Young and restless / Odds and ends
Today: Editor and writer Maria Bustillos; and Amy Chu, artist and publisher of Camoot.Journal.
Issue No. 427
‘The Wicker Man’ Was About 1973
Maria Bustillos
Top Tchotchkes
Amy Chu
‘The Wicker Man’ Was About 1973
by Maria Bustillos
The Wicker Man (1973) was made by a group of obscure but obsessive artists who would have been called, not woke, but “liberated” in the early 1970s; a time of hedonism, and of danger. It was an R-rated movie, so I would only have seen it in college a few years later. But I found it terrifying even as a grownup, in particular the idea that everyone around you could be sharing the malevolent secret of your doom, slowly and inexorably closing in (the same kind of suffocating dread that would animate The Blair Witch Project and scare the living daylights out of me decades on). Anyhow I was too scared to attend to the meanings of the story and the subtler ramifications of The Wicker Man until much later.
The Godfather had won the Best Picture Oscar that spring, but its rival Cabaret won eight of the other big Oscars. The counterpoint thus described, of the sexy, decadent musical against the moralistic, patriarchal mob masterpiece, gives a good sense of the times. Richard Nixon, having not so long before swept the presidential election with 520 electoral college votes, would be resigning the very next year. The Vietnam War was in full swing. A very sad time, in other words, and about to get worse.
Looking back now though it seems to me the world (and I) were dancing heedlessly on the edge of a seething volcano in 1973. I would have been listening nonstop to Ziggy Stardust and A Wizard, a True Star and reading, I don’t know, Tolkien, Vonnegut, Siddhartha, Agatha Christie, and just starting to sneak around and smoke weed with older friends, an older boyfriend who sold drugs out of his trumpet case in the park. Hedonism and danger. For me this film celebrates the richly permissive, pleasure-seeking ethos of that fading moment—and foreshadows the dark undercurrents that would annihilate its innocence and possibility—with weirdly resonant emotional, aesthetic, and political accuracy.
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