"The Love Witch" (2016) and The Curse of The Binary
The Power One Woman Holds to Create a Cult Classic
If you truly want to understand what it means to be a goddamn girlboss, look no further than Anna Biller, the clever mastermind behind the horror cult favorite The Love Witch. Which, if you were wondering, is COMPLETELY written, directed, produced, edited, composed, production-art-costume-and set decc’ed by this amazing woman.
The amount of thought and care that went into every scene and every direction is unmistakable, being shot on fading (though insurmountably aesthetic) 35mm film and ultimately curating/creating the wardrobe or set pieces that she wanted.
Talk about imagining something and then just whipping it into existence— every DIY-er’s dream and every filmmakers wettest fantasy.
We can praise her up and down the Hollywood block for the astounding 95% Rotten Tomatoes has graced this movie, for the 86% Google gives it, and for the massive cult appeal it has amassed as the years trickle by.
This is such a wonderfully stylized film that deserves every credit and every accolade for being one woman’s dream made reality, and then deserves every credit and accolade for making a deeply dark and disturbing narrative in a film landscape that thirsts for formulaic success.
Elaine (Samantha Robinson) is lovesick and finds comfort in the power of her womanhood and witchcraft. After many failed and damnably disastrous relationships (which are more like volatile and hallucinogenic one-night-stands that almost always end with her getting her much needed Vitamin D *awkward wink*, and the men also receiving their less needed D-Word [death. The guys usually attained a level of existence that plateaued at the death stage]), Elaine finally tips off into the deep end of self-satisfaction and fantasy.
All of which took me a good moment to decipher. The stylized look of the film is wonderful to look at and really sets the mood of a modern witch (or woman, depending on how you wanna slice this cheese) being held to 1960s-era standards.
The use of witchcraft is well-researched and spread across the 35mm film like mother’s drapes on a well-deserving chaise. A little gaudy, but looks good, fits the living room vibe, and in general gets the job done.
I was a little lost while watching this movie, but the conversation after sparked so much debate and thoughtfulness that I didn’t think about while enjoying this movie. Which is a mark of a good movie: where the first and foremost goal is to entertain. Layers peeled back while hanging around a water cooler or heck even while sitting in the emptying theatre and watching the credits reel by elevates the movie because it exists beyond its timestamp and we talk about it beyond what was on the screen.
This movie is a whacky vibe, but it is a GREAT vibe. It especially is a spooky, Halloween-y vibe, with a touch of poignant satire on the patriarchy so really. What’s not to love?
The storytelling and the style of the movie is so extravagant and campy, the themes becoming a little muddled and misshapen as the story stretches its gnarled threads out, but fear not, loyal and brave readers of the Newsletter:
We’re gonna analyze the top themes and metaphors from Biller’s The Love Witch. Which, in reality, make this movie that much more memorable.
Themes & Metaphors
Witchcraft and Womanhood
To give a blanket statement and say this is a feminist piece would be a bland oversight, one that disregards the many nuances of the film that subverts the idea of womanhood and redefines what it means to be a woman and to be powerful. The conjoined metaphor of womanhood and witchcraft is an obvious one, but one that has layers. Like an onion.
It harps on the idea that women are inherently powerful, they are inherently goddesses with innate powers of intuition envisioned as mothers and sorceresses. All of which, men fear. The idea of a man, to bow to a woman in her right, is terrifying and is cause for witch hunts and stoneings.
Elain, newly single and fully independent, finds her calling through witchcraft, the coven a community that accepts and uplifts her. Fully accepting herself as is and respecting herself is power unto itself.
Elaine fully accepts her role as a witch and the power that comes with it, but it is corrupting power nonetheless. She abuses it and while it is a trauma response to the hurt delivered to her from the men in her life, the consequences of this abuse are splatters of blood on the carpet, and more lives lost.
The Binary
Elaine is powerful, and that is unusual for a women. Soft send. Because it should not be an unusual circumstance, yet here we are, in awe of the confidence she boldly displays on screen.
She knows what she wants and she isn’t afraid to grab it, steal it, or manipulate it into being hers. She has lived her life for these men who are never satisfied and never loving enough, the least she can get in return is a good time and the woeful burgeonings of what love should feel like.
She wants the men to love her more, but not too much to be clingy or desperate. That’s a turn-off. She charms the men into doing her bidding with her body. She controls the mood of the room and flirts vivaciously. She owns every part of her body, mind, and soul and that control powerful.
Her confidence is her true power, but it belittles her person because she starts thinking like a man, and it feels like she fulfills the binary as her lovers become “too emotional” or “too clingy” like a woman, she gets disenchanted and dismisses them. She will only accept what she wants. Anything else is an excess she will not tolerate and discard of without a second glance.
She becomes thoughtless in her pursuit of her idealized love and bulldozes those who stand in her way. Her methods violent and aggressive, a mental enigma for sure, but one paired with death and destruction in its path.
Elaine becomes the very thing she hates: a person who doesn’t care about others, just like the previous men in her life.
Love as an Object
While we’re at it, we might as well say women as objects too, because they go hand-in-hand in the ring-around-the-posey of traumatic experiences to commemorate from this film.
To Elaine, love is something easily attained by using her wily feminine charms to woo men into bed. It’s not so much a warm and fulfilling feeling, but as a notch in her bedpost. She wants the love but none of the emotional attachments that come pre-packaged with it, and she seeks this validation through the love-making and potion-making.
Which makes it as superficial and disingenuous as possible as she fabricates her partners’ emotions through her sorcery (witchcraft and womanly charms alike). It is a status to claim, a feeling to capture for the moment, but not something sustainable, nor real.
The love potions she concocts are physical representations of her love, but once drunk, are void and gone. All the humdrum of her altars and potions and paintings are physical and material representations of a love she no longer believes in, a love she cannot attain because of the spite she has been dealt and the despair rooted in her heart.
