If you’re looking for nothing more than a bit of entertainment and don’t mind spending ten dollars on a movie ticket, then by
all means go and see Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. If not, then wait for
the DVD. Either way it will be an hour and forty minutes of fun but not
excitement. The plot and dialog are predictable. The setting is the standard 21stinterpretation of midlevel Europe. The same can be said for the costumes. In
truth not every woman walked around in a bodice and had heaving cleavage and a
full set of pearly white teeth. This was very much a fairy-tale world; more
fantasy than magical realism.
The acting was fair. I wouldn’t say that Jeremy Renner (The Avengers) was an amazing actor but he sure is sexy. There was a great opportunity to see some of those rippling muscles at one point in the film but instead we get a good shot of Ingrid Bolsø Berdal’s backside and breasts. This is a wonderful example of how Hollywood is just fine with showing female sexuality but heaven forbid the male is seen as anything but pure machismo and a killing-machine. That’s not to say we need to hyper-sexualize everything. I think the American culture is far too obsessed with compartmentalizing and cutting everything into objectifiable pieces, especially in regards to women/the feminine. American culture objectifies women all the time but when it comes to men, we have a much harder time swallowing the idea that man can be seen as a sexual object.
Now on to what the pagan community is really good at: seeing a witch in the main-stream and crying intolerance. Yes, the vast number of magic-users/witches in movies are cast as the villain. They eat children or burn down towns or turn people into frogs. This comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition that sees magic and witchcraft as evil. American’s live in a changing culture based around that same Judeo-Christian puritanical ideology. Therefore witches will be the villains just as vampires and werewolves once were the monsters that were sought out and slain. Hollywood loves to take the witch and make it into the bad guy. Simple fact.
I’m not going to yell at the creators of Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. The original story is about a pair of children who almost get eaten by a witch. Of course their adult-selves would become witch hunters, especially if that’s what witches do (eat children and burn down towns)in this particular fantasy world. Fairytales are not real. YES we can learn from them. I treat folktales as scripture and as such I see characters and ideas as universal metaphors. I could deconstruct the tale of Hansel and Gretel and the resent film adaption into bits and pieces and come up with something about how our obsession with youth and acting like children is going to be the end of our civilization and the only way to save ourselves is to accept the past for what it is, forgive our parents for our terrible childhoods and realize our true paths/selves but that might be giving this film to much credit. To claim that Hollywood is calling the modern pagan religions and those who identify as witches as nothing but evil hell-spawn who deserve to executed —burning-times style— is simply not the case.
Of course modern witches i.e. REAL WITCHES do not fly through the air or puck the eyes out of newts for potions. We go to work, buy groceries from the store and farmers market; we put our pants on one leg at a time. That being said, it would be nice, if not fun, to see witches normalized or at least not demonized in film. And it is. The best example of this is Practical Magic (1998). If you’re thinking what about The Craft (1996), well I’m still not sure how I feel about that one. Another is the upcoming movie adaption of Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing. I cannot wait for this to come to the big screen. It will be a few years. It is in the works but because they are creating an ecologically sustainable praxis for the film-industry (of course Starhawk would do that… and that’s why I love her) plus creating sets for the movie that can be used by the city of San Francisco post-production it will be a few years before it will be coming to a screen near you. You can support the
I would be great if an old fairy tale was adapted to have the witch/magic user not a villain. Even in Hansel and Gretel there were white-witches (though she played the martyr more than she was the mage/holy woman). It would be great if men were portrayed as witches (I know what you’re thinking and a warlock is not a male witch. The world warlock comes from the old English warloghe meaning “breaker of faith”; in other words… a liar). I would be sweet is a movie came out, fantasy or otherwise, that showcased modern witches. I’m not saying it’s needed but it wouldn’t be bad P.R. if it happened.
It’s true the over-culture is not permeated with ideas of what it means to be a witch in the 21st century. Most people don’t know what witches and pagans do for rituals. This isn’t the media’s fault. Let us move on and realize witches in film do not do the things real witches do in the real world. If you talk to a doctor they will say the same thing about shows like House and Gray’s Anatomy. If a film comes out that shows modern witches, using modern rituals, citing modern pagan events, and has those characters doing evil things to good people, then we’ll have something to cry and complain about. Movies that take place in a clearly fictional world should not be used as an argument that modern pagan religions and witches in particular are being persecuted.
1 comment:
Thanks for your perspective which I largely agree with.
I've never been one to take these Hollywood portrayals that seriously...in fact I've always stated that if you go around calling yourself a witch in 21st-century industrialized Europe or America, you should have a sense of humor. And often I'm quite thankful that witchcraft is not taken that seriously in our societies, because it's often more dangerous to be known as a magic user places where they are (i.e. Sub-Saharan Africa).
That being said, I do think that the demonization of the witch comes from the idea that people who go outside of the official power structures for spiritual experiences are dangerous and evil. It is a bit irritating that this legacy is passed on unwittingly. It's sort of like when you see the minority character (as a black and gay man I can say this) always be the one to get killed. In one particular series, there's no issue. But seeing it again and again does reflect a historical circumstance (i.e. gays seen as evil and thus destined to die). So in summary, even if it's not saying anything about modern Pagans such, it still is unwittingly transmitting the message that unofficial spirituality is a no-go. Which I think is a serious problem in our societies, which as you say, is too black-and-white about a lot of things.
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