I do film reviews too!

I used to write film reviews of Facebook. I'd evaluate movies (and occasionally television) through the lens of my discipline, political science. My first review was rather satirical, but over time they became more serious. To give you an idea of my film criticism, I am posting the text of one of these reviews below: I saw this film in the middle of reading a book called Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival, 1900-1950. The book is a study of how dictatorships and other radical regimes in the early 20th century conceived of the family and its relation to society at large. I bring this up because The Witch is more than a beautifully rendered horror film - though it is certainly that, with incredibly use of candlelight and firelight. It is very much a study of the family as a particular type of conservative political unit, one dissolving under the stress of growing internal change, environmental stress and bad leadership.

Before we go on, let me just get a distraction out of the way. If you see this film, you will spend the first several frames asking where you’ve seen the family’s mother, Katherine, before, and why you keep imagining Aiden Gillen throwing her down a mountain. This is why: http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/Lysa_Arryn

Plot synopsis (SPOILERS): The Witch is the chronicle of an un-surnamed family in the very earliest days of colonial settlement in New England, the northeastern-most part of the US. This region was settled first by Puritans, a group of Calvinist-influenced renegade Anglicans who are responsible for most of the bad things about the American character that weren’t down to slavery. The film does a great job of explaining Calvinism. Essentially, all humans are born sinful, and are saved only by God’s grace through Christ. God decided who would be saved at Creation, so there’s no way of knowing or influencing one’s fate, but it is more likely than not that Hell awaits. (One of the most famous Puritan sermons is titled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”) William can’t tell his son Caleb if his baby brother will go to Hell, or if Caleb will. So, in addition to living in straitened and isolated physical circumstance, these people are also in constant existential crisis.

The good townspeople of ... um, let’s say Plymouth, because there’s a heritage village there which probably provided the set - anyway, Plymouth kicks out the family patriarch, William (Ralph Ineson), because he refuses to stop calling them all unworthy godless sinners. (You might think this represents the sin of pride - William comes to agree with you a few corpses later.) So William, Katherine (Kate Dickie) and their five children, from teen-aged Thomasin (Anya-Taylor Joy) to baby Samuel, hie off into the woods - not the wide open spaces of American myth, but the much scarier notion of the frontier that reflects our fears of the unknown and perhaps our guilty consciences about the theft inherent in the whole enterprise. (There are, however, few references to American Indians in the film.)

Needless to say, shit goes south pretty quickly. Even before the witch shows up, you can tell the crops are failing and the isolation and stress are straining the family. Then Samuel disappears during a game of peekaboo with Thomasin. From then on, things rapidly escalate; the children squabble, the two surviving youngest (Mercy and Jonas - fiction’s first Calvinist brats) baiting Thomasin over the disappearance and claiming to talk to the family’s billy-goat, the ornery Black Philip; Katherine blames Thomasin; and it becomes clear that food and money are short. Then Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), the older of the family’s three sons, and Thomasin go out into the woods to find food, only to fall foul of ... something. Caleb comes back naked, ill, and at one point delirious/bewitched, and dies. Catherine demands to go back to Plymouth, to which William accedes.

Thomasin takes the blame for all this. Having told Mercy she was a witch to shut the brat up, she is now accused. Caleb’s bizarre death and Thomasin’s defiance of him lead William to lock up all his children and prepare to head home. Before he can, the witch (?) returns and attacks the family, killing the she-goat and perhaps making off with Jonas and Mercy. Katherine hallucinates that the Devil has returned her children and then breast-feeds a raven, in case you’ve forgotten she was on Game of Thrones. William is gored to death by Black Philip. Katherine ends up trying to kill Sansa ... I mean, Thomasin, and Thomasin wins that battle. The film ends with her naked, joining the sisterhood of naked, flying witches.

Before I discuss the politics, I first have to talk about the titular witch. We see her (Bathsheba Garnett) - an old, naked crone, living in a hut. We see in her profound, fire-lit darkness with a naked Samuel, and again suckling at the family’s she-goat Flora. In between, we see her as a youthful maiden seducing Caleb. But it is not at all clear that there really is a witch, or whether these are simply the dreams, hallucinations and superstitious rationalizations of 17th-century yeoman farmers under tremendous psychological strain. Much of the “witch’s work” can be explained away as dreams, or symptoms of delirium (in Caleb’s case). Thomasin milks blood from Flora’s udder at one point, but that could be her fear or Flora’s illness. Only Samuel’s vanishing defies easy explanation, assuming we are seeing what happened, and not Thomasin’s memory, which might be covering up some momentary neglect on her part.

Witchcraft is never about witches. It’s about trying to identify, isolate and exclude problematic elements from some sort of social situation. It’s a way of dealing with social conflicts indirectly, or justifying claims to power, which is why Arthur Miller compared McCarthyism to the Salem Witch Trials (held in 1692). A witch scare often reflects some fear of femininity or female power. In The Witch, society is a single household. Even then, it is a society riven by new forces beyond its comprehension or control, one that could easily founder without the added problem of naked milk burglars.

Ginsborg’s book, Family Politics, talks about various family models and their relation to the states of the early 20th century, and to political theory. In The Witch, we see a classically conservative family form. William is a patriarch. Once he leaves the village, he’s also the family’s priest. He serves God, but the move also exalts him to a new position, akin to the Greco-Roman family, where the patriarch was high priest of a family religion. His wife and children look to him for leadership; none of them say a word at their excommunication, only William. From Wikipedia: “Husbands were the spiritual heads of the household, while women were to demonstrate religious piety and obedience under male authority. ... Puritan husbands commanded authority through family direction and prayer. The female relationship to her husband and to God was marked by submissiveness and humility.” This hierarchical, patriarchal relationship, based in religion rather than some sort of human-made philosophy, is essentially conservative, at least in being antithetical to liberal individualism*. The same sort of patriarchal family would be found in most European peasant cultures of that day, or the 20th century.

The problem is that William is not a very competent patriarch, and he’s steered his little ship of state into seas too rough for him. First, there’s the external problem of lack of resources - the corn’s not growing, there’s nothing much to hunt, winter is coming (Kate Dickie, you will never escape). William’s not as competent as he is pious or rugged- at one point, he manages to nearly blind himself misfiring his musket at a rabbit, and then Black Philip knocks him into the mud. Katherine may be submissive in public, but not in private; she makes her dissatisfaction known frequently, and eventually compels William to make for the village.

Nor can William control his children. For starters, Thomasin is now becoming an adult, and thus a sexual being; like Maisie Williams in The Falling, that proves enormously disruptive. She has power now (her joining the witches’ coven at the end expressed that point). It becomes clear that Katherine is jealous of Thomasin, and Caleb a bit turned on - his puberty is another time bomb. William also fails as the family priest; Katherine states that she is losing her faith. In the end, William’s impotence and incompetence become blatant, because a) Thomasin calls him out on it in excruciating detail, and b) he dies at the hands of a fucking goat. (Remember, goat’s horns are an old symbol for being cuckolded - William is being unmanned. In a neat parallel, Katherine is killed by Thomasin, her scapegoat.)

In short, The Witch is the tale of a conservative society rapidly losing its mind under unimaginable stress, trying to understand the forces that are quickly destroying it. They are unable to fully confront their problems, because that would upend their entire worldview. Instead, they fall prey to scapegoating, to hallucination - and, just maybe, to a good old New England witch.

*But William’s willingness to challenge the town religious authorities is a sign of the liberal future. If 17th-century Americans could interpret the Bible for themselves, 18th-century ones would feel free to interpret British constitutional law - and then dump it in Boston Harbor.