My Personal Library (38)

Today I will cheat a little bit. I apologise profusely.

I will cheat in the sense that in reality I want to talk about a movie, but this part is usually reserved for books. Therefore, I will perfunctorily mention a book related to the movie, adding that I have bought the book but it is still on the To-Read List and will probably remain there forever, as I have other reading priorities. The book is called Inside The Wicker Man: How Not To Make A Cult Classic by Allan Brown (2013). As I said, I have not read it and probably never will.

But the movie itself deserves a few hundred words. I am referring to The Wicker Man, the 1973 original, written by Anthony Shaffer and starring Sir Christopher Lee and others.

(Warning: spoiler ahead.) It is essentially a horror movie, about a police sergeant who, upon receiving an anonymous letter, travels to the remote Herodian island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. The sergeant, a devout Christian, is shocked to discover that the islanders practise the pagan religion of their ancestors. Worse, it seems that all the islanders are trying to derail the investigation by insisting that the young girl never existed. The sergeant finally finds the girl’s name in the school register and asks the teacher to explain. The teacher takes him to the girl’s tomb and the sergeant asks the island’s leader, Lord Summerisle, for permission to exhume the body.

As the plot thickens, the sergeant understands that one of the island’s rituals is to offer a human sacrifice to the gods when the harvest is poor. A parade takes place, and the sergeant (wearing a disguise) frees the young girl who seems to be the intended victim of the human sacrifice. But the islanders capture him, and Lord Summerisle informs him that he was the real intended victim of the sacrifice. The community burn the sergeant alive in a giant wicker man statue.

It is a horror movie, and its beauty lies only partially in its rather simple plot. Its real beauty lies elsewhere.

But for our purposes today, the interesting thing is that everybody on Summerisle knows that the girl has not been murdered, and they are all complicit in capturing the sergeant to sacrifice him to the gods.

This particular detail – that everybody on the island knew – is what came to my mind while I was reflecting on the new twists in the Panama Papers affair. Everybody knows that Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi each had a swimming pool dug in their gardens because they wanted to fill them up with water. Everybody knows that when they were discovered, the two swimming pools were empty not because their owners did not want to fill them, but because they had not yet managed. Everybody knows that you don’t dig a swimming pool for the fun of having a big hole in the garden. And yet, some pretend to accept the asinine explanation that the swimming pools were not meant to contain water but were dug for some other, obscure reason. Similarly, some pretend unquestioningly to accept that the two big holes have since been filled in for some unexplained reason.

The other detail in the movie that struck me is that on Summerisle, everybody got something from the deception: they believed that the human sacrifice would persuade the gods to grant the entire population a bountiful harvest. On the Maltese Isles, those who pretend probably still get something from the deception. One need not be a rocket scientist to work out what and how.