Originally Published in print December 2021
Art by Meghan Flood.
Although The Love Witch (2016) may not have captivated mass audiences, ask anyone you know who spends a lot of time on Twitter or TikTok about the film, and they will most likely be familiar with it. They may not have seen the film directly, but they have probably seen aesthetic stills and clips from the movie featuring quotable lines like “I should have known… he’s a pisces”. This is perhaps a new formation of how a film gets a ‘cult status’, where a film’s ability to gain a following after its release is now predicated on how easy it is for it to gain a following online. The Love Witch’s obsession with aesthetics and overt dialogue lends itself well to tweets and screencaps, so it is easy to see why it has garnered such a space in the online sphere. The film’s ability to be continuously replicated in this way could be seen as part of its ‘camp’ status, as its theatricality is consistently reproduced in a way that affirms its artifice. The campness in the film is also conducive to what is defined in Susan Sontag’s well-known essay ‘Notes on Camp’, where she refers to ‘camp’ as a love of the “old fashioned” and “unnatural”, that provides a sense of detachment. This can be seen through The Love Witch’s use of technicolour aesthetics, ‘60s film style lighting and costume, which are sharply contrasted with the ‘natural’ ideas of paganism and witchcraft. Sontag explains that “time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it to the camp sensibility” which is certainly pertinent to the way that The Love Witch utilises ‘60s mise en scene to situate the main character Elaine’s absurd perceptions of what a woman’s role is.
This notion of camp in The Love Witch is something writer and director Anna Biller completely rejects however, as she has been frustrated with the idea critics posit that the film is essentially an homage or pastiche of a ‘60s movie. Biller writes in this statement on twitter:
“With The Love Witch, I was not trying to make a ‘60s movie. I was just trying to make a film using classic lighting and design techniques, emphasizing a strong heroine, color symbolism, strong psychological themes, and glamour. I also wrote a script with the rhythms of a play, because I like movies made from plays. The actors’ performances came out of that writing style. They gave sincere, professional performances and were not trying to be “stilted” or “wooden”. Since these are mostly techniques no one uses anymore, it came out like a ‘60s movie. If I could have one wish, it would be for people to stop talking about it as a pastiche, parody, homage, or simulacrum of a ‘60s movie and start talking about it as just a movie.”
This statement is fascinating, because within it Biller is asserting that her intention with the movie should always be considered when critiquing the outcome of the movie. Her ‘wish’ as well seems strange to me, because almost no movie is without aspects of simulacrum or homage. The idea of something being “just a movie” is admirable but completely abstract. Would she take issue with someone calling her movie ‘postmodern’? Maybe postmodernism is just camp for straight people.
Further, whether the dialogue in the movie is intentionally stilted and wooden, and whether this is a product of the script or the acting, the dialogue and the way it is spoken is undeniably unique and comical. Arguably, if Biller intended the dialogue to come across as sincere, this is all the more case for the film’s campness, as Sontag argues ‘pure’ camp relies on being unintentional, innocent and is created when something attempts yet fails at seriousness. Perhaps I am mistaking camp here for what should just be called ‘obviousness’, as throughout the film characters say things that have almost no subtext and essentially can be seen as thesis statements for the film. To be clear, this is not a criticism I have of The Love Witch, as I actually think that it is within this method that the most genius points of the film are made, hence why I reject Biller’s own distancing from it. For example, one of the witches in the film says that “they teach that a ‘normal’ human being is a hyper-rationalist, stoic male, and that a woman’s intuitions and emotions are illnesses that need to be cured.” Out of context, this reads as an almost academic statement that could be made about the film that can be taken completely at face value. Within the context of the film, where Elaine is a character so addicted to the notion of love that she casts spells on men and kills them, there is a comedic component of course that the so-called ‘intuition’ Elaine follows really is quite hyper emotional.
Of course Biller is not enforcing the idea that women are irrational, as the magic Elaine performs really does seem to work, but she is using the character of Elaine to make fun of the way men fear the love and desires of women; the inspiration for the film came from a book that posited the reason women could not be in fulfilling relationships is because they bombard their men with too much love. Therefore I don’t think it is correct if one is to argue that the feminism of the film comes from the character of Elaine herself, or that women in the audience are supposed to identify with Elaine. This is a mistake I think feminist analysis often reductively partakes in; a character is feminist or not and so the movie is feminist or not. Rather, Elaine is symbolic of the absurdities of expectations of women or alternatively could be read to reflect the absurdities of liberal ‘choice feminism’.
What I actually found most interesting about The Love Witch is that it partook in something I had not seen before: it pointed out the absurdities and made fun of aspects of supposedly ‘feminist’ spiritual teachings. It also overtly shows the gendered, and somewhat patriarchal, teachings of paganism and witchcraft through overt visuals where many naked women surround one clothed man. The assumption that all Wiccan teachings are feminist is reductive and Biller points to, through dialogue that explicitly states such concepts, how they can be a way of mythologising, and to some degree naturalising, gender differences. It is debatable whether this can constitute feminism, but again the power of The Love Witch lies in its ability to unsubtly say that this is what it is and you can do with that what you will. This is similar to the way the film embraces liberal feminist ideas that sexuality and femininity are inherently empowering for women and thus it embraces these ideas within its form too; a male gaze and fantasy is completely conformed in its cinematic techniques. To me, this is reminiscent of the campness or ‘obviousness’ of They Live (John Carpenter, 1988) as it is a film that ruthlessly criticises capitalism and the propaganda that surrounds it, yet in its form and style it almost epitomises the ‘80s capitalist Hollywood action movie aesthetic. Both films shamelessly confront you with an overt message of critique and yet aesthetically indulge in the thing they are critiquing, although this is evidently more intentional in The Love Witch.
Biller rejects interpretations of her film as a ‘sexploitation’ movie but also as a ‘feminist’ one. Whilst I think there are arguably some feminist points made in the film through irony, I strongly appreciate Biller’s own assertion in her blog that “To be feminist, a movie has to have the express purpose of educating its audience about social inequality between men and women”. Biller argues that there is an obsession in film criticism to label movies feminist just because we like them, or because they are not misogynistic, when very few films are actually feminist or intend to develop specifically female consciousness. The increasing association of moral critique with art criticism, in my view incentivised by short form websites like Letterboxd and Twitter, leads people to assume that because they like something and they are feminist, the thing they like must also be feminist, and vice versa.
It is clear though that Biller is acutely aware that feminism in movies is to do with more than just plot and characters however, as she visually references Jeanne Dielman when Elaine is getting dressed in the mirror. This is a striking and clever reference, as conceptually the films aren’t worlds apart, but stylistically Jeanne Dielman seeks to destroy all forms of the male gaze and the pleasure associated with it, whilst The Love Witch appropriates this gaze to an absurd and even comedic degree. As clever as Biller’s writings are, whether her own film is ‘camp’ or whether it is feminist is not really up to her. It is up to you.
