Wake Up Dead Man
Apr. 14th, 2026 08:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeWe watched Wake Up Dead Man, and we found it a fascinating story about how folks get taken in by culty, hateful people.
Monsignor Wicks is a great example of a terrible person who has a creepy hold on his flock of inmost followers... and is off-putting, unpleasant, and abrasive to everyone else. I feel like this is something a lot of people get wrong; they write cult leader types as massively charming and magnetic, often truly believing they’re doing good in the world. Nothing in our reading or regrettable Cultiples experience shows this to be true. (Indeed, if you DO get taken in by a cult leader, the ones that believe their own hype are the most dangerous. Pray you get a con artist instead.) People like Wicks are irresistibly magnetic to their target audience... and often just creepy weird to everyone else. And that’s Wicks: the guy who eternally yammers on about his entirely made-up masturbatory history to his confessor, who works to DRIVE OFF new members of his church so as to tighten his hold on the remainder, who looks upon even his most devoted followers with contempt. This is a sad, shriveled raisin-soul of a man. So how does he get his little flock of half a dozen so attached to him?
That’s the other common failure of stories about this kind of asshole: he’s so repellant and awful you can’t fathom how anyone would follow him, or the followers are depicted as gullible or cruel idiots, unworthy of compassion. It’s a hard needle to thread! But Dead Man does it.
You learn well and why how Wicks’s “flock” got here. And yes, some are jerks, like the sci-fi writer (which we find hilarious that he’s played by a Moriarty actor, only to have nothing to do with any of the crimes). His writing star has sunk, and he’s put himself into this downspiral because the more he listens to Wicks, the more awful he becomes, the fewer people want to hang around him, so the more he clings to Wicks. And he is completely unaware of this. He HAS to think that Wicks must be a special prophet nobody’s ready for, facing the slings and arrows of the unenlightened like Jesus, because otherwise he’d have to accept that he’s following a bitter douchebag and destroying his own life, work, and fanbase. (When I saw the enormous manuscript he’d written trying to make Wicks into the next L. Ron Hubbard and saw the word count was something like 750,000 words, I screamed on the inside. That’s like The Last Dangerous Visions! That’s like FIFTEEN normal-sized novels!) He’s the true believer because by this point, Wicks is the only thing holding his life and self-esteem up! How sad is that? He never does give up Wicks, he does publish the book... but he has to live with the knowledge that he doesn’t really like his new fanbase and nobody else likes the book. He’s a sad little man with a sad little fate.
The doctor is the least interesting to us. He too is a sad little man, made worse by Wicks. When his wife leaves, he doesn’t move on, descends into a bottle, and Wicks gives him a reason, stokes his bitterness because Wicks hates everyone, even his own flock, and sees their downfall as mild entertainment. It’s dramatically appropriate that the doctor is found liquidated in his own acid, throat clutched in Wicks’s dead hands: indeed, Wicks choked the life out of him slowly, and the doctor did indeed lose himself in his own bile.
Then there’s Cyrus, who would sell his own mother if he thought it’d benefit himself—but that includes turning on Wicks too. Cyrus seems to hold no values, not even real opinions. He cares about nothing except his own advancement, so he does and says whatever seems to him most expedient, unable to understand why it isn’t working, why nobody likes him. He can’t understand anyone whose beliefs or actions have substance, which might be why he gets along with Wicks, but also means he’s completely incapable of understanding Jud or Blanc. He happily gives up the info they ask for, since he thinks it can benefit him, but he can’t fathom people who CARE. Cyrus doesn’t have loyalties, he has momentary beneficial arrangements, and the moment Wicks can’t benefit him anymore, Cyrus ditches. He continues being a mediocre prick, and one could argue that his superficiality does serve him in one way: because he lives life on the surface, nothing can deeply hurt him, including Wicks.
Other members of the flock have TOO MUCH loyalty. There’s Ms. Draven, the lawyer, whose father was Wicks’s lawyer before her. Everything she does, it’s to make her father proud: she raises Cyrus, supports Wicks, only for her breaking moment to come when she realizes Cyrus has been Wicks’s son all along. She’s been doing all the work of raising him, which Cyrus doesn’t appreciate, only for Wicks to create this impromptu grand “you are my son and heir” scene, which Cyrus loves because it works great narratively for his advancement. She is the first of the flock to desert, the first to realize it’s all been a cruel sham. It’s a horrible ego blow, to realize (and without support) that she’s been covering for a horrid little man all these years, that Cyrus doesn’t give a shit about her, that all this MADE HER LIFE WORSE, but that realization allows her to leave, change, and build herself a new, better life. It’s no coincidence that she’s the first to leave, and gets the best end.
Then you have the cellist. Her dependence on Wicks is simple: she has chronic pain, incurable, and she needs to believe otherwise, and he gulls her into thinking he can pull a miracle. He’s taking shameless advantage of her pain and desperation, but mercifully, that means that in some ways, it’s easier for her to leave: once he mocks her for believing he could ever cure her, she can pull away. She has to do the bitter work of living with her pain, probably forever, and her life is irrevocably changed... but at least she is finally moving forward, not staying stuck. (In the end, that’s the choice all of the Flock have to make: accept the pain, move forward, change for the better... or deny, stay stuck trying and failing to move backwards, and stay the same or worse.)
Finally, there’s Martha. Martha’s loyalty is off the fucking chart. She makes Ms. Draven look wishy-washy. Martha was fanatically devoted to Wicks’s grandfather as a child, enough to help twist the knife against Wicks’s mother, the “harlot whore,” and now she’s fanatically devoted to Wicks. She has built her entire life on “being good,” which has nothing to do with real morals, only obedience and devotion to the “holy” men in authority. Her entire sense of who she is revolves around these shitty men; who is she without them? Even when it becomes incontrovertibly clear that Wicks is awful, that he’s determined to destroy his whole flock AND the church, she murders him because of a loyalty to that church, that image she had in her mind, a determination to make that heavenly man real. She only caves, only gives it up, when her husband Samson (who isn’t a true believer at all, he just goes to church because it matters to her and ignores all of it) gets murdered due to the scheming. Samson seems to have been the only thing she cared about that didn’t involve that church (and even he was the groundskeeper). And indeed, turns out she can’t live without Wicks; she commits suicide instead!
Next time I encounter someone who wonders how people get taken in by hateful movements, I’m gonna point them at this movie. All of the flock are flawed, vulnerable people. Everyone has some weakness that can be exploited, some desire that can be twisted. All of us struggle to grow and change, to realize when we’ve thrown our lot in with a douchebag. That’s human. That the movie works so hard to explain why is commendable.
Monsignor Wicks is a great example of a terrible person who has a creepy hold on his flock of inmost followers... and is off-putting, unpleasant, and abrasive to everyone else. I feel like this is something a lot of people get wrong; they write cult leader types as massively charming and magnetic, often truly believing they’re doing good in the world. Nothing in our reading or regrettable Cultiples experience shows this to be true. (Indeed, if you DO get taken in by a cult leader, the ones that believe their own hype are the most dangerous. Pray you get a con artist instead.) People like Wicks are irresistibly magnetic to their target audience... and often just creepy weird to everyone else. And that’s Wicks: the guy who eternally yammers on about his entirely made-up masturbatory history to his confessor, who works to DRIVE OFF new members of his church so as to tighten his hold on the remainder, who looks upon even his most devoted followers with contempt. This is a sad, shriveled raisin-soul of a man. So how does he get his little flock of half a dozen so attached to him?
That’s the other common failure of stories about this kind of asshole: he’s so repellant and awful you can’t fathom how anyone would follow him, or the followers are depicted as gullible or cruel idiots, unworthy of compassion. It’s a hard needle to thread! But Dead Man does it.
You learn well and why how Wicks’s “flock” got here. And yes, some are jerks, like the sci-fi writer (which we find hilarious that he’s played by a Moriarty actor, only to have nothing to do with any of the crimes). His writing star has sunk, and he’s put himself into this downspiral because the more he listens to Wicks, the more awful he becomes, the fewer people want to hang around him, so the more he clings to Wicks. And he is completely unaware of this. He HAS to think that Wicks must be a special prophet nobody’s ready for, facing the slings and arrows of the unenlightened like Jesus, because otherwise he’d have to accept that he’s following a bitter douchebag and destroying his own life, work, and fanbase. (When I saw the enormous manuscript he’d written trying to make Wicks into the next L. Ron Hubbard and saw the word count was something like 750,000 words, I screamed on the inside. That’s like The Last Dangerous Visions! That’s like FIFTEEN normal-sized novels!) He’s the true believer because by this point, Wicks is the only thing holding his life and self-esteem up! How sad is that? He never does give up Wicks, he does publish the book... but he has to live with the knowledge that he doesn’t really like his new fanbase and nobody else likes the book. He’s a sad little man with a sad little fate.
The doctor is the least interesting to us. He too is a sad little man, made worse by Wicks. When his wife leaves, he doesn’t move on, descends into a bottle, and Wicks gives him a reason, stokes his bitterness because Wicks hates everyone, even his own flock, and sees their downfall as mild entertainment. It’s dramatically appropriate that the doctor is found liquidated in his own acid, throat clutched in Wicks’s dead hands: indeed, Wicks choked the life out of him slowly, and the doctor did indeed lose himself in his own bile.
Then there’s Cyrus, who would sell his own mother if he thought it’d benefit himself—but that includes turning on Wicks too. Cyrus seems to hold no values, not even real opinions. He cares about nothing except his own advancement, so he does and says whatever seems to him most expedient, unable to understand why it isn’t working, why nobody likes him. He can’t understand anyone whose beliefs or actions have substance, which might be why he gets along with Wicks, but also means he’s completely incapable of understanding Jud or Blanc. He happily gives up the info they ask for, since he thinks it can benefit him, but he can’t fathom people who CARE. Cyrus doesn’t have loyalties, he has momentary beneficial arrangements, and the moment Wicks can’t benefit him anymore, Cyrus ditches. He continues being a mediocre prick, and one could argue that his superficiality does serve him in one way: because he lives life on the surface, nothing can deeply hurt him, including Wicks.
Other members of the flock have TOO MUCH loyalty. There’s Ms. Draven, the lawyer, whose father was Wicks’s lawyer before her. Everything she does, it’s to make her father proud: she raises Cyrus, supports Wicks, only for her breaking moment to come when she realizes Cyrus has been Wicks’s son all along. She’s been doing all the work of raising him, which Cyrus doesn’t appreciate, only for Wicks to create this impromptu grand “you are my son and heir” scene, which Cyrus loves because it works great narratively for his advancement. She is the first of the flock to desert, the first to realize it’s all been a cruel sham. It’s a horrible ego blow, to realize (and without support) that she’s been covering for a horrid little man all these years, that Cyrus doesn’t give a shit about her, that all this MADE HER LIFE WORSE, but that realization allows her to leave, change, and build herself a new, better life. It’s no coincidence that she’s the first to leave, and gets the best end.
Then you have the cellist. Her dependence on Wicks is simple: she has chronic pain, incurable, and she needs to believe otherwise, and he gulls her into thinking he can pull a miracle. He’s taking shameless advantage of her pain and desperation, but mercifully, that means that in some ways, it’s easier for her to leave: once he mocks her for believing he could ever cure her, she can pull away. She has to do the bitter work of living with her pain, probably forever, and her life is irrevocably changed... but at least she is finally moving forward, not staying stuck. (In the end, that’s the choice all of the Flock have to make: accept the pain, move forward, change for the better... or deny, stay stuck trying and failing to move backwards, and stay the same or worse.)
Finally, there’s Martha. Martha’s loyalty is off the fucking chart. She makes Ms. Draven look wishy-washy. Martha was fanatically devoted to Wicks’s grandfather as a child, enough to help twist the knife against Wicks’s mother, the “harlot whore,” and now she’s fanatically devoted to Wicks. She has built her entire life on “being good,” which has nothing to do with real morals, only obedience and devotion to the “holy” men in authority. Her entire sense of who she is revolves around these shitty men; who is she without them? Even when it becomes incontrovertibly clear that Wicks is awful, that he’s determined to destroy his whole flock AND the church, she murders him because of a loyalty to that church, that image she had in her mind, a determination to make that heavenly man real. She only caves, only gives it up, when her husband Samson (who isn’t a true believer at all, he just goes to church because it matters to her and ignores all of it) gets murdered due to the scheming. Samson seems to have been the only thing she cared about that didn’t involve that church (and even he was the groundskeeper). And indeed, turns out she can’t live without Wicks; she commits suicide instead!
Next time I encounter someone who wonders how people get taken in by hateful movements, I’m gonna point them at this movie. All of the flock are flawed, vulnerable people. Everyone has some weakness that can be exploited, some desire that can be twisted. All of us struggle to grow and change, to realize when we’ve thrown our lot in with a douchebag. That’s human. That the movie works so hard to explain why is commendable.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-14 04:38 pm (UTC)Description/Transcription:
Father Jud stands at the left side of the frame with his fists up in "ready to box" position. A shadowy figure stands at the right. The background is the side of the church.
Over the picture, these words are deeply etched:
In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out in his anger and his shame
"I am leaving, I am leaving", but the fighter still remains
(words from the Simon and Garfunkel song)
no subject
Date: 2026-04-14 05:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-14 08:30 pm (UTC)The hype around this movie has died down over the past few months, so it's great to see someone discussing it. I feel like everyone moved on too fast, I wasn't done yet!
no subject
Date: 2026-04-14 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-14 09:42 pm (UTC)This has me thinking about how some notorious cults, like the Zizians and the Manson family, were actually relatively small. (I've seen estimates of Charles Manson having up to 100 followers, but the serious followers were maybe a few dozen people at any given time.) Charlie Says, one of the better movies about the Manson Family, has a really good knack for making Manson look less like the Evil Mind Control Guru of popular culture and more like...everybody's abusive boyfriend, like the entire cult's abusive boyfriend who spends just enough time being sweet and charming that they talk themselves out of recognizing how shitty and awful he is the rest of the time. He's egotistical in a brittle way, clearly improvising his ideas from moment to moment, and mainly good at talking spectacular amounts of bullshit while high on drugs and lashing out at anyone who questions him. There's a good scene in the movie where one woman who comes by quickly calls out his rude behavior and doesn't fall for his tricks, and he starts angrily going off about how she's bad and doesn't belong there, and she just leaves. It made me realize the role of filtering in a lot of that cult shit, like they don't have the power to win over most people and don't try. (I think anyone could get pulled into a cult if it was the right kind of appeal presented at the right moment of vulnerability, but most people aren't going to be pulled in by the average cult leader.)
There's a power consolidation dynamic where people who are too prone to challenging and disagreeing with this particular flavor of bullshit are driven away early on, possibly before they even show up at all, so it filters down to the people who are invested in what they think they can get to the point of putting up with shit that isn't good for them, and often enduring an element of moral injury. (In the film, even the nicer members of that church had to live with knowing they'd sat silent and complicit while Wicks repeatedly turned his sermons into vicious personal attacks, and had come back week after week, showing ongoing support of a man who treated other people like that. That meant they needed to either believe Wicks wasn't just a petty mean asshole but a righteous man of God or confront something ugly about themselves.) That's how it becomes easy for cults to maintain and even escalate the destructiveness, because all of the people who would go "Hey, what the fuck?" as soon as shit started getting ugly are already filtered out, and all of the people who stay are unhealthily invested in believing this is true, because they're scared of what it means if it's not.