Lord Summerisle

Like many, I am today mourning the loss of the incomparable Christopher Lee. Many articles have already been written about what a unique actor he was, and how we’ll never see his like again (but isn’t that always true of the real, genuine originals?) Here’s one of the best. I’m not going to attempt to do this; others will do so much more eloquently. But I do want to talk, just a little, about one of the films he made, which is one of the most important of all films to me personally, and definitely in my all-time favorites list.

I’m talking, of course, of The Wicker Man.

The Wicker Man is a legendary film now, but you have to understand that for a long time it was well-neigh impossible to see; one of the films far more frequently discussed than viewed. I had heard of it long before I finally saw it in the early 90s; it would be years before it was readily available for any who might be curious. These circumstances lent it a mystique, and as grateful as I am that even the worst of the worst films are so readily available these days, it’s hard not get a little nostalgic about for a time when you really had to work to see this stuff. To connect the threads. The Wicker Man, though, had plenty of power regardless of any preconceptions.

On its surface, The Wicker Man is a classic old vs. new tale, modern vs. primitive, Christian vs. Pagan. It’s not a perfect film and it would be a shame if it were, because if there is one thing I truly believe, it’s that flawed masterpieces are the only true masterpieces. A core tenet of humankind is failure and the striving for knowledge and skill to overcome that failure. Christopher Lee’s performance as Lord Summerisle captures the elegance and mystery of knowing that we do not know.

The Wicker Man was a gateway experience for me, one of the first and certainly the most powerful visual works of art to lead me towards a deep curiosity in paganism and its symbols. It was marketed as a horror movie, and I suppose in a superficial sense you could say it is, but I’ve met any number of people moved by the film and that’s rarely the context in which they discuss it. As I’ve stated elsewhere, my education as a youth was limited. The Wicker Man opened me up to the idea of paganism—to a desire to understand it as more than a vague counterpoint in a horror tale. As well, I’d left Christianity well behind by then, but I still yearned for the idea of ritual that had meaning. It’s not that The Wicker Man is an accurate portrayal of pagan ritual (which is a pretty broad category.) Yet it connected the dots between nature, sexuality, ancient longing and the awesome magnificence and indifference of the universe in a way few works of arts have.

The movie would not exist without Christopher Lee. And it wasn’t the only movie I enjoyed him in (I dig a good Hammer film, and any other number of his films are worth your time.) But it was the one that I can honestly say changed me, and has stuck with me through the ages.  Thank you, Mr. Lee. I think Andrew O’Hehir’s article linked to above says it best:

Lord Summerisle understands that the moral order represented by Edward Woodward’s increasingly hapless and tormented mainland policeman is a fragile construction set atop primal, animal realities, and inadequate to contain them. Does he believe in the old gods of his islanders? It’s not the right question. In his joyous amorality, Summerisle is Dracula set free from his box of Transylvanian dirt, Saruman set free from his labored parable of sin and damnation. He is the distillation of the mysterious and incalculable gift of Christopher Lee, expressed over and over again across an acting career that resembles no one else’s, and built on the profound understanding that we do not understand the world anywhere near as much as we think.

Tonight I listen to Agalloch’s The White EP, a gorgeous album deeply influenced by The Wicker Man as I sit in front of my tiny altar—my tiny tribute to a legendary man.