Or so the recently released movie The Craft might have you believe.
Witches and magicians can't go to cowan movies expecting a world-view attuned to ours. But it does get tiresome watching our spirituality played for kicks - our ritual apparatus of candles, incense and knives used as showy set-dressing, magick reduced to special effects in the third reel. The Christians and Muslims would howl pretty loudly if their religions were mined for their value as a kinky backdrop.
The Craft is not the worst-ever offender of this type. But it's not exactly witch-friendly either. Through the first three-quarters of the movie, witchcraft as treated as a neutral-to-positive form of teen bonding, suitable for outsiders who can't make it in their school's social set. (Not that the social set is portrayed positively.) Then the edge tips, and Nancy (Fairuza Balk) taps into the darker side of Manon.
At which point, it's clear, the financial guys came in and decided the movie needed to make some money. (Which it did - the week of May 6 it was the top-grossing film in the country.) Roll out the snakes and explosions, and throw character integrity out the window.
The plot, quickly, runs like so: Young Sarah (Robin Tunney) moves to Los Angeles with her father and stepmother and begins school at Saint Benedict's Academy. After Bonnie (Neve Campbell) sees Sarah, bored in class, making her pencil stand on end, point down, she's convinced Sarah is the perfect fourth for a heretofore three-girl witch circle - the other members being Nancy and Rochelle (Rachel True). Nancy, who scowls through the movie's first scenes, is not so sure, especially when she sees Sarah flirting with Chris (Skeet Ulrich), a football jock, who in turn tells Sarah Nancy's a slut. But soon enough Chris is spouting through school that Sarah's a lousy lay, when she's never slept with him, and Sarah's loyalties turn to the witches.
The witches bond with a ceremony in the park. When they get off the bus, the bus driver warns them there's weirdoes in the place, whereupon Nancy turns and tells him, "We are the weirdoes" - one of the more identifiably pagan statements in the movie. Once in the park, they share blood in wine and are mobbed by a flood of butterflies. Later, at a witch store they frequent, owner Lirio (Assumpta Serna, veteran of Pedro Almodovar's Matador) hands Sarah a book called The Craft and tells her it contains everything she needs to know. (I'm still looking for that book, myself.) Nancy in turn digs up a copy of The Invocation of the Spirit. In the movie's major circle scene, Nancy uses what she's learned to invoke Manon.
About the invocation scene, Sony Pictures' World Wide Web site (open http://www.spe.sony.com/Pictures/SonyMovies/nowpl../home.html, and choose The Craft) has to say: "The crew had to return to the location a second time to complete filming interrupted by several weird occurrences that even caused witch consultant Pat Devin to raise an eyebrow. As the fog rolled in at midnight, the four actresses used actual Wiccan rites and language to invoke powerful forces. Then, as Fairuza Balk's character Nancy attempts to invoke the deity Manon, a flock of bats hovered over the set and the tide rose dramatically, extinguishing the circle of candles. Witchcraft consultant Devin recalls that 'Manon, a fictitious creation for the film, sounds very close to Mananan, the Gaelic god of the sea. Luckily, we weren't all swept to sea!'"
The Web site quotes director Andrew Fleming: "'Every time the girls started the ceremony, and only when they would start the ceremony, the waves would start coming up tremendously fast, pounding heavily. Then, right when Nancy says her line, "Manon, fill me," right at that exact moment, we lost power. It was a very strange thing.'"
Maybe this shit really does work.... Naah.
It's after that scene Nancy goes a bit crazy - as Lirio says, she accesses a dark side of Manon - the special effects kick in, and character integrity takes a back seat. Though I do want to learn that trick where you skate across the floor on your boot toes.
The cave-circle scene is also where we learn Manon leans toward Gardnerian Wicca - watchtower calling required. But note the big guy's male. No goddesses need apply. This glaring anomaly aside, the witchcraft in the movie is an amalgam of different traditions, sticking to no one path - bastardized, Hollywoodized. Of course. I actually didn't mind the mixing much. Plenty of circles practice with rites cobbled together from books and out of their heads, rites that don't look much different from what the The Craft's witchettes performed. I was a teenage witch myself, and we got up to some of the same things - some of the things the Craft girls did when their characters made sense, anyway.
The real problems I had with The Craft are, first, it falls apart as a movie. There is a movie in teenage witchcraft; adolescence is a dramatic time of life, and it's when most of us started practice. Many of us got into tangles that could fuel a plot or two.
But a real movie requires real characters. Fairuza Balk starts with a Nancy that's three-dimensional; she has a chip on her shoulder, but her bittersweet smiles win you over. By the end of the movie, though, she's a finger painting. It's always a treat to see her on screen - she has more life than the other three put together - but she turns up the volume and smashes in the knob. That's bad direction. And why do the other girls follow this lunatic as long as they do? It makes no sense, except that it looks cooler to have three chicks in black hanging from the ceiling than just one.
Incidentally, could it be a coincidence that the character elected to become a horror-movie monster is the white trash girl, the one with the active sex life? Can you say classist and sex-negative?
My other big problem with the movie connects to the first. Not taking its characters seriously, the movie can't take their witchcraft seriously. We at least have good witches as well as bad, but the movie's point of view is voyeuristic. At heart, it sides with the socialites. Pretty weird shit these girls are messing with. They'd be better off leaving it alone. But since they won't - let's watch 'em get hurt.
The Craft does have some incidental visual pleasures (dig the Spanish mansion Sarah moves into), and a cheesy, splashy energy. But don't expect a coherent Craft in The Craft - despite the fact that, as the Sony Pictures Web site notes, shooting for the movie ended last year at Beltaine. "Kind of spooky, huh?"
Huh.
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