Episode 20: The Wicker Man Script and Show Notes
My notes on Episode 20, followed by the script.
-parody
-bainbridge island
-women instead of of men running the island and greeting him
-must be ladies’ night
-lol this is washington
-the women weren’t going all crazy
-matriarchal society
-usually a MAN
-trap the bird to see how long HE can stand it
-man nothin better than a whole island conspiring to mindfuck a cop
-repeated lines from the first make this an excellent double feature
-men not allowed to talk
-exhume the body if one exists
-pagans migrating forms alem
-we love our men we’re just not subservient to them
-they’re important -- breeding you know
-angry man!
-reinterpretation
-explain the plot
-the place this fails is when they are too explicit about what his purpose is
-”bitches”
Well at the end of the last episode that I did on face off with my very good friend Juul I was too distracted by how much fun I was having talking to Joel about what a ridiculous film that is. To pick the next film. So I went to Twitter and I made a poll. The options were Lord of war. Bringing out the dead, national treasure two, and Wicker man…
The results of the poll We're very close. Lord of war had 20% bringing up the dead had 26.7%. National treasure to had 23.3% but the winner was Wicker man at 30%…
Obviously I made the poll I chose these four. And part of me knew that Wicker man was going to win. And the reason I included Wicker man the reason I knew it was going to win is because it's maybe the most infamous cage movie in the age of memes.
A lot of the episodes of this podcast have me talking about how. as someone who did not grow up watching cage movies and as someone whose major exposure to cage has been the internet. it's very shocking to me how often the movies are not well-represented by their means.
the means have done a great disservice to a lot of cages oeuvre. the big takeaway from that is about internet literacy in general, which can probably be mapped onto a lot of other problems that we have with, critical thinking and critical reading and just general knowledge acquisition. By only reading the headline or just looking at memes and drawing your uninformed conclusions from there.
I try to consume media critically and I attempt to never take anything at face value, but I’m reminded time and again through this podcast that my preconceived notions regarding Nic Cage have all been influenced by the internet’s fascination with him, and that oftentimes those influences are not only uncharitable but oftentimes completely wrong.
Now, another reason I was reluctant to watch Wicker man is because I was not excited about what I thought would be a really grossly violent movie. I like violent movies a lot, don’t get me wrong -- but the violence for me needs to be aesthetically interesting and dare I say beautiful, not gratuitous, and not the type that makes me wince in real life. The reason I expected Wicker Man to be the gross type of violence is because of the scene to which I am obviously alluding. I, like everyone else with a pulse online, have seen the “not the bees!” scene memed a zillion times, and presented as evidence for not only this movie being terrible but also for Cage being terrible. I had gone to youtube to watch the scene in its entirety, and just before the basket of bees is placed on the character’s head, the cultists break cage’s legs using a big hammer and some choicely laid pieces of wood -- think the ankle-breaking scene in Misery. This part disturbs me probably more than most people -- maybe because I’ve had bad knee injuries in the past, I dunno -- but I get really grossed out by bones breaking like that. So my knowledge of this movie was thus: not the bees makes it look ridiculous; there’s a gross bone-breaking part; it’s a remake of the 1973 Wicker Man movie which I hadn’t seen, but assume to be very grossly violent, because Midsommar, the 2019 folk horror movie which is obviously in conversation with the 1973 Wicker Man movie, has a lot of second-hand-pain-inducing scenes. I know I’m making a lot of assumptions here and that’s my point -- these assumptions really limited my viewpoint and were all ultimately proved wrong! Almost like assuming based on internet trends and such is a bad idea… especially when it’s about things more important than movies… but I digress.
Knowing that I was making a lot of assumptions about the 2006 Wicker Man movie, I hummed and hawed about first watching the original Wicker man. Before watching the 1973 Wicker man, I thought that you know there's there's probably benefits to going in completely blind to the 2006 Nick cage version, but there are probably also benefits to watching the original. I joked with my friend that I would just watch the video for burn the witch by Radiohead instead, but in the end I decided to watch the original Wickerman movie. And friends I am so glad I did. Because that's another movie that I had preconceived notions about that were mostly wrong. That movie is incredible. I was really expecting. a hokey, B movie type of exploitation film filled with Shock and awe, again, because I assumed that Midsommar was modelling a lot of itself on the type of movie I thought the 1973 Wicker Man must be. This isn’t true. By the way, the video for Burn The Witch by Radiohead has very few similarities to the movie too.
The original Wicker Man, as I said, from 1973, stars Christopher Lee, in what Christopher Lee later went on to say is his best role and his best movie. I always kind of thought that that was tongue in cheek but I totally understand where he's coming from now. He reportedly did the movie for free because he thought it was so awesome and knew that the studio couldn’t afford him.
If you haven’t seen it, I urge you to. It’s creepy and sometimes gross, but it’s not gory or shock-y, and not schlocky, either. After watching it, I understood that Hot Fuzz is a parody of Wicker Man in a lot of ways. And if you’re a fan of Scarfolk or other weird British Isles folk horror stuff, you need to see the 1973 Wicker Man. Though I’m probably the only person who was a huge fan of Scarfolk and the like and hadn’t yet seen Wicker Man. Anyway.
I loved this movie instantly, and I was talking to some friends about how I was doing this Wicker man double feature because I'm podcasting on the 2006 Nick cage Wicker Man. A friend of mine said that they will never forgive the studio and the marketing company or whatever for marketing the 2006 Wicker man as a remake of the 1973 rather than as a parody of the 1973 movie. I’d never heard this take before, and I'm so glad that my friend said this to me. Because it made me go into the 2006 movie with a different perspective.
Friends, I know why you picked this movie. I know why you wanted me to do an episode about this movie. You wanted me to tear this movie apart. You wanted me to talk about how shitty it is, and how over-the-top Cage is, and how stupid it is that they even made the movie in the first place.
I went into the 2006 Wicker Man, having just finished the 1973 Wicker Man, and under the suggestion that this movie is a parody and not a a remake, and I’m here to tell you that I enjoyed the 2006 Wicker Man. There. I said it. If you’ve seen the 2006 version and you hated it, I invite you to watch it as a double feature with the 1973 one and look at it with new eyes and an open mind to it as a parody, not as an attempt at a remake. And see if you can enjoy it more. And I’ll be explicit here about why I think it deserves that. I want to really hammer -- pun intended -- on something right from the outset of what is assuredly just going to be a rant of me defending this movie. And that is the aforementioned “not the bees” scene -- the scene that has turned this film into a joke on the internet, and, I argue, irreparably damaged Cage’s career in the public eye -- especially the eye that know him not as much from his movies but from memes.
When you picked this movie in the poll and before I watched it, I was like well I know at least I know what the thumbnail for this episode will be -- that meme of Cage’s character with the basket of bees on his head, screaming. I also knew that I would obviously be sampling that audio bit during the episode. Perhaps repeatedly, especially because I was worried there wouldn’t be much to talk about if the movie sucked as much as everyone says it did.
Some other episodes of this podcast have been spoiler-free, because I know that some of you listen to the episodes and then decide if you’d like to watch the movie. This episode will not be spoiler-free. And in fact, this episode has a spoiler that is in and of itself an anti-spoiler. Because here’s the astonishing, bewildering thing that I discovered about this movie.
THE NOT THE BEES SCENE IS NOT EVEN IN THE FILM.
YOU ALL LIED TO ME. YOU ALL LIED TO THE INTERNET. YOU DISPARAGED MY BOY’S NAME. AND FOR WHAT?
Let me explain, for those of you who haven’t seen it. Those of you who have seen it: I am so disappointed in you.
Just like the 1973 movie, Wicker Man 2006 ends with the police officer being put into the wicker man and burned alive in a ritualistic sacrifice. The sacrifice is necessary, according to the inhabitants of the island in each movie, because the island’s crops the previous year had failed. In the 1973 movie, the crop is apples; in the 2006 movie, the crop is honey -- hence the bees. The not the bees scene happens immediately before the wicker man scene -- Cage’s character is subdued with bee stings, because he is allergic to bees and would thus go into shock (a detail that by itself makes the scene slightly less ridiculous in my opinion but nevertheless). As I mentioned, his legs are broken before the bee basket part.
When it came time for the islanders to put Cage’s character into the wicker man, the audio of them breaking his legs plays over a visual of them processing toward the wicker man. I was confused but relieved as it meant I didn’t have to watch his legs get broken. But then I realized that the bee basket was just… cut. It didn’t exist. The next scene, he’s in the wicker man and burning. I obviously paused it and took to the internet. Did they release a new version because everyone ridiculed the scene so much?
No. The theatrical version of this movie, the DVD version of this movie, the HBO version of this movie, NEVER HAD THE NOT THE BEES SCENE. It was deleted. It appears on the dvd and someone uploaded it to the internet.
This is like someone taking a part of a blog post that I thought better of, or a part of a podcast I recorded and regretted and didn’t want anyone to hear, and deleted, and putting it on the internet, and then everyone making that go viral and making it become emblematic of me, and everything I create.
Can’t a director decide that a part is too silly for the theatrical version? And can’t, out of the goodness of their heart, they include it as a funny extra on the DVD? No. Because it means that people will take it completely out of context, assume that it’s representative of the whole movie, and the whole actor!!! God. I’m angry!! I’m ashamed I let the deceitful internet machine make me think ill of this movie and this actor whom I have come to adore. It’s almost like he was made a scapegoat and burned alive in a sacrifice for our own satisfaction or something. Anyway.
Now that you all understand the peripeteia I experienced at the end of the 2006 Wicker Man, I want to say that I was enjoying the movie even before this shock. Again, this is largely because I was looking at it as a parody. By the way, the fact that Nic Cage was cast should have been an indication that this movie was a parody, but I won’t dwell on that now. The movie is interesting in its own right, too. I’ll point out some differences between it and the 1973 version:
The 2006 Wicker Man reimagines the story in the pacific northwest of the United States instead of the fictional scottish isle in the 1973 version. By reimagining it in the US, it’s already, in a lot of ways, a joke. I’m asking you to be in on the joke instead of laughing at the joke -- which really is a good tagline for Cage’s career in general, as I’ve said in previous episodes. So instead of Summer Isle in the UK, we have Summersile off the coast of Seattle. Now, I’ve been to Bainbridge Island, twice, which is a large island off the coast of Seattle. The fictional Summersile would be much smaller, but it still has a lot in common with Bainbridge Island. I went to Bainbridge Island to visit my friend’s mom’s hippy commune. Sound familiar? My friend’s mom and her lesbian partner run a paganish women-focused commune on Bainbridge Island where travellers can stay in yurts, participate in ritualistic bonfires, crying ceremonies, and contribute their menstrual blood to the compost heap. I’ve been twice, and it’s a wonderful place in a beautiful forest, exactly like the one in the movie. Needless to say, I didn’t think what was happening on Summersile was far-fetched. Not only because of my own experience on Bainbridge Island, but also because, having just watched the 1973 version, it was clear that the director was mirroring scenes from the 1973 movie but turning them on their head by making it a matriarchal society. The women Cage’s police officer character encounters are the ones in charge. They occupy the pub exclusively, making Cage’s character wonder if it’s ladies night. There’s a brief shot where two men are told to get out so that other women can sit down, which is the beginning of making us understand that this is not only a matriarchal society, but that men are second-class citizens, as Cage’s character later accuses. But if you had watched the 1973 version, you have to remind yourself that everything everyone on this island is doing is a show with one audience member. The way the men can’t even look Cage’s character in the eye because they’re so subservient is all an orchestration to help trick him into thinking that this is a place where a little girl has gone missing for evil reasons. The cleverness of the 1973 and 2006 versions is that these are stories about a whole island conspiring to completely mindfuck a cop. The way the 1973 version does it is more effective, in my opinion, because I felt that the added layers of the missing girl being Cage’s character’s daughter, and the PTSD flashbacks to the accident he witnessed at the beginning of the movie, were added to make the movie more jump-scarey and sensational. But at the core of each of these movies is an interesting unreliability, where the characters cannot be trusted, even while they’re telling you not to trust them. You at once want to root for and against the protagonist -- because he’s a cop and fuck cops but also because the narrative forces you to wonder at what’s really going on. He’s lied to, but he’s also given chances to save himself, which he ignores because of his own sense of authority, not only as a cop but also as a man. Some women of the island purposely play on his desire to be their saviour by appearing helpless; others attempt to anger him and thus make him make bad decisions by deliberately trying to make him feel threatened in his masculinity. These aspects are missing from the 1973 movie, and in the 2006 version they are interesting but perhaps not handled in the best way and thus miss the chance to truly be a fun and subversive look at gender politics, and even a look at the definition of that term.
But another cool thing about this movie, for me specifically, is why the matriarchal society exists. The leader of the island, Sister Summersile, played by the incredible Ellen Burstyn, explains to Cage’s character that her ancestors wound up on the island because they escaped the Salem witch trials of the late 17th-century. If you don’t know, my dissertation research is about narratives of the Salem witch trials -- specifically about representations of masculinity in those narratives -- so this was a neat surprise. Anyway, being pagans, and seeing what was happening to those who were accused as “witches,” they fled and ended up as far west as they could possibly get. Thus they continue to practice their pagan religion. Sister Summersile also explains that the colony (she uses the word on purpose to link it to the bees) quote “love their men -- they’re just not subservient to them.” I think she’s being truthful here -- as I said, I believe that the way the men behave around Cage’s character is all in service of the ruse. My reasoning for this is that at the end of the film, the men join in the ritualistic sacrifice in a way that makes them seem equal. I also think that part of the way the ruse works is that Cage’s character knows nothing about pagan beliefs, which don’t place any gender above any other. I’m not saying it’s impossible for the colony to be quote unquote bad pagans, I’m just saying it’s not likely in the narrative, especially when compared to the way the 1973 movie’s islanders dupe their own cop. The islanders go far to make Cage’s character believe that men are unwelcome at best. The classroom scene, which is almost line for line from the 1973 version, includes a trapped bird the schoolgirls are torturing, that they take great care to refer to as “him.” The maypole, which in the 1973 version is completed by the schoolboys, is already completed, but male children are never seen -- the implication, Cage’s character reveals to believe later, being that male children are killed. And the schoolteacher aggressively accuses Cage’s character of being quixotic, which she defines for him as being a pursuer of lofty or impractical ideals, and then loudly adds “usually a man.” This character contrasts with Cage’s character’s ex-fiancee, Willow, who wrote him the letter asking him to come to the island to find her missing daughter. In the 1973 movie, the letter to the police officer is anonymous; adding the level of intimacy in the 2006 movie makes it maybe more cruel, but I can’t say I really think it’s necessary or very effective. Maybe I have to think about it more. But this level of connection that Cage’s character has to the island by being Willow’s ex, and then finding out that he’s allegedly the father of the missing girl, is the major departure from the 1973 version, and is the reasoning behind the aforementioned mechanics of jump-scares and other cliches I thought the movie could do without.
I’ll comment too on another often-memed part of the movie, which is when Cage punches a woman while wearing a bear suit. This is lifted completely from the 1973 movie -- the cop character disgusiing himself to join the ritual so that he can find the sacrifice, who he knows will be the missing girl, and clockign the person nearest the girl, then saving her, only to be led by the girl to his own doom. In the 1973 movie, it’s not played for laughs; he doesn’t punch a woman; and he’s not wearing a bear suit but a Punch suit, as in, Punch and Judy suit. The fact that the scene is funny in the 2006 version is another clue that this movie is a parody. I’d go as far as saying that this movie understands that it’s a parody of remakes generally. A 1973 folk horror movie about a scottish island remade in modern-day AMERICUH is a comment on the nostalgia industrial complex. Right around when this movie came out, we saw the beginning of the Hollywood remakes that have become so ubiquitous, you don’t even think of them as remakes anymore. Stranger Things and Ready Player One and so many other properties exist because big media knows you love nostalgia, and you love talking about how wrong they got your favourite childhood memories even more than you like talking about how got them right. Wicker Man 2006 is absurd, and ridiculous. Christopher Lee himself wondered why they’d ever make a remake of Wicker Man. My argument is that that’s exactly why they did. The absurdity of it is the point.
I’m not saying that this was an entirely successful parody. THere are things that this movie fails at, certainly. I hated how explicitly they explained the big reveal at the end, but I assume they were forced to do that because any nuance in movies these days has to have its legs broken with a big hammer. I also disliked the weird hive mother scene with Ellen Burstyn and her ladies in waiting, because Cage’s character wasn’t present for that part, so their acting like that muddied the message of artiface that I argue the rest of the movie has.
And if you’re wondering, by the way, why I keep saying Cage’s character, it’s because I didn’t catch his name at all during the movie, and when I went to record this, I looked it up, but, upon reading it, wanted to save it for the end. As a final argument for why I think this movie is doing more than the internet gives it credit for. In the 1973 movie, the cop is named Sargeant Neil Howie. Names are important in both movies, as the inhabitants of the island have names that are related to earth -- Holly, Rowan, Willow, etc. At one point, Howie points out that some deceased islanders had biblical names, and the record-keeper explains that this is because they were very old and their names are relics of christianity that no longer occupies the island. In the 2006 version, Cage’s character also points out that all of the islanders have names that are nature-related, including his ex-fiancee Willow and their daughter Rowan. By the way, the pub in the 1973 version is the Green Man, referring to the ancient pagan representation of rebirth, while in the 2006 version, the pub name isn’t given, but the sign briefly shown depicts women naked dancing in a circle.
Anyway, I looked up the name of this character, thinking it would be inconsequential -- much more important is that he’s a cop and all cops are bastards. Well, Cage’s character’s name is Edward Malus. I was surprised that the name was much more interesting than I thought it would be, and then again admonished myself for making an assumption about the movie -- hadn’t I learned yet? Malus is the latin word for bad, unpleasant, pain, injurious etc. from which the French word “mal” is derived. It’s also related to the word Malleus which, guess what, means hammer or, if you will, mallet. How do I know that? The Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, was the 15th century treatise on witchcraft that gave rise to what we call the witch hunts in Europe, which in turn influenced what happened in Salem in the 17th century. Part of my dissertation is about how we misremember Salem because of how the Salem witch trials have been conflated with European witch hunts, but I digress. But you know what else a malus is? A genus of apple. Like the crop around which the 1973 Wicker Man revolved.
Finally, to comment a bit on Cage’s performance: it’s great. It’s exactly what it needs to be, he is pitch-perfect being pushed to his limit and well cast. The way he plays the cop as being a lot more “Are you kidding me???” and laughing incredulously than the 1973 character is, I argue, even more proof that this is a parody, not a remake. And, listeners of the podcast will understand why I’m saying this, I thought he was pretty damn handsome in this one. Go figure.
Alright, I hope I’ve successfully rattled a few cages with what is surely a reading of this movie you didn’t expect. Remember to follow on social media, @rattlingcagepod on instagram and twitter, and support the podcast if you like by going to ko-fi.com/diezyn. Thanks for listening, and tune in next time when I talk about The Family Man.