The Craft - it's young, it's hip, it's now, it's wow! Be a witch or just look like one! Witches are young, sexy, and well-dressed. I hear a lot of high school students are trying to dress up in witchy gear since this movie opened. I've seen and heard people (including quite a few pagans and witches) speak well of The Craft, saying it's one of the more accurate portrayals of witchcraft and even that it's empowering for young girls. According to the press, some research was done to present a more accurate portrayal of modern-day practice. Well, just like the 10/11 episode of the X Files, a few details reflect actual practice, giving false credibility to yet another mysogynist, witch-hating film. I hear an oppressed minority once again praising the dominant majority when a few small crumbs are thrown their way - in this case, the crumbs consist of somebody being sent to observe a coven so a few shreds of truth can be mixed into Hollywood's stinky stew.
The way the script writers' lascivious sex fantasies and disdain for women play out in this movie echoes the venom towards women expressed by Sprenger and Kramer, the sexually repressed and twisted Dominican inquisitors and writers of the Malleus Maleficarum in 1486, the witch-hunters' guide to the Burning Times. This book, whose title translates to The Witch's Hammer, was wildly popular for the next two hundred years, printed in at least 29 editions and translated into German, French, Italian and English, and spread into civic law. "When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil. . . . Women are intellectually like children." What's written and disseminated through media does have an effect on history. The accusations and portrayal of witches in this hefty bit of very successful propaganda reflected and reinforced the general male hatred for, fear, disgust and ignorance of women. Bear in mind that 85 percent of the several hundred thousand people murdered in the European witch craze between 1560 and 1760 were WOMEN. 1
Let's see, what are the main concerns of witches according to the script-writers of The Craft? Is my hair pretty enough? Is my skin too ugly? Will the jock reject me? In choosing high-school as the setting the writers fulfill the quota requirements for footage of young girls (pant, pant, wank, wank) and show the audience that the supposed concerns of female teenagers are major themes in witchcraft, most especially vanity. (Gee, another parallel to the X-files episode!) These concerns all revolve around getting boyfriends, which I suppose the people who wrote the script figured was the most pressing concern women should have.
There are plenty of other lessons to be absorbed from this movie. The number one lesson being the one that's been drummed into girls' heads by mass media for decades - that women do not cooperate, they COMPETE, they compete for men. They will betray their closest friends in competition for even the most disgusting, unattractive, woman-hating, raping men.
Which brings me to The Jock. This is the pud with whom the main character, Goodie-Two-Shoes, wants a date. He treats her like shit. She pulls a love-spell on him and he becomes her stalker. Like Goodie, we're supposed to feel sorry for the asshole because he's been "tricked" into his obsession with her. After all, women are always tricking men (make-up, girdles, silicon implants, glamour) and putting spells on them to trap them into relationships, at least they are according to mass media and pop mythology.
Of course, there's the UBIQUITOUS RAPE SCENE to titillate the male audience. Goodie-Two-Shoes feels sorry for The Jock and goes on a date with him, and he nearly manages to rape her. Any one do a woodie-check in the theater? I'm sure that scene engorged the lipidinous vascular tissue of a few penises, sadly enough. For any one who has been raped, and for all people who must take extra precautions on a daily and nightly basis to avoid being raped, a rape scene in a movie not only does NOT titillate, it can be down-right traumatic! The inclusion of rape scenes in thousands of films works as an endless series of blatant THREATS TO WOMEN: 'see, bitches, you better just stay indoors, you better just find yourself male protectors to cling to! don't go taking back the night or your rights or nothing!'
It seems that one prerequisite for any "horror" movie involves writing in a scene where a woman gets herself into a situation where she is alone, unarmed, less than protectively dressed, and running with flailing arms from some danger, usually a male attacker/monster. The lesson here? Aren't girls DUMB! They always get themselves into some stupid situation and have to be rescued, and they can't even run! Yeah, that's what I do all the time.
Upon hearing about the attempted rape of her coven member, the Goth Chick seems angry, and decides to go "play." We're led to think she'll avenge the crime committed upon her friend. But when she finds the rapist, how does she punish him? She offers him her body to fuck. When he rejects her advances by shoving her onto the floor, she crumples up into a fetal position and makes pathetic whimpering noises, then changes her appearance so she looks like the goody-two-shoes (whom he'd earlier tried to rape) so he'll be tricked into having sex with her, the poor boy. When he learns of the deceit and her plan is foiled, she blows him out the window. Goodie is angry with Goth and we're supposed to see this murder as evil and feel a little bad for the poor misled rapist. The Messages? Women are pathetic and it's okay to rape girls.
As in movies about prostitutes and lesbians, who are either converted to the straight life or killed off in the endings, these girls have too much power and independence and must be punished. In The Craft punishment comes via the three-fold law. Following the presently quite popular "poor-white-trash"-bashing trend, Goth Chick, who hated living with her alcoholic, big-hair mother and her thug boyfriend in a trailer home, scores a penthouse but later receives the Punishment of the Thousand Cockroaches. The girl who willed a hair-hoppin' competitor's blonde hair to fall out loses her own head of pretty curls, and the girl who wills away a skin disease looks in the mirror to find it has returned with a vengeance. Goodie's punishment is the rapist.
Oh, yeah, let's not forget the old GORGON/MEDUSA imagery. We have been taught to associate women with snakes since before the Goddess EVE (who predated YHWH) was turned into a mortal apple-pusher with a snake cohort by the pudriarchal writers of the Old Testicles. Now, let's see, snakes (and dragons) were believed to represent the amazing dna-like wriggling energy of the universe until they were denigrated by Judaism and slain over and over again by the the heroes of the Islamic and Judeo-Christian dominators. All things associated with women and The Goddess had to be killed, demonized or converted into male deity or a saint. Of course, we slippery women sneak around on our bellies and deserve to have our heads lopped off and swung in the air, right? I think the general panic caused in most people by snakes brings to mind the underlying fear men have of women and women's power.
One last comment. The deity of these three girls is some male god. Never is there the slightest hint that there may be any female deity involved in witchcraft, let alone a pantheon. I won't insult your intelligence by explaining the absurdity of this deliberate omission, but I will say it's another of patriarchy's Big Fat Lies. The girls say shit like "I can feel him in come in me, I want him inside me!" The men in the audience can enjoy identifying with this male god, as is usual in monotheistic male-worshipping religions, and get off on the blatant soft-porn sexual innuendoes.
YEAH, RIGHT, there's no female deity. We can't have the public being given any notions about The GODDESS, now CAN we? Next thing you know, churches and synagagues and corporate offices will empty out as people take to the hills to revel skyclad in the power and beauty of their most ancient mother Earth! Let the wild rumpus begin!
1. Witch craze, A New History of European Witch Hunts by Anne Llewellyn Barstow
