Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Wicker Man
1973 · Robin Hardy · The Wicker Man on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how brightly everything on the island is lit. (light)
Waxman shoots Summerisle in flat, touristic daylight, green and pastoral, with no Gothic shadow anywhere in it. The unsettling business happens outdoors in good weather.
Payoff: You keep waiting for the menace to arrive in darkness. It stays out in the sun, in plain view.
Listen for who is singing and whether they are onscreen. (sound)
Giovanni's songs are performed by the islanders inside the scenes: the pub song, the maypole rhyme, the children's verses. There is almost no underscore in the film.
Payoff: The community is singing its theology into being, so the songs do the work dialogue would usually do. In the reading: fabulation / legending. The reading calls this fabulation: a people caught legending itself, performing a belief continuously rather than stating one.
Look at the masks, the maypole, and the gravestones. (setting)
The island is dressed in folk custom: animal masks, hobby-horse and sword dances, a Punch-like fool, pagan burials, a schoolroom teaching the maypole as botany.
Payoff: The design is the argument. Everything Howie is asking about is already on the walls and out in the fields.
Watch how rigid Howie stays in every conversation. (performance)
Woodward plays him prudish, brave, and genuinely devout, and he never once relaxes. The islanders meet his questions with cheerful evasion and provocation he has no way to answer.
Payoff: His faith is his dignity, and it is why he cannot bend to anyone in the room.
Watch the islanders contradict each other without getting nervous. (structure)
A photograph is gone from a wall. A grave has no record. A girl is said never to have existed. Nobody telling Howie these things seems the least bit worried.
Payoff: Nobody answers him straight, so you sort what he is told from what he sees. In the reading: demark. The reading calls these demarks: anomalies that break the chain you were reading by and force a fresh interpretation.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Everything here happens in daylight. Watch the smiling faces instead of waiting for something to come out of the dark.