Femininity and the Female Experience in Anna Biller’s ‘The Love Witch’
The themes and intentions of ‘The Love Witch’ told in Anna Biller’s own words, through curated quotes
Writer-director Anna Biller’s The Love Witch can be defined as a comedy horror, but Biller says it’s actually a tragedy because of “the nature of romantic love, where male and female interests are often at odds, especially at a time where the sexes are more or less social equals.” The plot follows a beautiful, young witch named Elaine (Samantha Robinson) who, following the death of her husband Jerry, starts a new life in California. She rents a gorgeous, gothic Victorian apartment and uses “female arts” (femininity and sexuality, often mixed with spells and potions) to get men to love her and unlock their true potential to love her back. This often backfires, however, as the men usually perish due to the agony and violence of feeling their own emotions.
The first thing that stands out about The Love Witch is the mise-en-scene. The set designs and costume designs (also done by Biller) are dripping in intense female beauty, femininity, and glamour. The film was shot on 35mm, “but we also printed directly from original camera negatives, which is never done anymore.” These days, films shot on 35mm are colour-corrected digitally, which makes life a lot easier, but, as Biller says: “nothing beats real 35mm — the beautiful deep blacks, the contrast, the saturated colours. Digital colour really looks different.” Nagra, an analogue audio tape recorder, was also used for the sound. To help with her vision, Biller trained Robinson in classical acting, “forbade her to laugh” even, because it “ruined the illusion of perfect screen glamour we were trying to create for her.” Biller wanted Robinson to play Elaine like a “sophisticated screen siren, like Liz Taylor.” The bold colours, attention to detail in set design, and classic poise of Robinson instantly brings to mind Hitchcock films, Technicolor, and 60s horror — which was exactly Biller’s intention.
Biller thinks that’s all men will take from the film — the visuals — but that women will go further. The Love Witch, after all, is about “the female experience,” which includes portraying a woman’s inner life. Speaking to the University of California Television (UCTV), Biller said this is because men don’t understand women because they look at things from the outside, whereas women look at things from the inside. For the character of Elaine, Biller drew from the figure of the witch and the femme fatale archetype, which are traditionally feared by men because of how they embody female sexuality. The witch is the symbol of an all-powerful woman: “It’s about male projection onto women that they’re a witch, either an evil witch or a sexy witch,” Biller told Thrillist. “And then the difference between that is a woman’s interior experience of herself and her own power,” though “not necessarily in the service of any man, [but] in an actual witchy powerful way.” Then, as ApolloPad writes, the femme fatale archetype is “a seductive female character who lures the male protagonist into danger,” but a woman’s power isn’t anything like a man’s would be, such as brute strength; it “lies traditionally in ‘feminine’ powers such as her charm and heightened sexuality […] to get what she wants.”
Biller reclaims and reinvents both the witch and the femme fatale. She gives them an inner life and puts them through the female gaze — but not just the female gaze, the female narcissistic gaze. The idea, originally developed by Simone de Beauvoir, is when women objectify themselves to conform to the male desire — when a woman’s wellbeing is based on her appearance, rather than what lies beyond her own reflection. As Graham Fuller from The Culture Trip writes, Elaine is trying to “co-opt the male gaze to fetishise herself,” which Biller expanded upon: “I was haunted with the conventions of horror and thriller movies and the way the gaze operated, and I tried to transform that to the female narcissistic gaze. So many women I’ve known have these very intense fantasies about being the most desirable woman in the world, and that’s how they’re gonna get their power. The truth about that has seldom been captured by cinema.”
The female experience is a “contradictory, confusing thing” and it’s a “male fantasy myth” that a woman who presents herself sexually and enjoys it is always empowered. “There are layers of conformism, anger, and self-hate in there, too,” Biller told Rolling Stone. I would add that this is also a female fantasy myth considering the recent idea in liberal feminism that women are always empowered in “sex work.” The Love Witch is a critique of the women who pander to male desire — but it’s also a celebration of it.
One of Biller’s ultimate goals is creating visual pleasure for women. When asked by Lenny Letter how she achieves this, Biller said “through interior decorating.” Instead of featuring weapons, guns, cars, objects of war and destruction, she’s “obsessively featuring lace doilies, tea sets, handbags, false eyelashes, ashtrays, curtains, pillows, domestic things.” Biller isn’t trying to say that women are domestic, though, it’s just “a way of creating a world of objects that feel female.” She also isn’t saying that all women enjoy feminine things or that women are defined by these things, but she wants to include the stuff that excites her on screen. “Maybe it excites me to put a beautiful woman on screen and have her wear beautiful makeup and have her look fantastic, you know, great stockings, great lingerie, great shoes, great handbag.” This might seem like a male fantasy at first, but is it? Does men care about these things in the same way that women do?
Biller told UCTV she grew up watching films from the 1930s to the 1960s (“movies became very masculine starting around the early ‘70s”). She loved pre-code and noir films due to the female characters, their witty dialogue and glamour. This is also when femme fatale characters were popular. “I was obsessed with the feel of the classics — the hair, the makeup, the glamour, the dresses.” Biller told Lenny Letter she is aware that some people might find it “retrogressive” for her to make films similar to Old Hollywood pictures, but she just thinks they’re better: “they were better written, they had better characters (both male and female); they had more humanity in them.” Biller isn’t trying to copy them, but she said she can “learn a lot from those kinds of scripts.” In terms of creating a feminist cinema, she started to ask herself: “What do I really like to watch on the screen? What kinds of images actually produce pleasure for me, rather than anxiety?” There’s a huge amount of women who are obsessed with Old Hollywood stars, both male and female, because of how everything looked, the ways these films were written, the set designs, and of course, the beauty of the stars.
Men lust after female characters’ nudity, whereas “women are putting themselves inside the characters, and they’re having pleasure in being a subject in the movie, not an object,” Biller told UCTV, adding that she’s not gonna hold back from trying to explore and portray her own fantasies. She explained how she doesn’t love Busby Berkeley films because there are nude women and she wants to have sex with them; she loves them because of the glamour and the sets. Speaking to Vice’s Kate Loftus O’Brien, Biller said: “That’s something I like to feel when I’m watching a beautiful woman on screen: I like to feel that I am that woman. I have that beauty. I have that power. It’s a kind of narcissistic attachment.” Elaine isn’t dressed in high-necked, long-sleeved clothing for the male gaze, it’s for the female gaze (as are her nude scenes). Biller believes in women being able to look glamorous for themselves and cites how women’s fashion magazines are not for men, but for other women — that’s what Elaine’s beauty, wardrobe, hair and makeup is about.
As much as Biller loves it, she still critiques Elaine’s femininity in The Love Witch. When Elaine’s neighbour Trish (Laura Wadell) goes into Elaine’s apartment, she tries on her wig and clothes, which is about Trish wanting whatever Elaine has because she stole her man away. Biller spoke about this moment with Shocking News: “I find that so sad. [Trish] does not believe in herself anymore, so she tries to become like Elaine. She toys with Elaine’s concept that to get love, you have to become a man’s fantasy. Trish almost loses herself in that moment, but she luckily comes back to herself in time. In some ways, she is the hero of the film.” Biller also talked about how we see the process “by which a woman is indoctrinated into feeling like she has to perform for men and sometimes it can come through grief.” Both Elaine and Trish experience this grief, Elaine through the death of a husband, and Trish through her husband lusting after another woman.
Biller told UCTV that “there’s so much judgement of women who conform to beauty standards; they’re mocked relentlessly for being shallow or stuck or a bitch. But there’s even more ridicule for women who refuse to conform to beauty standards or to please men.” She created Elaine and Trish to fit into this. They both think they’re safe, but neither is because they’re “stuck in a world where only male desire matters.” Biller explains that Elaine can get any man she wants by looking how she does and pleasing them, “but none of them are worth it because they objectify or dominate her, leaving no space for her to grow or self-actualise or love.” Trish is more secure in herself and isn’t performing in those ways, but her husband still goes for a “blank sexuality image of woman which is all Elaine gives them, rather than a real woman.” Either way, Biller says “a single woman has so many dimensions within her. We’re not like these stereotypes that men make of us.”
When speaking to John Patterson of The Guardian, Biller said The Love Witch is what would happen if “men loved women as strongly as women want them to; the way women crave to be loved by men.” While men are known for being less emotional than women, Biller says that, in her experience, they’re much more emotional: “That’s why they won’t, or can’t, open that gate — it would destroy them. And that’s what kills all the men in my movie — having to experience their own feelings.” This was inspired by a book Biller read about women who love their men too much. She told Thrillist: “It suggested that the reason that women can’t be in fulfilling relationships is that they bombard their man with so much love that it’s almost a form of abuse.” Biller thought this was “the most insane thing” she’d ever read. “So, it’s not that he’s emotionally immature and closed and sexist, and he cheats on you! [It’s that] your love is so bad. I just thought, that’s great! I’m going to make a movie about that — how women’s love is so horrible that it can actually kill a man.”
All this doesn’t mean, however, that Biller condones the actions of her heroine. “I show Elaine as a pathological narcissistic character, who’s not acting out of intuition but out of fears of damage and even mind control.” Biller studied narcissism in women for this film; “women tying themselves in knots trying to please men is so incredibly encouraged in our culture. There is this pressure to be sexy, starting from when you are about fourteen. It’s really bizarre.” This ties back to the idea of girls and women being raised to perform for the male gaze, in order to win the love of a man. Looking back to Classic Hollywood tropes, Biller also told Culture Trip that a strong man like Griff (Gian Keys) is never going to fall for a woman like Elaine because his moral code is stronger than her seduction. “It’s a little like that with Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon. All successful male heroes in movies choose their moral code over a woman. And because Elaine can’t win Griff’s love, she has to resort to an insane action.”
When UCTV asked Biller about The Love Witch’s ending, which leaves Elaine heartbroken, Biller said she looked into Borderline Personality Disorder: “For Borderline people, the love object is fetishised, but when it disappoints too much, it becomes devalued and discarded. Once it’s discarded it becomes a thing of evil, and it’s the thing you have to kill. So in my interpretation, [Elaine] saw Griff as already dead to her. Once he rejected her love, it’s like ‘okay, he’s dead now.’ And I actually literally portrayed him as a skull, like she sees him as dead. And then she kills him because she just has to get rid of the thing that he is that has a personality, so she can fantasise about him as the thing she wants him to be. So basically I think at the end she has a psychotic break, and so the thing about a psychotic break is that she’s not responsible anymore… she’s gone insane. It’s kind of like the end of Psycho. There’s no Elaine there anymore.” The concept of idealisation and devaluation, commonly seen in the BPD profile, is an idea that works exceptionally well here (not to say that everyone with BPD is likely to kill their lover).
Biller has been accused of being transphobic and a “TERF” due to the themes depicted in The Love Witch, in addition to her own feminist beliefs. Screen Queens’ Red called the film “bio-essentialist” and one Letterboxd reviewer called it a “121 minute long transmisogyny speedrun.” Red said “[Elaine’s] anatomy factors into all of her witchcraft from using an old tampon in a love potion to her initiation into her coven; it’s empathetically implied that Elaine simply would not have any powers to find her true love […] if it wasn’t for her uterus.” After Elaine’s current lover Wayne meets his demise, Elaine prepares a witch bottle to bury with him containing her urine and her bloody tampon, so part of her can always be with him. During the preparation, Elaine breaks the fourth wall via voiceover to tell the audience: “Tampons aren’t gross. Women bleed and that’s a beautiful thing. Do you know that most men have never even seen a used tampon?” In the film, a man actually recoils at the sight of a tampon, while a policeman doesn’t even know what it is. Women’s history is full of men’s aversion to menstruation — specifically to the blood itself. In some religions and cultures, menstruation is so feared and misunderstood that girls and women are forced to sit in huts until it’s over. Menstrual blood has also been seen as both good and evil, with magical healing properties. The Exploress Podcast says that “it was added to all sorts of drugs, ointments, and salves.”
Barbara (Jennifer Ingrum), who is part of the coven Elaine is initiated into, explains: “The whole history of witchcraft is interwoven with the fear of female sexuality. They burned us at the stake because they feared the erotic feelings we elicited in them. Later, they used marriage to hold us in bondage and made us into servants, whores, and fantasy dolls, never asking us what we wanted.” Biller said that a major theme in The Love Witch is “the sexual power of the female, which is emphasised in witchcraft as something which does not diminish the female but makes her greater — as opposed to much of the post-feminist theory that insists men and women are not only equal but ‘the same.’” Gahan (Jared Sanford) says the coven believes that a woman’s greatest power lies in her sexuality. They don’t view it as satanic or anti-feminist, but as a celebration of woman as a natural creature with “an earthly body, a spiritual essence, and a womb.” Some people genuinely believe that the female anatomy possesses such power, but the way people view sex and gender and how they interact with it will always differ — not everyone even believes in the idea of a “spiritual essence.” Biller has said this scene is also about witches indoctrinating young women into cults, which was inspired by Anton LaVey’s “The Satanic Witch” — a book focusing on the feminine and how women can enchant and manipulate men.
Gahan also says, “They teach us that a normative human being is a hyper-rationalist stoic male and that women’s emotions and intuitions are illnesses that need to be cured,” but the coven believes that “men and women are different and that true equality lies in that difference.” This reflects Biller’s actual views more: men and women have different bodies and that difference is the basis of sexism. It’s not bio-essentialist to recognise this. In March 2016, Biller said in a tweet: “What I have learned is that some people think that all feminists are transphobic, because feminism implies that there is a lived female experience which they find to be exclusionary.”
Bio-essentialism would be saying that being feminine means you’re a woman, and being masculine means you’re a man — something that Biller doesn’t believe. At one point in the film, Elaine tells Trish that “men are like children. They’re very easy to pleasure as long as we give them what they want.” Trish is horrified and tells Elaine she sounds like she’s been brainwashed by the patriarchy. Elaine only performs the activities a man wants, including going through the motions of sex with them, because she believes it’s the path to being loved by one. Barbara actually tells Elaine to use sex magic to destroy a man’s fear of her and open his heart to the “floodgates of love” so that he can finally view her as a human being. As previously mentioned, Biller is critiquing this — she does not agree with all the views put forward by the coven. The Love Witch is about the female experience and therefore touches upon misogyny— cis women and trans women will have some commonalities, but we won’t have the same blanket experiences, and that’s okay.
The Love Witch is designed to produce a different effect on men and women. Biller actually describes the film as a horror movie for men, “in the sense that men are the victims and they are not empowered. But it will especially scare men in that it contains scenes of women talking together obsessively about love, in rarefied female environments.” Considering that one of the biggest tropes in the horror genre is men enacting revenge on women who refuse to conform, Biller tells Vice that, with female audiences, “they don’t even see the film as violent. They’re kind of relaxed. They see these jerks dying and it’s kind of satisfying.”
On who would relate to The Love Witch the least, Biller Told Culture Trip “the women who think that Elaine’s type of femininity is ridiculous. They’ve maybe internalised male hatred of feminine women and they think that by showing Elaine on screen I am catering to male fantasies more than I should be. I plead guilty to that. I am catering to both male and female fantasies, and deliberately so.” She added that she’s “not that kind of feminist who thinks that the only feminism is the one where you take away male pleasure.” On the other hand, the women who like The Love Witch the most tend to “accept and enjoy female performance and display — the done-up and burlesque kind of girls. And they don’t care that it’s a critique of them.” Biller hates to say it, but she thinks those women “aren’t terribly well-educated or aware of issues about the male gaze. They just enjoy seeing a character that’s wearing the kind of clothes and makeup they like.”
For Biller, it was a guilty pleasure for her to create Elaine, like “Frankenstein’s Monster, but there is something about her that I also emulate. There’s natural enjoyment women have in gazing narcissistically upon other beautiful women. And this is obviously true of the fashion and beauty industries, which are supported by that female narcissistic gaze, which is very, very strong.” Everything Biller has said and depicted about women, sexism, and the female experience has highlighted that her beliefs are specific but cannot be put into a box. Biller has a wide and complex understanding of misogyny, gender, and sexuality, but she isn’t sure she’d call The Love Witch a “feminist” film. “It’s more of a film from a feminine point of view that asks the viewer to consider female experience and consciousness.” With great awareness, Biller delivers important commentary while indulging in a stylish and gorgeous film that focuses on women, on the female experience. I think Jyn Arro put it best: “Female fantasies do not exist outside of the influence in the male gaze in The Love Witch, rather it focuses on how much women’s ideas of the self and relationships, though their own, become twisted and mutated by the normalised gender roles and desires of cis-gendered heterosexual men.” And Biller has a blast with it all.
