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Nov. 2, 2016 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
53:27
Cult Classic

To celebrate Halloween, Dr. Frederick Kerr and Hannibal Bateman join Richard to discuss The Wicker Man (1973), the cult classic about the beauty, majesty, and horror of Paganism and the contradictions of Christianity. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Time Text
Well, Frederick Kerr, welcome to the podcast.
It's good to have you on.
How are you?
Great to be with you guys.
Great.
And Hannibal is with me.
Welcome back, Hannibal.
An interesting name choice, a pseudonymous name choice for this podcast, I guess.
Yes.
Anyway, happy Halloween.
Frederick Currie, you are a little bit older than Hannibal and myself, so why don't you talk a little bit about the first time you saw The Wicker Man.
Did you have the...
The film was released, at least in Britain, in 1973.
Most of it was filmed in October 1972, although it was supposed to be for May Day, the spring.
So you can read about the history of the making of the film.
But anyway, it was released in 1973.
But the U.S. release was very restricted.
And at the time, I was in graduate school, and you would hear about films word of mouth.
And of course, for example, I'm trying to remember when...
For example, the Dunwich Horror with Sandra Dee and Dean Stockwell based on H.P. Lovecraft.
Well, that had a little larger release and was more talked about.
But, of course, pre-internet, you didn't have a way of communicating very well.
And so unless among us who were young writers...
If National Review or the American Spectator, when it was still being published in Bloomington, Indiana, if they didn't draw attention to something, it could be months, even years, before you'd hear of some underground book or much less a movie.
And a movie, you couldn't see it.
I mean, because obviously this is the day before VHS.
No, with the very limited distribution.
So I didn't see the film until it came out on VHS.
Interesting.
So that was probably like the mid-80s?
What, VHS?
When did those come out?
Because by that time, people would have heard about it.
But not until there was some distribution would have even been mentioned in passing, and not necessarily favorably even, just because of the nature of the film.
So when you first saw it on VHS, you know, late 80s, early 90s, something like that, so what was the context?
I'm just curious.
I think, you know, when you first saw something or your first impressions, I always like to know this about films.
Well, this was also, remember about in the early 80s, there was Conan the Barbarian came out, Excalibur.
Yeah.
Came out.
That was, what, around 1980 or so?
And so The Wicker Man, I think everybody's reaction was it was the first sort of pro-pagan film, even though Conan and the Barbarian and, of course, Excalibur is about looking for the Holy Grail, but it was a great film.
Oh, yeah.
That is definitely a traditionalist movie.
Yes.
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah, it is interesting.
In the 80s, you had some of these, like, glimpses, even though they were all pulpy, you had these kind of glimpses of right-wing...
Even traditionalist, archaeofuturist films.
I remember when I was a kid watching Excalibur, I loved that film and I would go back to the sex scene parts with Sir Lancelot and Guinevere.
I probably wore out the VHS tape.
Interestingly, that's where The Wicker Man fits in a very interesting time for films.
This sort of folk horror type film from the late 70s that combines a lot of elements of the older counterculture, but takes them in a weirdly traditionalist direction in a lot of ways.
Yeah, I mean, this is what I was thinking, because I, unlike you two, I only saw this movie for the first time this year.
A couple of our friends were saying, oh, you should do a podcast on The Wicker Man.
And I was like, oh, I've always heard of this movie.
And I've not seen this abomination, the 2006 version with Nicolas Cage.
But I've seen highlights of it on YouTube where it just looks like the worst movie ever made.
So I hadn't seen it, but I had heard of it as a cult classic.
And I definitely, I mean, I love the film.
I've watched it three times now.
What I was thinking about is, and this is why I ask you when you first saw it, The film, you don't really know what it is when you're watching it.
Not until the end!
Exactly.
And when you go in, if you imagine going into the theater and maybe you've read a one-line synopsis or you just passed by the movie theater and you saw the poster, it looked interesting, or you like Christopher Lee or whatever, you don't know what you're watching.
And so when you go in, these opening scenes of this man going on this mission, a crusade across this...
Amazing Scottish landscape.
And then you go and you wonder, am I watching a comedy?
Is this a kind of counterculture 60s movie where you have all of these sexually liberated...
Townsfolk and the stuffy Puritan.
So it's kind of like a post-60s pro-hippie film.
You could imagine that.
So it kind of plays with genres.
And then at the very end, you really do think that it's a comedy.
Or it's a comedy of manners where this fool didn't understand what was really going on in the town.
And then when you finally see the appearance of the actual wicker man, you're aware that you're watching something like a horror film.
And you are filled with horror.
There is something about that original image of the first time you actually see the Wicker Man and the screams of Sergeant Howie of, Christ!
Jesus Christ!
I mean, it's a terrifying scene.
So I do think this is a shocking film.
It definitely can't really be categorized in any genre.
I mean, you have Christopher Lee, obviously a famous horror actor, but it's...
Much bigger than that.
And it's also a small movie, I'd also say.
I mean, it's clearly a low-budget film, but it's also one that has a lot of levels to it, and it's one that you kind of...
I don't know.
It has a lot of themes, but even those themes are fairly ambiguous.
Yeah, again, go into the whole theme of the film.
As we were talking about a little earlier, I think, it's a confrontation of Western modernity and its full force and its very confident, Protestant, Christian, rational face with the sort of archaic soul at times of a lot of European man.
I think of the philosopher Haman had this line that he looks upon logical proofs the way a well-bred girl looks upon a love letter.
You have to think that was sort of the smiling faces of the island's inhabitants to Sergeant Howie throughout the entire film.
Because Howie is a fool.
He doesn't get it.
Also, I was thinking about...
Just, you know, who he is.
And I was thinking about his name itself.
It's Sergeant Howie.
So he's obviously a policeman.
He's in uniform for the entire movie, outside of a few scenes when he's in bed, when he's about to be sacrificed.
And he is, as Lord Summerisle says, you know, you are a representative of the king.
You're about law.
And he says it like, I care about the law.
So he's just purely rational being.
And you can kind of see that in his last name, which is Howie.
I don't think it's a coincidence.
Perhaps it's an unconscious coincidence, but it's a how-ee.
He's obsessed with how you do things.
He's obsessed with rationality.
Also, his name, which he reveals while he's being burned, he says, Take this, your servant, O God, Neil Howie.
He's a kneeling Howie.
K-N-E-E-L.
He's kneeling before God, and he is obsessed with reason.
That is the mechanism, the how.
You know, and I often wonder, in the last moments, whether it's Howie or, you know, someone who was going to be executed by the Bolsheviks or something, at their last moments, they finally wonder, well, you know, have I been lied to all this time?
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that you can tell.
I mean, that's part of the horror of it.
But so, yeah, I mean, it's an interesting thing because oftentimes the way we look at the world, you know, from 2016 is we look at it as kind of like Christianity is this, oh, it's this...
It's a mythical, mystical, irrational thing that doesn't fit into the modern world, and it's a residue of an ancient time, and so on.
But actually, I think The Wicker Man, why it's like a movie for our movement, is because it has the correct position.
And that is that Christianity is...
It's two different things.
On the one hand, it's not a traditional mystical religion.
The Christianity that is dominant, particularly in the case of this Sergeant Howey figure, is like an Apollonian rationalist religion.
It's important that he's Protestant and not a Catholic.
That's also true.
But he's lost touch with the real grounding of religion.
And he might have even lost touch with things like sacrifice and so on.
So he doesn't understand what religion really is.
It's this institutional, rational, law-giving aspect of the state.
And he is a deductive reasoning detective.
So in a way, Christianity gave birth to modernism.
And that is a traditionalist view.
That's the view of Nietzsche.
That's the view of German idealist of all stripes.
That's also certainly the view of Evola.
That's other things.
And so basically you have Christianity as part of the modern world, the modern rationalistic world.
And it's confronting the more organic, and it's confronting organic ancient wisdom.
It's like these townsfolk are simpler, but they understand life better than he does, and they're able to laugh at things, whereas he's only able to cry.
Well, your point is well taken, because as you recall in the film, when Sergeant Howie is going through the village, and he's interviewing the schoolteacher, interviewing the librarian.
And he keeps reminding, even when he goes to the Green Man, the pub, he's reminding people, well, these are the law.
This is the law.
And you are under a Christian law, and you're breaking it.
And this is an outrage against the Christian institutions, whether you believe it or not.
And yet, the school teacher is teaching the kids to not have hang-ups about nature and about...
Sex and fertility?
Yeah, precisely.
Well, you know, I think it's worth teasing out a little bit here the difference between sort of the modern secular world, a sort of Protestant like Sergeant Howie confronts in the Britain of his day versus this sort of lush and verdant paganism he stumbles into.
You know, I'm not...
I don't know where to really take that completely, but there was the counterculture at the time, which was, you know, they talked a lot about open love, free love, and things like that, but it never touched...
in many ways to the you know on the deeper sort of hierarchical consciousness of What actually embracing nature and embracing?
The world sort of will be like The way I would view a lot of the hippie counterculture is probably different than the way most right-wingers do.
And that is, I think, and we, like, we are, we all, we're men of the right, we almost look at images of, like, Woodstock or whatever and just be like, ah, goddamn hippie commies, you know, we should, you know, throw them in prison.
But I think to just have that knee-jerk reaction...
To try to see them on their own terms and see hippiedom or the counterculture as, to a degree, as a genuine attempt to get back to the real, to some organic grounding for the social order.
And it took terrible forms.
I don't think...
I don't think any of us think that polymorphous perversity or anything like that is some...
You know, positive thing, but this idea of not having hang-ups about sex, having a proper understanding of love and death and the joys of life and so on, that they were, I think the hippies were kind of an understandable and you could say perverted, kind of ironically perverted reaction, but it was actually something genuine.
It really was an attempt to reground society.
And to that extent, I think there's probably, like, some things that we can learn from them and some things that are somewhat redeemable about them.
I mean, it was...
The whole movement, like, went wrong.
It was connected with the left.
It was connected with...
All sorts of craziness is connected with Jewish intellectuals, connected with, and the, you know, culture critique and so on.
But there actually was a kind of genuine organic quality to it.
And so, yeah, I mean, and that's where it's like you kind of, things kind of flip around where you have this community that you could see as like a hippie commune.
But, you know, on one level, but then on another level, it's like, it's the ultimate traditionalist society.
I mean, it's an absolute monarchy.
Yeah, it is a benevolent monarchy, where they have a sense of lordship, they have a sense of high and low, they have a sense of the perennial seasons.
I think that's something that, in, like, postmodern life, that we've totally lost.
What strikes me is, it is really such a moral film.
And it's a highly moral community.
It is.
A community of love, a community where even the Lord, like you have a Lord who is above these people and station and wealth and so on, but who actually still has a connection to his people.
He loves his people, and it's from his grandfather.
Doing that horticultural research and reestablishing and making this island bountiful.
And throughout the film, the generations respect each other.
And the scene in the school where they're passing on the knowledge and the respect.
Yeah.
And it is, again, there's this one more layer of irony where...
The reason why this island, Summer Isle, became so bountiful is because this Victorian gentleman used all this new knowledge of genetics and evolution and science.
But he's described as a free thinker, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
And he did that to actually restore something.
So again, it's this perennialism.
Of something dying and being reborn and coming back and so on.
I mean, it's like, you know, there's this...
What was that like?
When they're around the maypole, they're singing this song where it's like, you know, in the tree there is an egg, in the egg there's a bird, and the bird's a feather, and the feather becomes a bed, and then there's a woman on the bed, and a man on the woman, and that has a child, and then the child's a man, and the child dies, and he goes to a grave, and then on the grave there's a tree.
And it's just this, like, the great chain of being.
And, you know, I do think that is something that we've just totally lost in society, where we can't really face death.
You know, this is a bit of a digression, but I mean, it is kind of, if you look at, like, the degree to which the contemporary world can't...
Can't face death as unwilling to.
You see these kind of Silicon Valley technologists who want to live forever, and I guess they could live in a brain and a vat, and they'd just be a thinking organism that's kept alive through electricity, and maybe you could even digitize yourself.
I mean, just this kind of hyper-rationality.
And then also, if you look at so-called traditionalist in modern American society, if we go back 12 years to the Terry Schiavo affair, Where it's like, we have a brain-dead woman that we must keep her alive.
We're pro-life, therefore, someone who could never have any experience of the world, never think again, oh, we need to just keep pumping her lungs full of oxygen so she has the appearance of life.
I think both the left and the right, if you want to call them that, have no concept of death and rebirth and life.
Or being.
We have a sort of throne-ness, but no being, so to speak.
Absolutely.
We should talk about Christopher Lee, the famed descendant of Charlemagne as lord of the island.
Christopher Lee is related to everyone.
He's related to Ian Fleming and Charlemagne.
That's an interesting...
Yeah, well, yeah.
It's a small world.
It comes from a legitimate, noble family.
Yeah.
And, yeah, you know, he's slumming it as an actor, but here he's sort of, you know, reviving, I guess, a little bit of his ancestral glory.
Yeah, it is funny because Christopher Lee, you just, you look at him, he does seem noble.
You know, even in his, even though he does have a strange look to him, you know, he's not...
He's not stereotypically handsome, but there is something about him that seems noble, but then also a little bit devilish at the same time.
He is an amazing figure, kind of perfectly cast.
It's hard to imagine anyone else.
A heathen, but an enlightened one, we hope.
Yes.
I think one of the greatest lines in all of cinema is that...
What was it from Sergeant Howie?
It's like, those women are naked.
He's like, well, you can't expect to jump through a flame with clothes on.
That would be dangerous.
Well, I mean, yeah, no, we should talk more about that.
We should talk about the feudal angle of the island, especially in contrast to the Britain that Howie is coming from, which is sort of, you know, the decaying Britain of the 70s, pre-Thatcherite Britain.
You know, the sad socialist isle in contrast to the merry absolute monarchy of Summer Isle.
I think Sergeant Howie definitely is a representation of that, like, sad Britain.
Of the 1970s.
Yes.
Just obsessed with law.
Totally joyless.
Yeah.
It's like, where would you rather live?
Summers Isle or Sergeant Howie's London?
Yeah, and there's also the need...
Getting back to...
Getting back to Lord Summerall's grandfather, he sort of recognized that people don't live by production alone, but they need myths to live by, to animate themselves.
They need more than mere bread alone, which is what you get with these people, that this is a real community.
It's not just based on selling their apples.
They didn't just...
You know, they might have bought into the restitution of the old gods at first because it seemed to be good for crops, but now you realize that there's a big difference between the community of Summer Isle and the communities around us today, which are animated by mere profit or just pleasure-seeking without a higher purpose.
Oh, yeah.
And people in the suburbs who just, they know members of their own household, but none of their neighbors.
And they just kind of go watch TV in their household.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's total atomization.
Whereas the people of Summer Isle, like, they work together.
They're kind of all in on it.
They have this tradition that everyone, you know, takes, literally participates in.
I mean, yeah.
I mean, it is, that's how humans are meant to live.
And they're not diverse.
They don't have Somalis brought in, transplanted.
No one's wearing a burka.
And no one's suggesting that it would be a good thing if they did.
No, they are truly deprived.
No one's suggesting, you know, that they can make a few extra bucks by getting in a few Somali immigrants to pick the apples instead of villagers.
Yeah.
They are a community in a way that we don't ever know.
You know, another theme that is interesting is this kind of like dual face of Christianity.
That, you know, and I think this is another way where these themes are ambiguous and kind of like once you think you know the movie, you could always flip things around, is that Sergeant Howie, you know, he views Christianity as effectively like a modern rational system.
But he certainly does take part in its rituals, but he doesn't seem to ever understand them.
And so, you know, you have all of these situations where Lord Summerisle is kind of challenging him to be a true Christian.
You know, it's like when women are jumping through the flames, this is a fertility ritual.
This is immaculate conception.
And, uh, and, and some of them reminds him, he's like, look, you know, your, your God was, uh, you know, impregnated by a ghost.
That's right.
Yeah.
You know, you believe in this.
And in terms of sacrifice, I mean, what, what is Christianity without the central notion of sacrifice?
Like you have to pay something.
Yeah.
And that basically it's the biggest sacrifice of all.
You sacrifice an actual God.
I mean, that, I mean, again, the, the fact that you.
The symbol of Christianity is a crucifix.
It just cannot be underestimated.
It's not a hammer or a raven.
It is a defiance to the world.
Or a moon.
Yeah, it is a sacrifice at the heart of it.
It's such an indispensable notion.
Yeah, that orthodox slogan, you know, death to the world.
The first element you get of Sergeant Howie's sort of defiance is when he knocks aside a lot of the stuff on that grave and leaves a cross there.
He's literally defying death there in a way.
It's the sort of first intimation of his sort of primordial Christianity.
Yes, yeah, absolutely.
And just to go back to even the theme of death, he's having this conversation with a schoolteacher.
What is that actress's name?
She was actually married to Sean Connery.
I'm forgetting.
She's a very attractive woman.
Very handsome woman, as they say.
Oh, it's Diane Cilento.
She was Miss Rose.
And then Ingrid Pitt was the attractive librarian.
Remember, he busts into her when she's in her bathtub, so we get to see another view of her.
She was big in hammer horror films.
It's female vampires.
She played Elizabeth Bathory.
Yeah, interesting.
There are a lot of these connections.
And then you have, you know, Christopher Lee and Brett Eklund were both in The Man with the Golden Gun.
So you have all these...
There's a small acting pool, I guess.
Kind of connection.
The Man with the Golden Gun came out the year after this.
They must have just started filming right after they finished up.
The world was a smaller place then.
Yeah, it was just the world was a smaller place.
But all these other situations where, you know, it's like...
The Sergeant Howie tells Summerisle, he's like, you're sacrificing me and for nothing.
And he says, what do you mean?
I'm paraphrasing, but he said, what do you mean for nothing?
I'm giving you the greatest achievement of Christianity.
You are becoming a martyr.
And it's all of these ways that Howie, and I would say most modern Christians, have just totally lost touch with the real...
I mean, it was a radically...
The Christianity that followed Paul, a Christianity for this Jewish...
Jesus religion for the Gentiles, that is for everyone, where, you know, Greek, there is no man, there is no woman, there's no Greek, there's no Jew, we're all one in Christ.
This radical new notion was really kind of like an anti-religion, because you're ripping out religion from a grounding in a folk community.
Well, you know, Rich, it's like they say, it's not a religion, it's a relationship.
Yes.
I remember when I was in Texas in this small town, which is a very nice town of Fredericksburg, where they no longer speak German.
Supposedly, when you would be there, they were just speaking German in a coffee shop or a gas station.
But anyway, I remember seeing these extra-large T-shirts that said, Jesus died for me.
I was thinking, geez, what a waste.
Yeah, this personal religion.
That is one, definitely the personal religion of the last 25 years.
It's definitely one way that Christianity has evolved.
But it's an anti-religion at some point.
But on the other hand, you can't get away from the deeper, perennial, traditional aspects of Christianity.
I mean, it is a religion about ritual sacrifice and cannibalism.
It would have worked with Sergeant Howie being a Catholic, for instance, or even Orthodox.
He is a Protestant in the sense he has shorn himself of everything but the Bible and its word.
But the word and law.
Right, exactly.
It's lacking in some of those other elements.
Yeah, I mean, it's Howie.
Again, this might have been an unconscious thing, but I...
I think it might have been quite conscious.
It's how-y.
It's about the how.
It's about the mechanism and the reason.
It's not about the what or the whence or the why and all the grounding of something.
But, yeah, that is the irony of it.
And I don't know.
I think if Christianity is going to survive in the 21st century, it probably will survive in...
In a primitive form that I think most Westerners would find embarrassing.
I think it would probably survive in this kind of reduced, primal, emotional form that you see.
You know, in some places in America, you definitely see in Africa and so on.
I think the kind of, you know, the high church Christianity, when all it is is about law and reason and order or something, well, why don't you just become a liberal?
You know, cut out the middleman.
You know, it's an interesting question.
I've talked to this with some Christian traditionalists before, and the question becomes, with the growth of Christianity in places like Africa and Asia, and if you take Christianity seriously, you're convinced of its final victory.
However, your sort of civilizational status or your racist status doesn't really matter, ultimately.
What will end up winning will be the spirit of all of men united in Christ at the end of time.
So civilization and races can rise, fall, and be destroyed.
But if you care deeply about the West, about European-ness, how do you go about preserving that in the face of all this at the same time?
Well, Christians are looking forward to the end of this earth, this world.
They're looking forward to it.
So they don't care about, you know, if they're Christians, well, we don't care if all of Africa moves to Western Europe.
The Western Hemisphere.
If they're Christians, all the better.
But they're looking forward to this.
You can even see this in Cux, and I don't...
It's interesting, because in someone like Eric Erickson, where they'll talk about these things, like, you know, if...
I don't want to support Donald Trump precisely because he doesn't follow the law.
He doesn't truly believe in Christ as I see it.
And, you know, America doesn't matter to them at some level.
Whereas, you know, there is something pagan to nationalism in the sense of being connected to the soil, being connected to the people, being connected to history and a tradition.
And this idea that you defend this because it's yours.
Well, and it's real, and it's not some supernatural.
People are real.
Nations are real.
Yeah, I mean, we have to remember, you know, one of the earliest conflicts with the Christian church and the Roman state was whether or not a Christian, you know, could just pay the sort of obligatory, you know, oblige to the state gods.
Which, you know, to a pagan, it's just...
It's sort of a wave of the hand.
But to a Christian, it requires an acceptance of something of this world, which they cannot do.
To get back to the film, maybe we should talk a little bit about the music throughout the movie, which is just sort of haunting in its own way.
Because this is another thing, because I was saying that the film can't be categorized as genres, because in another level, it's a musical.
It has these performances in the pub, in the Green Man Inn, that where you have actors singing, it really feels like a musical.
The music is all throughout this movie.
And it is like in the music that you have these little bits of wisdom, like what I was talking about, like when they were singing around the maypole, just this notion of the great chain of being and rebirth and death and so on.
Well, when they're singing the innkeeper's daughter.
Yes.
Even that, I think, is a good song because it lacks the hang-ups about sex.
It's not about being totally debauched.
That's, in a way, just a photographic negative of Puritanism is to be some polymorphous, perverse lunatic who has sex with everything and masturbates.
That's this kind of...
That's the kind of reverse side of Puritan Christianity, which is being totally debased.
And you can see this, certainly, particularly in the Old Testament, there does seem to be something about this Semitic mind that imagines a kind of sexuality that I think for most...
For Europeans, it's just totally alien and utterly disgusting and repulsive.
Anyway, it is the innkeeper's daughter.
Maybe the innkeeper's daughter isn't the most admirable person, but...
In every town, there's an innkeeper's daughter.
She serves a certain purpose, and she is, in her way, a kind of goddess.
She's like a fertility goddess of sorts.
Even the innkeeper's daughter should be respected and honored in her way.
I think it's important just not to be hung up on...
Hung up on demanding that everyone be chaste, and so on.
Obviously, heathen paganism has a very strong place for the family, for the social order, and hierarchy, and love, and so on.
But, you know, we're human beings.
You know, it's like...
Everyone has to go visit the innkeeper's daughter once in a while.
Remember, you know, the community has to reproduce itself.
And, you know, as Dr. Kerr was pointing out earlier, you know, this is a homogenous community.
And within, you know, within a group of your own, you should be okay with, you know...
You know, bringing on a legacy.
It's the way in which you have your own immortality in some sort of way.
Right.
That's why, like, you know, Rowan Morrison isn't dead.
You know, she's a hare.
She's in the trees.
She's in the wind, you know, kind of thing.
And that might be poetic, or you could say euphemistic, but it actually is like a proper way of seeing life, is that a tree is growing on your grave.
But, yeah, I mean, obviously sex is part of culture.
I mean, it's interesting that Sergeant Howie is a virgin.
I mean, the actor looks to be well into his 40s.
I don't know if the character is supposed to be a little bit younger than that.
Well, even the opening scene where he's holding hands with his fiancée at communion, she's an older-looking female.
She's not a teen or even early 20s.
No.
No.
You have to make issue.
I mean, the world must be people.
You can't be saving yourself forever.
Right.
Well, especially for us at this...
We need to, you know, we need to people our continents.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, we have a, there is kind of like even a certain kind of Puritanism amongst modern people where it's, it's not pure sexual Puritanism, because obviously there's...
We live in a hook-up culture and so on.
But it might as well be Puritanism because...
Yeah, it's a barren culture.
It's a barren sexuality.
Yeah, it's basically people hooking up but using condoms or sometimes some kind of prophylactic and not making issue.
And so you have, again, if you ever go to New York City and you meet all these cute girls living in Williamsburg or wherever...
You know, they're smart.
They're often beautiful.
They're also 37 years old.
In that sense, our society today is profoundly a-erotic.
You know, erotic coming from the original Greek for wholeness.
We lack a whole.
You know, we're just barren.
We're a void.
We're a-erotic in a lot of ways.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And again, it's like the flip side of Puritanism is not the green eroticism of paganism.
The flip side of Puritanism is perversity and debaseness.
What is the movie that comes out on Valentine's Day this upcoming year?
Shades of, what is it?
Fifteen Shades of Grey.
Fifteen Shades of Grey, yeah.
Like, even darker.
So it's all about totally non-procreated.
Totally non-organic and real, you know, S&M and masturbation and just weird, you know, psychologically disturbed sex acts.
It's the kind of sex that only a Puritan could love.
You know?
And again, you don't...
God, sorry.
I'm really...
This is meant to be a Halloween podcast, but it's become an anti-Christian podcast.
But it's like, there are many Christian...
Ministers who are not like this.
Jerry Falwell, from what I've heard, I've never heard major accusations of sexual infidelity or impropriety, and so on, as well as with his son, Jerry Falwell Jr., who is supporting Trump.
God be with him.
However, are we really surprised?
When we learn that this puritanical minister was, you know, renting boys on some weird website and doing meth, are we really surprised when this news comes out?
It seems to be only a matter of time.
And again, it's an expression of a malformed sexuality.
It's not an expression of a healthy, flourishing sexuality.
Like we see in Summer's Isle.
Right, right.
Well, you know, I guess if we can get a little bit to the horror nature of the film, which really comes there at the end, you know, as the villagers are singing, you know, Summer is a Coming In, that great old folk song.
We're, you know, not just Sergeant Howie, but the viewer is really confronted with life and death.
In a way that's very different than the way they would go about seeing it, you know, in the modern world.
You're all of a sudden seeing the giant wicker man, you're seeing it burn, and you're like, oh my god, this is happening.
You know, you're not expecting it throughout this entire film.
Well, even though we know the name of the film from the outset, we don't know what the wicker man is, and we see it, the viewer sees it, at the same moment that Sergeant Howie does.
Yes.
It's very effective.
It absolutely is.
That shot of him.
And actually, not only is that, there's another level to it.
We see The Wicker Man the very moment that the actor Edward Woodward sees it.
Yeah.
Because there's actually one of these little tidbits that I discovered actually after Googling The Wicker Man is that he actually never saw the effigy until he was dragged up the hill.
And so there was like a genuine sense of surprise and shock and horror in his face.
Yeah, we should talk about how the Wicker Man itself as a concept comes from Caesar's Gallic War commentary, where he's talking about the various Celtic tribes he's conquering, and the Wicker Man in Caesar's commentary was where they would execute various criminals and what have you.
As justification for invading...
They spread these stories that they engaged in human sacrifice and all, and maybe they did, but the Romans certainly seized upon that as an excuse, this feigned indignation.
While they were, you know, slaughtering thousands of people in the arenas and stuff, these blood sports, but they were allegedly just shocked and they had to stamp it out.
Yeah, you know, you think of the sort of atrocities attributed to the Germans and World War I and the like.
You know, it's the same sort of impulse.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, I'm reminded of, you know, Americans feeling that they had to spread democracy to Iraq because of some of these tales.
Tales, some of which might have been true, I'm sure many of which were totally untrue.
Madeleine Albright saying, oh yes, that 500,000, what, was it Iraqi children or Iranian children?
Whoever we had were boycotting.
Oh, yes, it's worth it.
Yeah, well, she was making a blood sacrifice of sorts, of those children.
I mean, in a way, that was the symbolic content of that very famous phrase, where they said, is it worth it?
Are these sanctions worth it?
This is before the Iraq War.
Are these sanctions worth it if we've learned that there's starvation of some million children or something?
She was like, yes, it is worth it.
Which I guess she has to say, but on a deeper symbolic level, that was her own blood sacrifice that she was making to her wicked God.
Well, she's no Caesar.
No, no, she's not.
No, I mean, that is, again, another element to this culture.
I think there is this, you know, Dionysian and Apollonian, you know, conflict throughout history.
And, you know, Nietzsche articulated in that manner, but you can think about it in other ways.
But in some ways, the Roman world was the kind of great big Sergeant Howie writ large.
And, you know, it was conquering these outer lands, this outer wilderness.
And, you know, again, it's like with Conrad.
I mean, this too was once a dark continent.
I mean, the old Britain was something much more primitive and dark, but then also much more rooted and organic than the, you know, the kind of decadent empire that Rome was becoming.
Obviously, the modern Britain has taken on the Sergeant Howie mentality in spades to a point where he needs to...
Have a little bit of the more Dionysian wisdom.
Oh, yeah.
You can imagine his descendants going about shrieking about anti-PC digressions in modern Britain.
Or doing something like, we have to ban this Richard Spencer from coming here.
Yeah, we have to ban racism.
I can imagine a Surgeon Howey of 2016 going into the traditional Britain group or something.
Racist heathens!
There is racism in this holy place.
It is being defiled.
Do you not understand that you live in a politically correct culture?
Yeah, I know.
I mean, it's definitely there.
I think the way I've always seen it is that you need a little bit of both.
You need some Apollonian and you need some Dionysian to be a full human being.
And if you have one or the other, you lose yourself and you've been perverted.
I mean, if you have no reason, if you have no law, or you have no...
You know, spirit of scientific inquiry or something.
Then you do become the stereotype of a hippie.
You become too organic.
You become just too rooted.
You lose yourself in ignorance and imbecility and so on.
At the same time, if you totally evacuate the Dionysian...
From your life or from your culture, you also lose that deeper folk wisdom.
You lose that spirit that makes you a human being.
So, yeah.
I mean, I think that's definitely the lesson.
You're all in that sort of horror aspect a little bit.
Not just the horror aspect, but the sort of strangeness you feel with the Wicker Man.
When you're watching a lot of these scenes, it's almost like you're seeing the world around you, but everything's a little bit off.
You know, Sergeant Howie is sort of initiated into the paganism of the island slowly in that way.
But not just for Sergeant Howie, but for someone that's even a secular humanist or someone who rejects religion altogether.
The sort of world they're peering into just seems slightly off.
And, you know, you don't really understand why.
And that's one of the things that's so intriguing about this film is that there are so many moments like that.
You know, we've talked about the graves, the teacher, and everything else.
But you're peering into a world that's almost your own but slightly tweaked.
Yeah, they're wearing masks.
I mean, I think that's also another interesting thing where Howie's like, take off that mask!
But anyway, so what are you guys doing for Halloween?
I've noticed Halloween in modern America has become, it's basically like all holidays with maybe the exception of Christmas.
They just become excuses to go out and get drunk and maybe pick up a girl.
Although the real Halloween has, I would say, a deeper meaning.
It's obviously a harvest festival, and even in the kind of gothic aspect of Halloween, it's a way of experiencing death and confronting death in some ways.
Bobbing for apples is obviously...
I remember doing that as I was a kid.
That's some kind of deep connection you have with Halloween.
But whenever I peruse Facebook or something like that, it seems like...
I've been in big cities for Halloween a couple of times.
It just seems to be girls dressed up like sexy versions of superheroes.
That seems to be a common theme.
Sexy cats or something.
Something I was thinking of.
Because I spend a lot of time in a resort town, and we see lots of, and also there are a lot of weddings here in the summer.
And something that struck me watching the Wicker Man again is just the physical appearance of all the people.
In the community, they were all healthy looking.
Even the aged, the elders, they were still healthy elders.
Whereas, something that just struck me this summer, hiking around the marina, where they have wedding parties and whatnot, hiking around there with my dog, seeing all these fat people, young people, fat chicks.
Fat guys.
And it struck me, you know, there's nothing appealing about any of these folks.
And I thought, you know, but looking at Summer Isle and the whole community, the various age groups, they all looked healthy.
They were appealing-looking people.
When I was in Amsterdam a few months ago, one of the things that you notice is that if you see fat, fat young females, almost without exception, they're British or American tourists.
I, unquestionably, I had the displeasure about, it's a little bit more than 10 years ago now, going to this northern...
English town to visit a friend of mine, and it was a Friday night, and it really did prove that all of those images you see on the Drudge Report, like, it's all true.
It's happening.
You were on the shore.
Yeah, exactly.
This Jersey shore of...
Of England.
It was just these fat, drunk women, you know, loudly screaming or just vomiting as if you're sneezing.
You know, it's like it's not even a problem for them, just vomiting somewhere.
Crying, acting in some just utterly vulgar manner with a man.
Dressed in just the most appalling outfits.
Fat women almost showing off their midriff.
In miniskirts.
Fat women in miniskirts.
Fat chicks in these gauzy wedding costumes that they'll wear once.
It is quite an appalling sight to behold.
But that's where we are as a culture.
It doesn't seem to be as bad in other parts of...
I remember Halloween growing up.
I was brought up as a Catholic.
Go to All Souls Day and everything.
So you think about the dead a little bit.
The turning of the season.
I always liked that aspect of it all.
I'll probably go visit some sort of graveyard or something before the time is done.
Maybe drink some wine and toast to the dead while there.
I like walking through graveyards.
I might have to do that this Halloween.
Yeah, it's a weirdly comforting thing to me, at least.
Yeah, absolutely.
On this grave, there is a tree.
And hopefully from that tree sprouts a renewal.
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