“The day he left me was the day that I died. But then I was reborn as a witch.”
This line comes early in The Love Witch, in response to Trish, friend of Elaine (played with a perfect magnetism by Samantha Robinson) interrogating her as to the congruity of Elaine’s devotion to men as it related to her notion of womanhood. Elaine presents as both all-knowing and oblivious to her questions. The honesty and self-deception on display is presented with a wink and a smile, but I feel nothing but the utmost empathy for Elaine’s imperfect formulation of sex and gender. What I know of femininity is directly tied to what I know of my self-presentation, and I know so very little of either. The film opens with Elaine smoking a cigarette as she drives through the countryside, an image that holds as my eyes glazed over on many a morning drive. She is a character who I have carried with me for years. I see myself, a trans woman and former cam model, in The Love Witch.
Throughout its festival run, The Love Witch was often given the misnomer of satire, a play on vintage softcore porn. The director Anna Biller has rather aggressively denied this, stating that the film’s reference points are medieval art, Wicca, and Antonioni. Biller’s Twitter features a cornucopia of artistic reference points, and The Love Witch bathes in an archival internet. As the film’s grain pulls up the roots of feminine experience, transferring them onto this stilted and otherworldly pastiche. Despite Biller’s meticulous and ostensibly artisanal aesthetic, the accessibility and far-reaching modern world’s mechanisms seep into each frame. Magick springs from museum database .zip files; My apothecaries take the form of blogs and HTML-laden slideshows on forgotten websites. Like Biller, I have scavenged for representation and inspiration. I take comfort in the film’s palette, its rhythm, its corniness and agonizing tragedy. I had no easy direct pop culture figures for quality trans representation growing up. I had Sleepaway Camp, Tumblr, drag queens on Youtube, side characters in novels I hid from my parents, friends of friends, two hundred word articles in The Week on “sex changes” I would re-read until the page bled, Sheri Moon Zombie. I was not natural or final, as I was. I required something beyond what I could comprehend.
Elaine’s trajectory throughout the bulk of the film is a slow murdering of the masculine. She seduces men through a magic clearly prepared but rarely explicated in the moment: Out of context, her interactions with various suitors are those of marvelously coordinated performance. From the outset, this is framed as the processing of the trauma drawn from Elaine’s marriage to the late, abusive Jerry. As she kills man after man with her supernatural love, it is stagnant and empowering, a massive, unresolved contradiction.
The implicit pain coursing through The Love Witch’s acrylics hits so naturally it’s often unnoticeable. What I continue to find so striking, however, is the overwhelming, intoxicating, rampant individuality of Elaine, and the directorial voice present, the kind that I have only ever achieved myself when I was camming.
I was a cam model on the side for several months shortly after turning eighteen. I liked it and I feel no shame now. I would perform in my bedroom late at night, with a set-up I could easily assemble. I got money and a decent nuber of fans. I wonder if any will read this now and recognize me. I remember how my back would never ache while I was doing a show, flooding me as soon as I logged off. My fans carried me, spread-eagled across a carpeted pentagram. I wish I had footage of it, or at least some still image, though I believe I destroyed it all in a moment of panic.The first time I ever felt present in my body was with people watching from oher rooms. This is messy — of course, I know I should have explored my body healthily on my own and with loved ones I trusted before I ever broadcast myself on that scale. That is not how it worked out for me. It does not strike me as a tragedy. Though I did not come out until long after I’d stopped camming, the acceptance and awareness of my body I needed to finally identify my swollen skin as the woman it was tugging to be. My persona when I went live was meeker, more cautious, more coy. Men loved what they witnessed. I was good at my job. That my sexuality and body were to some extent commodify does not rob me of any agency of validity in my own relation to either of those things, no matter the struggles or revelations I experienced.
Biller is cannily anti-sex work, and makes all sorts of claims about the damage it inflicts on those in the industry with zero experience of her own. She has been vaguely dismissive and demeaning about the notion of transness, rejecting those like myself as a bastardization of true womanhood. The inevitable irony of The Love Witch is that, as a film about creating an image rooted in the very people who deny your power, it is made by a person who denies the very power I derive from the film.
When Elaine delivers a monologue about the ultimate feminine divinity that is the tampon, I, dissociated from the text, graft on the frankness with which I desperately desire affirmation for my trans body, a magic potion of razor-burn.
Biller has called the film an autobiography. I can think of nothing more honest to me as a trans woman that such a fashionable amalgam. Transition is a slow process of cycling through clothing, garishly painting my face until my hands force the makeup into a tone that covers my stubble, and collecting so many open tabs about padding and tucking tutorials that the header texts switch to dots. I bought wigs and short skirts in the dead of winter with perfectly lengthy head of hair. I get used to speaking higher and I go softer. I bought bras and lingerie, which I quickly shoved in the corner of my closet. I rebirthed myself, slowly. I molted.
The final stretch of the film features a medieval wedding fantasy, full of song and dance and kaleidoscopic pastels. The sequence is glacially paced, giving each image a sense of unease and unsustainability. As a woman who spent nearly two decades trying to convince myself I was the man the world saw, I see myself where I am not welcome, where I am disregarded, where I can never permanently reside, a reality that is only a dream for me. When I show myself, my self-cultivation, it is inherently disreputable. These two things are irrevocably intertwined for me. Biller offers a trap-door with art, an abyss of self-reflexive co-opting of the images that mean so much more than originally intended. Ultimately, for Elaine, this proves insufficient in a vacuum. Biller closes on Samantha Robinson’s face as she laughs, covered in blood, subsumed by the frame. The Love Witch is a story of spiritual isolation, a descent beyond the fantasy of being, a world populated by a world that desires not you, but the mirror you’ve built for yourself.
“I wonder if all women feel that way?”
