Full House: Robert Eggers's THE WITCH

 Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie. Dir. Robert Eggers, A24/Lionsgate, 2015

People have a tendency to tell me I think too much. I used to feel ashamed and guilty when someone said that, but these days I shrug and snort. The comment pretty well gives truth to the idea that when we point our finger at someone, the other fingers point back at us. Those who need to shame someone for the quantity of their thought tells me much more about them than the accused. Once in a while, however, they're also correct.

Sometimes a movie or book or song et al will stimulate a cascade, or even a deluge, of free association as I consume it. The associations, particularly if I'm on my first joint of the day, come too fast to keep organized so I can explore them in logical order in a later writeup. Robert Eggers's 2015 directorial debut, THE WITCH, stimulated just such a flood last night.

The principal association reminded me of a paper I wrote in college about the psychological state of the Puritan settlers in 17th century Massachusetts. It struck me as apt that at least some of our ancestors were seen as religious fanatics, because you'd have to be at that level of devotion to sail 3,000 miles across a stormy ocean to a land devoid of the basic creature comforts and security of your home for a chance to go to your own church in peace. For Separatists, who rejected the Church of England, altogether, such a voyage became a matter of life and death, but for most Puritans, who wanted to reform the Church, it was not and yet they came in droves, as well. For all the atrocity colonists brought with them for the indigenous peoples of the New World, it's hard to deny their bravery, but sometimes bravery and madness wear the same clothes.

You're an ocean away from home, in a land where wolves and bears roam free, where the natives view you with ambivalence, at best, and still outnumber you 100 to 1, where the climate and weather are very different, where forest presses in everywhere, a condition not seen in England in a few centuries. You believe Scripture to be literal truth. Like Muslims, you teach that everything in life - every challenge, every blessing, every tragedy - reflects the will of God. Like the Jews, you believe God is merciful, conditionally, but not, as C.S. Lewis put it, "a tame lion." In that mindset, in that environment, every moment of life owes to either God or the Enemy. Toss in a little malnutrition, some susceptibility to disease, and the utter exhaustion of working the land, and it's not hard to see why our forebears perceived portents and visions in natural phenomena, saw witches, demons, and monsters everywhere.

I wish I had kept that paper so I could quote it directly, because it speaks to the heart of THE WITCH's setting and background. When a Separitist family, led by Ralph Ineson's William & Kate Dickie's Katherine, is exiled from the Massachusetts Bay plantation for being too purist about the faith, things don't take long to turn sideways and slide out of their control. Not skilled farmers or hunters, William and Katherine's ability to keep themselves and their children, including Anya Taylor-Joy's Tomasin, fed and healthy deteriorates, followed soon after by an inability to keep them both safe and alive, as their infant son, Samuel, goes missing while playing outside with Tomasin.

Their beliefs convince them Samuel must be the victim of the Witch of the Woods, an ill-defined malign spirit which serves mostly as reason not to enter the forest. Though we see a montage indicating the "witch" has both kidnaped and killed Samuel, Eggers' establishment of their mental vulnerability to superstition and paranoia allows us to wonder if this has truly happened or if Tomasin and/or her family imagine it, at least with respect to his murder as a human sacrifice to the devil, whom Tomasina's twin siblings, Mercy and Jonas, claim inhabits the family's horned ram, Black Phillip. Again, a reminder that in this family, God or Satan live within everything, as close as their shadow, and always around every bend.

Eggers does a masterful job of allowing us to wonder, even conclude, that the family's rapid and disastrous deterioration, which they attribute to demonic forces, increasingly seeing them personified in pubescent Tomasin, is in fact the product of its poisonous faith. While supernatural occurrences and freakish accidents abound, Eggers maintains a plausible deniability that their dissolution has anything to do with devilry. 

The family's scapegoating of Tomasin triggered my second major association, with the Salem Witch Trials. All those tried as witches were Tomasin's age, pubescent girls on or just over the cusp of menstruation. The trials, and their parallel in William & Kate's family, truly center on the regulation and repression of women's, especially young women's, sexuality. Isolated from the plantation, young Caleb naturally notices his older sister's development, and Tomasin prays to be freed of her fleshly temptations, as I imagine some devout teenagers do today. What seems understandable to the audience, however, looks heretical to the family, particularly to William and Katherine. 

By this point, I found myself thinking that a "supernatural horror film" makes a great launchpad for a study of psychological aberration, fanaticism, and how they combined in Puritan Massachusetts to victimize and destroy young women and their sexuality, even as they also corroded the very society they purported to purify. When the supernatural elements finally reveal themselves at THE WITCH's climax, Eggers' movie had me half-shouting, "DAMN! OH GOD DAMN, THESE PEOPLE ARE INSANE!" I felt willing to believe my own mind had been so well and truly fucked that I imagined Black Phillip's voice. I didn't, and neither does Tomasin, and not long after that the shouting started up again, now involving the F-bomb.

THE WITCH is a supernatural horror film and no mistake, one with a long fuse leading to a bundle of sweaty, unstable dynamite and a huge, brain-rattling detonation, which makes it aces with me right there. It's also the abovesaid, a hard look at how fanaticism and superstion can damn a family already in crisis, which allows it to stand in as a prophetic vision of these pandemic years and the largely-Evangelical Christian anti-vaxxers keeping us mired in them. All that adds kings to my aces. To mix yet another metaphor, Robert Eggers's first feature, THE WITCH, runs the table. I'm collecting on sidebets against him in the crowd. Thanks, Mr. Eggers, for letting me get well on THE WITCH. Please continue directing movies.