Here’s the really clever part: the Halliwells haven’t only become Barbie; given their preoccupation with clothes, they’re also the girls playing with the doll. You can’t get much less threatening than that. Clothing at the Halliwell house is chosen for any and every occasion with all the attention to detail of a seven-year-old sorting through scraps of fabric looking for the perfect tiny outfit. Seven-year-olds generally don’t care about age-appropriate, or work-appropriate, or that redheads cannot and should not wear certain shades. Little girls are “in the moment,” and if that moment includes a sleeveless, rhinestone trimmed cocktail dress to be worn on a date that doesn’t include either cocktails or, in point of fact, actually going out (“Witchness Protection,” season seven), then at least they’re playing quietly and the grown-ups needn’t worry about them for a few moments.
How preoccupied with dressing up are the Charmed Ones? When Paige died in “Styx Feet Under,” the season seven episode where Piper went to work unwillingly for Death, she stalled her final passage by confessing to Piper that she stole one of her favorite jackets and a pair of earrings. On Charmed, Death itself has been delayed by fashion choices.
Lest Death have the final word, let’s finish up by replaying the opening montage and revisiting the question: “What is she wearing?”
If I’m right, there’s only one answer.
Camouflage.
Tanya Huff lives and writes in rural Ontario, Canada, with her partner Fiona Patton, seven cats and an unintentional Chihuahua. Her twentieth book, Smoke and Shadows, came out in paperback in the spring of 2005. Its sequel, Smoke and Mirrors, came out in hardcover in July 2005.
SITTING ON THE DOCK OF THE BAY, CASTING SPELLS
WHERE THE HECK DO THE CHARMED ONES ACTUALLY LIVE?
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NICK MAMATAS
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Halliwell Manor has been like home to viewers for seven seasons, but where is it, really? Not San Francisco, Nick Mamatas says. Maybe not Earth.
A LIFELONG NEW YORKER, I finally decided in 2004 that I needed a change of scenery and began making plans to move to the Bay Area. I was living with my sister at the time and she decided that I should watch the entire syndicated run of Charmed—her favorite television show—so that I could learn about San Francisco, which is apparently full of fairly incompetent demons.
Well, having lived in the Bay Area for just over half a year now, I have to say that I am very disappointed.
It’s not all that difficult to meet witches in SF and the surrounding areas. I live about four blocks away from a “metaphysical supplies” shop that’s larger than any apartment I’ve ever lived in. A good fifty percent of the people I’ve been introduced to since moving here have revealed themselves as pagans or witches of some sort, and surprisingly frequently as part of the construction “And she was like, ‘I want an exclusive relationship,’ and I was all like, ‘You knew I was a bi poly pagan when we met on the bipolypagangeek board’. . . . ” Not that the town is half pagan or anything; this is just the milieu a young and nerdy writer of dark fantasy finds himself in these days.
There are plenty of places in the Bay Area for witches to congregate. One friend of mine offered to take me around to various hangouts and stores frequented by her part of the greater witchcraft pagan scene. B (we’ll call her that to protect her privacy) wanted to show me the Sword and Rose, a witchcraft supply store she stumbled upon just as she was finishing up college and “looking for something” to believe in. The store is at 85 Carl Street, but good luck finding it as it’s hidden between two buildings and through a garden pathway. The owner, a fellow named Randy who is said to be a “master of conjuration” (not sleight-of-hand stuff; he claims the ability to bring various supernatural entities to some sort of physical appearance), put his shop in such an out-of-the-way space, according to B, “So that only those who are meant to find his store discover it.” And indeed, The Sword and Rose is hard to find from the street and is also seemingly the only place of business in town not to have its own Web site. (It does have a phone number, though.) Enough people find the store to keep it open, that’s for sure. Earth religions, and even claims of magical powers, are as common as nipple piercings in this town, and the crowd tends toward the alternative and the countercultural.
But the Halliwell sisters? Mundanes. Squares. I’d call them nerds but nerds are cool now, apparently. And wherever they live, it sure isn’t SF. It is more like the San Francisco Bay Area as imagined by someone vaguely familiar with some elements of the city (or as they have it out here, “The City,” though “The City” will always be Manhattan to me), but who had never actually been there. I mean, there’s a bridge and a park. In most episodes of the series, however, the action might as well be taking place in Columbus, Ohio, during a pleasant spring day.
There are some elements of SF-themed action in the show. An early episode shows Prue going to the beach to unwind and get over some emotional issue. She, seemingly contra one of Charmed’s major charms, is fully clothed the entire time. The lack of skin makes sense, though: the Bay Area is a lovely sunny place where the populace simply pretends to experience nice weather. Mark Twain was being funny when he said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” but he sure wasn’t joking.
The Halliwells live in a very nice Victorian (and indeed, they must be powerful witches to be able to afford its upkeep and property taxes given their day jobs), but even the exterior shots of the house betray a certain plainness that many of the great Victorian and Edwardian (post-1906 earthquake homes) in SF don’t have. Bright, sometimes garish paint jobs that bring out all the decorative details of a classic home are the local fashion. Halliwell Manor is a bit too much Home And Garden, not nearly enough Mission District.
Another San Francisco element appeared in the first season episode “Power of Two” in which Phoebe went sightseeing at Alcatraz and encountered the ghost of a serial killer looking for revenge against those that executed him. Nitpickers have pointed out that nobody was ever executed at Alcatraz, but the more egregious sin was that Phoebe went there at all. Locals don’t go to Alcatraz unless they’re children on a school trip. I know because I’ve asked around and gotten confused looks.
“So, how do you get to Alcatraz? I’d like to see it,” I asked a whole bunch of SF residents when I first showed up here.
“I don’t even know; I’ve never been there. A boat?” was the usual answer. “Try an elementary school field trip,” was the second most popular.
Now I know how the tourists who used to stop me on the street to ask me how to get to the Statue of Liberty felt.
Piper’s nightclub, P3, is also the most mediocre of music venues, far below the standard SF hangout. Given that Piper’s about as hip as the official seamstress for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, we can’t be too surprised at the shape P3 is in—but how on Earth does the club even stay open?
P3’s décor is late backlot lounge set-dressing. The “P3” name brings to mind nothing so much as some sort of urolagnia fetish club. As a music venue, it’s a damn nightmare: Dishwalla, The Goo Goo Dolls, Cranberries, Orgy and other alternative pop bands that a) would in real-life fill up much larger venues, b) would likely not play a newish club and c) suck somehow manage to keep enough drinks flowing to keep the girls in business. I will give the devil his due, though, as SF-area alternative industrial band Snake River Conspiracy appeared in season three’s “All Halliwell’s Eve”; local music is big in the Bay and the band has enough of a following to make a P3 club appearance viable but not overcrowded. (SRC also does a great cover of The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” which is, as performed by Love Spit Love, the Charmed theme—the show gets extra credit for not having had the band play that song during the episode.)
There are other issues too: where are the damn hills? How come even the non-witches can find parking so easily? Nobody ever nibbles on a See’s Candy, or complains about the fog and the rain, or spends any leisure time on their compute
rs. When Prue turns into a man in “She’s a Man, Baby, a Man!” it’s as though none of the sisters had ever encountered a transgendered person before.
The ultimate problem is the Charmed Ones themselves—they just don’t come off as Bay Area witches. In “Witch Trial” Phoebe and Piper attended a celebration of the Equinox in a park. “Wild” Phoebe was willing to join the other women in stripping for the ritual, saying “When in Rome,” but Piper balked: “No-no-no! We’re not in Rome, Phoebe. We’re in California. And it’s illegal here.” Ah, but in SF, public nudity is not illegal unless the nude person is engaging in lewd behavior. Pagan rituals, the annual Dyke Parade, the Folsom Street Fetish Fair, UC Berkeley’s Naked Guy and, heck, even the fellow who does naked yoga in front of the tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf are just the most famous examples of public and legal nudity that have made the national news. One need not be a resident to know that SF is one of those cities where we let everything shake, dangle and sag. And a native nightclub-owning witch had never contemplated or even heard of a skyclad ritual before? It might play in Peoria, but not in the Bay.
The arrival of Rose McGowan and her portrayal of Paige did lend the show a bit of hipster cred, and her character was used to play off some of the stereotypes of the Bay Area. “Witchstock” featured Paige trying on red go-go boots left behind by Penny Halliwell (Grams) and finding herself projected back to the Summer of Love. Well, sort of—the Summer of Love and hippie culture as presented and described in the episode was a mish-mash of half-remembered clichés. Grams was a hippie and also wore go-go boots? Timothy Leary’s Human Being-In was mentioned as happening during the summer, but it actually occurred six months prior. Allen (Gramps, though in other episodes Gramps is called Jack and died in ’64) was a beatnik instead of a hippie, though he did have a VW Microbus. Police batons were turned into daisies, which was a cute touch, but Penny’s pacifism (even backed by magic) was generally derided for macho action heroics. And, of course, drugs were still a no-no. Young Penny said to Paige, “There’s no acid allowed in the Manor, Paige. We’re all on a contact high.” Well, that’s boring. It must run in the family.
I don’t want to make it sound like I’m too down on the show, or too overly impressed with San Francisco. Charmed is a very cute show; I’m a great admirer of the early, darker episodes and enjoy watching a program that successfully combines the fantastic with a plausible and emotionally appealing depiction of a modern family of thirty-something women. Charmed doesn’t delve into the banal dysfunctions that drive so many television dramas and shows that family is important and love is possible. And as far as The City goes, I’m a bit too old and cranky to be endlessly fascinated by leather vests, “cool” workplaces that lay everyone off as readily as any Old Economy factory ever did and the psychodramatics of polyamorous relationships. The real-life witches I’ve met often claim expansive psychic abilities, but most of them can’t even predict with regularity that the rent is due on the first of the month.
As writers and readers of the fantastic have long known, setting itself often becomes a character. Lovecraft’s Arkham is more recognizable and memorable than any of his human protagonists. Stephen King’s Maine, the New Orleans of Poppy Z. Brite and Dennis Etchison’s Southern California all speak to the reader by presenting the quotidian realities of the area and then subtly (and later, not so subtly) warping them to make the environments both frightening and liberating. Frightening, because anything can happen. Liberating, because, again, anything can happen.
But in the San Francisco of Charmed what is remarkable is that almost nothing happens. Much of the supernatural action takes place in the Manor or in other dimensions. The City proper is almost never shown, and the daily lives of the Halliwell sisters almost never involve the city—there are no late BART trains, no Giants or Raiders games, no Halloween down on The Castro, nothing. SF does serve a purpose in Charmed—its big city and freak-friendly aura allows the writers to avoid the otherwise inevitable “nosey neighbor” character—but other than that there is no reason at all for the show to take place where it does.
Instead of using San Francisco to provide both color and scares for the audience, the show uses the Charmed Ones to drain SF of all that makes it special. Its radical past is pooh-poohed and trivialized; its vibrant present is reflected only in the evil outsiders that the Halliwells face down every week. Charmed represents the gentrification of the soul of the Big City; The City is rendered safe for virtual tourists/viewers who are too frightened (or complacent in their own homes) to even get on the plane and come visit. It’s too bad, as there is an enormous amount of material one could work with: Emperor Norton, the “painted ladies” houses, the many ethnic cultures and their myths and supernatural systems, the winding, sometimes sinister streets and alleys, the changing nature of the family and, of course, the embrace of the weird that makes SF such a great place to live. These sorts of plot hooks and overarching themes can turn a good show into a great one.
Unfortunately, the San Francisco of Charmed is no deeper than a postcard.
Nick Mamatas is the author of the Lovecraftian Beat road novel Move Under Ground and the Marxist Civil War ghost story Northern Gothic, both of which were nominated for the Bram Stoker Award in horror fiction. He has published over two hundred articles and three dozen short stories in venues ranging from the men’s magazine Razor, the Village Voice and various Disinformation Books anthologies to Strange Horizons, Polyphony and ChiZine. He is a regular columnist for both Forteanbureau.com and Flytrap. After spending a year in the Bay Area, he recently pulled up stakes again and moved back to the East Coast, where he splits his time between NYC and Vermont.
TALENT AND THE SOCIALISM OF FEAR
* * *
JODY LYNN NYE
* * *
You’d really think the sisters would dress more quietly, go to more local gathering places, join a few organizations . . . anything to fit in with the rest of the populace because, as Jody Lynn Nye points out, if anybody ever gets suspicious and their secret gets out, demons will be the least of the Halliwells’ problems.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
– KARL MARX, THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
IN BETWEEN DEALING with their very complicated love lives, their interpersonal relationships with one another and with non-family members, and now the responsibility of children, the three Halliwell sisters are busy saving the world on a nearly daily basis. Problems of a serious magical nature frequently stumble into their laps, forcing the three to drop their own lives in order to resolve the threat. When a crisis is resolved, however, the ladies resume the semblance of a normal life, working jobs, taking care of their house, themselves and one another, and dealing with neighbors. But wouldn’t karma demand that these extraordinary women extend themselves even further, using their special abilities more broadly to save still more worthy people from the evils that threaten them? After all, the Power of Three is unique; most of the malign forces of the Charmed universe burst into the Halliwell home on a regular basis, seeking to destroy the sisters or subvert that power for themselves.
In a perfect world, one might reasonably ask such a question. And, in a perfect world, witches such as the Halliwells might give of their power when it was not being otherwise demanded. They are obviously meant to do as much good as they can. Why else would fate have caused such a confabulation as the Power of Three to come into existence in the first place? Why else would the Elders have assigned semi-angelic Whitelighters to guard their backs? The problem is that the sisters live in this world.
Karl Marx’s words, quoted above, voice an ideal, one in which no one would demand more than she or he required and those who were capable of filling those requirements would give willingly of their time, talents and resources. However, human beings have a tendency to increase their demands to suit their wants rather than their needs. It’s all very well to argue equal access to all resources, but who is to arbitrate when such resources
are to be allotted, and to whom? Without other complications the Halliwells might be able to slowly educate their friends and neighbors to ask for help only when in dire need, as George Bailey did in the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life, if only it weren’t for that other factor accompanying the knowledge that your three lovely neighbors are witches—real ones, with actual powers equally capable of banishing demons, summoning the spirits of the dead or saving your baby from being hit by a car. That factor is fear.
Fear is animal in nature. While modern humans pride themselves on their rationality and almost certainly believe that they live in an enlightened world, most respond from the most primitive part of their brains when it comes to dealing with the unknown. For all the technology we possess, for all the scientific arguments that we supposedly espouse, human beings still fear what they do not know. It’s a complicated fear, one that a simple assurance of safety is not enough to allay.
Should the Halliwell sisters go public with their talents, even in a limited fashion, they would stir up that dread of the unexplainable. Most likely strangers would not take their claims of magical ability seriously until receiving proof positive, at which point they would be almost certain to have one of two reactions. The first, and rarer of the two, would be the “Hey, cool!” response, evoked from people whose curiosity is stronger than their native caution. The second, and far more likely, would be terror and withdrawal pending a more emphatic, even violent, response of self-defense. In season three’s “All Hell Breaks Loose,” the sisters were exposed in the media and an angry mob appeared on their doorstep, terrified to discover witches living secretly in their midst. The threat to the three Halliwells could be removed only if no memory of their exposure continued to exist. Though the effort to reverse the chain of events resulted in Prue’s death, allowing the situation to stand would almost certainly have claimed the lives of all three sisters.
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