Witches – Bitch Flicks

“You Can’t Sit with Us”: Witchy Girl Gangs and Covens

Underwritten in this claim of selfhood, however, is a larger message. Each of the films and the TV series, to varying degrees, promote individuality over conformity. Eventually, each teaches viewers the importance of being true to yourself and avoiding the pitfalls of group mentality. …Each manifestation of the girl group trope proposes an affirmation of self-esteem, non-conformity, independence, and individuality.

This guest post written by Michelle Mastro appears as part of our theme week on Women in Horror.

The volume of films exploring the hazards of “girl world” is quite robust. Before the comedy Mean Girls there was cult classic Heathers, a darker satirical vision of teenage girl strife. Rounding out the cinematic landscape between these pillars of classic girl-on-girl warfare set in the average American high school are numerous other examples from Never Been Kissed to Jawbreaker. In fact, so hackneyed is the trope of female-centered cliques that if it isn’t treated as part and parcel of teen comedies as a genre, it is almost always at least a minor plot point. Yet horror films and television series grapple with themes inspired by catty drama and gossip as well, only the aesthetics are different to align better with their genre. In these iterations of the girl clique trope, girl gangs become covens, and the power of gossip is transformed into charms and incantations.

Swapping out girl gangs and cliques for covens is as easily done as replacing “witch” with that other not so nice pejorative term for women. In the TV series American Horror Story: Coven, for example, Fiona Goode (Jessica Lange) toys with both words, calling one of the school’s meaner pupils a “little witch bitch.” In that same episode, she takes the band of squabbling girls on a field trip through New Orleans, telling them all beforehand to “wear something black.” The show aired on Wednesdays, prompting fans to coin the phrase, “On Wednesdays we wear black,” another play on words, only this time in reference to Mean Girls. One of the frequently quoted lines from the film includes the “Plastics”’ rules about hump day association and uniformity: “On Wednesdays we wear pink.” The writers of AHS: Coven and fans alike got the joke: girls in groups can be mean — mean like witches.

This, of course, might seem like a sexist reading of girl friendships — and it would be even more understandable to question the show’s depiction of gender given how female sexuality is portrayed and its problematic depiction of race. Yet, given that women, historically, could only maintain their social status through heteronormative marriage — through their connections to men — it would make sense that the young women might begin to view each other as competition. In high school, who dates whom really matters, and thus the high schools of the films are more or less stuck in a time warp. Their cafeterias, the place of social gathering, are where romantic attachments are forged. The dining hall perfectly figures as a sort of Regency court of King George III, where marriages mattered to one’s social superiority. Social status dictated how close courtiers got to sit near the king. Terrifyingly, the king’s friendship could help produce advantageous marriages or dissolve them entirely. Thus, the more popular the girl in Mean Girls, the closer she resides near Regina George. She usually forbids more readily than she grants unions, however, and her despotic rule feeds much of the clique’s cattiness.

Which begs the question: why would these characters hang around each other at all? On the surface, each school clique offers a certain amount of protection. In AHS: Coven’s case, if the girls don’t band together, they will face assaults from outsiders. “If witches don’t fight, we burn,” says Fiona to the students. In Mean Girls (written by Tina Fey), the point of being in the Plastics is somewhat similar, though obviously not nearly as dire. For protagonist Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), lunchtime at the cafeteria posed as a minefield full of aggressive cliques, and not being a member of any group at first, she found herself the butt of jokes, a social outcast forced to eat alone in a women’s bathroom stall. Better to have fun at the expense of others with the Plastics in their “Burn Book” than get burned oneself. The same conclusion is proposed near the beginning of The Craft and Heathers. Sarah (Robin Tunney) in the former joins her clique more out of necessity than anything else, whereas Veronica (Winona Ryder) in the latter participates in spiteful pranks on fellow students, even though she questions the group’s methods and is quick to claim her own name in a gaggle of Heathers, stridently affirming: “I’m a Veronica.”

In The Craft, when the girls catch a bus together, they all wear dark sun-glasses and nearly identical fashions, precursors of the pink Plastics and black-draped New Orleans witches, not to mention references to the shoulder-pad loving Heathers of the 1980s. Each group of young women has made their own clique, but within each group, conformity is essential. What’s worse, the supposed protection proffered by The Craft’s coven in the form of casting spells is as spiteful as participating in any girl gang gossip. Both hurt and have unforeseen consequences. Sarah learns to be careful about what energy she puts out. “Whatever you send out, you get back threefold,” she is counselled. She casts a spell to get back at football player Chris Hooker (Skeet Ulrich) for spreading lies that the pair had sex. After the spell, he becomes her lapdog, but his obsession quickly turns violent. Apparently, her intention behind the spell was wicked, and the results matched. Although Sarah was right to seek justice, her spell was framed in a way that could only elicit revenge, a much more volatile act that inflicts a cost on both parties, although this in no way means that she deserved nor brought on herself slut-shaming or attempted rape. In AHS: Coven, one of the girls, Madison (Emma Roberts), is gang raped. She uses her magic to kill the boys, but also murders an innocent guy in the process. Her actions will come back to haunt her, as all the witches’ poor decisions inevitably do. Madison becomes more and more heartless as the series progresses, symbolized by an actual heart condition preventing her from ever serving as the coven’s leader. “The only good or bad is in the heart of the witch,” Lirio (Assumpta Serna) tells the girls in The Craft. Cady in Mean Girls arrives at a similar realization. The Burn Book of the Plastics is photocopied and dispersed among the students, and Cady will have to find a way to take back her words. It is too late, of course, just like in Sarah’s case. In The Craft, Lyrio tells her: “When you open a flood gate, how can you undo it? You unleash something with a spell. There is no undoing; it must run its course.” The mistake each of the girls all made was attempting a kind of vigilante justice — really a type of revenge.

The Craft is a cult classic that impacted many women due to its representation and messages of empowerment and “taking back the threat of female power.” In the oral history of The Craft at Entertainment Weekly, producer Douglas Wick said he “was curious about the phenomenon of girls marginalized in a man’s world who suddenly come into their sexuality and have this enormous power.” Actress Robin Tunney said, “Somehow it still speaks to everybody’s inner teenage girl.” In her Vulture article on The Craft‘s legacy, Angelica Jade Bastien writes:

“Witchcraft is more than mere teenage rebellion for these young girls. It’s a means to attain what at first glance appears unattainable: power, control, autonomy, the ability to live beyond the various oppressive forces that govern their lives. […] These girls, each in their own way, is calling out for something women learn early and often is hard to attain: the power to control your own life.”

Yet the girls’ friendship ultimately turns toxic and destructive, demanding conformity over individuality.

Sarah, Veronica, Cady, and the girls from AHS: Coven learn painful lessons. Words and spells cannot be taken back and cannot be undone, and the girls prove more powerful in their individuality. In The Craft, Sarah realizes her friends’ coven is organized more like a petty club and her fellow witches are just as spiteful as the young women and men they sought vengeance against. Veronica realizes she cannot undue the harm she has caused; she cannot bring back the kids she helped to murder. And Cady learns that being “personally victimized by Regina George” does not give her license to become another queen bee. Each of the protagonists find strength in themselves. Sarah is called a natural witch, for unlike the other girls, her “power comes from within.” After Sarah’s coven disperses, all the girls lose their magical powers except Sarah. Veronica and Cady, meanwhile, end their films with the promise of never allowing any future cliques to form in their respective high schools ever again. Or at the very least, they won’t conform to what others say; they will listen to their own moral compass. In AHS: Coven, the ruling mean girls Madison and Fiona have been ousted as well. And the rise of a new headmistress, Cordelia (Sarah Paulson) brings with her the promise of beginning the school afresh. Past mistakes will not be repeated, she informs the press, revealing the school to the world.

In this way, each manifestation of the girl group trope proposes an affirmation of self-esteem, non-conformity, independence, and individuality. The chilling and ominous tales about teenage witches invoke and summon the moral of their comedic cousins, warning female viewers against resentment and revenge, while encouraging them to always “do unto others as they would have done unto them.” What might seem like an allusion to Christian doctrine is, in fact, the basis of many beliefs, even Wiccan practices. “[I]t’s part of a basic spiritual truth. Said in many ways in many faiths,” Lirio says matter-of-factly. Spells, like gossip, will come back “threefold.”

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Girl Gangs Are Mean: Teenage Girl Gang Movies Through the Years

20 Years of The Craft: Why We Needed More of Rochelle

American Horror Story: Coven: Gabourey Sidibe’s Queenie as an Embodiment of the “Strong Black Woman” Stereotype

Exploring Bodily Autonomy on American Horror Story: Coven

I’m a Veronica: Power and Transformation Through Female Friendships in Heathers

Veronica Decides Not to Die — Heathers: The Proto-Mean Girls

How Should a Show about Witches Be?

Michelle Mastro is a graduate student at Indiana University, Bloomington’s English PhD program. She loves all things horror, and to her, autumn is the greatest season not just for Starbucks pumpkin spice but for the availability of horror film marathons on TV — of which she watches plenty.

How Should a Show About Witches Be?

It seems in Hollywood, you can’t talk about women without talking about witches.

This is a guest post by Kaitlyn Soligan.

If “Women in Television” has a unifying theme of the moment, it is this: Everybody Wants a Witch. American Horror Story, Witches of East End, Salem, and HBO’s new Jenji Kohan project The Devil You Know are only the latest instances in recent years of television venturing deeply into witchy woods, with decidedly mixed results. Besides a litany of recent shows devoted solely to Magical Women and Where to Find Them, witches also play various parts in the plethora of supernatural and fantasy shows on television right now; witches are featured in main or recurring roles on Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries, and Grimm, among recent others. More general mainstream fare, including Outlander, Pixar’s Brave, and even the upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron have fantastical elements and crucial plot points that include or revolve entirely around witchy women. It seems in Hollywood, you can’t talk about women without talking about witches.

Historically, witches have been everything from women who speak their mind to women who own property. Witches have been men who supported women or wouldn’t back down from an argument; witches have been those with a more fluid gender expression or characteristics that failed to fit neatly into an acceptable box on medical forms. Witches have been those with a race or ethnicity that differed in any way from that of those around them, particularly when they occupied the space they did as a result of forceful intervention and colonization. Witches have been the poor and disenfranchised and unlucky. Witches have been sexually powerful and enviable, wealthy and confident; occasionally, witches have been anyone who accused someone else of being a witch, when the tides quickly turned and luck was unsettlingly re-distributed. Witches have those with a faith that differed even slightly from the dominant one of the place and time, including, at intervals, Jews, Pagans, Wiccans, practicers of Hoodoo, and those with basic medical knowledge or an interest in science, among others.

Witches are in the very fabric and nature of gender and queerness and the margins we live in. So if “the season of the witch” just won’t end, how, exactly, should a show about witches be? How about this: Womyn-centric. Gender queering. Aware of race and ethnicity and faith and their role and lived reality in any particular time and space. Deeply intersectional and examining of those aforementioned spaces in the context of that intersectionality. And, without reservation and above all else: totally, joyfully bonkers.

Recent attempts to bring witches to the mainstream have succeeded and failed in almost equal measure. American Horror Story: Coven, created by an out gay man, had a sense of camp about it that harkened back to The Witches; it had something of the horrible feminine in those early images of Kathy Bates smearing her face with blood, of what women will do for power when power is ferociously limited by age and desire; it had some notion to examine race and its implications in magic and magical portrayals. Unfortunately, it also had an abhorrently mishandled rape scene in the first episode, and, whether for fear or incompetence, neither asked the right questions about race nor answered any at all.

Salem, while certainly a missed opportunity to examine the actual Salem witch trials, which were consumed by all of these questions and more, also has camp, gore, and a gleefully nuts sexuality going for it. Witches – both men and women – are everywhere among the good townspeople, who are painfully repressed and not particularly good. The devil is real and holding massive orgies in the woods. Two witches seduce a man, pin him down, and force-feed him a frog. One witch feeds the frog nightly from an extra nipple. Pure insanity abounds.

Also, Salem is pretty gross. — Also, *Salem* is pretty gross.

What Salem and so many other shows that feature witches gets painfully wrong is race. The character of Tituba is weak and jealous, and, as one of the only characters with implications of queerness, leaves us with a jealous almost-lesbian who practices a weirdly racialized magic as the sole character of color on the show. While plenty of other characters are similarly messy or even mishandled, having the entire diversity of the cast rest on that one token portrayal makes Tituba’s mismanagement unconscionable as well as flat-out uncomfortable. Moreover, Tituba actually is a fascinating historical figure, and deserves some of the dignity of the woman herself, whose story is one of dislocation and survival in an extraordinarily dangerous time.

Surprisingly, Lifetime’s Witches of East End’s sometimes diverse cast handled the intersection of race and magic well – to a point. One early character was an African American librarian who thought magic was a fun game of pretend and was the incidental victim of real magic gone wrong, as was a brief romantic lead who became a ghost (obviously). A later romantic interest for one of the main characters was a badass warrior witch that resulted in a few episodes that explored a magical, interracial same-sex relationship of equals, making those traits incidental and the relationship itself about commitment and ego and family. The cast on the whole was diverse in a laid-back way that really worked, until a storyline about an ostensibly Caribbean witch fell into a trap earlier laid by historical misrepresentation, AHS: Coven, Beautiful Creatures, and many others: magic was suddenly racialized, with the Caribbean witch doing dark “blood magic” with bones and powders that was nothing like the ostensibly “better” or cleaner magic practiced by the white leads.

You can feel the sexual tension radiating off of this photo, and these two weren’t even the ones sleeping together.

Aside from the sadly typical mishandling of representation, Witches of East End had some of the things one would hope for; certainly bonkers, sexual, funny, community and family oriented, it also had a messy, sometimes defiantly non-existent narrative structure that in and of itself queered television – if only by making it almost unfollowable, requiring the viewer to give up on the notion of neat boundaries and control.

It’s this new Jenji Kohan HBO vehicle that shows the most promise and gives audiences the most to hope for in terms of what genre-bending things a show about witches could bring to TV. Kohan has headed the excellently written and extremely diverse Orange Is the New Black, proving that she gets women and deliberately women-centric spaces in television. That show also did some cool things with narrative structure, partly as a way to bring an audience in through a typical white-girl-fish-out-of-water point of entry and then go to different, much more interesting places. That cast gave us the unbelievably fabulous Uzo Aduba. The Devil You Know offers similar cause for excitement. It’s full of less-knowns who’ve shown enormous potential, particularly Zawe Ashton, who was part of the weird and moving Dreams of a Life, a queer kind of cinematic endeavor in and of itself, and better-knowns like Karen Gillan, a movie star and genre favorite in her own right as well as a badass action star who shaved her head for a role. Most significantly, the cast includes Eddie Izzard, simultaneously a seriously phenomenal dramatic actor and one of the greatest stand-up comedians in the world, who once explained to a reporter, “Drag means costume. What I do is just wearing a dress.” And all of these moving pieces will be on HBO, the venue that brought us True Blood, which was, for all its problems, queer, dark, funny, extremely sexual, and absolutely, joyfully, bonkers.

Witches are an energetic reality; like ghosts, monsters, and loneliness, they wouldn’t have such a deep psychological pull if they weren’t. We examine these things because they obsess us and keep us awake at night; we examine these things because they are an unquantifiable, intangible, undefinable reality, but a reality all the same. Witches have been terrified victims, sexual beings, rich women trapped in penthouse apartments and more; all of this is so. But what witches do has been and is another matter entirely. Witches upend: dreams, homes, lives, whole villages and cities. They make us uneasy. They steal outright: babies from cradles, men from beds; they take quietly in the night: crops, a sense of security; they give: love potions, stories, endless wonder. They pervert and fascinate beyond measure.

Witches have been wild and untamable for all of recorded human history, and for as long as we’ve had the written word, from The Brothers Grimm to Arthur Miller to Bewitched to Buffy, hardly a storyteller hasn’t tried to tame them. It’s time to stop trying. Let loose the beasts. They won’t promise not to hurt you, but if rumors or true, they will show you a hell of a good time.

Kaitlyn Soligan is a writer and editor from Boston living in Louisville, Kentucky. She writes about that, and bourbon, at www.ivehadworseideas.com. You can follow her on twitter @ksoligan.

The Power of Work/Life Balance in ‘Charmed’

Phoebe and Paige’s evolution through their working lives is particularly poignant to the millennial ‘Charmed’ audience; many people I know grew up watching the three (or is it four?) sisters flitting from job to job in their quest to find purpose and fulfillment. And we don’t even have daily demon attacks to contend with!

This guest post by Scarlett Harris appears as part of our theme week on Women and Work/Labor Issues.

Despite all the midriff tops and high heels worn while fighting supernatural beings, and despite the damaged household items, buildings and cars which seem to miraculously be fixed by the next episode, if not before, Charmed is a lesson in work/life balance.

Throughout the eight seasons, which culminated in 2006, the Halliwell sisters struggle to balance demon fighting with romance, employment, study, and family.

Oldest sister Prue (Shannen Doherty) was killed off at the end of season three but not before she ditched her demon-dwelling auction house job at Buckland’s for freelance photography and bowed out of the dating game to focus on magic. As the head of a household whose mother died young, Prue was a maternal figure to her sisters, always concerned with putting family first, at the detriment to her love life and, ultimately, her actual life.

In “Which Prue Is It, Anyway?” from season one, Prue casts a spell to produce two carbon copies of herself, which carry out tasks such as dealing with her ex-boyfriend and cop on her case, Andy, while another one works on a spell with Piper and Phoebe, and yet another goes to Buckland’s to finish up some work. Talk about being a Superwoman!

Prue, Prue, Prue — Prue, Prue, and more Prue

Piper (played by Holly Marie Combs), who turns out to be the most level-headed and conventionally “normal” of the three sisters, gets fed up with being walked over in her season one job as manager of Quake restaurant and quits to open her own club, P3. She then gets seriously involved with whitelighter Leo, whom she marries in season three, and has two children with him, Wyatt and Chris. They then separate, Piper dates other people, they get back together again… Apart from the anguish of knowing their firstborn, Wyatt, grows up to be evil, Piper’s depiction as a frazzled “working mum” with a supernatural side really is the most realistic of the four Halliwell/Matthews sisters.

Which brings us to Phoebe (Alyssa Milano), the youngest of the original Charmed Ones until Paige comes along in season four. She enters the show as a free-spirit with a flawed perception of the future, or so we are led to believe by Prue, who’s had her issues with Phoebe in the past. In the first season alone she works as a hotel psychic, Prue’s assistant at Buckland’s and a real estate agent. After she casts a smart spell in “The Painted World” early on in season two, Phoebe decides to expand her knowledge for good and goes back to college. After graduating in season three (I wish I graduated college that quickly!), she goes on to write a successful advice column for The Bay Mirror newspaper, which fellow independent woman Elise edits.

We can’t forget Phoebe’s tumultuous personal life–her intense connection with Cole/Balthazar turn her into the queen of the underworld and the prospective mother of his demon spawn, she moves to China with millionaire boss Jason, becoming an aunty to Wyatt and Chris and, later, a mother to her own kids and taking a sabbatical from the newspaper because she’s feeling disconnected from her work. After Prue’s death, Phoebe takes on her longing for a less magical life which becomes somewhat of a reality for her in passing on the Charmed Ones’ knowledge to rookie witch Billie (a post-8 Simple Rules but pre-Big Bang Theory Kaley Cuoco) and the next generation of Halliwell witches.

Phoebe's column becomes famous — Phoebe’s column becomes famous

Half-sister Paige Matthews, played by Rose McGowan, enters Piper and Phoebe’s life as a social worker at the beginning of season four. She is unreceptive to being magical at first, and spends most of the first season trying to maintain a “normal life,” with a job, a boyfriend, and a new family who happens to be supernatural. (She, like Prue, later leaves the paid workforce to focus on witch duties full-time.) Throughout her televised tenure as a Charmed One, Paige dabbles in temp work with a magical twist, becomes a whitelighter and the principal of magic school, then marries and has kids.

Phoebe and Paige’s evolution through their working lives is particularly poignant to the millennial Charmed audience; many people I know grew up watching the three (or is it four?) sisters flitting from job to job in their quest to find purpose and fulfillment. And we don’t even have daily demon attacks to contend with! The support of their family is key in allowing the Halliwell’s to shun traditional careers in favor of part-time- and self-employment and working from home, much like Gen Y is able to save for house deposits and overseas gap years while living with their long-suffering parents.

After all, that is what Charmed is all about: family—sisters who just happen to be witches, and everything that goes along with both of those roles. While the manifestation of three fully groomed and immaculately dressed sister witches each morning in the Halliwell manor, who spend their days flitting about town vanquishing demons, protecting the innocent, working their day jobs, caring for their family, going on dates, maintaining a home, studying, managing their own businesses, etc., is extremely unrealistic, the sheer magnitude of what the Charmed Ones have to go through each day is somewhat of a metaphor for what working women—especially those with an extended family who all happen to live under the one roof—go through on a day-to-day basis. And sometimes, they manage to take it in stride, just as the Charmed Ones do.

Scarlett Harris is a Melbourne, Australia-based freelance writer and blogger at The Early Bird Catches the Worm (soon to be undergoing a revamp; stay tuned!).

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

The Seven Stages of Important Black Film Fatigue by Stacia Brown at American Prospect

Why ’12 Years A Slave’ Is Different From ‘The Help’ And ‘Django Unchained’–And Why It Matters by Alyssa Rosenberg at ThinkProgress

It’s Time To Say Good-Bye To TV’s Strong Black Woman by Nichole Perkins at BuzzFeed

13 Myths Hollywood Uses to Hide Discrimination Against Women Directors by Maria Giese at Women Directors in Hollywood

Voices: Halloween–A White Privilege Christmas by Arturo R. García at Racialicious

The Big O: Oscar Could be Swayed by Leto’s Feminine Mystique by Susan Wloszczyna at Women and Hollywood

15 Fantastic Horror Films Directed by Women by Alison Nastasi at Flavorwire

Creator/Producer Lorne Michaels Responds To Lack Of Black Women On ‘SNL’ Criticism by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

Queen Latifah, Patti Labelle, Venus Williams to Be Honored at Black Girls Rock! by Evelyn Diaz at BET

Why White People Can’t Quit Blackface by Camille Hayes at Bitch Media

‘Homeland’ And The Delicate Art Of Withholding by Linda Holmes at NPR

Heroines of Cinema: 10 Great Films About Female Sexuality by Female Filmmakers by Emily Craig, Matthew Hammett Knott and Sophie Smith at Indiewire

Season of the Witch: Conjuring Strength Through Power by Alyssa Rosenberg at Women and Hollywood

Tina Fey’s New Show Picked Up By NBC #Blessed by Eloise Giegerich at Bust

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

We’re the Weirdos: Female Power for Good and Evil in ‘The Craft’

The Craft presents a lesson that coming-of-age films don’t typically make a point to show. A ballot is cast for prom queen or SAT prep sits on the horizon with college days looming, a girl must get a boy to like her, losing her virginity in the process. But this film is about serving the self—the craft of empowering oneself to surmount the archaic persecutions against women—taking back the threat of female power. But like a genie in a bottle that allows three wishes, this craft must be practiced and understood, respected completely before it can be outwardly used, or else it will perpetuate transgression.

This guest post by Kim Hoffman appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.

There are countless teen films with themes that focus on the ways young females work with, and then eventually against each other, for the sake of a number of factors: their place in a social hierarchy, a jealous feeling, or in summation, an overall insecurity they are plagued with because they’re sixteen and they haven’t yet developed a sense of self-awareness outside of their high school cafeteria.

What I’ve always welcomed in The Craft was the idea that a group of girls could be simultaneously contributing to the ongoing high school drama they’re faced with each day, while nurturing their powers on a higher plane that none of their peers could possibly grasp. Earth, air, fire and water—the four corners of the world, but incomplete without a fourth girl until character Sarah (Robin Tunney) begins attending her new Catholic high school and develops a friendship with the school witches.

The group needs a fourth to be complete.

In elementary school, slumber parties with girlfriends typically involved the game “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.” It was a bonding experience between us girls that didn’t quite mean we believed we could actually make one another float, or invoke a spirit to talk to us through a candle or the Ouija board, but perhaps that very hyper-adolescent female clout was a presence in itself, an ember growing hotter within us, if we dared pay attention. Boys in class picked me on—one called me “Casper” because I was so pale. I was living in Florida at the time and all of the other girls were tan and flirted with boys by dumbing themselves down. I didn’t subscribe to that diluted mindset. I was determined, even as a confused pre-pubescent girl with a deep shyness in me, to move to the beat of my own drums, however weird others thought I was.

The understood leader of this teenage coven in The Craft is Nancy (Fairuza Balk), a girl who stands up to the likes of other mean girls in teen drama history like the most cruel of Heathers or Rose McGowen’s unapologetic lipstick machine Courtney Shane in Jawbreaker. Next to Nancy are Bonnie (Neve Campbell) and Rochelle (Rachel True). Bonnie is scarred with terrible marks on her back, causing her to be shelled and quiet, uncomfortably covered up so no one can see her, fraught to feel beautiful. Rochelle, an African American athlete with a sweet and open disposition, puts up with torment from a girl named Laura Lizzie (Christine Taylor), a popular blonde who makes terrible racial slurs at her. Nancy and her mother live in a dilapidated trailer with her sickening and habitually abusive stepfather. There’s a feeling hanging in the air when Sarah begins to show signs of telekinetic power; the girls know their coven could be complete and that their powers joined could change everything they can’t currently control.

After popular boy Chris (Skeet Ulrich) asks Sarah out on a date and she agrees, she’s angry to find out that the following Monday at school, a terrible rumor has been spread about her and Chris having sex on that date—despite the fact that they absolutely didn’t. As a result, the three other girls approach her with an idea, a spell. They cast a spell to make Chris do whatever Sarah says. And it works. He’s now following her around like a lost puppy, and Sarah’s slut-shaming rumors are put to rest. It’s a moment of reckoning, wherein a bad school rumor at the hands of a guy is twisted to his disadvantage, causing him to be the weak, demure one that he attributed to Sarah, banishing his ego and putting Sarah in power. But is it power for women, or is it power modeled after male dominance?

Now fueled with delight, greed and confidence, the coven is a complete dynamic troop, marching through the hallways in their Catholic school-girl uniforms, evoking a new brand of strength that makes their school mates fear them even more, which they love and welcome. Nancy’s face says, “Look at me, I dare you.” It’s the high point in the film for these girls, as they’ve joined their powers to reclaim their place, to restore their souls—but as quickly as that power is recognized, they begin to misuse it for revenge—a yin yang of dark and light that must bring chaos if used too recklessly.

The girls perform a healing spell on Bonnie, who only wishes for her scars to be gone. At her next doctor’s appointment, Bonnie, her mother and the doctors are stunned to find out that when they peel back her bandages, her back is completely healed. The next day at school, Bonnie walks in with a new outfit, a new attitude, and an outward vivaciousness that all can see. Of course, the boys take notice—but this is about Bonnie, for Bonnie, and no one else. Simultaneously, Rochelle is handling Laura Lizzie, who is still taunting her in the locker room. Over the course of a few days, Laura finds her hair is beginning to fall out in her hairbrush and in the shower—and it’s only becoming more and more atrocious. Finally, Nancy causes her stepfather to have a heart attack and die. She and her mother are left with a booming inheritance and can move out of the trailer into a swanky new high-rise condo.

The Smiths’ iconic “How Soon Is Now?” echoes in the background, and the girls, who call upon a deity named Manon, host a ritual in attempt to invoke the spirit within them. What they don’t realize is that Nancy has a plan to take Manon into herself completely, a dark power that the woman at the magick shop they frequently steal from knows is not the kind of magick that amateur witches should mess with without proper practice. The crone shop owner however recognizes Sarah is different from Nancy and the others, a consciousness that rises above the girls who have impulsive, quick-tempered intentions.

Inside the traditional current of teen film subtext in which we root for the new girl/the odd girl out/the girl with the chance to teach something/the girl who has been influenced by the luster of a life she is told will make her more popular, Sarah must defeat the soul-sucking people who seek to make her an object. We root for her because we see what she can’t see yet, and we know that something terrible might have to take place in order for her to come to fully developed realizations that push her into making important choices. This isn’t about making an A; it’s about making sure you aren’t burned at the stake for your high school to witness.

The Craft presents a lesson that coming-of-age films don’t typically make a point to show. A ballot is cast for prom queen or SAT prep sits on the horizon with college days looming, a girl must get a boy to like her, losing her virginity in the process. But this film is about serving the self—the craft of empowering oneself to surmount the archaic persecutions against women—taking back the threat of female power. But like a genie in a bottle that allows three wishes, this craft must be practiced and understood, respected completely before it can be outwardly used, or else it will perpetuate transgression.

The mystery of women, our cyclic connection to the moon, to medicine, math, written words—it has all been condemned and misappropriated as voodoo, black magick, devil worshipping, witch work. To many, witch means bitch. Bitch means witch. What is unconventional is evil. But ego is genderless, and it feeds a darker realm. The people who attack and target Sarah, Nancy, Bonnie and Rochelle represent that gender-neutral aspect that aims to banish female power. The age that is dawning doesn’t require school texts and chalk boards. The real war taking place requires ritual books and goblets filled with blood and wine, you know—typical high school material.

However, Sarah’s spell eventually backfires when Chris tries raping her at a party because he will stop at nothing to be near her and can’t wrap his head around these feelings he can’t part with. Nancy saves Sarah by throwing Chris out of the window with her powers, and he is killed. Despite the harm he has caused, Sarah is mostly just scared of Nancy now. It’s a turning point in the film when the roles shift and the people against them are not the ones to be feared—it’s the girls themselves that have to come face to face with their own shadows.

After Sarah tries casting a binding spell against Nancy to prevent her from causing harm against herself and others, the girls turn on Sarah. As a real life outcast who was banned from my own in-crowd group of girl friends in middle school, I see this as a blessing in disguise for girls who are meant for bigger things. It’s a calling of sorts—a low hanging cloud that beckons you away from cliques, from being another follower, from believing in something just because someone tells you its real. What about believing in you? Sarah has had the power all along—Nancy knew it. So she muddled Sarah down in the hopes she could overcome her and maintain what would only ever be a false sense of supremacy. All Queen Bees are only as strong as their weakest link; they can’t survive alone.

In the final act, Sarah and Nancy come head to head, Nancy filling up Sarah’s house with snakes and creepy crawlers, attempting to influence Sarah to commit suicide—the ultimate female betrayal in which Sarah’s death is the only means for Nancy to move forward. Motivated by life and a true sense of power that musters itself back to the surface, Sarah defeats Nancy and thereafter Nancy is sent to a mental hospital. We’re left with a few lingering feelings and questions. Most prominent is the feeling that good can defeat evil and that female power is strongest when the belief is in oneself, not what they’re told to follow. But what does this say about a coven of women? Can women work together without turning on each other? What factors would dispel women from competing over control and success? Is The Craft a lesson in the art of witchcraft, or is it a deeper lesson in the very real and everyday transformation we make from girls to women?

Kim Hoffman is a writer for AfterEllen.com and Curve Magazine. She currently keeps things weird in Portland, Oregon. Follow her on Twitter: @the_hoff.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Guilty Pleasures: Practical Magic (1998)

This cross-post by Didion originally appeared at Feminéma.

Okay, you know me: I have the whole snarky thing down. I’ve never even seen Forrest Gump or Titanic. I can barely bring myself to watch a trailer for a film starring poor Katherine Heigl. I’d rather re-watch that 2-hour, grueling, and explicit film about illegal abortion in Romania — it was excellent – than submit myself to 30 minutes of the Julia Roberts feature, My Best Friend’s Wedding. So what’s the deal with my weakness for Practical Magic, which gets only a 20% approval rate on RottenTomatoes.com?

Confession: I’ve probably seen it 10 times.

Sandra Bullock as Sally Owens in Practical Magic

I’ll grant you the obvious: this is not quality filmmaking or screenwriting. The list of goofs and continuity errors is long. The background music is annoyingly cheery and sentimental, even during scenes when it shouldn’t be. It claims to be set in a Salem, Massachusetts-type place but is obviously filmed using the dramatic coast and sunsets of the Pacific Northwest. The film keeps cycling back to themes of love and loss and longing, like any Katherine Heigl film. The resolution to the characters’ problems — an ancient curse on this family of witches — is completely inexplicable. I know. But it always gets past my radar, and I seem to keep coming back.

My latest viewing of it prompted me to wonder about guilty pleasure films.

Why should I feel so embarrassed and apologetic about liking this film? What is it about liking this unabashed chick flick that makes me feel sheepish to confess it? Why does liking this film make me wonder whether I might have some kind of tumor growing smack on my frontal lobe?

(Spoiler alert: at some point below I’m going to talk about That Great House. Also: if you’re eager to know my two favorite insights, get down to the last half of this post.)

Now, there are lots of reasons to like this film. First: the cast. Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest as the kooky old witch-aunts who raise the orphaned sisters Sally (Sandra Bullock) and Gilly (Nicole Kidman). Oh, to have aunts like Channing and Wiest!

Stockard Channing as Aunt Frances and Dianne Wiest as Aunt Bridget

Moving on, the men-folk are all superbly gorgeous and desirable: Aidan Quinn, Goran Visnjic (slurp!) as the bad boy, and the total mensch Mark Feuerstein as Sally’s short-lived husband. Even Sally’s little daughters (Evan Rachel Wood and Alexandra Artrip) manage to be believably appealing.

Goran Visnjic as Jimmy Angelov (really) and Nicole Kidman as Gillian Owens

Also, no one should underestimate Sandra Bullock’s appeal. The critic David Thomson jokes that she’s been inducted into the Hall of Eternal Likeability. This induction occurred in 2009, Thomson quips, when Bullock won an Oscar for Best Actress (for The Blind Side) and a Golden Raspberry (aka “Razzie”) for Worst Actress (in All About Steve) — and she appeared at both ceremonies “with the same easygoing attitude that guesses she didn’t quite deserve either award but that knows her life has always been something of a gamble.”

I’ve always liked Bullock, and have a particular weakness for her skills in slight rom-coms (While You Were Sleeping; Miss Congeniality), again in spite of myself. How does someone possessed of such exceptional beauty seem to be someone I’d be friends with? How does she manage to seem convincingly the ugly duckling for even one second? How does she nevertheless seem to be at ease in her own skin?

Two things I always notice in Practical Magic: she goes bra-less in most of the scenes. And although she’s thin as a rail (of course), her body looks real — especially her big, strong legs. Who wouldn’t like a beautiful woman with healthy-looking thighs who skips the bra most of the time?

Okay, now that I say that out loud, I’m starting to see where some of my sheepishness comes from.

Bullock and Aidan Quinn

Just because I like all the actors is no guarantee I’ll like a film, however. Lots of good actors have appeared in terrible films. Remember my refusal to see Titanic despite the fact that it stars Kate Winslet, who’s in my Top 5 current favorite actors?

*****

In thinking about my perverse attachment to an ostensibly weak film led me to scour The Land of Blogs for insight, and here’s what I found: us ladies love that house. Love it.

This very fact makes me embarrassed … because I’ll admit I love that house too. Shouldn’t I feel like I’ve been manipulated?

That House!

Now, just because a girl confesses a propensity for nest-building and a weakness for a good kitchen should not make you presume she wants nothing but housework and a hubby who brings home the bacon. Virtually everyone I know has found themselves susceptible to the house porn shown to us on those real estate, cooking, and bedroom re-design shows on cable TV. And when I call this porn I fully admit to have had unholy desires for that one hunky handyman who seems to know his way around every power tool known to man. So yeah, I love this house — and I’m not the only one.

That kitchen!

Entire websites appear to be dedicated to screen capture shots of the kitchen and/or attached greenhouse. I get it. Who wouldn’t want all that great tile, lots of cupboards, big central kitchen table, and that awesome stove?

There’s so much room here for those kinds of decorations you could never be bothered with because you’re a Busy And Important. Big wooden bowls of pears or round loaves of bread. Cunning little bottles of herbs and witches’ potions. Scattered potted plants that need to be kept alive somehow. This is not the kind of house I could manage (or clean) in real life.

But I think the reason why this kitchen/ greenhouse/ dining area has hit some kind of world-wide Lady G-Spot is because these rooms are the location for so much of the film’s drama. Just like in real life, except these settings are a lot more attractive than our cramped kitchens. Gilly and the little girls whip up a Go Away spell to put into the maple syrup; Gilly and Sally try to bring the terrifying Visnjic back to life (with a spray-can of whipped cream, I say as I shake my head woefully); Sally and the hunky Arizona investigator Aidan Quinn have a special moment in the sunroom/ greenhouse.

The greenhouse!

(Mental note: must procure sunroom/ greenhouse so I, too, can have special moments with Aidan Quinn.)

I’m joking, of course. Although some bloggers seem eager to transform their own homes into Practical Magic-style palaces, I say that sounds like too much work. In fact, this leads to my most important insight: no matter how appealing, that house doesn’t fill me with consumer desire — I like the idea of the house, and I like it for reasons other than the fact that it looks good. Another film might have used the same house and sunroom and still failed to capture people’s imaginations (i.e., mine).

*****

So here’s my big realization: this film gets me every time because it portrays such rich and important relationships among women, even when they’re flawed. The warmth of the house matters when Sally and Gilly lie under the covers together, healing one another’s wounds, or when they go to the kitchen to exorcise demons. Ultimately the reason I like the house is the fact that I am so impressed that the film takes for granted the intense connections amongst this group of women.

Sisters Sally (Bullock) and Gilly (Kidman)

The house feels so warm and comfortable because that’s where the film portrays the most important plot points, bringing together the warmest of relations between the characters. It’s those moments in the film that get me every time. Scenes that convey the close communal and familial relations that encompass a kind of closeness that isn’t reducible to something as simplistic as “love.”

There’s a hard edge to some of this as well. Women who are very close to one another also piss each other off, or they say things that hit nerves even if they have no intention of hurting anyone. One of my favorite random scenes in the film, in which they all blend up some Midnight Margaritas and dance around the house (who hasn’t been there?) is immediately followed by a scary scene at the dinner table, when no matter how good their mood, none of them can keep from spewing bile at one another — and it takes a while for them to realize the ugliness of this weird moment.

Ah, the scene of female bonding and mutual support … and pissing each other off. Was there ever a time when I didn’t imagine growing old, living in a big house (or neighborhood) with my sister and a bunch of my best old-lady friends, all cooking and gardening and exercising together? I remember being stunned to learn that every single one of my friends has the same fantasy. It’s not that we don’t like men — some of us are partnered up with them, after all. It just seems so natural to have tight, mutually-constitutive relationships with women, especially as you grow older.

The Aunts (Wiest and Channing)

All the more eerie to find that this film explicitly imagines that scenario for its characters, too. “We’re gonna grow old together!” Gilly says to Sally when they’re teenagers, on the night when Gilly is about to run off with some guy, and the unglamorous Sally stands there in her awful bathrobe, stringy hair, and gigantic glasses. “It’s gonna be you and me, living in a big old house, these two old biddies with all these cats! I mean, I bet we even die on the same day!” Tell me, isn’t that your secret dream, too?

For Sally it is. “Do you swear?” she asks her sister.

Sally

In the end I think it is that female closeness that gets me about this film and which makes me slightly embarrassed to admit it — because I suspect that by using some kind of dark magic, the filmmakers cooked up a heady brew of fine men-folk, house porn, and scenes like Midnight Margaritas explicitly to fly under my critical radar and keep bringing me back. I fear my uncritical affection for this film because it feels manipulative to me, not a genuine dedication to women’s relationships and good houses above & beyond women’s relationship to men. I feel embarrassed that what I had long believed was an unrealistic and slightly embarrassing fantasy — that my friends and I would all grow old together — has been packaged into a very pretty filmic production for me to watch. Shouldn’t I feel all the more guilty about this pleasure?

*****

But there’s one other reading that works even better for me, and I lift this directly from the great documentary The Celluloid Closet. This insight goes something like this: I watch and appreciate Practical Magic not for what it is but for all that I read into it, all that speaks to me beyond the surface. I don’t see Midnight Margaritas as a throwaway scene or as instrumental for forcing Sally and Gilly to deal with their mistakes. I read into it a world of intense female closeness that I rarely get to see onscreen. What gives me pleasure in this film is what I imagine in between the lines of its essential mediocrity.

Sally and her daughters

I remember so vividly Susie Bright, one of the commentators in The Celluloid Closet, describing how she spent her youth combing through old movies just to get to a single scene that seems a little bit queer. For LGBTQ persons who saw virtually no one who looked like them onscreen, “It’s amazing how, if you’re a gay audience and you’re accustomed to crumbs how you will watch an entire movie just to see a certain outfit that you think means that they’re a homosexual. The whole movie can be a dud, but you’re just sitting there waiting for Joan Crawford [in Johnny Guitar] to put on her black cowboy shirt again.”

Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar

This is ultimately the reading that allows me to feel pleasure in watching this film without much guilt. It’s discouraging to realize that on some level, what I get from Practical Magic is what I don’t get very often onscreen: happy, complex, and intense relationships among women that aren’t just about appearing sexy and finding a man. I very seldom get to see onscreen relationships that look like the ones I enjoy with my friends and family. Sure, the movie concludes with a happy kiss between Sandra Bullock and Aidan Quinn — not that there’s anything wrong with that — but I’m arguing that the whole package sparks a happy endorphin rush for far different reasons.

Yes, there is a romantic happy ending.

And finally, let’s also not forget that this movie is about a family of witches. Witch being such a stand-in for bitch, as well as conveying all manner of notions about women’s powers, both dark and light. This film probably flies under my radar in part because it’s about women who possess powers that they can choose to use (or not). The false cheeriness of the music and the generally lame spells might well downplay as much as possible any sense of real danger — and probably seek to undermine objections from crazed evangelicals who might see this film as the work of the devil. Nevertheless, I’d argue that the subject matter can’t help but speak about power.

I see it as metaphorical. This is about women’s power — and their power in numbers. I may be trying very hard here to stop feeling so guilty about my appreciation for this film, but this works for me:

terrific cast
eminently likeable lead
great range of attractive men-folk
fantastic house
rich portrayals of women’s relationships
the movie facilitates queer readings against and/or alongside its mainstream messages
it’s about women’s power, and their power in numbers

I welcome your thoughts, quibbles, and good-natured derision for my poor taste in film!

Feminéma is a blog about feminism, cinéma, and popular culture kept by Didion, a university professor in Texas, who celebrates those rare moments when movies display unstereotyped characters and feature female directors and screenwriters behind the scenes. Most of all she just loves film. Take a look at feminema.wordpress.com.