The VVitch

 Yeah, I know it's just a stylization thing, but I'm sticking with it.

I'm ten years late to the party, of course, but I finally got around to watching The Witch (stylization just for the post title). This was Robert Eggers' debut feature, and also was Anya Taylor-Joy's breakout role.

As a further note, I, like Eggers, am a New Englander originally, and I always appreciate a story taking place in my own "homeland" so to speak. Of course, the irony is that the towns and cities around which I grew up were founded by militant puritans, while I grew up in an environment that was largely secular and progressive - the number of Irish Catholics in Boston would surely send many puritans to roll in their graves.

I believe the movie was predominantly filmed in Canada, but it matches the overall type of woodland that I remember growing up around. Frequently, my parents would take us to Salem to visit the Peabody-Essex Museum, but of course the city is known mostly for its infamous witch trials.

I had seen Eggers' The Lighthouse a few years ago, and while I think this movie has a more straightforward narrative, it's the kind of film that has a lot of subtext and questions boiling under the surface.

The movies is a decade old, but just to be safe, I'll put in a spoiler cut.

My surface-level reading of the film is that the witches and the devil, disguised as the goat Black Phillip, engage in a project to turn Thomasin into a witch. They do this by systematically destroying her family one by one (well, in one case two at a time).

I think there's probably a reading of the story in which Thomasin is secretly pursuing this the entire time, but I didn't get that sense: instead, I think that the insidiousness of the plan is to make everyone around her believe this to be true before it is. By the end of the movie, with her entire family dead (even the animals) she has basically no other choice than to accept Black Phillip's offer.

As someone who is not religious - I consider myself an agnostic, a position that sometimes provokes scorn and condemnation from my staunchly atheistic elders - I struggle to understand why the hell anyone would want to be a puritan. It seems to me that the "make any mistake and you go to hell" worldview isn't really in keeping with the idea of forgiveness and mercy that I think of as being a core tenet to Christianity. And yet, I suppose that if you really do believe that everlasting hellfire is your reward for, like, wearing bright colors, you're going to develop a deeply repressive way of living.

I have ancestors who were like this: I have an ancestor who came to America on the Mayflower, though more broadly I think about my ancestry as a mix of Jewish Hungarian and Irish American (the latter is more technically about a quarter, with the remaining quarter being some amalgam of Northern European ancestries, including a fair amount of English).

In America, we're taught about the way that the Pilgrims, and more broadly, the Puritans, fled religious persecution in England, coming to the New World for religious freedom. But I think it's telling that we never learn anything about the English Civil War, and the period in which the Puritans controlled England and did plenty of their own persecuting (among other things, the banning of Christmas celebrations was one of their policies - merriment was not godly, after all).

It's a struggle that I think continues to this day - there's an everlasting debate over whether "Freedom of Religion" means that we should be free to practice and believe as we want, or if religion should be allowed to dominate our culture and lives without any restraint.

Our family unit in the Witch echoes certain religious extremists who wished to separate themselves from the mainline Puritan church and its ties to the old one in England, like Roger Williams (who would go on to found Rhode Island). I suspect that the patriarch of the family in this film, William (Ralph Ineson), might be named after him.

Again, my read on the movie is that Thomasin is just put in terrible and guilty-looking positions, each manufactured by the witch (or witches, as we see there's a whole coven in the woods by the end of the movie). She seems to be a good kid, and a loving sister, to Caleb and to Samuel, though maybe not so much to Mercy and Jonas - who themselves seem to have already been corrupted by Black Phillip.

Now... is there something weird and wrong going on?

Caleb multiple times fixates on Thomasin's breasts (and she isn't dressing period-appropriately-modest, but maybe that's a conceit), but while there's a somewhat incestuous aspect to this fixation, I also think that we're looking at a boy on the cusp of puberty who may not even understand his burgeoning libido (I'm sure that his parents never gave him "the talk,") and the only girl near his age is his older sister. In a healthier environment, where taboo thoughts are spoken aloud and processed, and where he might have other girls to interact with, it'd just be an awkward and forgivable part of his maturation process.

The impulse to isolate themselves from the rest of their community, ostensibly to live holier, more virtuous lives, of course creates this opening for perverse impulses.

Thomasin's initiation as a Witch is not a good thing, per se - we've seen that the Witches do, truly, enact horrifying and evil things. Barely ten minutes into the movie, we see one grinding up baby Samuel's internal organs to make her flight-paste. We can imagine that Thomasin's time living "deliciously" will be at the expense of others.

And yet, I think we're also meant to sympathize with her, because what choice does she have?

Earlier on, Caleb asks his father is his baby brother Samuel is in hell because he was never baptized, and asks how it can be just that a baby who has never harmed anyone should be condemned. William shows humility in his worldview in saying that no living man knows where anyone is heading after death, and that God alone knows.

But it is a real question: why should a God who allows a baby to burn in hellfire be worshipped? Why must it be drilled into us that by our very nature, we're evil, and that only by salvation that is the exception rather than the rule can we escape eternal torment?

Notably, though, the movie doesn't present the alternative as good: the Witches in this are truly evil, and we can presume that Thomasin will go on to commit heinous acts like what was done to her family. It's a horribly bleak conclusion.

One could say that the family is punished for their hubris, but save the intervention of these witches, they might have been fine (it's possible the crops are failing because of the witches' intervention as well). But the seeds were there, and if the family went into the wilderness (hilariously, I imagine that it's probably just some suburb of Boston now) to test themselves against it, they did not measure up.

It's also really interesting to me that the twins, Jonas and Mercy, seem to be corrupted well before anyone else. They're already singing about how Black Phillip is the king of the world, which I guess we could interpret only as a silly little song for them to come up with about the family goat. But while Thomasin clearly was having lots of fun playing peekaboo with Samuel before he vanished and seems to have genuine affection for Caleb, the twins are kind of just nasty to her.

Really, from the moment that Samuel is snatched faster than Thomasin can even see, she's sort of doomed - she loses the trust of her family.