Bewitched S1E7: "The Witches are Out"
This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a good source that enabled screencaps, so this review will have to be text-only.
Have you ever seen a story that is trying to say something, but accidentally says much more than it intended to?
The 1965 American sitcom series "Bewitched" is possibly the strongest case of this that I've ever run across, and "The Witches are Out" is one of the episodes that does it the most.
I'd seen bits and pieces of "Bewitched" reruns on TV as a kid. Never paid much attention to it. Just seemed like another of those corny old 1960's sitcoms whose fantasy elements didn't do much to make it more interesting. I heard more interesting things about it as I got older, though, and after watching the episode for today's review I decided to also go back and watch the pilot to give myself more context. And...well. Like I said. This is a knowingly political work. The creators are on record saying they intended it as such. But I don't know if they realized just how far their own political subtext actually went.
The premise of "Bewitched" is that, in a proto-masquerade urban fantasy world, a young witch named Samantha has decided to marry a mortal human man named Darrin, and - in an act of rebellion against her people's traditions - reveal the existence of witches and warlocks to him. The two of them try to keep Samantha's nature a secret from the rest of Darrin's family and social group, while also dealing with disapproval, condescension, and occasional supernatural dickery from Samantha's clan. The series is best remembered for Samantha's signature move of doing magic by wiggling her nose (usually with comical musical accompaniment); a movement that actress Elizabeth Montgomery could do and most people can't.
It's unsurprising that Bewitched came from the mind of a Jewish showrunner who had been an adult during the rise and fall of the nazis, and who was writing during the height of the US civil rights saga and just a few years before the Stonewall riots. Writer and actors have all stated in later interviews that they talked backstage about Samantha and Darrin's marriage being both queer-coded and miscegenation-coded while keeping it quiet around the studio suits.
Sounds all lovely and progressive. But. Well.
"The Witches are Out" is a Halloween episode, and it concerns the witches' generational resentment of their portrayal in mortal media. When Samantha was a kid, her family would outright take a vacation to India or somewhere to get away from the Halloween aesthetic with its endless microaggressions. The episode begins with Samantha being paid a visit by her aunts and the lot of them commiserating over how unpleasant this time of year is.
In this scene, Samantha comes across as a total pickme. Spending the entire conversation defending mortal witch-hatred with the justification that most of them don't know witches are real. While also serving tea and cleaning dishes by hand, because she's trying to avoid using magic in order to be a good, non-weird housewife for Darrin, as her aunts urge her to just save herself all this trouble and effort and use her telekinesis. She's not endearing herself to me here. Still, she accepts that they could at least be doing something to try and change things for the better, and that since her husband works in advertising maybe he can help them put a pro-witch message out there.
Meanwhile, Darrin is handed a major project, coming up with a mascot and logo for a candy company's Halloween specials. The client wants it to be a witch. Specifically, a warty, green-skinned, long-nosed hag with a diabolical grin. He accepts, and that day at home Samantha walks into his studio to ask him about improving the portrayal of witches in pop culture only to find him literally sketching her people's Happy Merchant equivalent for an ad aimed at children.
The fight that they have in the wake of this is...awkward. It's weird. On one hand, Darrin's actual argument ("how can the people I'm catering to with this be bigoted against a group they literally think is fictional!") is one that has some merit within the silly world of the story. On the other hand, his delivery, Samantha's own arguments, and the general tone and vibe of the scene are a hell of a lot realer than that. To the point where I'm a little discombobulated by him arguably being at least sort-of in the right. I think this is what TVtropes calls a "Space Whale Aesop?" Where a fantasy metaphor is sort of undercut by the nature of its fantasism.
Darrin eventually gives in, after realizing how badly he's in the process of alienating his wife. His new version of the logo features a sexy witch that bears more than a passing resemblance to Samantha. It's funny, because the slutification of anything and everything Halloween-related in the last couple decades would make sexy witch logos (even on child-targeted ads, creepily enough) perfectly normal nowadays, buuuuut this is the 1960's. Being an archetypal dorky sitcom husband, Darrin is unable to come up with an argument in defence of his changes other than "just imagine how insulting a real witch would find this portrayal, if witches were real!" With dire results for his job security.
The plot is resolved by Samantha and her aunts appearing to the client in his midnight home and terrorizing him into reconsidering his determination to make witches seem ugly and evil. The ad campaign ends up being a smashing success, because a lot of Halloween shopping turns out to be done by dads rather than moms and/or kids, and the sexy witch pinup definitely gets their attention. Silly, on-brand sort of resolution.
As a sitcom, it's pretty much "okay." Some really good gags throughout, and brilliant comedic facial expressions from the cast members that help sell the humor of the scenarios. But there's also a lot of really lame gags that I don't think would have been any less lame in the sixties, and a really obnoxious laugh track that cuts in at the most inexplicable moments. But the humor - successful and otherwise - isn't what merits the real analysis here.
Something that really jumped out at me in the "terrorizing the client" scene, though, is that Samantha specifically seems to be taking a sadistic pleasure in what they're doing, and her aunts don't.
Considering Samantha's earlier pickme characterization, her determination to not use magic, to not do anything "witchy" in her day-to-day life, this feels a loooooot like externalized self-loathing. Like maybe the evil, ugly witch is actually something she (unlike her aunts) actually identifies with, she isn't happy about it, and she takes a perverse delight in making others unhappy about it as well when she can justify it to herself.
And...there's more to this as well.
From the pilot onward, part of the show's premise is that Samantha has to not use magic in order to be a satisfactory wife for Darrin. On a surface level, you could just call this a silly sitcom plot device that the characters are getting worked up about for no really convincing reason. Subtextually, it's a non-normative couple (queer, interracial, take your pick. Not many things were normative for mid-twentieth century white America) struggling to pass muster in a society that won't tolerate deviance, with most of the burden falling on one partner while the more privileged one is at least somewhat oblivious. But on a different subtextual plane...this is a woman completely disempowering herself in order to satisfy her husband, and then surreptitiously reprising that power to spitefully lash out at other people behind his back.
And there's still more.
Like all too many sitcoms, "Bewitched" pairs a smart, interesting, sexy wife with a mediocre, childish, dorky husband. "Bewitched" is better than most in at least letting the husband be good looking and artistic, so you can see why she might theoretically be into him, but overall he's still mostly the archetypal sitcom manchild dad. In some ways, this pairing is subversive of patriarchal norms, showing the woman being the real competent adult in the household. In others, it's the opposite of subversive. Even the dumb, mediocre guy is entitled to a super-hot, super-talented woman, and she'll endlessly bend over backwards for him and forgive the manifold insensitivities and indignities he bombards her with, because that's the natural hierarchy.
In this case though, the hypercompetent sitcom dreamgirl wife isn't just subordinating herself to a mediocre shmuck. She's literally disempowering herself for him, explicitly for the purpose of "being a proper wife." And also, this episode strongly implies, cutting her own witch family out of her life whenever he or his own family and friends are watching (she repeatedly makes a point of having her aunts in and out before he can see them). And...at that point, we're not even just talking about gender anymore. We're also talking about race again. But not in the same way as before.
...
Granted, the pilot did have a scene that works against this reading. Samantha's conversation with her overbearing, disapproving mother about her decision to marry a mortal reads as an aristocratic parent being outraged at their child for shacking up with a peasant, casting the witches rather than the mortals as the priveleged ingroup (and that does make more sense, inherently. This is a subject that I've seen discussed repeatedly with regard to stuff like X-Men, with the persecuted minority being the ones with superpowers sort of defeating the purpose).
But the rest of the show that I've seen has the power dynamics going the opposite way, if only because of Samantha's ostensible self-hate. No matter how powerful witches are compared to mortals, and how befuddled and bedevilled Darrin is by Samantha's family, it's somehow always still HIS world that they are hiding in the cracks of.
...
This show is depicting how everyone and everything besides traditional white men are consumed, reprocessed, and subordinated under traditional white maleness. Agency, culture, tradition, all must be wiped away in the transformation of the feminine, the free, the foreign, the savage, into effectively a consumer product for the hegemonic ingroup.
The real source of conflict in "Bewitched" isn't mortals not liking witches, it's the existence of the nuclear family structure within the imperial core. The antagonist isn't bigotry, it's their marriage itself. She shouldn't have married him. She shouldn't have ever wanted to marry him. Their matrimony is anathema to everything she is, and her acceptance of it is nothing short of spiritual suicide.
So, like I said, I'm not sure if this show ever realized what it was actually saying. Maybe it did. But I don't think so.
