DEFETISHIZING THE WITCH AND RETHEORIZING THE CINEMATIC 'LOOK' IN THE LOVE WITCH AND THE LITTLE HOURS

Abstract

I have chosen two contemporary films, The Love Witch (Anna Biller, 2016) and The Little Hours (Jeff Baena, 2017), both which showcase a movement away from the overt spectacularization of the witches’ magical powers, and instead portray their witches as ambiguously magical. I argue that the magical witch is threatening, and thereby fetishized (or punished) within traditional modes of cinematic spectatorship as prescribed by Laura Mulvey in her seminal film text, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). Thus, this ambiguity of magic the films is presented as a textual gap, which facilitates the establishment of various spectatorial positions that can simultaneously identify with the witch as a magical or non-magical figure. This elicits a discussion of a more nuanced presentation of visual pleasure that resists the fetish-or-punish matrix of the cinema’s scopophilic pleasures. My claim for the defetishization of the witch figure in my chosen films is also supported by Elizabeth Cowie’s theory of fantasy, written about in “Fantasia” (1984), which suggests that spectators are likely (and able) to make various identifications across gender boundaries. The spectator who observes Elaine in The Love Witch, or Sister Fernanda in The Little Hours, is therefore not bound to strict heterosexual boundaries of scopic identification, and instead, in this more diverse cinematic landscape, can observe the witch at varying levels of spectatorship that the films’ apparatuses facilitate.