#ultimately still hold everyone under the domination of an unchallenged power structure

[thevividgreenmoss]

Like much folk horror, The Wicker Man first appears to be a rural exploitation story in which an urbanite stumbles across a backwater burg where society’s standardized pieties aren’t observed. But it twists into a story about how useful a naive scapegoat—the “fool,” as Howie is positioned by Summerisle—can be in keeping the pitchforks pointed down at the land and never up at the landowner. Whether Lee’s character buys into his folksy, back-to-the-land heresy is irrelevant. For all his rituals and ceremonies, he remains gentry. This is what governs his actions, and what seals Howie’s fiery fate.

In Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), a group of curious American millennials decamp to a remote Swedish hamlet for a highly Instagrammable solstice festival (think Maypoles, peasant dresses, flower crowns, and all the other summery, Coachella-chic accoutrements). In Wicker Man fashion, their arrival is more auspicious than it initially appears, as they end up embroiled in a conspiratorial pagan plot, unfolding against the ceaseless daylight of the Scandinavian mid-summer. Even before Midsommar, the ideas and imagery of The Wicker Man have sprouted up across the landscape of contemporary horror cinema, tapping into fears about manipulation, xenophobia, urban-rural divides, crowds gone mad, post-truth epistemology, and a lurking sense that personal agency is illusory, with the actions of the individual governed by forces that are (or are presented as being) beyond our ken.

In Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, Adam Scovell identifies isolation, landscape, skewed morality, and a happening/summoning (often in the form of ritual sacrifice) as the four links in the “folk horror chain.” In Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015), a family of seventeenth century Puritans banished from their New England village must carve out their place in a hostile, unforgiving landscape. Crops fail, family members disappear, livestock is unsettled, and adolescent girls fall prey to the hysterical throes of puberty. In Eggers’s film, it’s as if nature—that immortal “devil’s playground”—is avenging itself on the colonizers who came to tame it.

...In contrast to horror films that teach us to fear Satanists simply because they are Satanists (Rosemary’s Baby, The Mephisto Waltz, House of the Devil), The Wicker Man and its progeny force us to reckon with the deeper implications of the hooting-and-hollering heretic cabal. Folk horror may be best distinguished not by its mere depiction of Satanists, pagans, witches, buxom nudes wreathed in summer garlands, but by the manner in which they pose threats to our fundamental beliefs. Unlike most horror, in which an interloping monster is either destroyed (in order to purge a threat to an established order) or otherwise incorporated into that order, folk horror operates by implicating the viewer in the dissolution and destruction of that order.

...The first wave of folk horror crested during the waning of a vital counter-culture that had wholesale rejected long-held beliefs about social order, gender, sexuality, and imperialism. If 1968, the year Witchfinder General was released, marks the beginning of the folk horror cycle, it also marks the moment where utopian visions of social revolution were abandoning a politics of collective liberation and ceding to New Age philosophies of personal transformation. The genre’s development maps onto the what Scovell describes as “a backdrop of confident optimism disintegrating impossibly quickly into a nihilistic pessimism.” The films crack open the space between the promise of Paris 1968 and the repression of Kent State 1970, between the dream of Woodstock and the nightmare of Altamont, between The Beatles and Black Sabbath.

Folk horror’s original social context saw the energy animating the 1960s collectivist repudiation of traditional values fizzle and fade into the following decade’s interest in esotericism, astrology, and the occult. Some hippies who suspected that the existing social order could not be willed away with songs about peace and love reasoned that they could at least build their own Buckminster Fuller-style domes and settled into agricultural communes to experiment with pantheistic spiritualties.

...While The Wicker Man’s viewers are not exactly invited to cheer as Howie burns, the merry music and free love of the Summerislanders does seem more fun than the dour abstention of the film’s ostensible protagonist. Teenage daughter Tomasin’s entry into the forest at the end of The Witch is also treated with similar ambiguity. The witches’ coven is both a source of fear for the viewer and freedom for the character, who after accepting the enticing offer of a talking goat—“Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”—gets to literally fly away from her overbearing, repressive family.

The overlapping intention here is not mere proselytizing, or preaching the ethical superiority of some alternative, some hippy-dippy, left-liberal, or openly Satanic worldview. Indeed, some read the end of The Wicker Man as a defense of Howie’s beliefs (a reading encouraged by the rictus grinning Summerislanders who gaze upon his burning body, joined together to sing some sinister folk shanty). But finding horror in the space between opposing belief systems, rather than in the content of belief systems themselves, allows these films to appeal both to the permaculture-curious anarchist sporting a “Cops for Crops” back patch and the Christian viewer scared of the Beltane-observing freaks who hate their un-freedom.

A 1998 reappraisal of The Wicker Man in a Scottish broadsheet identified the shifting appeal of a film that, since its release, was regarded as little more than a relatively obscure Brit-film cult classic:

Now, as demonstrated by the enthusiastic remarks of a group of New Age twenty-somethings with Celtic tattoos (that’s Celtic with a hard C, folks) and faces full of ironmongery, The Wicker Man has become keenly appreciated not only by mainstream film buffs and horror hounds but by people who find it a vindication of their own mystical beliefs. It is as though a movie of The Diary of Anne Frank were to become a hit with Nazis, who’d come along to cheer the feel-good ending when the storm troopers haul the Frank family out of the attic.

It’s a sarcastic quip that probably seemed absurd at the time, invoking a comparison so far outside the sphere of consensus that it’s easy to brush off as a harmless joke. But it seems, like so many historical absurdities, considerably less funny now, as white supremacist attacks on synagogues and racially motivated murders regularly dominate the fickle news cycle. The surge of blood-and-soil, volkish fascism in North America makes the counter-cultural embrace of folk horror antagonists seem more deeply uncomfortable, especially when groups like the Soldiers of Odin and the Wolves of Vinland incorporate runic symbols and pagan iconography that seems culled from some hard-bound Compendium of Folk Horror.

In Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism, Mattias Gardell argues that during the 1990s, Ariosophic occultism and Norse heathen religions like Asatru overtook Christian Identity as the spiritual dimension of the white supremacist movement. This might seem like a crude projection of the fears of the present onto the films of the past, demanding a revision of that old Mark Twain quote: “To a man with a Hammer film, every nail driven into the palms of a scapegoat looks like brigades of /pol/ cybernazis unleashing Pepes of pestilence to trigger the libs.” But the association between the appeals of paganism and fascism was not lost on The Wicker Man helmer Robin Hardy, who in a 1979 interview was quoted as saying: “It was no accident that Hitler brought back all those pagan feasts at the Nuremberg rallies. The ovens would be lit later.”

Such evaluations may be reasonably deemed a little suspect; like a variation of the internet-favorite Reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy, in which the themes of Hardy’s film gain consequence in their evocation of the world-historic cataclysm of the Holocaust. But they gain a renewed (and again, sinisterly absurd) significance in the present moment, where symbols of paganism and white nationalism are being revived not only in conspicuous tandem, but confused confluence. In place of a more conspicuous swastika, a more obscure runic symbol—a Celtic cross, Thor’s hammer, the German Wolfsangel—will suffice. Once again, the symbols and regalia of the past (be it the imagined distant past of pre-Christian heathenry or the more recent past of the Third Reich) are being revived. We live in an age where, ludicrous as it may seem, certain viewers may well cheer the Nazis hauling Anne Frank out of her annex.

...At its core, folk horror is speculative fiction about the failures of the Age of Enlightenment. In Tentacles Longer than the Night, Eugene Thacker explains how the universal maxims of Enlightenment thinkers are conditional. Kant’s categorical imperative requires one to act “as if” the values dictating their actions are universally valid. In supernatural horror, the conditions of this logic are violated by the appearance of some entity that threatens the anthropocentric view of the world, evoking terror from the knowledge that Enlightenment rationality is bumping up against its limit.

Folk horror, by contrast, inverts rather than negates Enlightenment philosophy: the mob sacrifices the individual, peasant superstitions supplant science and reason as the true source of knowledge, a holistic and animistic conception of the universe overtakes an atomistic and mechanistic one. The genre presents a return of these things that had to be repressed in the transition towards a rational, individualistic, and ultimately capitalist social order: witchcraft, female empowerment, sexuality, and an organismic, earth-based conception of the universe.

Here the idea is not so much that logic and reason have reached some natural limit, but rather that the promises of the Enlightenment are always provisional, subject to revocation following one too many bad harvests. Again, the ideological structure may seem warped and inverted, but it possesses an internal, contingent consistency. The death of Sergeant Howie turns the standard horror trope of sexuality and impropriety leading to death on its ear. Unlike the many slain corpses stacked elsewhere in the horror genre, Howie’s sin is precisely his dopey virginity and piousness.

For all its dabbling with the supernatural, the folk horror genre is ultimately one rooted in materialism. The landscape holds considerable power over its people, but not in a mystical way. Allan Brown argues that The Wicker Man specifically can be read as a sci-fi story about technological failure—without the barren fruit trees caused by the poor performance of Lord Summerisle’s experimental botany, no sacrifice would be needed. If the Enlightenment philosophy that provides the grounds for contemporary liberalism involves a faith in humanity’s ability to transcend material conditions, to behave as if laws were universal and human ingenuity had no natural limits, then The Wicker Man brings us back down to earth, and we are reminded of the material conditions that make modern society possible.

Chained up in the wooden structure, Howie attempts to reason with the Lord:

Your crops failed because your strains failed. Fruit is not meant to be grown on these islands. It’s against nature. Don’t you see that killing me is not going to bring back your apples? . . . Don’t you understand that if your crops fail this year, next year you’re going to have to have another blood sacrifice? And next year, no one less than the king of Summerisle himself will do.

In this moment, Adam Scovell argues, the film is “laying down the law/lore of folk horror; that fear supplanted into communities comes back to haunt those who sowed its first seeds.” Burning to death, Howie calls out to his Christian god; the villagers sing and dance as they offer him up to their pagan lords. The viewer may feel that Howie is right, the apples won’t come next year, but the horror comes from the realization that Summerisle is also right: the sacrifice will be accepted.

Like the detestable vogue in white nationalist movements, which cop their iconography and philosophy from the rubbish heap of some imagined pre-Christian, Aryanist past, the renewal of folk horror (particularly in the American context) speaks to an unsettling truth, festering in contemporary political and cultural life. The return to symbology of Neo-Paganism, or the back-to-the-land return to the supposed “realness” inherent in far-off solstice festivals (an attraction of authenticity alluring the lambs of Midsommar), suggests not so much an antidote to the cult of Enlightenment rationality as its uncanny complement. Think only of Julius Caesar himself, whose grisly imagery of human bodies crammed into a flaming wicker statue was utterly self-serving: casting Gauls and Celts as paranoid pagans in order to justify their slaughter and conquest at the tips of legionnaires’ spearheads.

The horror latent in folk horror, then as now, is not an abject fear of pagans or free-loving hippies or straight-up Satanists. It’s the unsettling knowledge that the people are often all too willing to trade one form of power and subjugation for an aesthetically different manifestation of those same conditions, if only to restore faith in power itself. Even if the crops continue to fail, and the heathens of Summerisle never again taste a locally sourced organic apple, it doesn’t matter: the sacrifice succeeds. Killing Howie need not bring back the damn apples themselves, so long as it restores faith in ritual, mysticism, heathen magick, and the other counter-Enlightenment energies that Lee’s Summerisle, in all his sinisterness and sartorial preposterousness, wields in a perverse seasonal pageant, all undertaken to consolidate his own power: as gentry and patriarch, one Lord substituted for another.

[frozenstyx]

I think it’s fair to say that everybody who buys a ticket for Captain Marvel does so ready for ‘feminist themes’.  Marvel has been leaning heavily on the the Lady of it all - the marketing clearly drawing attention to it and the release date falling on International Women’s Day. This wasn’t subtle. The cynical part of my brain that knows full well that this is a business move on the part of the studio can’t help but feel a little uncomfortable with it - much like in the run up to Jody Whittaker’s first episode as The Doctor, the marketing sometimes felt a little self-congratulatory. Acknowledging that they have finally, at long last, given a woman a shout, also acknowledges that they didn’t, for a long damn time. And yes, the film itself also contains a few on-the-nose Girl Power! moments that, again, didn’t go in for subtlety. But there are two points that the inevitable criticism the usual parties will level at this bring up for me, that I think is important to mention.

CAPTAIN MARVEL SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT

(Before I begin - this movie wasn’t an absolutely perfect, tightly-made example of cinema that has absolutely zero flaws and is beyond all criticism. It did have flaws. But these things, for me, were pretty trifling. Things like the clunky infodump of exposition right at the beginning - things of that nature that could have been done better but overall didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the film. I’m not attempting to hold this up as something sacred, or guilt anyone into feeling like they can’t criticise elements they didn’t like.)

First off - yes, a major theme throughout this movie is that of the female experience. And yes, they do not go in for a subtle, clever approach. Those Girl Power! moments are clearly signposted - Carol’s big, climatic fight scene to No Doubt’s I’m Just a Girl and the ‘smile, honey’ scene being two that immediately spring to mind. But, actually, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think something that gets lost in all the analysis and discourse surrounding the MCU, and superhero movies in general, is that these are family films. These films have to have stories and messages that can be interpreted by children.Not that I believe in talking down to kids, definitely not, but social context can sometimes be lost on them. This is why re-watching childhood favourites often reveals troubling things that you never picked up on as a child. Honestly, I would much rather these movies by a little on-the-nose to an adult eye and allow children to be fully engaged with the message, then try to get too clever and have the context the stories are coming from be completely lost on the young audience. Any oh-so-intellectual adult that complains about this movie sledgehammering it’s message: yeah, it did. But it wasn’t for you. When Monica watches her Auntie Carol fly off with a smile on her face? That’s who it’s for. Because even my 27 year old self - that knows that having Carol single-handedly take down a crowd of enemies to a banging No Doubt track is a little contrived - was still emotionally reacting with a very sincere hell yeah. And the fact that the movie, and the marketing, refused to let up on the feminist angle was something that already brought so much criticism to the movie kind of proves the point that these things still need to be hammered home. That so many people, particularly men, are immediately put off by the idea that this movie wasn’t going to allow them to forget that Carol is a woman and sexism exists is so revealing - just like the reaction after Fury Road when men felt ‘cheated’ when it turned out the female characters were the main focus, and not just the set dress they are usually in those types of films, to be saved by Tom Hardy and his manly manly muscles. That these people not just have these reactions, but don’t even think to examine why they have them, is proof that we’re not yet at a point where a female-led superhero movie can happen without comment. Let it be unapologetically obvious in what it’s doing, let is draw unavoidable attention to not just what it is, but what other superhero films aren’t.

And to the second point - while the female experience is a major theme, it is not the only theme. Feminism, as explored in this movie, kind of acts as a bedrock for a wider theme of the treatment of all minorities by dominant power structures and institutions. Carol’s relationship with the Kree has moments that are explicitly about the treatment of women in patriarchal societies, yes - Yon-Rogg calmly explaining to Carol that she is too emotional to be allowed power or agency, that she has to be controlled for her own good is probably the biggest example of this. But once the truth is revealed, both about Carol and the major twist of the Skrull actually being refugees rather than aggressors, the whole thing becomes something of an allegory for how real world minorities are treated, and kept as minorities, by real world powers. When Yon-Rogg tries to convince Carol is ‘turn off’ her powers and prove that she can fight him without them, what he is saying is that in order for her to be worthy of respect, she has to play the game according to the rules he has decided on, rules that they both know give him the advantage. Is this not how all minorities are made to feel at point or another? Make yourself less, be less obvious, blend in, make yourself weaker, make yourself less of a threat to me or my position, and only then will we, maybe, grant you respect. One of the universal experiences belonging to every minority group is constantly having to adapt and moderate your behaviour for the comfort of others. All are expected to go to sometimes great lengths to be nonthreatening and unchallenging.

The fact that Carol is repeatedly told that her power has been ‘given’ and can be ‘taken away’ - even when she knows that this is a lie - is a very clear mirror of that. That’s why it’s so satisfying when Carol doesn’t submit and hits him with the full force of her power - not just because it’s a rejection of a pretty frustrating trope, but because of what she says to him; “I have nothing to prove to you.” She refuses to be any less than her full self to give him the illusion of being better than her or allow him an advantage he hasn’t earned. It’s what her World of Cardboard speech is about - “I’ve been fighting with one hand tied behind my back. What happens now I’m free?” (paraphrasing there, forgive me). And ultimately, what this movie seems to be championing is oppressed and marginalised people standing together to support and protect one another. Maria’s love for Carol comes from the fact that she stood with her and supported her as a single mother and a career woman (of colour, no less), that she believed she could be both a strong professional and a nurturing mother at the same time. The weakened Skrull survive because of those with strength that see what is happening to them and stand up against it. This point really hit home for me when it’s shown how Carol was the major inspiration for Fury in creating the Avengers initiative - that the original name was ‘Protector’, that the name ‘Avenger’ came from Carol’s aviator callsign. The initiative was built upon the idea of protecting the people of earth from more powerful aggressors, of people with strength and power using it defend those without.

   Basically what this ramble was trying to say - feminism is a clear, signposted, smack-you-in-the-face theme throughout this movie, but that’s lack of subtlety isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and the story very much seems to be concerned with the experience of being a ‘minority’, of everyone that is held down by the established powers maintaining their position of privilege, being told that they aren’t as strong, aren’t as important, that they should be grateful for table scraps - that their stories can’t sell movies. And if you were so preoccupied being offended about feminism to even notice the rest, then buddy, this movie was never for you to begin with.