The Witch

Often times, people will get upset over a book and ban it. They get upset over a movie and speak out against it. Art is called out for being nonsense because of its subject matter or content but the way I see it: if a child dies in an African war, does that mean you can stop it from happening by not looking at the pictures of it or criticizing the artist?

Sin is a concept we don't talk about. We marginalize sin because lying is something we can justify with it being a white lie. Lust is something we can justify by it being simple human nature but when we see it graphically portrayed in a truly disturbing context, then all of a sudden, we're offended and up in arms.

Envy, greed and wrath in our everyday lives look like a guy calling another guy a jerk for getting a bonus for hard work on a project at work; taking that bonus and using it to buy things he doesn't need or things that bog his life down with more sin; yelling at his wife or child because these things and this money have made him just as miserable as the man who envies him.

The movie The Witch, which promised to be a horror film turned out to not be a horror film but rather a graphic representation of these sins. There were moments in the movie that were a bit gratuitous but like any work of art, they were made to seriously piss someone off, and not to simply touch upon why a sin was dangerous to mankind.

The background of the Puritan characters made it obvious what they were trying to do and the fact that they hardly touched on The Witch, herself: where she came from, why she walked the woods, what woods these were and why these particular woods were significant; showed that the film wasn't about the witch, it was about the devil and sin.

At one point in the movie, the father of the family gets down on his knees and begs God, "forgive me for my pride! Do not punish my children!"

So for those who haven't seen the movie but intend to, you can stop here but for those who haven't or don't want to, here's the recap:

We see the little brother exemplifying lust. He lusts after Thomasan when she's in bed, while she washes clothes in the river and then when he meets the witch, he lusts after her and culminates in an orgasmic death reminiscent of The Exorcist movies to really solidify that: for all his puritain training and prayer, which he does often throughout the movie, he has not been saved through baptism and he still is the perfect candidate for sin just by being human.

Second: Gluttony. There is no exemplifying characters of Gluttony that I saw because the family is starving but perhaps the two fat little twins could be a hint of this. The mother's crying over her baby and neglecting her children could be seen as her being gluttonous in her neglect. The Father's cutting wood to drown out his sorrows could be considered gluttonous and perhaps his death at the end, burried under wood was representative of that sin.

Greed: the covetous nature of the wife over the silver cup could have represented greed. The entire motif of selling ones soul to the devil to get their loved ones back or to "see the world" as the devil says at the end could be considered greed.

Sloth: the mother was constantly having the daughter do all the chores and having the father go out to hunt and thinking about selling her silver cup to sustain her sloth. She came out only to yell at the Thomasan so the question of her being slothful was answered absolutely.

Wrath was also obvious in her as she turned her anger with their situation and not having enough and her bratty kids on Thomasan and at the end, culminated in trying to murder her as the embodiment of wrath.

Envy was also obvious as the mother was envious of Thomasan for being still young and beautiful and still in the house when she should, "already be married and serving a husband," just as the mother had done herself. That envy lead to wrath and her death so that commentary was obvious there.

As the father says at the end, pride is his biggest sin. He does not admit to taking his son hunting in the woods or selling his wife's silver cup because he is filled with pride. He lets his pride come before his wife and his children because he can barely keep it together after his pride gets the family kicked off their plantation at the beginning of the movie. Pride, may be the biggest theme in this entire movie because the daughter has it until she looses her cool at the end and shows that she has it, the dad has it and it gets him killed. The mother has it because she can't just admit that she's envious of her daughter Thomasan and that she's mad at her husband for getting them all kicked out of the place they lived and bringing them to the US in the first place. Pride is the single largest sin of the movie.

The movie itself could have used subtlety to illustrate some of these points a little better and not used such graphic imagery to explain their points but they remained consistent with the time period and not all of the graphic imagry was unfounded. There were places in there that I felt warranted less metaphoric pedantic motif and more attention to story and plot but as one who has been trained in English to read between the lines, I can see what the writers of the movie were trying to do.

Their movie will not get them an Oscar and it will probably be ignored and trashed by most who see it but I feel that to really see the movie, you have to be someone very specific. Someone who can both understand what the movie says, without being blatent or obvious, and someone who can appreciate and know what sin really is. When you are that someone, you recognize these sins from afar and come out of the movie very quiet because you have seen these things before, in your own life.