Not just a cult-favorite TV show but an issue of free speech on campus at the University of Wisconsin. With Neil Gaiman and a thick-headed campus police chief. Don’t underestimate the fans of Firefly.
UPDATE: Sorry, the YouTube link disappeared for a while.
The trailer to a new documentary, The WinniPagans, focusing on the (largely Wiccan, I think) Pagan scene in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It will be available as video-on-demand — details at the website
Complete with a cute Pagan puppy and a nice shot of Boletus edulis.
Don’t count on me for breaking pop-culture news. That Pagan classic film The Wicker Man was released in 1973, but I did not see it until the mid-1980s.
I always say that I missed the 1980s in pop-culture terms. Part of that was due to graduate school and a general turn away from or just not caring so much about music, movies, etc. And catching up on the 1970s, evidently.
I did finally see The Wicker Tree, which sort of re-uses the first movie’s plot. (Here is an article connecting them published before the newer film’s release: “The Wicker Tree: The Return of the Pagan World.”)
Thanks to Netflix, I am only two years behind instead of ten years or more.
As Star Foster noted in one of her blog posts about the newer wicker flick, in comparison with The Wicker Man, “Robin Hardy played a brilliantly cruel joke on us by giving us more sympathetic victims and utterly vicious Pagans.”
I see a huge difference between the two, but I don’t know if it is not due merely to my being more prepared for the second film. When I saw The Wicker Man, I honestly did not know where it was going. Sgt. Howie’s search for the missing girl was sincere, and there was no cinematic villain in sight.
In The Wicker Tree, Sir Lachlann and his lady were more obviously sinister and villainous, while the young Texas evangelical Christians were of course portrayed as innocent and clueless. It’s probably in the secret Filmmakers Code somewhere: “All missionaries are either evil or deluded.” (Before the 1960s, missionaries or wannabe missionaries might be heroic, but not since then.)
You have to be clueless yourself if you cannot see where it is going from the young couple’s arrival in Scotland. The plot hits you in the face with the subtlety of a fresh-caught herring.
Pagans liked The Wicker Man because many could imagine themselves in a place like Summerisle. Not so this time around.
On Peg Aloi’s recommendation, I recently watched Season of the Witch, also known as Hungry Wives. As Peg mentioned, part of it is witchcraft-meets-Second Wave feminism, and part of it acknowledges the whole “occult explosion” of the late 1960s-early 1970s.
Maybe it it is what the old Bewitched series would have been if that show had any sort of edge to it.
Or Mad Men with a coven, bumped up to the early 1970s. (Hey, Mom had that couch!)
Enjoyable, and with enough twists that it rates three pentacles.
At The Juggler, Zan continues the series on witches in pop culture with a look at the 1990s.
No, I did not know that Charmed wins the category of “longest-running hour-long series that features a trio of women.” But then it started after M. and I had moved up into the hills where, not being committed enough to TV to get a satellite dish, we get by with one or two channels.
Four toppings this evening. . .
• Some occult-cult films from the past reviewed by Peg Aloi.
• Teaching a course in “world religions” is not as simple as it looks, once you start sorting out “religion,” “religious,” and questions of group identity.
• In the “Finding a God” chapter of Triumph of the Moon, Ronald Hutton describes the rise of Pan in Victorian literature. Sometimes he personified an idealized countryside while at others he was “a battering-ram against respectability.” He appears in America during that period too — this time as sculpture.
One of the jobs that usually falls on the writing program is teaching undergraduates not to be afraid of the university library. By contrast, in 2004, the University of Kansas, with gentle librarian humor, went the Lord of the Rings parody route, with this short video directed by then-film student Christopher D. Martin.
A friend pointed me to the Vimeo page where you can see The Occult Experience (95 min.), an Australian television documentary from 1985, researched and co-produced by Nevill Drury, on witchcraftandprimitivepeopleandsatanismandexorcismandallkindsofspookystuff.
Watching it was hard, because I kept turning away after encountering such portentous statements as “The search for supernatural powers continues in spite of science and technology” or that people practice “ancient Celtic traditions of nature worship.”
No one unpacks these assertions at all. Rather, they are just delivered as though they were the Final Word.
At one point, the narrator intones, “How does it feel to be a witch in the computer age?” (At the time the documentary was made, I thought my KayPro II portable personal computer was cutting-edge.)
It has its historical interest. Hey, there’s Herman Slater doing ritual in a Manhattan street. Why? You won’t learn from the film!
And at about the 20-minute mark, Alex Sanders delivers version number 1,045 of the original “I was initiated by my grandmother” story, which has been imitated so many times.
Back then, boys and girls, to be a Craft leader you had to have some special story to tell about your magical heritage or you were nobody.
And look, there is Janet Farrar taking her clothes off while chatting with her late husband, Stewart. And the paintings of Rosaleen Norton—can’t have an Australian production without those. Drury would build his later academic career on them.
Margot Adler, Olivia Robertson . . . so many names. But no context.
The whole film is thunderingly pretentious and yet basically content-free. You would not learn anything systematic here about the development of contemporary Paganism—which might be Satanic and which might be “primitive” and might involve “altered states of consciousness” (quick clip of Esalen), and is certainly spooky spooky or silly silly, depending on your perspective.
It make me wish that I could take those clips and arrange them into a meaningful narrative. Maybe some day someone will.
Added to the blogroll: Juliette Harrisson’s Pop Classics, “witty and entertaining random thoughts on appearances of Greek and Roman stuff in popular culture.”
Here is her episode-by-episode review of the series Rome, of which, it must be said, I was a total fan.
“Boring Soldier” and “Dodgey Soldier” — love it.
If you are a Pagan watching Dark of Moon, you probably will be thinking “I know her! I’ve met them! I’ve been there!” — even if, of course, you have not.
You will probably be so pleased to watch a feature-length film that treats Wicca and Druidry as normal rather than as scary or exotic that you will overlook the technical glitches and occasionally wooden dialog.
To me, skill in lighting separates the pros from the wannabes. The movie’s lighting was occasionally flat and harsh. M. is more conscious of dialog and kept saying that the first half of the movie was “propagandistic.”
And why all the door and window moldings have been removed from the Gardnerian covenstead must be a third-degree secret. It is odd, considering that the protagonists enter expecting something fancier than their own shared house, only to find quite the opposite.
At the center of the movie is an ensemble of Wiccan housemates, friends since college, each one single, members of the Coven of Mystic Light — and all on the threshold of “real life,” or as Beth says, “Woo-hoo, I’m an adult. What do I want from my life?”
The zaftig Sammi (Angelia DeLuca) bubbles her lines, most of which have to do with how much she enjoys various aspects of sex.
Like Samantha in Sex and the City, is she a gay man written as a female character? There is a lot of risqué humor in Dark of Moon, most of it about as subtle as a wet towel to the face.
Drew (Roger Conners), the actual gay housemate, is the only one with a back story—he is a would-be graphic artist waiting tables to pay the bills
The slacker-ish Miller (DJ Remark) seems to have wandered in from Clerks.
Zeke (Brad Arner), the tall, dark, and handsome one, works in — wait for it — an occult-supply shop.
And in contrast to the conventional wisdom that says once a woman says “let’s just be friends,” any chance of romance is dead, Zeke’s long-time friend Beth (Kelly Rogers) genuinely wants him. With mobile features that register every emotional twinge, Rogers may have the most acting talent of the cast.
When Zeke leaves his old covenmates to join a Gardnerian group, the plot is set in motion.
The setting is northern Ohio, and the Gardnerian HPS is named Lady Circe. That may be an inside joke; if so, I did not find it all that funny. But maybe there was more than one Lady Circe in Ohio.
Or maybe we are in Cleveland, in which case The Drew Carey Show-with-pentagrams is still better than Charmed.
And in the end , each covener finds true love, or at least true lust, all in a setting where “Pagan” is the default setting — and that’s refreshing.
Order DVDs, read cast bios, view trailers and all the rest at the official website.