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 also the handle the island takes hold of.
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: You read the clues the way he does, as a cover-up, because that is what clues are supposed to mean. In the reading: demark. The reading calls these demarks: anomalies that break the chain you were reading by and force a fresh interpretation.
Once you have seen it
Watch the investigation as a script the islanders wrote. (structure)
The anonymous tip, the evasions, the missing photograph, and the search all lead exactly where they were built to lead. The islanders know the plot from the first scene.
Payoff: Every answer he was given turns out to be true. Nobody on the island ever had to lie to him. In the reading: le faussaire / the forger. The reading calls them forgers: people who produce the true and the false together until the two cannot be separated.
Watch the May Day procession as a piece of theater. (staging)
The maypole, the sword dance, the hobby-horse, the animal masks, and the fool do not advance the plot by anyone acting. They stage an entire society in one moving line.
Payoff: The ceremony is where the island states its position, and it does that in costume instead of in argument.
Watch how reasonable Lee makes Lord Summerisle sound. (performance)
Lee plays him urbane, witty, and entirely persuasive, explaining his grandfather's invented religion as a practical matter of agriculture and morale.
Payoff: The charm is the mechanism. On a second viewing every courtesy he extends is part of the arrangement.
Watch for scenes you do not remember from another cut. (cutting)
British Lion shortened the film and the trims were lost, so what audiences first saw was not the intended shape. Later restorations of varying length were rebuilt from surviving prints.
Payoff: There is no single authoritative version, which is why fans argue about which cut you should be watching.
Carry this in: Everything here happens in daylight. Watch the smiling faces instead of waiting for something to come out of the dark.