The Wicker Man · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Somewhere in the bare Galloway woods in October 1972, the crew is wiring artificial leaves and blossoms onto naked branches. The story is set at May Day; the trees won't cooperate; so spring is faked, flower by flower, onto a Scottish autumn. You can take that as a production footnote or as the film's whole method. Everything green and fertile on Summerisle is manufactured. The island sings its springtime into being, and so does the film.

Start with what Sergeant Howie does, because for most of the runtime he is doing the most ordinary thing a movie character can do: he perceives a situation and acts to change it. A girl is missing. He flies in, asks questions, follows clues, presses witnesses. Deleuze calls this the movement-image, and its purest engine the action-image: a situation calls for a deed, the deed answers it, order is restored. Howie is built for exactly this — the large-form variant, where a whole encompassing milieu (the island, its denials, its failed harvest) presses on a man until he must act decisively. The detective is the action-hero's brainy cousin.

But the detective film, Deleuze noticed thinking of Hitchcock, is really something subtler: the relation-image. Here meaning lives not in the deed but in relations the viewer holds in mind. We watch Howie read objects the way we've been trained to read them — what Deleuze calls a mark: a thing meaningful by its customary chain. A photograph of the harvest queen, conspicuously gone from the wall. A grave with no record. When you see X, expect Y. Howie reads each clue as the index of a concealed crime, because that is what clues mean, and we read alongside him, nodding.

The island answers with demarks — anomalies that snap the customary chain. The girl who "never existed." Adults who smile and contradict each other without anxiety. A schoolroom where the teacher explains the maypole as a phallus the way another teacher explains long division. Each demark forces interpretation, and Howie, the good Protestant rationalist, interprets in the only direction his world allows: cover-up, murder, a body to be found. He cannot conceive that the chain itself has been authored against him.

This is where the film stops being a thriller and becomes, in Deleuze's late vocabulary, a machine for the powers of the false. The contract of the detective story — and behind it the older contract Bazin named, that the camera doesn't lie, that clues lead to truth — is exactly what Summerisle weaponizes. The islanders are forgers. Lord Summerisle's grandfather forged a religion to motivate his laborers; the island now forges a missing girl, a false crime, a false investigation, to lure the one ingredient the harvest needs: a king, a fool, a virgin, a man who comes of his own free will. Deleuze's forger doesn't lie inside a true world; he produces the true and the false together and makes them undecidable. Rowan both exists and doesn't. The investigation is real and is a script. By the time Howie tears the fool's mask off in the May Day procession to "save" her, we learn there was never anything to save — only roles, into one of which he has walked.

Watch what the pageant is doing formally. The maypole, the sword dance, the hobby-horse, the animal masks, Punch the fool — these don't advance the plot by anyone acting. They figure. Deleuze would call the procession a gest: ceremonial bodies carrying a whole social and theological relation in their posture, theatre that exposes its own staging. And the songs do the heavy lifting dialogue usually does. "Corn Rigs," "Willow's Song," the Maypole Song — almost all diegetic, sung by the islanders themselves. This is fabulation in the strict sense: a people caught in the act of legending itself, singing its theology into existence rather than stating it. The community doesn't have a belief; it performs one continuously, and the performance is load-bearing.

Here is the cruelty of Hardy and Waxman's great formal choice. No Gothic shadow. Summerisle is shot in flat, bright, touristic daylight, green and pastoral, the horror conducted in good weather and open air. Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan's Claw had already moved cruelty out of the crypt and into the sunlit field; Peeping Tom had already locked a viewer into a banal, well-lit perspective the film would betray. The Wicker Man inherits all of it and perfects the betrayal. Nothing is hidden — and that is the trap. We keep waiting for the menace to declare itself in darkness, the way menace is supposed to, and it never does, because it has been smiling at us in the sun the whole time. The last image obeys the same logic: the effigy burning against a genuinely beautiful coastal sunset, murder framed as a postcard.

What did the film do to its art? It proved that horror's deepest resource isn't concealment but the readable surface that has been authored against you — the relation-image turned predatory, the powers of the false dressed as folk song. Shaffer's trick architecture (the same machinery as his Sleuth) and Don't Look Now's withheld reveal are its siblings; but it was The Wicker Man that founded folk horror's grammar: the cult-as-organic-society, the song that is also a snare, the daylight that hides nothing because it doesn't need to. Watch it again knowing the ending. Every smiling islander is already telling you the truth. That's the horror — they never lied. They just sang you a spring that was wired on.