"The Third Day": Jude Law in "The Wicker Man," with scissor goblins, a dead son, and Will Rogers

  

Link to the n*de dudes

The Third Day, on Netflix, had an interesting premise: an island where "you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave."  The "third day" is when Jesus rose from the dead, so there may be some people coming back to life.  Plus it stars Jude Law, who played gay characters in Wilde (1996) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), so I'm in.

Update:  It's hard to find.  It keeps changing streaming services, from Netflix to Hulu to MAX, as if the universe doesn't want me to see it.  

Scene 1: Sam (Jude Law) stops his car on a deserted road to call a woman: the money is in the office, 40,000 pounds cash.  Don't call the police; don't let Amboy in the house.  He stares into space for a long time, then walks into the woods.  Everything goes blurry.  Is he entering an alternate universe?

He stops at a brook, and lets a small striped shirt float away.  Mourning a dead son.

Scene 2: Suddenly Sam hears a girl yelling at her friend to let go of the rope.  He rushes over just in time for a friend let go and run away.  She is hanging herself!  He cuts her down and asks if she wants to go to the hospital, but she just wants to go home.  

On the way, he gives his back story: he used to work with troubled youth in social services, but now he runs a garden center in London; he's married with two daughters.  Heterosexual identity established, he asks if someone is hurting or scaring her at home, but she won't say.

Weird detail: she asks for water, and then puts salt in it.  Who drinks salt water?  Are her people aliens out of the Cthulhu Mythos?

Home is Osea Island, across a narrow, winding causeway that's only open at low tide.  Very stressful to get across.

Back story: Osea is a real island in Essex, accessible by a causeway at low tide twice a day.  Over the years it has been home to a naval base and a rehab clinic, but now it's privately owned.

They pass a amphitheater, a lot of porta-potties, weird giant figures, and brown-robed goblins attacking townsfolk with scissors.  The Girl says that there are only 93 people living on the island, but this year they are opening their pagan cult festival to outsiders, hoping to turn it in to a music festival and raise some money.  

Hundreds of people driving on that narrow causeway?  They'll be driving right into the ocean.

Scene 3:  The Girl doesn't want to go home to her dad (uh-oh), she wants to go to the pub, where the Martins take her into the kitchen, whisper anxiously, and occasionally peer out at Sam.  He checks for cell phone reception -- none -- and looks at the pictures on the wall.  Why are there three pictures of corpses?

Mr. Martin (Paddy Considine, below) returns and dumps a hasty explanation: "She wasn't trying to hang herself, it was just fooling around like kids do; she's not afraid of her father or anybody on the island; everything is fine.  Thanks for bringing her home, but you should leave -- NOW!"

But Sam has to get in touch with Aday from Scene 1 right away: he's a planning official who will be deciding on whether they can go forward with their plans to build a new center -- this afternoon!

Mr. Martin doesn't like that name -- "African, innit? Lots of African immigrants on the mainland.  Everyone thinks that they cause trouble, but some are ok."  Dude is racist.

After a long, inappropriate story about how he and his wife always wanted kids, but seven pregnancies didn't come to term, Mr. Martin offers to escort Sam to his car so he can LEAVE, NOW!   

Scene 4:  On the way, Mr. Martin reveals that the music festival will coincide with their "Esus and the Sea" ceremony,. Esus was a Celtic war god, but because of the similarity in the names, everyone thinks that the ceremony is about Jesus.

Mr. Martin begins to interrogate Sam: why were you so far from home, on such an important day?   Also, Mrs. Martin recognized you, so you're not here by accident, are you?

Uh-oh, his car is blocked in, they can't find the driver, and the causeway will be closing in about 15 minutes.  Don't they have ferries?

Mr. Martin changes the urgency of his advice to get out. "You'll have to spend the night.  I'll put you in a room at the pub."

"No, I need to get off this island now!"  Sam reveals that the burglars took 40,000 pounds in cash, that they were going to use to bribe Aday! That's sleazy, but not as sleazy as I ithought.  Maybe he's lying.

Martin reaches the obvious conclusion: Aday stole your money.  But why would he steal the money, when they were going to give it to him anyway?

More after the break

Who Killed Cock Robin: The Only Gay Nursery Rhyme

When I was a kid in the 1960s, I liked science fiction, like The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet and The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree, but I hated fairy tales, and I especially hated nursery rhymes.

Most of them made no sense: who would bake  blackbirds into a pie?  Who keeps a lamb as a pet?  And what the heck is a tuffet?


Those that made sense (sort of) were entirely heterosexist.  Jack and Jill go walking up that hill hand-in-hand.  Jack Sprat and his wife have the disgusting habit of licking dinner plates. Some kid named Georgie likes to kiss girls.

The only one I could stand was "Who Killed Cock Robin?", which like most nursery rhymes, was intended to teach Medieval children about death.  It's not actually a mystery -- a Sparrow confesses to the murder in the first line -- and the rest of the poem involves various birds offering to sew his shroud, dig the grave, build the coffin, and so on.




What I liked about it:

1. I didn't learn the British meaning of the word "cock" (a male bird) until much later, so it was amazing to hear about a bird named after a penis.

2. I could even get away with asking my Dad to "read me the nursery rhyme about the cock."

3. The illustration in my nursery rhyme book showed a muscular male killer, not a sparrow.

4. One of my first "British Invasion" tv programs was the episode "Who Killed Cock Robin?" on Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), about a pair of swinging detective buddies (Mike Pratt, Kenneth Cope), one a ghost.

5. An episode of Matinee at the Bijou in the 1970s featured a murder mystery entitled Who Killed Cock Robin (1938).  It starred the handsome Charles Farrell, who would go on to play the dad in My Little Margie in the 1950s.  I didn't know it at the time, of course, but Farrell was: a former nude physique model; and rumored to be gay.

6. The nursery rhyme is reputedly about William II, the King of England, who was gay.  He was shot with an arrow by Walter Tyrell, probably his lover, while hunting in the New Forest on August 2, 1100.  In The Golden Bough,  Sir James Frazier argues that his death was no accident, but a sacrifice to the Old Gods in a remnant of an ancient fertility rite.

See also: The Joy of Saying "Cock"

Jim Morrison: Bisexual Poet of the Dark Side

I didn't know Jim Morrison of the Doors until 1980, when a biography by Jerry Hopkins and Daniel Sugerman appeared on the racks at Readmore Book World, with a shirtless photo and a provocative title, No One Here Gets Out Alive.

It made Jim Morrison into a tortured poet with ties to the world of magic and the occult, a hippie rebel against convention of all sort.  That read Gay to me, although the book made him sound exceptionally homophobic.  But in the 1980s, every biography of a gay or bi man made him sound like a homophobic heterosexual.

Other biographers have mentioned that Morrison was bisexual, usually in a negative light.  Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison (1992), says that his search for "the dark side" led him to "unpleasant places," like gay bars. Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend (2005) talks of his "midnight ramblings in the gay underworld."

But there's a lot of gay symbolism in the Doors' lyrics:


"Break On Through" (1967) seems to be a search for a "good place":
You know the day destroys the night, night divides the day
Tried to run, tried to hide, break on through to the other side

"Strange Days" (1967) sounds like nights at the levee, looking for love in the darkness:

Strange days have found us..we linger alone
Bodies confused, memories misused
As we run from the day,  to a strange night of stone

And "The Soft Parade" (1969) seems to include a reference to same-sex love:
There's only four ways to get unraveled:
One is to love your neighbor 'till his wife gets home









And Jim Morrison's writings:

Boys get crazy in the head and suffer
I sacrifice my c*** on the altar of silence. (The American Night).

Every gay and bi man in the 1960s sacrificed himself on the altar of silence.