A long time ago, I wrote about the role of male virgins in literature. This is a small but fascinating coterie, much put-upon and under-discussed, despite many of the greatest characters in literary history belonging to its ranks. There is Jean Valjean, the long-suffering hero of Les Miserables, who forgoes sex simply because—as Hugo explains—he was too busy suffering to fuck. This tracks: sex can only be a distant thought for the man who has to resort to swiping loaves of bread to make sure his family doesn’t starve. We know that for the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table, sex is a huge problem. Even the finest knights have the blot of sex on their escutcheon except for the virgin Galahad—who is too sickly to fuck. His virginity allows him a kind of second, holy sight: he is allowed to behold the Holy Grail and confirm its existence for a mere moment only before dying. In the Carolingian epics, the hero Orlando (or Roland) is famously a virgin, and because of his virginity prolific as a soldier.
These men are not necessarily happy with their lot, but nor are they unhappy, and their role in these kinds of heroic stories feels purposeful. The Biblical scholar Northrop Frye attested that virginity is, in storytelling and myth, a “selfhood symbol,” one which must be taken away by sex in the covenant of marriage, by which one becomes two. In a patriarchal society (ours) the “givings up”, the sacrifices, are almost exclusively done by women. But what happens when the virgin of the story is male? How does his presumed purity complicate the narrative? If he doesn’t have to deal with the social shame of sex—and he doesn’t—why should he hang on to his virginity? For the sake of difference, to keep that sense of self intact, to remain more holy—or perhaps as a way to stay blind, both to the irreligious complexity of reality and the uncharted reaches of his inner self?
I was thinking of the male virgin’s singular plight as I watched both versions of the folk horror tale The Wicker Man this week. Only the original 1973 film makes the hero’s virginity a plot point. But the Neil LaBute remake—a nearly unbearably stupid film saved only by its camp classification—bears the earmarks of the male virgin narrative perhaps more proudly than its predecessor, despite removing this character detail. The original film is a classic pagan horror story that feels ripped from the pages of Arthur Machen. The remake is a personal project, a lashing out at the crimes the creator feels to have been inflicted upon him not by a single woman or series of women, but by the female sex writ large. The Victorian agrarian society of the original is transformed into some kind of matriarchal bee cult; not only do we lose the sexually-charged and paranoid atmosphere of the first film, we find it replaced with a kind of early incel manifesto. “Why did you do this to me,” Nicholas Cage’s policeman begs of his ex-girlfriend, the woman who dragged him to the isolated island Summersisle under false pretenses. It’s almost as if he expects an answer. Instead of being able to see himself as a relatively meaningless detail in a ritual meant to bring about a bountiful harvest, he takes it all personally. When he meets the now-female leader of the cult (Ellen Burstyn) he asks her what men are in this female-centric society: “second-class citizens?”
He says it as if it’s absurd—as if the reversal of the usual order is the worst of all of Summersisle’s crimes, which include killing children and sacrificing adults to their pagan Gods. What began as an exploration of what society could be like without the Christian doctrines of “thou shalt not kill/thou shalt not fuck” becomes, by 2006, the story of how one man had his life destroyed by vindictive women. Everything is personal in the remake, but nothing is political.
Perhaps that’s why the remake is so fucking funny. The film can’t succeed as a serious piece of art, but it can and does succeed as an unintentional comedy. Neil LaBute couldn’t have created such a perfect glimpse into the inner workings of misogyny if he tried: fortunately for us, he didn’t. It was completely accidental.
The key lies in LaBute’s biggest mistake: when he adapted The Wicker Man, he left out the plot’s most important detail, the virginity. Nicholas Cage’s Edward Malus is not a virgin: in fact his inclusion in the story depends on his having had sex. He’s lured to the island under the pretense of helping his ex find her lost daughter, but he only commits fully to the project after learning (or simply being told) that he’s the child’s father. The film then becomes a father reconnaissance mission in the style of Taken: the final betrayal smarts even worse after Malus learns that his dreams of a sudden family will never come to fruition.
But the original Wicker Man isn’t about this—it’s about something much darker than the male obsession with secret progeny. The temptations of the matriarchal cult are never interesting to Malus, he never feels tempted to join in on the pagan fun, as the virginal, betrothed Sergeant Howie is in the original. Malus remains a thoroughly unconflicted figure, as dimensionless as most any action hero. His virginity isn’t the thing at stake, and it isn’t the thing that puts a target on his back. Malus is punished, finally, because he is male only. The threat of the matriarchy isn’t the traditional one, in which a world run by and for women thrives in the absence of men. It’s that Malus believes what all men mistakenly believe, which is that anti-patriarchal autonomy isn’t exciting to women because of the freedom from oppression it promises, but because it’s a way to punish men.
But who—and what—is being punished in the original? Something much more complex than masculinity itself. The threat of the original is that it takes the basic tenets of Christianity to task, and not in the corny way of so many horror films full of possessed nuns or bodies impaled on crucifixes. The sinister thing is that the people of Summersisle are overwhemingly happy, happy because in agreement, and in agreement over the almost unthinkable concept that paganism is better. Freer, less cruel and punishing.
It took me a minute to understand this. Why, I wondered, is this goofy film so unsettling? Why is the sight of children dancing around a maypole so dark? It’s not the threat of human sacrifice that even the most oblivious viewer knows is coming. It’s that the lack of the basic Christian beliefs that we believe hold society together are shown to have no real adverse effect on this particular society. Not only are people fucking out in the open without shame and leaping over a fire in order to impregnate themselves, it seems to work out pretty well for them. This is, to some extent, always the fear behind a cult: that for all our insistence on a certain kind of morality that feels intrinsic, deep down we don’t actually know that our way is better.
For instance: what’s the actual problem with the way they do things down there? Sure, they kill a guy, but just one guy, and he’s someone none of them actually know, and it seems to be a rare occurrence, at least while the crops are good. Sure, they’re fucking all over the place, and there’s a kind of obsession with maternity and parthenogenesis—but again, is that really a problem? At least, is it any more of a problem than those engendered by the Christian construction of shame around sex? I don’t know. I can’t say. The film is very clear about the fact that all Christian values have done for Sgt. Howie is make him insufferable, a prude who insists on the Jesus myth without seeming to have any real intellectual investment in it. At one point, he expresses his fear that the people of this island are being kept from reality by the tenets of this cult, kept from the truth of how life should be lived, represented by the outside world. “These children,” he asks Lord Summersisle (Christopher Lee) in outrage, “have they never heard of Jesus?”
“Himself the son of a virgin,” Summersisle replies, “impregnated by, I believe, a ghost.”
The way he phrases it reveals to us, suddenly, the inherent sillness of the tales we hold so holy. Howie accuses the islanders of practicing a “fake” religion: but is not every religion fake? Were they not all, at some point, created out of thin air?
That worry is at the heart of The Wicker Man’s unsettling theology: the idea that a man’s virginity doesn’t represent any purity of spirit, but obstinate stupidity; the idea that people who follow a Christian moral doctrine are not themselves moral, but merely unawakened to other possibilities about life. Howie is not just virginal in his body, but his mind: he refuses to question his own adherence to Christianity, just as he refuses to listen to his body, and just as he blinds himself to the logic of the island in a way that prevents his ability to make his ultimate escape.
The point is that all religious beliefs appear silly if they are not believed. As an outsider looking in on almost any religion, we’re bound to see its absurdities, bound to ask the kinds of questions that insiders might consider blasphemy. The complexity of Howie’s virginity, his inability to accept another truth but the one that’s been drilled into his head from the day he was baptized, is his undoing, and ours. We can’t believe it’s all this simple, in the end: that all they needed was a human sacrifice, that they don’t and won’t and can’t feel bad about it, and that if all it takes is a miserable man’s death to appease the Gods who keep these people happy, fed, and fucked all the year round…well—is it really that bad that he dies?
This is where horror excels as a genre: in asking the questions that religious people can’t for fear of destabilizing their own beliefs, in questioning whether society itself is backward in its pursuit of the illusion of purity. If society makes us miserable because of its rules, who’s to say it is we, and not the society itself, that are sick for continuing to live by them?
In the famous Ursula K. Le Guin story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” we’re told of a society where everyone is happy and thriving on the condition that one person remains locked away underground, suffering. And not just any person: a child. Those who live in Omelas know this, and accept it. We’re supposed to be sickened by this: we’re supposed to feel for the suffering child who must absorb all of society’s sadness. But what if we’re left instead thinking of how happy everyone else is?
That’s the point, and a dark one. As much as we believe of ourselves that we wouldn’t let something like this stand, of course we would. We are already doing so. Don’t we access our lives in the West depend, in large part, on the sufferings of other nations? Don’t we wage wars to access oil? Don’t we enjoy the luxury of living at the expense of all the suffering we can’t see?
We do, and we’ll continue to do so. We’re no better than the citizens of Summersisle, after all.
Next week: shadows come to life.