For about two decades I'd intended to see this movie, and somehow just never got around to it. I'd guess this is partly because I had no idea why I was supposed to see this movie. People would just say "you've never seen
The Wicker Man?" and I'd say I hadn't, and they'd laugh knowingly and tell me to add it to my queue.
I should pause here and point out - apparently I never ask what a movie is about when being given a recommendation. You'd think I'd care more.
Friday evening, I swung by Vulcan Video on my way home and, after some deliberation, selected this movie out of the sea of titles. Saturday night Jamie and I stayed in, and while I'd planned to watch
The Wicker Man (1973) after she went to bed, we wound up dropping it in the player and watching it together.
Suffice it to say, I now know what
The Wicker Man is about, and I get why it has a reputation as a bit of must-see cult cinema in The States, and - I guess - a bit more of a reputation in the UK. It also was not what I'd call Jamie's cup of tea, and I suppose she'll be picking the next three or four movies we watch together.
The timing is a bit odd. I'm currently wrapping up a multi-hour/ multi-part series from the
You Must Remember This Podcast, something called "Charles Manson's Hollywood". I'll talk more about that series and the podcast in a future post, but I've spent the past week or so thinking a lot about the hippie and counter-culture scene of the 60's that bled into the 1970's of late, and the bending of free-love into very traditional gender roles, exploration of the psyche via psychedelics and non-Judeo-Christian religion, communal utopianism - and how most of that collapsed in on itself, sometimes ending in violence... Well, you can see how I might have drawn some parallels here.
