The Aesthetic (and Less-Aesthetic) Allure of the Occult: Diving into the Beguiling World of The Love Witch

 

(Image sourced from The New York Times)

Flashy, bold, and oh-so encapsulating, Biller creates in The Love Witch (2016) a glorious pastiche of iconic 20th Century cinema. Brimming with contemporaneous sensuality, resplendent costuming and technicolour excellence, the retro-fuelled melodrama is a riot of aesthetic indulgence to be sure. Having written, directed, edited and storyboarded every shot of the film, working closely with cinematographer M. David Mullen to expertly reproduce classical camera styles, and having designed and constructed much of the lavishly detailed sets, props, and costumes to boot, The Love Witch took a staggering seven-and-a-half years to complete. The result? A species of deeply artisanal independent film that achieves a level of precision and unity so faithful to Biller’s vision that The Love Witch (forgiven perhaps for a few languid or awkward moments) could readily be referred to as a film d’auteur.

Complete with campy overacting and deliciously satirical feminist commentary, Biller also conceals beneath the artificial splendour of The Love Witch a much more significant and deeply political sensibility, using themes of the occult to examine feminist ideals. Speaking in a 2017 interview with The Guardian, Biller discusses how the themes of her 2007 debut Viva, which she describes as an exposé on the sexual revolution, trickled into The Love Witch:

“Maybe there is a little of that in The Love Witch: the sense that you take the woman, the objectified sex symbol, and you ask what’s inside her mind. The queasy thing about it is how the left has appropriated that kind of free sexual politics in a way that’s not really that good for women. So that if you complain about some of the problems for women in the sexual revolution, you’re looked at as a rightwing prude. The sexual revolution promised all kinds of freedom to women, and none of it was accomplished – at least, not for women.”

- Anna Biller, 2017

Samantha Robinson as Elaine in The Love Witch (2016)

As the film progresses, it becomes clearer that we’re viewing the narrative from the muddied lens of The Love Witch’s protagonist, Elaine’s, internal dialogue. Elaine yearns for escape: flashbacks to her past reveal that she is deeply traumatised, and as such these scenes appear in fragments, as though Elaine (whether consciously or subconsciously) is blocking them from her own mind. In general her daily life is a fantasy, the manifestation of the inner-fairy tale that she desperately wishes to be true, but memories of her ex-husband appear to plague Elaine, and as she slowly begins to remove her wig, leaving herself vulnerable and exposed, the haunting words of her ex-husband and father berating her echo from the confines of her mind. 

Elaine’s ever-perfect hair and make-up, the carefully staged and calculated movements that she makes, therefore reflect an innate desire for control, and an almost fanatical desire for her life to appear as picture-perfect as the dream she’s built up in her mind, even if it means betraying her friends or submitting herself to servitude to, as she says, “give a man his fantasy”. The celestial retro-chic aesthetic of The Love Witch thus becomes less about visual gratification and more an investigation into Elaine’s psyche, an exploration of a woman harbouring the deep-rooted belief that the love of a man will complete her fantasy, thus ‘fixing’ her - though what love should actually look like, it seems she never learned. 

Exuding provocative feminist overtones, The Love Witch appears at first glance to critique the ridgid patriarchal norms of the past. The intended time period of the film is elusive: shot on 35mm film and drawing from a litany of cinematic influences, from 50s Hitchcock and the melodramas of Douglas Sirk to the salacious, female-driven movies of early 1930s Pre-Code Hollywood, The Love Witch could barely be picked apart from a line-up of vintage B-movies in terms of style. However, kitschy contemporaneous wit (when lamenting the emotionality of one of her victims, Elaine comments dryly that “[she] should have known, he’s a pisces'') and the appearance of modern props (from cars to, finally and most revealingly, a mobile phone) settle the film firmly in the present-day, confirming with it The Love Witch’s place in the feminist discourse of today. Considering that The Love Witch is set in contemporary times, the attitudes espoused by Elaine, coupled with her friend Babara’s somewhat stilted remonstration that Elaine sounded as if she’d been “brainwashed by the patriarchy”, highlight that the 60s mise-en-scene of the film is no pretty accident. By throwing viewers into Elaine’s vintage fantasy, The Love Witch shines a light on contemporary gender roles, and how long-entrenched patriarchal ideologies persist today, in societal spheres and institutions, and the minds of women, too. 

Samantha Robinson as Elaine in The Love Witch (2016)

Six years post its release date, the growing cultural relevance of The Love Witch is steadily earning it cult classic status. The timely release of The Love Witch (2016), arriving at the dawn of the Trumpian era and a Fourth Wave of feminism, coupled with an increasing fascination in the symbol of the witch (according to a 2018 article by Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz and Dan Kopf, the practice of witchcraft and paganism has seen major growth in recent decades), The Love Witch falls neatly into a niche that has rapidly been creeping into the mainstream. With an occultic flair and ruminant flavour of feminism that came just slightly ahead of the curve, Biller comments on how audience attitudes towards The Love Witch changed after the 2016 US presidential election:

“It came out right on time. As soon as the election happened, the reviews became very different from what they had been before. They talked about the character and her situation as if it were now something current and relevant, which they hadn’t done before. [...] People became more conscious that this movie’s ideas were relevant now, rather than seeing it as some fun little retro thing. And those scenes towards the end, at the bar, with the near-rape and the crowds shouting: ‘Burn the witch!’ – that all feels pretty Trumpian all of a sudden.”

- Anna Biller, 2017

Spurred by social media, contemporary feminists are becoming more critical of what can be considered feminist, with terms such as “choice feminism” becoming well-known as a critique of the previously-held belief that any choice a woman makes is justified and politically acceptable simply because she is a woman. Though it may be questionable whether the complexities of the women’s movement can reasonably be condensed into bite-sized TikTok videos, digital platforms such as these, wherein sociopolitical conversation is readily available and easily accessible to the masses, have undeniably had a huge impact on the world-views of 21st Century women. Historical figures of feminine power or oppression are thus being revised from a contemporary position: for example, the concept of the witch dates back thousands of years, appearing across several cultures from Ancient Greece to Yoruba tradition, and has always been associated with powerful women until, eventually, male fears brought around by profound social change following the rise of modernity saw these women demonised. 

Samantha Robinson as Elaine in The Love Witch (2016)

Samantha Robinson as Elaine in The Love Witch (2022)

Having been a self-proclaimed “nerd who was always watching old movies” in childhood, Biller was inspired by the sexually aggressive, confident women of the pre-Hays Code era, as well as the later film-noir femmes fatales. She argues that, in The Love Witch, she is reclaiming the figure of the witch. The ideas behind witches and witchcraft was and is exceedingly complex, simultaneously a male fantasy figure and a symbol of cunning power and endurance in early feminist movements; Biller, therefore, turned this muddled notion of the witch on its head, evoking it from a deeply feminine and nuanced perspective. 

In perhaps a somewhat paradoxical nature, Biller simultaneously subverts the male gaze, representing Elaine as empowered in how she uses her sexuality for her own gain, whilst also critiquing her actions in a manner cognizant of how the patriarchy affects all women’s actions, even those seemingly empowering. Nonetheless, the nudity and lasciviousness of The Love Witch, given the feminist tones woven into the fabric of each scene, and Elaine’s perhaps cunning or manipulative intentions, fails to gratify the male gaze. Indeed, there’s a sense of dramatic irony in that the viewer, party to the fishy circumstances of Elaine’s ex-husband’s death from even the opening scenes of The Love Witch, suspects that each lover Elaine takes will imminently meet his end.

Samantha Robinson as Elaine in The Love Witch (2016)

Pointed flashbacks to Elaine’s traumatic past (for example, questionably consensual sex with a cult leader), in addition to the ultimate dissatisfaction that Elaine experiences whenever she succeeds in ensnaring a man, emphasise, however, that Elaine is also a victim - of patriarchy and the oppression that she’s faced (and hasn’t dealt with) as a woman - she simply refuses herself to be treated as such. 

In the final scenes of the film, Elaine’s future is left ambiguous. The screen cuts back and forth between shots of Elaine, clutching a bloody dagger to her chest with a dreamy expression, closeups of her latest victim, scenes of when they ‘married’ at a renaissance fair, and the artwork that Elaine created at the beginning of The Love Witch, that which elegantly foreshadowed the final moments of her story, before finally fading to black. Though Elaine’s expression, paired with the scenes of her reminiscing on her ‘marriage’ with a similar demeanour, indicate that she continues to be lost in her fantasyland, the overwhelming feeling of this ending is that Elaine has completed a cycle, leaving her free to move forwards, anew. Artful foreshadowing particularly in the form of tarot cards, notably the three of swords (during the film, Elaine vanquishes three lovers), playfully mirror the events of The Love Witch and convey a sense of completeness. In this sense, Elaine’s expression can be interpreted as one of gratitude: she is grateful towards Griff, ostensibly her final victim, for catalysing the breaking of a painful and bloody cycle and allowing her the freedom where, as viewers, we cannot know where she may be headed next. 

Samantha Robinson as Elaine in The Love Witch (2016)

In essence, The Love Witch is a film of pure visual excess. Radiating beauty and gilded at every corner with dazzling mysticism, Biller rejects feminist resistance to ‘the gaze’, artfully dabbling in how women can subvert historically masculine tropes of filmmaking. “Cinema is gaze”, journalist Cathy Lomax points out, “it’s all about how you play with it, and how we as women can empower ourselves by taking charge of that gaze”.

In The Love Witch, Biller tackles themes of feminism, trauma and the occult without reticence, allowing her protagonist Elaine to be at once victim and perpetrator, perfectly imperfect, and, if in part regretfully misguided, teeming with rightful fury. Put simply, Elaine is a woman: complex, audacious, and ineffably enthralled by the omnifarious allures of the occult. 

By Elodie Davies