Bewitched

From Past to Present: George Washington Was a Hippie!

106 Bewitched their sometimes-bloody fates. Thus, when the witch sends Sam back to Henry VIII, she is sending her back to be beheaded . Darrin’s voyage into the past is at once a heroic quest to save his wife from such a fate, and yet another of the show’s allegorical engagements with potential adultery. For when Sam arrives, her beauty, not her powers, bewitch the king, who decides upon her as his next wife. With no memory of Darrin, Sam will do exactly as the king says until Darrin can manage to restore her memory. The show here contains men’s power over women (which is safely located in the past, in the guise of the nuptial beheader), reinforcing the present-day belief in marriage as a mutual contract based on love, which is deemed superior to medieval marriage rituals. Yet the threat to that present -day stability is disturbingly reiterated: with little provocation , Sam can again be in a situation in which she does not remember her husband and instead chooses to marry another man, if not Henry VIII, then some other more appealing figure, such as Rhett Butler from Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), as happens in the episode “Samantha Goes South for a Spell.” From Past to Present: George Washington Was a Hippie! Bewitched employs another strategy to more directly analyze the importance of history: the accidental summoning of a historical figure from the past by one of Samantha’s relatives. Although Bewitched critics often invoke a “textual decay” model in analyzing the series, claiming Bewitched became less and less interesting because the screenwriters simply ran out of ideas, the fifth- and sixth-to-last episodes of the series (#249–50, “George Washington Zapped Here,” 2/19/72 and 107 From Past to Present 2/26/72) grapple usefully with the meaning of history. David Marc similarly defends Bewitched’s late-run episodes, arguing that: “In sit-coms such as The Beverly Hillbillies and Bewitched , shows that had elements of the absurd built right into their structure, periods of decay late in their production runs often provided particularly fecund episodes; an unlikely realism gave way to a kind of seedy, primitivistic surrealism, which in turn mingled freely with science fiction” (185). In the two-part episode about George Washington, the show performs some of its most interesting work on the importance of history. In the episodes, the Stephenses’ maid, Esmeralda, accidentally summons the first president into the twentieth century. Going for a walk, he meets hippies and other youthful protestors at the town park. Here, they update Washington on the important events of recent U.S. history. Disturbed by tales of the Vietnam War and police brutality, Washington begins an oration that draws together an everenlarging crowd: “Earlier, I stood here and listened to some of you explain what is going on in this country. Things like assassinations, pollution, wars to end wars that do not end wars. This does not please me.” A hippie encourages him: “You tell ’em, George.” Washington continues: “Where is the voice of the people? Remember what my friend Tom Jefferson said: ‘What country can preserve its liberties unless its rulers are warned from time to time that the people preserve the spirit of resistance?’” At this point, a police officer comes to break up Washington’s “political rally,” since he has no demonstration permit. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered, Washington declares that the only permit he needs is the Constitution of the United States, and is summarily hauled off to jail when he insists on “running this tyrant through” with his sword. In an admittedly simplistic yet effective way, this episode reveals some of the large contradictions of an early 1970s culture that purports to be defending American free- 108 Bewitched doms abroad while at the same time demolishing them at home. The episode performs the same sort of work that a radical historian would do, and resonates with such work being done at that time. Compare, for example, the opening of Howard Zinn’s Post-War America, a radical history of America from 1945 to 1971, first published in 1971. Zinn opens the book by comparing three historical sites: the eighteenth-century events at Bunker Hill, the 1945 “celebration” of the bombing of Hiroshima, and the 1971 Bunker Hill antiwar protests. Zinn juxtaposes the three events in order to shed critical light on their comparative...