Here was an idea for a show with the potential to entertain and edify. It could tap into a burgeoning cultural trend that was already of interest to millions of people, and what’s more, make it accessible to teenagers, as The Craft had done. Such a show would surely glamorize and romanticize the world of contemporary witchcraft, but might also clarify its complexity, make it palatable and feel-good fuzzy for nervous parents and suspicious school administrators. Witchcraft for the new millennium, damn it.
So what happened?
How is it possible that the small-screen conceptualization inspired by this intelligently conceived, ambitious, well-researched, classy, deliciously naughty film could be so ill-conceived, bland, sappy, predictable and devoid of sophistication? And where witchcraft authenticity is concerned—forget it.
It’s not that Charmed looks bad on its surface. In its early seasons it had much to recommend it in terms of sheer style. Its innovative use of popular music, for example, wherein obscure and often unsigned bands were given a chance to have their songs featured during (and credited at the end of) each episode, was a cool, feel-good move. Unfortunately the show’s theme music remained a cover of The Smiths’ “How Soon is Now?” which was also in The Craft’s soundtrack, when it might have been “A Charming Spell” by the Boston-based ethereal trip-hop band Splashdown. (Disclosure: members of this band are friends of mine.) They did eventually have a song or two featured on the show but the royalty checks and fame would have been far greater if the producers had taken a bigger creative risk with the show’s opening. The opening credits segment, which uses the Smiths’ song (covered, as in the film soundtrack, by the band Love Spit Love), clearly acknowledges Charmed’s debt to The Craft. But there, all groovy similarities end.
The show’s basic premise isn’t incompatible with the film’s narrative structure. Prue, Phoebe and Piper are three sisters who are “hereditary” or “natural” witches living in an opulent (and ancestral!) San Francisco home. In the first episode they learned of their inherent powers and that they are meant to use them to fight evil and do good in the world. A huge, heavy grimoire of spells lives in the house, which the sisters refer to in times of need and impulsive wrong-headedness. Unfortunately, the book—solid, vibe-y, a tangible repository of learning and mystery—is the only witchcraft-related thing grounding the show in any sort of reality. The sisters’ wardrobes, jobs, relationships and daily pressures are so implausibly glamorous as to make their lives appear hopelessly shallow. As a consequence, to avoid having the show look more or less like 90210, the show relies on heavy-handed, silly special effects and implausible plotlines involving “magic” to make sure audiences know it’s a fantasy, not just a glitzy teen soap opera.
If the actresses were playing characters maturing into their thirties instead of their twenties, they’d be Botoxed and aerobicized to skeletal prettiness, like the glamourpusses of Desperate Housewives. To be twenty-something in California is to be nubile and dewy-faced. No golden girls, these daughters of darkness: their pinkness and pallor is not only an homage to the gothic princesses of The Craft (even the African-American sister, Rochelle, was caramel, not cocoa), but conjures a New Englandy provenance of harsh winters, apple orchards and Puritan ancestors. And in this we have another crucial area where Charmed errs. The show posits a heredity-based witchcraft that only encourages naive viewers and witch wannabes to fabricate their own dubious claims to non-existent lineage. The three Charmed Ones are “natural witches” (a term also used in The Craft to denote innate psychic ability—the term soon became popular among teen-aged seekers, too, and was found throughout web discussion groups and teen witchcraft pages at the time) who are connected to witchcraft through their matriarchal line. Their family history has occasionally been portrayed with direct ties to the Matter of Salem.
Okay, while I’m on the subject, why is it always about Salem? The film version of the excellent novel Practical Magic also decided the two sisters had to have female ancestors hanged during the witch trials. Look, girls, we can’t ALL be descended from them! It’s every bit as implausible and tiring to suppose all modern-day witches are as-good-as-blood relations of the Puritans (sorry, witches) hanged at Salem as it is for us to assume we must all have been persecuted witches in a former life. I don’t know if the show’s producers were aware of it, but when it first aired there actually was quite a bit of this sort of posturing going on in the pagan community. You know: my grandmother initiated me, I’m descended from Rebecca Nurse, I was a witch who was burned to death in a past life, etc.
You see, when Charmed premiered, Wicca was becoming very popular very quickly. If you were practicing by 1984, you were still cool. But by 1988, plenty of people had at least heard of Starwood and Starhawk, and meeting a “real” witch was not as freaky an encounter as it would have been considered a few years earlier. Eighties witches were not the patchouli-dipped, lovebead-wearing, back-to-the-earth dreamers of the seventies. We had our own shops, our own music, our own fashions and plenty of books. But even in the midst of discovery, we could sense our nascent tradition was becoming old hat. No sooner did we learn that there were coven secrets than we saw those secrets published. This thanks to the granddaddy of modern witchcraft: Gerald Gardner.
An English civil servant with an encyclopedic knowledge of the occult, Gardner hung out with a group called the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry as a boy, then met some random ceremonial magicians and decided that he wanted to practice witchcraft in the Old Way. Trouble is, no one really knew exactly what that way was. So, Gardner cobbled together a number of texts (from sources like Aleister Crowley, the Kabbala and the Golden Dawn), wrote them up in a book and claimed to have “discovered” an ancient tradition. He initiated dozens of witches into his New Forest coven and, when the Witchcraft Act was repealed in 1951, immediately started publishing books and speaking publicly about what witches do. His claim that witches had been “underground” since the Middle Ages, and that what he and his followers practiced was inherited from our pagan European forbears, was more or less accepted, if not embraced, and witches’ covens in the “Gardnerian” mold started springing up throughout England and eventually in the United States. It was all very hush-hush throughout the 1960s and ’70s, with an occasional whiff of weirdness with the release of films like Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist, which offered titillating glimpses of the black arts and portrayed witches as Satanists. Despite damning rumors about witchcraft, most serious seekers were not daunted and covens continued to form, although many witches remained “in the (broom) closet.” Then more witches went public and started writing books which claimed to “share secrets,” and it wasn’t long before anyone could declare themselves a witch and be privy to the language, rituals and practices of the craft. You could walk into any bookstore and buy any one of dozens of books on the subject in the early 1980s. Nowadays, those books number in the hundreds, and most witches do not see this as a Good Thing. At the time, the increasing tendency to put a public face on witchcraft did not sit well with some of the old-timers, who had come up through the ranks looking for little hand-lettered ads mentioning meetings on the bulletin boards of occult bookshops, who mail ordered newsletters and crudely produced magazines that arrived in plain brown wrappers, who hid their robes and ritual implements away in cupboards so as not to become suspect among their neighbors or non-pagan loved ones. I recall meeting some of these folks when I first got involved in witchcraft. They were often grouchy and resentful, seemingly because this thing they had been doing in secret for so long was suddenly trendy. But some of the older folks seemed genuinely thrilled about having new blood (or is that new meat?) around for the party. That, alas, is another essay, and one I am not necessarily eager to write.
Since some of the established covens were not terribly welcoming to strangers, many younger or newer seekers attempted to move quickly beyond the standard Gardnerian Wicca-based groups to include ethnic and cultural practices; hence, Celtic-derived paths became extremely trendy
for a while (Riverdance helped). If you weren’t straight vanilla Gardnerian, why then you just might have something unique going for you. But, alas, the old chestnut “I was initiated by my grandmother” only worked for the first ten people you heard it from. The lure of authenticity and heritage is all the greater when you’re told your religion/ path/lifestyle/belief system/craft is actually not millions or thousands or even hundreds of years old, but dates in fact only as far back as the Second World War. To be sure, many of the trappings and activities are old, way old. Tarot, astrology, herblore, ceremonial magic . . . yes, all this is ancient stuff. But Gardner and his protégés put it together into a nifty anachronistic package that certainly seemed to originate in antiquity. Of course when he/they said that’s exactly where it came from, no one wanted to know differently. And along with the appropriation of the (supposed) beliefs and practices of the witches of Medieval Europe or Colonial America, contemporary witches also willingly adopted a persecution complex. Even if what we believed was no longer going to get us labeled criminals or heretics (weirdos, yes; criminals or heretics, no), we understood that reclaiming the word “witch” was going to make people raise their eyebrows, if not their cudgels.
So, you started to hear whispers and then shouts and then songs of The Burning Times. Nine million witches burned, said one book, and the rest followed suit. Witchcraft, it is said, went “underground.” Information was passed down orally from one generation to the next and reached us in better times. We were sisters and brothers in flesh and spirit with countless martyrs. Wow. Trouble is, it never happened. Historians waffle, but most place the actual number of victims of the witch craze somewhere between 100,000 and a million. Still, being historically aligned with the victims of torture allows for some pretty righteous self-esteem issues. Welcome to the pagan community! May I take your backbone? And you won’t be needing your common sense either! Just as we started to realize aligning ourselves with history’s biggest patsies was maybe not the best idea, the media representations started to pop up like mayapples in spring. Gosh, Ethel, look—witches really don’t worship the devil, they really do do magic, and gosh, do they really spend that much time doing love spells and chanting? And look at those silly robes! And why is that cat talking?!? And we were victims all over again—but of misrepresentation this time, not of religious persecution. Suddenly, we pined for the days of being labeled Satan worshippers because at least then, people took us seriously. Perhaps it is this desire to be taken seriously that has led so many modern witches to cleave to the myth of The Burning Times, even as it has been debunked thoroughly by scholars.
If you’ve read your history, you know that public floggings, hangings and burnings of accused witches were akin to public entertainment, just as public torture and execution have been entertaining the masses since the gladiator days. But it is the method used that raises some forms of spectacle above others (think of Urbain Grandier’s death in The Devils versus John Proctor’s in The Crucible—of course, we should perhaps be thankful that Nicholas Hytner, and not Ken Russell, directed The Crucible). Burning is somehow, well, sexier than hanging. Is it that human flesh smells sweet when it’s burning, like roasting pork? Is it that it’s a vicarious so-glad-that’s-not-me reminder of hellfire? Either way, public conflagrations sure did draw big crowds of onlookers in Medieval Europe at the height of the witch craze. Despite the fact that condemned witches in the North American colonies were never burned, dramatic literature plays fast and loose with facts and evidence and likes to consign its naughty nymphets to the flames, not the gallows. Several episodes of Charmed have exploited the sex appeal of the public immolation, and, the show being what it is, the magically crafted illusion (wrought by the Charmed Ones or others) of people being burned alive is as likely to be featured as the “real thing.”
This is one of the more irritating aspects of the show for me: that the use of “magic” is so often merely about the use of illusion, and the transformations that occur are almost always merely temporary and easily reversed. The lessons learned after these illusory forces are tangled with are rarely connected to the nature of illusion (or delusion, or glamour, or any other concept related to it); it’s usually more along the lines of “Whew! Good thing we got through that scrape! Gosh, next time we’ll have to check the book and make sure we don’t say those words in that order ever again!”
But I’d be willing to forgive Charmed its many sins: its deviation from the smart, character-driven monolithic structure of The Craft; its reliance upon cheap, glitzy effects to portray “magic”; its shallow, ingenuous portrayal of the Charmed Ones as professionally accomplished businesswomen who, oh yeah, just happen to be battling evil all day long before they freshen up and start their evening stint managing a successful restaurant/nightclub. Yes, I’d excuse these infractions but for one thing: the show insists on using the word “Wicca.” The use of lexicon in Charmed is every bit as slipshod as its portrayal of history. But there is simply no reason for it if the show’s writers and producers do their research and give a crap about accuracy and authenticity. I mean, is “Wicca” a noun, a verb or an adjective? Do we blame Buffy the Vampire Slayer for first using it as a word interchangeable with “witch” instead of its more correct usage, a synonym for “witchcraft” (albeit only in a very specific modern sense)? Or is it that the word “witch” is still too scary to some people? Or maybe practitioners wish to have a more arcane way to refer to themselves, since calling yourself a witch is still very much verboten in much of suburban America . . . good for being invited to a few cocktail parties, maybe, but not to the neighbor’s kid’s graduation barbecue.
That’s okay, we have our own parties and drinking games (drink every time one of the main characters changes costumes on Charmed, for example). Becoming media darlings has at least made mention of us as fashionable. But is Charmed making it okay for us to do what we do, in terms of being respectable members of society? Or is it making TV audiences think twice when they encounter a “real” witch in “real life”? Do mundane folk think that we witches are crazy/disillusioned/naive/just plain weird for calling ourselves witches? Or, and this is the scary part, do some viewers actually believe we can do stuff like freeze time, burst spontaneously into flames, force people to fall in love with each other at the snap of our fingers and shapeshift into other people or animals? If you listen to some of the right-wing Christian rhetoric out there, it is surprising to acknowledge just how much power some people attribute to the modern witch. The power to corrupt all of the children of America, for example. Or, if we’re not doing it directly, evil books like Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince are doing it for us.
I propose one, just one, episode of Charmed that deals with an average day of a real live practicing witch. If audiences bought it, they’d maybe buy an entire series about real witches. Not the megalomaniacal showgirls on programs like Mad Mad House, but witches who have boring jobs, families, mortgages, PMS and hopes and dreams. Prue would not have had some handsome, glamorous detective as a lover, but an average-looking boyfriend who was, say, an insurance salesman or a portfolio analyst. She would have stopped all the incessant wigging out and kicked back with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s once in a while. She would have worn a grimy t-shirt on laundry day like the rest of us slobs. Phoebe would come back from yoga class dripping with sweat and devoid of lipstick. She would worry that her domestic know-how was not quite what it should be and check out some books from the library on, say, vegetarian cooking or furniture refinishing. Piper would get a pimple once in a while and have some sort of addictive vice like jalapeno potato chips, or scratch tickets. Paige would, oh, I don’t know, have a thing for bad eighties hair bands and frosted lipstick. Oh, and their boyfriends’ infractions would not involve demonic revenge scenarios or being spirited away into some misty limbo-land where they’d be incommunicado for months. This tendency of the Charmed Ones’ men to just not be around in a dependable fashion would be due to very plausible reasons. Like, they’d b
e inaccessible because their cell phone batteries died, or because they had a not-quite-ex-wife they were still sloppily separating from, or because they just felt like watching the game with their buds over pineapple-ham pizza and Zima. No more declarations of undying love and then zapping themselves into the ether—these guys simply need to be less mysterious. Hey, better yet, make their men pagan, too! They could be Trekkies, or wood carvers, or weekend warrior types spending a few days a month in the woods with other men, banging on drums and howling at the moon.
This new Charmed would find its young heroines struggling with decisions such as the ones real-life witches make. How to get wax out of a silk ritual robe. What to bring to the potluck feast. Where to find broomstick-shaped cookie cutters. What to do when the High Priestess of your coven gets dumped by the studly new Harvest Lord and is left with her heart in pieces. How to tell your parents you don’t want a Catholic wedding or funeral. How to comfort a friend whose Baptist family has disowned her for coming out as a witch.
No more lightning bolts shooting from anyone’s hands. No more big books of spells hurling through the air. No more manipulation of the time-space continuum. No more ill-considered spells that change people’s fundamental personalities. And, please Goddess, no more flawless designer hairdos. Witchcraft is earthy, sweaty, messy, frustrating and exhausting—much like life itself. And like “real life,” it too can be a source of immeasurable beauty, ecstasy, insight, joy and excitement. Why can’t we ever get that on TV?
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