Charmed and Dangerous: The So-Called Power of Celluloid Witches
Melissa Levine
Among the new images of “powerful” girls and women served up by the contemporary media has come a flashy, supernatural version—the mainstream American witch1. Shorter than Xena, less blonde than Buffy, witches have swept into the girl-power scene and staked a claim on the imaginations of a good number of viewers, many of them adolescent and female. The past few years alone have seen the appearance of supernaturally endowed women in The Craft, Practical Magic, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Charmed, among others. On the major networks and in theatres, strange sisters are coming out from behind their cauldrons, carrying with them the ostensible promise of a different (if not new) way to be female.
Witches are, in a basic narrative sense, the objects and not the subjects of contemporary films and TV shows—that is, they are about “witches,” as opposed to by and of Wiccans. Want to know what it’s really like to form a coven, or hold a seance? The WB is not your source. Instead, these media witches, like their sisters in fiction (and history), are signifiers; they’re the blank screens onto which the shows’ creators map their feelings about powerful and unconventional women. So, while little can be learned about women who identify as witches by tuning in to Sabrina or Charmed, current media renderings of witches give us a great deal of information about something else: how the people developing the shows (and, by extension, their presumed audiences) feel about whatever it is that they call a witch.
And how do they feel? Are our mainstream media, for so long palsied with images of girl-women obsessed with appearance and men, finally acknowledging the existence of a more transcendent female persona? Are we as an audience now soliciting and supporting models of women unshackled by prevailing and misogynistic societal mores? Is, ultimately, the preponderance of witches in the current media a cause for celebration? Or should we trash the film, turn off the TV, and shield ourselves and our daughters from still more harmful and hateful representations of women in power?
I’ll give you one guess.
No contemporary witch narrative endows a witch with enough power to transcend the societally induced concerns of a woman of her place and age. Worse, with the possible exception of Sarah in The Craft3, celluloid witches are universally punished for using the power that they do have for anything other than a narrowly prescribed (and often unclear) set of purposes. So, while the recent proliferation of witch shows and movies would seem to say that media images of women are increasingly empowered, the truth is just the opposite. The large print giveth, as Tom Waits says, and the small print taketh away.
Perhaps more than any other witch movie or show, Charmed is not about how powerful its protagonists are but rather how powerful they aren’t. The premise: Three twentysomething sisters, orphaned by the death of their grandmother, learn that they have magical powers. Prudence “Prue” Halliwell, the oldest, can throw things with a glance; Piper, the middle daughter, can freeze time; Phoebe, the youngest, can (sometimes) see the future. Together, using spells from the Book of Shadows—their sacred, attic-bound tome—they can banish demons, travel through time, cast love spells, conjure dead relatives . . . and a few other things. In fact, exactly what they’re capable of as a threesome is mysterious; with each show, they accomplish something new. The ultimate nature and extent of the Halliwells’ power is as mysterious to them as it is to us, since the sisters are still learning the craft. With patience and concentration, it seems, these girls could go far.
And yet. As of the first season, there is one significant and severe limitation on the charmed ones’ power4: They cannot use magic for personal gain. On an immediate level, this limitation prevents the witches from doing what most of us would, were we so blessed: They can’t use magic to make themselves rich, smart, happy, or at least president (if holding such a position could be regarded as personal gain). Neither are they allowed to use magic to summon romance, though in one episode, two of the sisters subvert this restriction with a hefty dose of rationalization. On a more profound level, the limitation makes clear what many contemporary witch TV shows and films merely suggest: Being a witch does not solve a single problem but, rather, invites additional ones. At the beginning of the first season, when the Halliwell sisters inherit their craft, they also inherit the demons attending it—demons who, prior to this, did not bother the Halliwells in any conceivable way.
Beyond directly curbing their power, the prohibition against personal
gain renders the Charmed witches in stereotypically female roles:
Their job is to serve others. Whereas, previous to inheriting powers,
they might have had goals of their own, now those goals are shelved (or
at least rendered secondary) for what is perceived as the greater good.
Before their inheritance, Prue, Piper, and Phoebe might have been challenged
with forming meaningful lives as young, single women in contemporary San
Francisco. Now they’re challenged with protecting the city (and
themselves) from demons, warlocks, shape-shifters, and windigos. Their
accomplishments have included restoring sight to the blind, reuniting
lost relatives, bringing emotional peace to the grieving and ill, etc.
Admirable, sure, but powerful? Decidedly not.
The Halliwell sisters are far from alone in their powerlessness. In no
contemporary witch movie or TV show does a witch benefit from her own
magic, except as a vehicle for learning things she either already knew
or could have learned another way. Worse, witches are repeatedly punished
for infractions so minor as to be considered experimentation and/or education
(and education is, in nearly every one of these narratives, a considerable
part of the point). In The Craft, each of the four witch protagonists
is visited with horror for attempting to use magic for personal gain.
In Practical Magic, the witch sisters Gillian and Sally are made
to pay for using their powers with a demonic possession so severe as to
threaten Gillian’s life. Sabrina the Teenage Witch is forever learning
that her magic can’t be used to conjure whatever cool thing she’d
like to have to impress her classmates, and she often suffers for things
she hasn’t done. What is going on here? A woman learns that she
is a witch, with supernatural powers. What’s the next thing she
learns? That she’d better not use her powers, except in defense
of herself or others.
Again and again in contemporary witch shows, the witches’ magic is limited to solving the problems that it creates5. The limits on power, as well as the severe punishment exacted for messing up, eventually lead Charmed’s Prue Halliwell to question the worth of her powers. What good is being a witch? she asks in one episode, and who can blame her? In her world, having magical powers results mainly in undue and unrewarded stress (to put it mildly). And yet, who could pose this question except somebody who hated witches? These words are a thinly veiled warning to those of us at home: Having magical powers may look glamorous, they say, but it’s actually a burden you wouldn’t wish upon yourself or anyone you love. Here, as elsewhere, Charmed undermines its ostensible premise of female empowerment. Though it may hold out the promise of new facets of female acceptability, this show is neither girl- nor woman-power revolution. Instead, it’s a warning against precisely those “unfeminine” (and therefore “dangerous”) things that girls and women have always been told to avoid, power foremost among them.
Entwined with all of these limitations on contemporary media witches' power—indeed, perhaps even more constricting than any other prohibition or bind—is the purported “need” for secrecy. Secrecy renders witches far more powerless than they would otherwise be by denying them three essential benefits of magic: First, they can’t perform magic whenever necessary; second, they can’t accomplish anything merely by threatening; and third, they never receive recognition for what they’ve done. The argument (presumably, if not actually, their own) that if the witches revealed their powers they would be defeated/corrupted/exploited by the public is a specious one: They’re witches, right? They can (contingent upon the extent of their power) control that. And, more appropriate, this is fiction. If the witches can’t arrange things exactly as they like, the producers can.
So, what is the problem? Why must witches live in secrecy? It seems that the real reason that media witches are obsessed with secrecy is that the creators of these films and shows lack the ability to imagine a society in which witches—standing in for powerful women—are not merely present but visible, active, and influential, not to mention happy and successful. Put another way: Witches have to be secret because otherwise, they would simply be too powerful.
The twentysomething Halliwell sisters fret about, rehash, and occasionally even conjure romantic relationships. From early childhood, Gillian and Sally Owens of Practical Magic expend a great deal of their energy first resisting and then collapsing into love. When invoking magic for the first time, Sarah of The Craft asks for the ability to let a particular football player love her6. Only one witch in this lot—Sabrina, the youngest—is happily partnered, if such a phrase can be used to describe her relationship with Harvey, her clueless (though sweet) high school boyfriend.
But in the contemporary media, being a young, sexy, love-seeking witch carries with it certain risks. Apparently, the combined threats of female sexuality and magical powers are overwhelming for the creators of recent witch movies and shows: The witches who are overtly sexual are also inevitably evil. And they are made to pay.7 Within the (at once narrow and extreme) spectrum of witch sexuality, there is a special caste reserved for slut-witch, an overdetermined signifier if ever there was one.
Slut-witches, defined by their active pursuit of sex (as opposed to love, or status, or money), are invariably the witches who kill. Men. The Craft’s Nancy kills the boy who spurned Sarah, and who later rejects Nancy; Practical Magic’s Gillian kills her murderous boyfriend; even Charmed’s golden-hearted and passively powered Phoebe kills (a killer). And once the witches kill—even if they do so in self-defense, or for the greater good—they are severely and violently punished.
Nowhere is the slut-witch so menacing as in The Craft, where Nancy invokes the power of Manon, a universal force “greater than God or the devil,” to do her bidding. The least conventionally beautiful (and by far the poorest) of the lot, Nancy is of the fuck-you school of coping: She knows she’s living in a world with empty values, and she rails against them with open aggression. (Envision: dyed black hair, black trench coat, heavy eyeliner, big boots.) For her, magic begins as a means to the power she so obviously lacks but ends up as a means to revenge. In the movie’s climax, Nancy is pitted against Sarah, the “natural” (read: good) witch, who summons the power of her dead mother to blow Nancy through a mirror and, presumably, out of this world. But such an end is apparently too good for Nancy, who in the final frames of the film can be seen writhing against arm constraints in a padded white room, screaming for help. This is by far the most horrifying image in a film that, until this point, is not scary. Finally, still another misogynistic signifier has been heaped upon this character—that of the madwoman. But it’s not, alas, surprising. This is where we want our (poor, promiscuous, unconventional, angry) powerful women: locked up and restrained.
Practical Magic suffers from this prejudice, too, though the novel on which it’s based does not. In fact, the differences between Practical Magic the novel and Practical Magic the movie are illuminating and say as much about the de facto politics of Hollywood as the portrayal of the witches themselves. Most notable is the utter reverse in sympathy. In the novel, Gillian, the sexually licentious and rebellious sister, is favored and adored. By both her witch aunts and the narrative, she is rewarded with pleasure and approval, and finally with a fairy-tale romance unsurpassed in hyperbole by anything else in the book (all of it hyperbolic). On the other hand, the novel punishes Sally, the domestic sister who courts a middle-class life. Her husband dies, and she’s condemned to years as a lonely single mother, swallowing her pain. Of course, though the novel purports to buck middle-class values by favoring Gillian over Sally in this way, it ultimately endorses these values by pairing Gillian with a high school teacher and settling her down. (At least author Alice Hoffman pays momentary tribute to the subversive power of witches by allowing the aunts to live outside of traditional societal mores.)
Practical Magic the film is much more immediate and blatant
in its endorsement of the archetypal suburban family. In the celluloid
version, Gillian is demonized as a menacing slut, and Sally is rewarded
with true love. After she kills her abusive boyfriend, Gillian is denied
any form of romantic partnership (unless you count being possessed by
his evil spirit), whereas Sally becomes the romantic lead and is pursued
by a man she dreamed of as a girl. The “lesson” of the slut-witch
strikes again.
Romantic relationships are, we assume, about intimacy, and there’s only a certain amount of intimacy possible when one member of a couple is guarding a major secret. As Prue Halliwell says of her momentarily dissembling boyfriend Andy, “He kept something from me. I keep something from him every day.” Even when witches do find men they like, it’s a rough row to hoe: They can never truly reveal themselves, and they have to spend a large portion of their time and energy covering their magical tracks.
As many of the witches note, their prospects for enduring romantic love are not good. None of the witch elders in any of these shows or films is partnered by anyone other than a sister. Sabrina’s aunts live together (though they both date men); Gillian and Sally’s aunts live together (neither dates); the Halliwell sisters’ mother and grandmother were single; Sarah’s witch mentor in The Craft appears to be alone. The Practical Magic film goes so far as to invent a curse preventing the Owens women from enjoying long-term relationships: Any man who loves an Owens woman is doomed to early death. (If this is not a bald expression of the fear of female power-qua-sexuality, what is?)
Because of these prospects, young witches are often anxious about (to use the misogynistic shorthand) spinsterhood. As Prue Halliwell says, “We can’t stay together forever. What are we going to do when we’re sixty—wear the same clothes and have a cat?” This is not a rhetorical question. It appears that this is what witches do: They live together, among other witches, and grow old together, often with cats. And why can’t the Halliwell sisters live together when they’re sixty? With demons constantly attacking and challenging The Power of Three (these witches, as most, are together greater than the sum of their parts), don’t they have to? In show after show, romantic relationship after romantic relationship, one thing becomes clear: The Halliwell sisters are closer to each other than they can ever be to anyone else. Their magic binds them in a kind of compounded sisterhood.
In Practical Magic, the Owens girls invite ultimate spinsterhood, sealing their vow to grow old together with pricked fingers and mixed blood. And in fact, theirs seems to be the true romance of the movie. Sally and Gillian pine for each other, write each other love letters, and experience a music-filled reunion when Gillian returns from afar. (The song is Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You,” a classic folk love ballad.) The sisters lie in bed together and share secrets: Neither is seen doing that with a man. In The Craft, when the girls become a foursome and begin to explore their powers, we see them hanging out in bed together, cuddling at slumber parties, and playing with each other’s hair. The romantic musical montage of this movie is reserved for the relationships among these girls and not for relationships between these girls and any of the boys in their midst. Here as elsewhere, these witches may crave romantic attention from men, but they almost invariably give it to each other.
This would be the appropriate time to point out the connection between witches and lesbians. Like lesbians, witches live in societies/families/partnerships of women, and they live outside prevailing societal mores. Both witches and lesbians are feared, hated, misunderstood, and marginalized at either end of the sexual spectrum (asexual crones or highly sexualized turn-ons for straight men). Even though no contemporary witch movie has explicitly explored this connection, its implicit presence is impossible to ignore.
But the witch/lesbian collusion is the effect, not the cause, of the fear of powerful and unconventional women. One might imagine the cause-effect to run this way: They’re witches, so they live in tight societies of women. But the reverse is the case: They live in tight societies of women, so they must be witches—why else would they choose to live without men? Our culture is so afraid of women who are independent of men and/or who love each other that we eschew them and endow them with mysterious powers: Calling them lesbians and calling them witches is in this sense one and the same.8 It can’t be a coincidence that in nearly every contemporary witch movie and TV show, the women increase their power by holding hands. Inevitably, as it did so famously and unforgettably in Thelma and Louise, the camera lingers on this image.
In one way or another, the witches in the current media are disabled. Rarely are they at the height of their powers; rarely are they encouraged to become so. Instead, they are first bound and then curbed, admonished, and even burned at the stake for using precisely what could make them transcendent.
What would it look like to show a woman empowered, unconcerned with and unburdened by the prevailing values of society? Have you ever seen such an image in the mainstream American media? Perhaps you have never seen an image of a truly powerful woman anywhere at all. If we have encountered an image of a woman living outside society’s shackles, she’s almost certainly either insane or evil (or, like Nancy in The Craft, both). The trick here is to be able to imagine a woman at the height of her powers who is not. Can you do it?
Footnotes
1As you may know, “witch” is an overdetermined cultural signifier, long the subject of analysis by feminists and occultists (among others) alike. In fact, to use the word “witch,” which originated in the woman- and pagan-fearing Christian church and is not what women who self-identify as supernaturally endowed call themselves (that would be Wiccan), is to admit bias.
2 In fact, even women who lack power—as in the infamous Salem witch trials, which targeted outcasts as well as ordinary Puritan wives and mothers—can suffer from the fear of female power simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The “witch” label is as easy to apply as it is difficult to peel off, conveniently applicable to the shy and obedient as well as to the loud and independent.
3Why “possible”? Sarah is distinguished from
other witches in that film—a high school popularity drama about
four outcasts who bond through discovering magic—by being a “natural”
witch. While this label/quality is never defined, a generous reading might
observe that Sarah inherited powers from her mother, rather than cooking
them up with spells, as is apparently the case with her three peers. A
less charitable reading could see this “naturalness” as an
upper-class whiteness that also distinguishes Sarah from her “lesser”
witch friends, one of whom is black, one poor and promiscuous, and the
third disfigured. Whichever it is, Sarah’s “naturalness”
allows her to be particularly powerful without suffering the consequences—although
even in this, her actions can be perceived either as self-defense or as
punitive, against other witches, instead of transcendent or even (less
powerfully but more notably, especially in this culture) self-serving.
4The second season introduced a new and previously unmentioned
limitation, a prohibition against vengeance. In the second episode of
the 1999-2000 season, the Halliwell sisters make the mistake of going
beyond “protecting the innocent” to “punishing the guilty,”
a line, though ambiguous, that is apparently so dangerous to cross that
the transgression leads to Phoebe’s execution by fire. (The sisters
travel ten years into the future to witness Phoebe’s death at the
stake.) With this show, Charmed’s witches are curbed more
severely (not to say violently) than ever before.
5Actually, to add insult to injury, the witches’ magic often can’t rise even to this minimal task. TV witches find themselves unable to use their magic precisely when they need it most: when they have traveled to another time and can’t get back to the present; when they’re in another dimension and facing a demon, etc. Sabrina, like the Halliwell sisters, is frequently in this predicament.
6Remarkably, Sarah takes responsibility for a blatant lack on her love object’s part. When Chris rejects her for refusing to have sex on their first date (and then spreads the rumor that she was “the worst lay he’s ever had”), Sarah asks for the power to let him love her. Through some inexplicable transformation, Chris has become a desirable partner whom Sarah is too shy or self-loathing to “let in,” when it seems perfectly clear that he’s an angry, stupid, misogynistic asshole who punishes her for respecting her own boundaries. Perhaps the real magic of this movie is how the witches are made to assume blame for what is patently not their fault.
7So frightened of this paradigm are the creators of Sabrina
the Teenage Witch that they build an entire show around Sabrina’s
chastity: She can’t even kiss Harvey until she loves him. Of course,
Sabrina is never dressed in anything but skin-tight mini-tees and stretch
pants or mini-skirts: We’re invited to sexualize the high
school student, just as long as she doesn’t sexualize herself.
8Obviously, lesbians exist; “witches” (as imagined by the
contemporary media) do not. The point here is not to suggest that “lesbian”
is a concept created by a society threatened by women who don’t
need men but rather to say that we are so frightened of powerful and unconventional
women that their choices must be seen as unnatural and bad. (Would it
be going too far to compare the historic witch trials with more recent
accusations of lesbianism?)
