From Calvinism to Consumerism: The Persistence of Patriarchy in Robert Eggers's The Witch (2015) and Anna Biller's The Love Witch (2016)

Abstract

Abstract: Robert Eggers's film The Witch (2015) is filled with meticulously accurate seventeenth-century period detail; it presents us with a grim, pre-modern world in which the supernatural is a real and palpable presence, but the ending suggests an alternative course that American history might have taken, away from the materialism of capitalist modernization. Anna Biller's The Love Witch (2016), on the other hand, presents us with a bright-and-shiny postmodern world bereft of any real magic, except for the magic of images. It also reminds us that the alternative road suggested by the ending of The Witch was not, in fact, taken. Together, these two films about witchcraft bookend the long, slow process of capitalist modernization that transformed the U.S. from the dark and mysterious wilderness encountered by its early European colonists to the hyper-civilized postmodern superpower of today. The very different figurations of witchcraft in the two films serve as focal points that highlight the dramatic historical movement from 1630s New England to modern-day California. At the same time, the two films, read together, suggest that certain stereotypes concerning witches (and women) have managed to survive this historical storm virtually intact. In a broader sense, the process of capitalist modernization has transformed almost every other aspect of Western society, yet certain fundamental patriarchal attitudes highlighted and critiqued in The Witch remain a problem in The Love Witch , as well.