The Witch

  Robert Eggers’ first feature film is an astonishing achievement: It’s a Seventeenth Century film. If a 17th Century American colonist had our technology this is the film he would have made. 

Everything in it is 17th Century: the characters, the language, the world view, the life, the clothing, the props, the lighting, the faith. 

Mainly the world view. There is no sign of modern knowledge, science or medicine within the film. The only modern understanding is what some members of the audience may bring to it. Not anyone from the Republican/Tory Right, though — it’s their knowledge and belief the film depicts in its total fidelity to the 17th Century. That, of course, is why the film was made today. Our current political debate makes Puritan religion a perfect emblem of contemporary pre-Enlightenment America. 

The film reminds us that America’s putative independence remained rooted in religiosity. When the constitution deliberately separated the state from religion its intention was not to privilege any one religion over the others, not to free the land from all religion. In God they still trusted but they didn’t want to advantage any one god or path. This the ultra-Christian modern demagogues have self-servingly forgotten.

The religiosity smacks through the opening scene. A Puritan court — black and white in its religious morality and duds — banishes a family from the plantation because the father has been even more religious and demanding than they are. 

The banished William and Katherine, with their five children,  carve out a homestead in the wilderness. At first they seem the model of self-reliance. But when things go wrong, when they make mistakes, when nature proves noncompliant, they can only blame the devil and his spawn. That’s why we have religion: to blame the devil for our failures and to court God with our arrogant humility. 

Because this is a 17th Century film we watch the witch ritually abuse the stolen infant, we see the siren tempt son Caleb and choke him on the forbidden fruit (a desiccated Delicious), and we hear the witch descend in the wind to kill the goats and carry off the twins. What in a modern film would be supernatural horror in this 17th Century world is nature. 

What begins in nature ends in supernature. First the ram Black Phillip kills the father. That’s natural, what often happens when an animal previously out-rassled by his master, gets a chance for revenge. 

But then nature is ratchetted up to superstition (aka religion). We hear the black devil ram seduce the oldest, Thomasin, and carry her off to join the powerful coven of sexually free women that terrifies domestic normalcy.  That sexual paranoia, of course, is the psychological source of the legends of witches. They represent a rampant female sexuality that no man can control — so they must be demonized. 

Certainly never elected.