he was aware that warrants might have to be used, such as when he asked the teacher for the school registry, and she refused. He threatened to come back with a warrant, and she relented.
• I'm curious, does Lord Summerisle actually believe in his pagan religion or not? He knows full well that it was cooked up by his Victorian scientist grandfather, apparently as a way to keep the islanders under control. I can see why he'd pay along in public to retain his status as Priest-King of the island, but why does he seem to keep slipping in and out of belief when he's talking privately to Howie?
  • He grew up with paganism. Our culture and upbringing influences how we act whether we believe in it or not.
  • He believes strongly enough to set up the ritual murder of a human being; the attitude he takes with Howie may be deliberate misdirection. The whole plan hinges on keeping Howie engaged in the search for Rowan Morrison until the time is right. Convincing Howie that he's fallen among madmen would likely make him try to call for reinforcements; even if his plane and radio have already been sabotaged by the time of his meeting with Lord Summerisle, the Islanders want Howie to come to his own death of his own (misinformed) free will, not to run and hide or come out fighting. As to whether Lord Summerisle believes sufficiently strongly to go willingly to the sacrifice himself, as Howie tells him he must when the crops fail again, well, that is quite another matter.
• So does their whole sacrifice method actually work? I guess it must, since they keep doing it.
  • No. The Aztecs kept cutting people's hearts and throwing them down stairs, it doesn't mean it did anything.
  • In any case, they don't "keep doing it" (at least, not the wicker man part) - this is the first time their crops have failed.
  • Consider the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc - believing erroneously that since X happened after Y, X must have been caused by Y - and B.F. Skinner's "Superstition In The Pigeon". Our brains try to find patterns in the world that we can exploit; sometimes, this neural mechanism seizes on something that isn't a pattern but looks like a pattern, and convices gamblers (and serial seducers) to wear "lucky" underpants, cargo cults to build non-functional replicas of air traffic control towers, or cultures to murder people because it brings a good harvest, victory in war, an end to a plague, or whatever else seems important.
• Why does Willow try to seduce Howie? Wouldn't the sacrifice be all-the-more likely to work if his virginity remains intact?
  • Perhaps it was a Secret Test of Character. If he hopped over to her room for a quickie, he probably wasn't "pure" enough for the harvest.
    • Isn't this the great irony? He would have saved himself if he had given into temptation.
  • Or, if she on any level feels bad about what they're doing, it could be a way to placate her guilt. Okay, she offered him an escape route and he didn't take it, her hands are clean. And if he had come into her room she'd have justified it to herself with the above 'Well, obviously he wasn't pure enough after all' train of thought.
  • Maybe Willow just couldn't resist trying to seduce someone she wasn't supposed to. Their religion doesn't exactly preach sexual restraint, after all.
  • Most likely it was a test. The only way they have to know for sure a male is virgin is if he resisted this kind of temptation.
• How did they know Howie was a virgin? Surely, they didn't send a tip to the police station in hopes that the one virgin cop in all of the UK would come over. There was a deleted scene that holds the possibility of the pagans having a plant in the department. Since the island was so closed-off, that seems unlikely. Not only that but how did they assume they would find a virgin cop once they got the plant?
  • Perhaps they just lucked out in this regard. They needed somebody who fit the other categories of a sacrifice (authority of a king, can be made into a fool, etc.) and ran with it when he turned out to be a virgin too.
  • Presumably there was some kind of oracle/prophecy stating that if they set up precisely this situation, the gods would send them a suitable sacrifice. Meaning that the magic was Real After All.
• Yeah, but when did the islanders ever actually find that out, if not secretly before he arrived? He didn't tell them.
  • They make it clear at the end that they made sure that it was Howie specifically who came to the island. Summerisle makes it sound like someone left the island and did a lot of work finding a suitable candidate, so, while they can't be certain about his sex life, they can be certain that he's A: unmarried and B: devoutly religious, so it's a pretty safe bet that he's also a virgin.
  • It seems that Willow's attempted seduction was in fact a test to see if he was as devout as he appeared to be, and thus a virgin.
    • The morning after Willow's failed seduction, she remarks that she thought he was going to come and see her the previous night; Howie replies that he doesn't believe in sex before marriage. Presumably, a delighted Willow passed this information on.
• If the pagan religion is not true, then how DO they grow apples on the island? The climate in the Hebrides really shouldn't be suitable.
  • "The unique combination of volcanic soil and the warm gulf stream." Even Summerisle himself does not claim that paganism is solely responsible (or even responsible at all) for the island's fecundity.
• Is it just me, or did the fact that the villagers sabotaged Howie's plane derail the entire plot of the film? Every other part of the movie showed Howie going willingly to his doom because of the villagers manipulating him, and the sacrifice speech tells us that that was what was going on... but then they prevent him from leaving the island, going completely against that.
  • As I recall, when Howie discovers the villagers jacked up his plane, the dockmaster (or just a fellow on the docks perhaps) pretty bluntly tells him he could get someone to ROW him to civilization, but that it'll take quite some time for Howie to get to his superiors and get back-up; in Howie's mind that's leaving a little girl to die at that point, and he stays around and starts his search.
• I have seen and eaten purple potatoes (which can be that colour in the natural state), red corn and carrots of every colour from white to purple. But whatever would you have to do to broad/fava beans to make them turn turquoise?
  • Can them, and leave them soaking in sugary water for a long time. Howie is, in a rare show of dry humour, pointing out that he knows the supposedly fresh produce - on an Island famed for its ability to grow crops - in fact came out of a tin. (It's also another clue that last season's harvest failed.)
  • They could have boiled them in water from red cabbage, which is how one dyes blue Easter eggs. Or there's varieties of anellino beans that closely resemble broad beans and are naturally bright greeny-blue.
  • Cheap processed and tinned food, especially in 70s Britain, sometimes had artificial colouring added to compensate for the loss of natural ones despite not looking remotely realistic. It's a lot less common now, but you still see it sometimes such as with mushy peas in British chip shops.
• Lord Summerisle says by killing Howie, he's granting him a martyr's death, since Howie's a Christian. I'm not a Christian, so I don't know for sure, but aren't the requirements for martyrdom a little more specific than, "must be a Christian when you die?" Even if Summerisle doesn't know the ins and outs of Christian martyrdom, Howie most likely does and draws comfort from the thought of being martyred in the book. Am I missing something?
  • You're considered a martyr if someone kills you because of your faith. Howie was considered an acceptable sacrifice in part because of his faith (his virginity is a direct result of his religious beliefs), and he goes to his doom strongly testifying of his belief in Christ. So yes, he fits the basic definition of a Christian martyr.
• So we know that the islanders sacrificed an animal last year to improve the harvest. We know that that didn't work, so they are planning to sacrifice Howie (because he's a virgin, a fool, and a "king") this year to improve them. We also find out that, if that still doesn't work, they'll sacrifice Lord Summerisle because he's their leader. Assuming that doesn't improve their harvests either, what happens after that?
  • Presumably their belief system collapses and the community falls apart.

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