Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016) opens with the image of a solitary vintage car driving down an isolated California road. The woman in the driver’s seat is dressed in all red, with matching lacquered nails, handbag and cigarette case, and a voice-over begins to tell the story of her mistreatment at the hands of a man she once loved. When lighting a cigarette she inadvertently jostles the contents of her handbag, revealing a single tarot card – the Three of Swords, a harbinger of sorrow and heartbreak. Her story of betrayal is riddled with foreboding asides on the nature of male-female relationships and she reveals that she is on the run from unnamed trouble in San Francisco. The audience first meet Elaine (Samantha Robinson), a witch obsessed with fantasies of courtly love and on a quest for eternal devotion, as she is settling into a small Northern California town with the intent of rebuilding her life after an abusive marriage and her ex-husband’s mysterious death.
Elaine’s trauma is intimately linked to the desire that drives her: being loved by a man. This is explored through the twofold nature of her coping mechanism: she both internalises the common hetero-patriarchal theme that places the burden to change in order to please a romantic partner on women’s shoulders and weaponises her physical appearance and sexuality. She utilises both in order to play to the archetype of woman as seductress and high-femme caregiver, armoured with her expertly applied eyeliner, swinging mod makeup, luxurious hairpieces, short dresses and sensuous lingerie. Yet Biller does not tie Elaine’s self-objectification to either a lack of agency or individuality. Although she is partially motivated by trauma, Elaine is also a beautifully adorned predator: she pursues men with rapacious need until they can no longer provide the love and adoration she seeks and she enjoys doing so. Elaine’s strategies of conquest are both practical and compulsive: they are necessary for her survival as a woman in a world built for men but also function as tools to aggressively go after what she wants. A central tenet of Elaine’s guiding philosophy is expressed during a tearoom lunch with her new landlady, Trish. Both women chat about relationships and when Elaine states that “Men are like children. They’re very easy to please as long as we give them what they want,” Trish is horrified by Elaine’s seemingly outmoded view of female submission. But Elaine’s submission is self-interested – she only coddles a man, cooks for him, or has sex with him because she views those activities as stepping stones to reciprocity, a relationship where Elaine receives her partner’s devotion and affection, coddled in turn.
Elaine’s somewhat dated views of femininity are further complicated by her own sexuality and induction to witchcraft. We are told that her experiences with magic began back in San Francisco with a sect of witches who practiced an erotically tinged magic somewhat akin to LaVeyan Satanism (a sect of the American occult founded by Anton LaVey and based in California). Although the group preaches a doctrine of free love, sex magic, and erotic renewal, female members are held to different standards than males, and Elaine and her fellow female witches are initiated into their craft through sex on the altar with the group’s aged high priest, who routinely likens the women to goddesses and spouts other cliches about their “wild” and “untamable” natures. Elaine’s own feelings regarding her body and sexuality are much more complex than the high priest’s platitudes – she utilises her body, clothes, and makeup to ensnare men but also to bring herself joy.
This pleasure, however, is inflected by the difficult legacy of her past abuse. Throughout the film Elaine’s motivations exist in a space located between self-interest and regressive self-hate, a psychological fragmentation that doesn’t allow for any of Elaine’s seductions to turn out as she hopes. Each man Elaine pursues inadvertently dies as a result of her attempts to transform sex magic into love magic. When Elaine first attempts to seduce a college professor who catches her eye she cooks him dinner at his mountain cabin before entrancing him with a magically aided strip-tease. Due to the violence of his charmed love for Elaine, the professor renders himself deathly ill with longing – he cries for her whenever she leaves his sight and begins to talk incessantly about his feelings. The audience stays with Elaine as she exits to the study to smoke, visibly annoyed that her magic backfired leaving the professor unable to love her as she imagined and that this keeps on happening. Yet there’s a sense in which the deaths of her lovers provide a sense of symmetry, as none of the men are able to match Elaine’s complexity or depth of feeling. The film’s climax is specifically concerned with this gap: it becomes clear that Elaine’s police office lover is now disinterested in her as a romantic partner, disturbed by her connection to the deaths of other men. As they lie on her bed, she has a vision of him as both a harbinger of her death and as death itself. She then stabs the police officer to death and the film ends on her bloody, satisfied face.
Positing Elaine’s murder of her lover as what happens when a history as an abuse survivor and the pressures of living as a high femme woman in a man’s world merge to form a fragile, cracking psyche is not the only way The Love Witch can or should be read. The image of a woman undone by her own violence, which comes from or depends on previous male violence, is excessively simplified, a popular archetype that needs to be questioned. Violence and self-defence can be rational responses to a dangerous world. Rather than understanding Elaine’s murder as signifying her madness, it might be more interesting to think of it as an allegory of transgressive birth, as she frees herself from the man who would be the death of her (very literally in the case of the police officer) and is therefore able to honestly negotiate her own desires and fantasies. Viewing Elaine’s actions in this way draws on the work of writers such as Angela Carter and marxist feminist Sylvia Federici. Though both thinkers differ in their primary disciplines – Carter being well-known for her fiction and Federici for her political and economic studies – their work contains points of convergence as both women examine the ideas surrounding transgressive expressions of gender. Carter and Federici analyse femininities that do not neatly adhere to the strictures of patriarchy, heterosexuality, or capitalism or to the feminist systems that exist within those broader organising structures (a phenomenon in the The Love Witch that is embodied in the contrast between Trish’s straightforward proto-feminist views and the precarious empowerment that the witches gain via the high femme goddess archetypes of their society).
The difficulty of striving for gendered notions of perfection is explored throughout The Love Witch. Elaine’s struggle with her own desires and how they intersect with the gender expectations of society echoes the uneasy empowerment the witches of her coven find in practicing and learning their goddess myths and rituals. Such myths and archetypes can only exist precariously – although they are often positive they also deprive the women of both their humanity and the ability to choose what they want and Carter asserts that archetypes like this only perpetuate inequality as they encourage one to ignore disparate material circumstances.¹ Carter’s materialist observation nicely meshes with Federici’s argument that the figure of the witch is emblematic of rebellious subjects, those who are actively striving to dismantle inequality through rebel economies and ways of living independent of capitalism. According to Federici, witches are the “embodiment of a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient, wife, the woman who dared to live alone.”² Though Elaine’s story touches on the material circumstances of her and her fellow witches (Biller creates a femme-centric nexus of survival for her characters as they either dance at a local burlesque club or sell their magical elixirs at women-owned apothecaries) the film emphasises the power structure of the libidinal economies she transverses in hopes of obtaining love. Throughout the film Elaine is visited by memories of the abuse heaped upon her by lovers and caregivers: when applying her makeup the voices of her father and ex-husband remind Elaine that she is ugly, fat, and a subpar housewife. Elaine navigates that toxicity as best she is able, indulging the whims and egos of lovers who want a “bad girl” and then acting out the part of the coy virgin for those suffering from delusions of personal conquest.
Elaine’s web of relationships with male lovers illustrates Federici’s argument that sex is “a social and historically determined activity, invested by diverse interests and power relations.”³ Both Federici and Carter agree that due to these material factors men and women (and outside the context of Elaine’s tale, LGBTQ+ folks) experience sex in different ways. This is most pronounced during a scene between Elaine and her police officer lover at a Renaissance Faire, where the two playfully enact a wedding ceremony in medieval garb and the audience is privy to their duelling point of views on the nature of love and sex. The police officer is of the mind that men lose interest in women once they know too much about them: once there is no more mystery the magic of the relationship dies. Elaine holds the opposing view that the more she, and women at large, understand a partner, the more in love they become. While the ceremony is in jest, for Elaine it also functions as a sincere celebration of love. She is in rapture as the faire attendants place a crown of flowers on her head and two matching white horses appear with a surreal flourish. While Elaine lives out her dream of a fairy tale ending, the audience is made privy to her lover’s cynical inner monologue (he is losing interest, growing bored, etc).
This disconnect in viewpoints is a highly gendered example, filtered through the lens of a heterosexual relationship under patriarchal conditions, but it speaks to Elaine’s reality, which is that her lovers, whether through symbolic deaths or changes of heart, dismiss and devalue Elaine’s personhood and by extension her magic. Federici classifies such a rejection as necessary under patriarchal capitalism as “magic is premised on the belief that the world is animated, unpredictable, and that there is a force in all things”.⁴ Magic is disruptive, threatening an alignment of labour built upon cis-male authority. Elaine represents the “perfect woman” to her lovers and so they reject, abuse, and leave her (through their symbolic deaths). As in a capitalist allegory this is never a game she can win on her desired terms. Following Carter’s cultural survey of the fate of fictional female libertines, within this nexus of capitalist and hetero-patriarchical oppression Elaine will never be “respected for her integrity [her mind and personhood] although, if she is successful enough, and her business [i.e., seduction tactics] prospers, she may ‘ruin’ men, like any other successful entrepreneur.”⁵
Elaine’s killing of her cold-hearted lover, then, is a grim and bloody birth. This analogy makes sense – the murder marks the moment Elaine ceases to be an object of desire and becomes an active, desiring subject with no need for subterfuge or dishonesty. Angela Carter writes that “to be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed. That is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.” Elaine’s climactic act of violence is the inverse of Carter’s logic as it is a moment of escape – she no longer has to be perfect. She is not killed, but kills. The cycle is broken.
1 Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History, Virago Press, 1979 2 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, Autonomedia, 2004 3 Ibid., 91. 4 Ibid., 173. 5 Carter, The Sadeian Woman, 66. 6 Ibid., 88.
Annette LePique is an independent arts writer and researcher based in Chicago. She recently completed a post-grad fellowship at the Chicago Institute For Psychoanalysis and is an independent archivist at the Leather Archives and Museum.
