GOD, NOT THE BEES: The Wicker Man, then and now.

As a fan of the original 1973 The Wicker Man, I was planning on giving the remake a fairly wide berth. Then I saw this and figured it was probably worth renting.

Good God this movie hates women. We’re not talking about a subtext or some kind of feminist reading, it’s literally just ninety minutes of paranoid misogyny, occasionally interrupted by chase sequences where Nicholas Cage is pursued by a swarm of CGI bees. This is almost, but not quite, as stupid as The Day After Tomorrow, in which Jake Gyllenhall is chased up a corridor by global warming and stops it by shutting the door behind him. I digress. Obviously this post contains spoilers for both the 1973 and 2006 versions, although so does the DVD cover. It’s got a wicker man on it and everything.

In the original, our protagonist / sacrificial victim is a fundamentalist Christian police officer, specifically chosen as the May Day sacrifice because he’s fundamentalist Christian police officer and thus meets the sacrificial requirements: He’s in a position of authority, he’s a virgin, he’s hostile to paganism, and his profession makes him easy to manipulate using red herrings.

In the remake, he’s still a police officer, but he’s a down-to-earth everyman kind, and only chosen because some man-hatin’ broad used him to get pregnant before dumping him. She then reappears out of nowhere years later and uses the kid to manipulate him into going to Evil Lesbian Island. You know those MRA stories about women deliberately getting pregnant in order to live the life of Riley off some innocent guy’s child support payments and take his kids away? It’s that. But with CGI bees.

In the original, the motives of both sides are cast into doubt, with Sergeant Howie initially coming across as a stubborn bigot and the pagan community as nice, if slightly off-centre. By the end, Howie hasn’t become any nicer a person, but it’s the pagans who end up burning him alive as a May Day sacrifice. This obviously isn’t the most tolerant depiction of paganism, but at least the story looked like it could go either way up until that point.

In the remake, Sergeant Malus is a nice guy who becomes increasingly appalled at the antics on Evil Lesbian Island, but keeps soldiering on because he’s just so damn concerned about his daughter. Had Malus been written as a paranoid misogynist (rather than by one) and the separatist women as superficially pleasant, the film might have managed to generate some suspense about who was right and who was wrong. Instead, we get a matriarchy where the men are speechless and referred to as ‘drones’, while the women live in a hive-like building full of hexagonal yellow windows and attend to the needs of their queen. The director seems to have been going for kind of symbolism here, but… no, sorry, it was just too subtle for me. Oh, did I mention the island’s economy is entirely dependent on making honey?

In the original, the sacrifice is a purely religious offering designed to ensure a good harvest the following year.

In the remake, the sacrifice is half a religious offering and half a paranoid MRA fantasy about what feminists do when nobody’s looking. They’re positively salivating at the death of Malus and chanting “THE DRONE MUST DIIIIEEE!” while the wicker man burns, except for the one who used him to get pregnant, who has a moment of regret about it. Because even evil separatist lesbians secretly crave cock. You know they do.

In the original, the film ends with the a closeup of the sun as the burning wicker man collapses.

In the remake, oh Christ in the fucking remake, we get a little coda where two of the hot evil women from the island to go the mainland and pick up two guys at a bar. The implication is that they’ll deliberately get pregnant and then use those children at some point in the future to lure their fathers to the island in order to burn them or beat them to death with copies of Intercourse or whatever floats their man-hating boat that day. I can picture Neil LaBute fighting the studio executives for this scene to be included: “No, it’s vital! The audience might not realise that women are manipulative and evil yet!”.

This could possibly have worked as a satire, in a “Guys, how would you like it if you were treated as a second class citizen because of your gender?” way. It… didn’t. It didn’t work because it didn’t try to work, it’s just 90 minutes of paranoid castration anxiety, created by somebody who’s scared that women in power might treat men in the way that men in power treat women. The greatest tragedy, though, is that the “OH GOD, NOT THE BEES!” scene was removed from the Australian DVD release, meaning I sat through the entire shitfest with no payoff.

They also never explained how a matriarchal pagan tradition was formed around insect colonies nobody knew were matriarchal until relatively recently.

Or why they had a fucking wicker man in the first place.