The Love Witch is the Kitschy, Hedonistic, Feminist Film You Need to See

BY KAILEY TEDESCO

*Please note that there are some scene descriptions here, which may constitute a spoiler for some. 

I found out about The Love Witch nearly a year ago. It all started with a still of Elaine Parks’ heavily shadowed eyelids and a tea dress with ruffles too glorious for words. The still became a fascination which led me to interviews with the film’s feminist auteur, Anna Biller, which eventually led me to a trailer, then back to some interviews, and so on for about nine months. It took until just yesterday for the movie to come to one of my city’s indie theaters. Usually, and in my personal experiences, a build-up of anticipation that long often results in disappointment. I remember thinking several times that this 1960’s B-Horror pastiche could not possibly live up to the hype which I, myself, have ascribed to it. 

Well, dear readers, let me tell you it was worth every moment of the wait. 

The film follows Elaine Parks (Samantha Robinson), a newly inducted yet gifted, member of a Wiccan coven who is quixotically obsessed (or, in her own words, “addicted) to love. After suffering years of gaslighting and emotional abuse in a previous marriage, Elaine is quickly scouted by a coven while dancing in a burlesque nightclub. From there, she quickly learns to transmogrify “sex magic” into “love magic,” but ultimately leaves each of her dalliances for dead.

Starring: Elle Evans, Samantha Robinson, Jeffrey Vincent Parise The Love Witch Official Trailer 1 (2016) - Horror Comedy A modern-day witch uses spells and magic to get men to fall in love with her, in a tribute to 1960s pulp novels and Technicolor melodramas.

The Love Witch is an open allegory with a feminist agenda. While the film’s aesthetic and score set the viewer up for the typical supernatural tropes of 1960’s technicolor horror, we are instead greeted with a more realistic sense of witches which somehow opposes and aligns with our own world’s cultural conceptions. This is because the “witch” is ostensibly equated to a sexually liberated woman, and the townspeople treat Elaine and her coven members as such. In a scene where Elaine meets up with her friend and coven member Barbara at a Burlesque show, men can be heard having discussions about how witches used to hide, but now they seem ubiquitous in society. The attitude towards witches and Wicca is mostly one of bigoted tolerance — as though witches have been publicly granted rights that the anti-intellectualist bar-dwellers can’t override, despite their disdain (sounds familiar, right?)

And the allegory grows stronger. 

Elaine herself, after losing weight and gaining empowerment after her husband “leaves,” willingly codifies herself according to the male-fantasy. In the beginning of the film, she sits down to tea with Trish, a self-proclaimed feminist who has been married for ten years. After hearing that Trish will often refuse her husband of some of his fantasies, Elaine scolds that women should always give men what they want. And this is exactly what she does… or so it would seem. 

Throughout the film, Elaine creates a world for herself that is heavily influenced by male-perpetuated ideas of femininity, ultimately masking herself in layers of Bardot-esque eyeliner and Audrey Hepburn LBDs. She is often cooking decadent cakes or donning renaissance gowns while riding horseback. She speaks politely and is never seen without make-up. When it comes time for intimacy, she seduces her lovers with elaborate dances in intricate lingerie. She makes herself, essentially, the embodiment of male fantasy. However, she is not quite the Stepford Wife that one might think. 

She uses her beauty and sexuality as a bait for men who describe themselves as libertines or unhappily married, aka sexists. From the start of the film, she can be seen batting her eyes in what one initially assumes might be a call-back to the Bewitched nose-wrinkle. Yet, these two are largely dissimilar as Elaine is not using magic at all, simply her own sexual prowess. The men she baits are already ignobly piqued by her as they often catcall and grope. She invites herself into their lives, feeds them a philter, and suddenly they become madly (in every sense of the word) in love. What begins as a dalliance quickly turns into a literal sickness that causes these men to become hysterical with love to the point of death.

The hysterics are played for laughs and ultimately reminiscent of the ways in which women have been misogynistically portrayed in film for the past century. Elaine has none of it, immediately becoming disinterested in her own subjects and proclaiming “what a pussy.” She buries the body of one lover ritualistically, yet ultimately remains un-phased. To top it off, she places a witch bottle containing her own urine and a used tampon over the shallow grave. Her Kardashian dead-pan narration asks viewers to consider that most men have never even seen a used tampon. What she calls an addiction to love is evidently an addiction to power. Elaine exemplifies the culturally normative ideas of masculine aloofness while patronizing her dying lovers in her ruffled mini-dresses.

Anna Biller flips the typified romantic narrative while also giving the protagonist her cake and letting her eat it, too (quite literally). Elaine hedonistically enjoys all of the pleasures associated with sexist romanticism without letting the male stick around long enough for her to suffer the consequences. She flits from man to man like this in perfectly polished composure while her own paintings of liberated goddesses cutting the heart out of a man line the walls of her bedroom a la Dorian Gray. She has polarity and unity of her being, and all of her empowerment lies in her willingness to appear submissive. 

Biller constructs this narrative through a carefully cultivated 60’s lens that sometimes alludes to even older Hollywood, yet the inclusion of a smart-phone at the end grounds the viewer in a phantasmagorical contemporary. The film is a world that already exists. Kubrick and Ashby and Argento are all carefully woven into it. Yet, it is not their world. Nor is it Tate’s or Hepburn’s. It is all Biller’s – a world which re-writes over a century of misogyny with one unapologetically empowered witch. 

And it is fantastic. Please see it for yourself. 

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Kailey Tedesco is a recent Pushcart Prize nominee and the editor-in-chief of Rag Queen Periodical. She received her MFA in creative writing from Arcadia University. She’s a dreamer who believes in ghosts and mermaids. You can find her work in FLAPPERHOUSE, Menacing Hedge, Crack the Spine, and more. For more information, visit kaileytedesco.com.

The Handshake by Becca Shaw Glaser

BY BECCA SHAW GLASER

Up close, he wasn’t as cute. He was older and plumper, and anyway, it all just felt so weird. When I first saw his profile earlier in the day I thought, Ooh, he seems like someone who wants a relationship. I was absolutely specifically not looking for a hookup, but as soon as we started typing, it became clear that’s what he was up for. His place turned out to be a bank converted to a condo by the Dean of Architecture. Everything was huge and austere, almost entirely white, with cathedral ceilings. Perfect, I thought.

Oct 5, 6:41pm
How do you feel
driving to meet a stranger,
naked under your skirt
knowing that you may be
seduced and taken and
fucked.

Conveniently he’d forgotten that I’d told him I would be arriving hungry and could he please feed me. After I reminded him he tossed canned clams and hasty pasta together, smashing garlic cloves with the side of a silver chef’s knife. I hung awkwardly by the granite island.

He had wanted me to wear heels but I didn’t own any. Boots? Yeah, I had tall black boots. He’d asked me to wear something that showed cleavage, and no panties, so I did. While I waited on the hard-backed chair, legs firmly closed, he plied white wine. I said No thanks. I knew I was supposed to uncross my legs so he could get a glimpse, but I didn’t even want to take off my long black coat, keeping it tightly buttoned.

Oct 5, 6:41pm
Wet with anticipation?

When the food was ready we sat at one end of the stark maple table. Half-chewed worms poured from our mouths as we discussed the economy of desire, the poststructuralist concept of sexual exchange—really it’s a handshake, we agreed, a Marxist solidarity. He said In those days they used to think women so lusty the husbands made them wear metal plates when they were away to stop them from fucking half the village. And I hate it now—for men it’s like supposed to be a conquest and the woman’s supposed to be pushing away, keeping her number low. I was impressed by his awareness of gender and sexuality, but I still felt so timid that even sitting next to him on the couch felt scary. Our voices were tinny, floating around under the white cathedral ceilings and getting lost.

When he took off his clothes in the bedroom he was glazed in ginger fir, pale skin flecked with large pink freckles, each candied with a hair, long strands piercing out of his pubis, and I realized I was repulsed. How unfair and fucked up of me, I thought, to be so political in my preferences. He devoured my vulva, he was good at it, it’s a skill, I shut off the top of my head. Looked out the enormous arched window. Can anyone see?

Oct 5, 6:43pm
Nervous. Also,
I’m kind of lost.

He told me his favorite was to be with female CEOS, older women who were used to being in charge, he loved when they became submissive with him, let themselves go. And he loved being the odd-male out with a male-female couple. He liked going to truck rest-stops and having his dick sucked by another dude, most straight-identifying, of course, or sucking other guys’ dicks through those glory holes. I loved hearing the stories. I loved thinking there are younger guys out there who get off on giving older women pleasure, because, I’m getting older. I wished for a world where I could feel safe being so sexually adventurous, not terrified of rape, disease, or being considered a slut.

Oct 5, 6:44pm
Oh. We don’t
have to do this,
you know.

He stuck his fist partly in, and I was opening on his cool white sheets under his white down comforter against his vanilla-stained Ikea headboard in his white marble flat but I didn’t want to suck his small pink dick or even kiss his lips which I felt bad about and thankfully he didn’t pressure me at all but I think it was pretty obvious and then when it was clear I couldn’t or wouldn’t cum, Want to watch me? he slid his hand over his penis moving silently until white spurted out. I tried to at least touch him a bit while he was touching himself but the truth is I didn’t really want to.

After the shirt got tucked back into the jeans, after the zipper on the black dress was zipped up again, my still-wet vulva bristling between my thighs, my curly hair tangled, my breasts pulsing with the sensation of stranger-touch, after I shut the door to his white world firmly with a thud behind me, the first thing I wanted to do was see my lover, the lover who can’t be in a real relationship, the lover who gave me permission to try to find one. Not even in my car yet, I dialed, and surprisingly he picked up, said Sure, come over—and it was almost like coming home, to his soft gorgeous body, the body I’m bonded to, he was stretched out on his tiny bed, books and clothes chaotically strewn everywhere, small piles of trash that for some reason he sweeps into a corner and then leaves for weeks, he was watching Baron Munchausen, being uncharacteristically silly. He knew where I’d been. It didn’t bother him. In fact he liked the look of the dress, too, the way it clung to my breasts, pushing them together. I dropped my black shoulder bag and pressed my mouth to his.

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Becca Shaw Glaser is the co-editor and author of “Mindful Occupation: Rising Up Without Burning Out.” Her writing has also appeared in Mad in America, Black Clock, H.O.W., Two Serious Ladies, Birdfeast, The Laurel Review, Quaint, and Lemon Hound, among other publications. 

Polyamory Commands Intimacy, Not Just a Fling

BY GHIA VITALE

This piece is part of the Relationship Issue. Read more here.

As someone who has been polyamorous for seven out of the 11 years I’ve been with my partner, I can say with utmost certainty that polyamory is not an experiment for me.

It is the path in life my heart wandered down and never turned back. And suddenly, the mainstream dating world knows about polyamory. Now that I can simply check off the “polyamorous” box in an OkCupid profile, I am still hesitant to dip my toe into the icy waters of online dating.

One of their most recent additions is a feature that allows you to link your account to a partner’s account in order to let users know whom you’re currently dating on the site. It’s actually no better than how Facebook only lets you be in one relationship. In other words, to Hell with the rest of your lovers if you’re poly because according to these websites, only one of them is worth mentioning. The threesome requests were frequent enough when I confessed that I was bisexual in my profile. I’m worried that no matter how much I stress that I’m not looking for flings, that’s all others seem to want me for. That’s how it went in the past, anyway.

One of my biggest hang-ups about poly dating is the same issue other experienced poly people struggle with: the risk of becoming collateral damage in someone else’s quest for self-discovery, novelty, freedom, and most importantly, love. A recent spike in popularity has saturated the poly community with widespread interest. That means the poly-curious population is increasing. While that might mean there’s more to love, it also means there’s more people there to mess it up. Many newbies embark upon their poly journey with pure intentions; others mistake our permanent lifestyle for whatever they wish would fulfill their temporary and misguided desires. How do I know their desires are misguided? I know this because I’ve been directly implicated in these personal quests for self-fulfillment that end in nothing except breakups.

I let everyone know that polyamory is the only way I roll. While people are more than happy to enjoy my company as a fling, the idea of having multiple significant others that are actually significant is beyond most people’s comprehension and it seeps through their behavior. Once I let them know there’s zero chance of a monogamous future happening (or even a monogamish one), the tone of our interaction change drastically. All of the sudden, our relationship is no longer headed in any kind of committal direction and I lose my viability as a “serious” partner whom they envision a future with. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not pressing for commitment before it’s appropriate. I’m all about free love and I believe each relationship being a unique expression of love. But even though we’ll both claim we want poly relationships, I’m the only person who means it. What they actually mean is that they want to indulge in multiple relationships at once without strings attached. That’s fine, but that’s not polyamory.

It’s always different variations of the same scenario: I meet someone who claims to be poly-curious, poly-friendly, or “open to being with a poly partner.” Then they realize they’re not as poly as they thought they were, that they just wanted to date around and explore before meeting a monogamous partner. Whether or not I consented to this involvement never mattered, so I’ve learned how to recognize the unique smell of this trainwreck smoke so I don’t have to stand the heat later on. I understand that these people usually mess up because they don’t know better. As the person who’s actually poly, I basically have to be the person who knows better. It just sucks to become seriously invested in someone because they seemed to say the right things at the right times and gave you the impression that polyamory was a long-term consideration for them. It no longer felt like a carpet being pulled from beneath me once I developed a healthy sense of paranoia about it. Even educating these people about poly doesn’t seem to make them go back into the hookup culture that better suits their yearnings.

Polyamory is about maintaining multiple relationships, not just the freedom to have as many flings. Too many people enter polyamory with the “playing the field” mindset. They’re more than happy to practice polyamory, but never actually be polyamorous. If they were actually living polyamory as opposed to practicing it, they would see polyamory as a part of their future rather than a quick fix. That’s just the problem: They don’t see polyamory as a part of their future. They only see polyamory as a situational means to their temporary ends. Yes, polyamory absolves you from having to choose 1 person over another, but there’s so much more to it than that. Polyamory is far more about building and maintaining connections than it is about driveby romances and hooking up.

As a polyamorous person, I want more than a good time. I want love.

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Ghia Vitale is a writer from Long Island. She graduated from Purchase College with a BA in literature as well as minors in psychology and sociology. She has written for Ravishly and Quail Bell Magazine.