“The Wildling” is a low budget 2018 horror movie. The focal point of the movie is the teenaged daughter, who is suspected of being possessed. Over time her body changes and she transforms into “The Wildling”, who she has been told her whole life is a demonic being known to eat children.
But as a child, the so-called father (we find out later he’s not her biological father) of the now teenaged daughter attempted to keep her a child forever by injecting her with a serum and hiding her away in an attic.
The quarantining and injecting of the girl didn’t work. She still transformed into some sort of wild human-animal hybrid and by the end of the movie roamed wild in the mountains, heeding the call of other Wildlings who had escaped their own perilous upbringing and were also free.
Of course it’s a metaphor for shedding shackles that bind us to childhood and all the dependance upon others that comes with it and the subservience to fear-based thinking. It’s only when we are free and fully actualized that we can roam to make our own decisions and explore the world under our own conditions.
It could also be a symbol for the unnatural biological interferences into the natural world and how that creates a new life-force unto itself. This hybridized life-force seems like something out of a comic book as the Wildlings themselves could be a symbol for the polluted waters and skies that are changing our world forever. As natural humans we must acknowledge these pollutants and somehow live amongst them. Some may evolve. Some may not.
I know a couple of Wildlings personally. Women, actually.
One lives in a small domicile deep in the woods. Actually, it’s a converted abandoned shack that she convinced the practically non-existent owner to rent to her. She insulated it herself, installed floors and she painted the interior of the place herself. She warms her small space in the winter with a wood-burning stove and she uses a compostable toilet. She reluctantly drives into the nearby-ish small town to stock up on groceries for herself and has as little human contact as possible. She has a dog who she takes for long walks in the woods and to the nearby river. In the spring and summer she drives the distance to run her own gardening business. She has no staff. All the money she makes is squirreled away so she can buy food and whatever else she needs for the winter. I’ve seen pictures of her hauling food on a sled in the middle of a snowstorm because her car couldn’t get through the snow. She has limited internet access and only uses it occasionally to show photos of her dog or share her drawings and nature-photos.
The other Wildling I know also lives on her own terms but is a little more “urban” if you will. She lives in a medium sized town in a large West Coast state but it’s nearby enough to a giant park that she can go on long hikes or runs for hours at a time to escape the modern world. She has a hard time visiting family and friends because most people now use LED light bulbs to light their house and she has discovered that the old fashioned incandescent bulbs don’t seem to affect her health as much as the LED bulbs. In a recent trip to see family she described the LED bulbs giving her headaches and the plug-in chemical scents emitting throughout the home made her feel nauseous and unstable. She found herself unable to sleep because the scented detergents the hosts use to clean the sheets were making her ill. She has to sustain a life like we all do, so she does have a stable full-time job in a field where she physically helps injured or disabled people. I imagine her being a sort of real-life Florence Nightingale of sorts adding her own holistic advice to the patients she cares for but always with an extreme air of caution. Like a typical Wildling, she keeps to herself.
Wildlings in general have a healthy distrust of the modern world and only seem to really trust the natural world, fully immersing themselves to their stubborn childlike love of the purity of the natural world. They recoil from certain modern tendencies or if they have to rely on them like we all do, they do it reluctantly.
My husband and I left our home, the modern and up-to-the-minute in technology innovative San Francisco, in 2018, and moved to Pittsburgh which fashions itself equally advanced. (It’s not). In November 2023 we moved to the Gulf Coast and we found ourselves settling into our own subtle version of a Wildling nature, minus the aversion to all things modern and technological.
For example, we have a Netflix account but no TV. I’ve stocked up on incandescent bulbs but some of our bulbs are LED. At night, we turn off our WiFi booster, and sometimes our WiFi when we remember. We use cash everywhere in town but sometimes use a credit or debit card to reserve a hotel room or pay for a bigger ticket item. We fly on airplanes.
We have 8 live oak trees on our property which provide ample shade in the sweltering heat of the summer and we live within walking distance to two bodies of water: The Back Bay and the Gulf of Mexico which means our area is always a little cooler than the more inland areas of our Southern State. Yet, we do have air conditioning in the house and electric ceiling fans in every room.
Where we live seems to have found this natural balance of the modern and the Wildling. It’s not fancy but it’s also not completely shrouded in nature. We live in our world as it exists but we don’t seek out technology for its own sake.
A friend who lives in a small urban apartment in the third largest urban Northern City in the United States recently visited us. He is not a Wildling and like most urbanites could never function fully immersed as a Wildling. This is not a criticism. This is just the way life is. I am an urbanite most of my natural life and am fully aware that I could never live as a fully immersed Wildling myself.
He had to take it all in pretty quickly and despite being an urbanite, his nature is kind, he tends to take things slow and doesn’t jump to conclusions; he is careful with his words and processes information on his own time. The second he disembarked the plane in the tiny airport that services this region, he probably found us changed.
After all, we were urbanites in San Francisco when he visited us in 2017, then urbanites still when he visited us in Pittsburgh in 2020 and 2022. But this recent trip (2024) to visit us we had changed and I imagine our Wildling sprit may have taken him aback a bit.
He barely had time to process a place he’d never been, when he found himself sitting outside on the Gulf of Mexico eating coconut shrimp with nearby palm trees swaying in the breeze and the local Wildling children frolicking in the beach and sand below the wooden deck where we sat, gawking at the sunset.
The un-jaded and un-tainted nature of all our servers and the genuine kindness and conversational attitude of everyone he met for the time he spent with us must have seemed an innocent reflection of what Human Nature has always been and is always supposed to be: a Wildling that seems to have been bred out of places with canyons of skyscrapers that line a glittering City skyline.
He must have felt he was in a town where maybe time stood a little bit still. The houses around us are small, built for the working class locals around the 1940s or 1950s and a lot of them survived Hurricane Katrina. A block away there are bigger more estate-like homes though with stunning views of the Back Bay or even the Gulf of Mexico, sitting on stilts above the fragile ground beneath. Yet, on the edges of these homes is that Wildling nature, although subdued. The trauma of Hurricane Katrina still palpable, leaving an aversion to most things new, most things modern and most things unfamiliar.
Wedged in the nature of the locals is a harmonious Wildling existence where the skill of survival in a Northern world that admonishes and “others” them for simply being Southern, is an effect unfamiliar and foreign to someone like my friend, a born and bred Northerner who has never felt this baked-in cultural disregard. He may have never felt what it’s like to be slighted and dismissed simply for being born in his region. He may have, at one time in his life, felt a dismissive othering by people he trusted or loved or loved him, but it was brief.
The Slight of the South sparked the Wildling within. In the movie referenced at the beginning of this post, “The Wildling”, it’s about keeping humans from evolving or growing into their true nature and using extreme and hostile measures to do so. Yet, the very instinct the villain(s) tried to destroy was made even stronger as a result of the violence and gaslighting waged against it.
I don’t know if my friend will be back. When faced with the uncompromising nature of a Wildling it can be off-putting, surprising and scary. I suppose that’s why the movie “The Wildling” was a horror movie. The viewer is left with this idea that these wild, grotesque creatures live all around us and could tear our throats out any minute as we innocently meander through our existence.
There is this idea in San Francisco, and the North, that we are supposed to live in a beige, bland, polite world where trauma is under wraps, never acknowledged, never our adversary and never something to conquer. The fentanyl crisis in that town, for instance, is one of the most deadly and destructive outside forces the world has ever seen. The City has abandoned itself to this monstrous cancer with collapsed and exiting industry abandoning leases at breakneck speed and yet, no one I know back home ever talks about it. They refuse to look at it. Only the few Wildlings in that City are willing to march out into the open, gnash their teeth and bring the truth of what’s happening into crystal clear view through cataract ambivalence to a destructive nature that has a will all its own.
“The Wildling” is a movie about the story of survival. Survival is never pretty, it’s never as grand as you think it is. It can be frightening, even ugly and always a little off-putting but that is what evolution looks like. To dismiss it or keep blinders on in the face of it means a refusal to grow, expand, evolve and mature within the world. And that refusal means you are captured, quarantined and held in that perpetual gas-lit childlike state.
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