Sad Girl Lens: Love Spell Medley
sad girls lens: witches and love spells teach us how to love men… to death
image via movie still.
by Abygai Peña.
For the most part in film and television, love spells don’t work as intended. As VICE writer Colleen Kane point’s out in their article, Love Spells in Pop Culture: A History, “Like alchemy, they're [love spells in pop culture] all pretty much-doomed attempts to artificially create something that is notoriously unyielding to attempts to force it: love.” What comes up most for me when I think about the trope of the love spell gone awry, I think to myself well this was probably written by a man...
I say this because the archetype of the witch is intertwined with patriarchal fear. Even in the TV show Bewitched (1964) where Samantha, a powerful witch falls in love with a New York ad executive named Darrin who when he finds out about her magic forces her to promise to never use her powers again. We get it, men, in Hollywood, in the office, and down the block, you don’t want women to have power.
During the 1990s witch flicks were in vogue. Among them films like The Craft (1996) and Practical Magic (1998) both of which include love spells. In The Craft, the film follows a group of high school witches who come into their power after the addition of a fourth witch, Sarah. The Craft is namely about these teenage girls in the wake of power, desire, and greed. When Sarah meets Nancy, Bonnie, and Rochelle they find that with their new power their desires can finally be realized. For Sarah, love is in the air as she falls for antagonist Chris who is notorious for his reputation with the other young women at their high school. Early on in the film, Chris smears Nancy’s character to Sarah and later spreads rumors about Sarah around school after a harmless hangout. Yet, Sarah decides to cast a love spell on Chris. This is Sarah’s spell from The Craft: I drink of my sisters and I ask to love myself more and to allow myself to be loved more by others especially Chris Hooker.
Sarah’s spell is about asking spirit to help her be more open to Chris’ love. The results were not so innocuous. After the initial spell Chris is like a puppy dog at Sarah’s feet and later his feelings escalate into an intense obsession where he forces himself on Sarah. I’ll ask you, dear reader, what about the words in Sarah’s spell asked to be mistreated by her crush? Now, we could say that Chris is already a scummy person and loves in a twisted way. That his form of love is possession and treating women like objects is his love language. I doubt I’m alone when I say that Sarah did not deserve those consequences when she delivered a love spell. What’s more bothersome is that at the time this film was thought to have feminist ideology with the Rotten Tomatoes consensus reading, "The Craft's campy magic often overrides the feminist message at the film's core.” A feminist message. This film is more about the consequence of young women gaining power rather than actually empowering them. During my research of love spells, I found a wealth of information in the February issue of Witch Way Magazine title The Love Issue (2020).
Contributor Emma Kathryn in her article “Ethics of Love Magic” writes about love magic saying, “Perhaps the biggest issue or concern with love magic is that of free will. Making someone do something against their wishes is indeed a serious business” and my biggest takeaway from this statement is the spectrum of free will. I think in the mundane world there are a lot of things that people do to illicit a reaction; wearing a loud outfit, sickening makeup, an elaborate hairdo. The list could go on and on. In the rest of the quotation Kathryn mentions the #MeToo movement as an extreme case of refusing someone’s free will in the mundane world. And, I think Kathryn is absolutely right of course. Although the #MeToo movement is more indicative of lust rather than love. Lust is what Sarah was met with when Chris felt rejected by her. The misogyny is in the screenplay. The screenplay is about women coming into their own power and sexuality in a way that is clearly written by two men.
Practical Magic (1998) is another 90s witchy classic based on the novel by Alice Hoffman. This story follows a family of witches who are cursed in love. The curse in the Owens family began with Maria who saved herself from hanging during the witch trials. Maria is sent away by the villagers with her unborn baby to Massachusetts where she finds herself heartbroken and abandoned by a lover. Maria Owen decides to cast a spell so that she may never fall in love again. This spell is so powerful that it becomes a curse and impacts the lives of all future women in the Owens family. Any man that falls in love with an Owens woman will die. I think the premise of this story is really interesting. Discussing curses as love spells opens up so much for us. I think when we’re thinking about dark magic or sinister magic we are talking about hexes, jinxes, and curses in which we are talking about the magic that’s meant for justice, by any means necessary in some cases. Whereas a hex or jinx is a small, one-time redemption, a curse is in a whole other ball-park. A curse is in it for the long haul and in many cases generational.
Maria Owens's spell turned into a curse because of the shame and self-hatred she harbored as a witch who was exiled from her community. This shame and self-hatred were personified long after Maria’s time. The rest of the film follows Sally and Gillian, descendants of Maria who’s mother has passed from a broken heart due to the death of the love of her life. Sally and Gillian are brought up by their aunts who make their familiar magic no secret to the young girls. As Sally grows older and eventually has children we see the internalized self-hatred as she forbids magic for her own children. As an adult, Sally refuses to openly use magic because she fears for her children to experience the same shunning she did in her youth. Even in her marriage, she felt as though if she rejected her witchly lineage that the family curse would not impact her. After her husband Michael dies, Sally moves back in with her aunts. Back in her childhood home, Sally senses Gillian’s imminent danger as she’s been living in Los Angeles. Soon after receiving a call from a panicked Gillian, Sally travels to LA to help her escape her abusive boyfriend. However, on their way out Gillan’s boyfriend, Jimmy holds her at gunpoint right as they’re trying to make their escape. Sally attempts to knock out Jimmy with belladonna that is slipped into his liquor but accidentally kills him instead.
Like we said, all the men die. Both Sally and Gillian experience different forms of generational trauma. Sally experiences an exiled shame that has been passed down to her whereas Gillian finds herself in an abusive relationship pattern. In retrospect, Gillian might be scared to love someone as that would result in their death. So, Gillian copes by dating abusive men she will never love. What breaks the spell is not the arrival of a new love–although that is a part of the storyline. During a final battle with a resurrected Jimmy, Sally and Gillian make a blood oath to protect and love each other. The blood oath put an end to the curse because of Sally and Gillian’s true love for each other. Love magic is what you think it is and more. Yes, it can be a pink candle blowing in the wind but, in Sally and Gillian's case, their magic is a form of working through generational trauma and love at it’s best can be as transformative. In Practical Magic (1998) we see that killing a man or even just ending a relationship does not necessarily put an end to the abuse.
We can look at this as a metaphor for how we interact with oppressive patriarchal structures. The work is inside us, through loving ourselves and healing our ancestral trauma we see positive results in the mundane world.
In The Craft (1996) we witness the duality of a cult classic that has inspired so many witches today to pursue the craft yet when we take a closer look at its contents the film shows us the consequences of desire. The film’s attempts to demonize desire mirrors current societal whorephobia where women are shamed for being in touch with feeling good. In fact, the type of punishment we see in the film could also be related to past feminist movements where women were fighting to the right to vote, work, and generally have lives and opinions outside of their head of household. In either case, the witch transforms as a figure that is feared and celebrated for her power. The witch is all of us.
***
Abygai Peña is a Manhattan-bound feminist filmmaker and writer who contributes to BUST Magazine and Sad Girls Club while serving at the Deputy Editor of arthouse film magazine Cinema Skyline and Managing Newsletter Editor of Bluestockings Bookstore. Abygai Peña’s work lives at the intersections of cinema, gender, activism, and the occult. Abygai Peña is utilizing her expertise to soon launch a new publication called Banshe Magazine which aims deconstructs and decolonizes femme images in media.