Bewitched

Conclusion: Television in the Aura of Film

130 Bewitched ation of such a complex narrative universe within the depths of the “wasteland” era is an indication that our historiography of American television needs to be rendered more complex . Conclusion: Television in the Aura of Film The relationship between film and television has haunted my approach to Bewitched. I write as a contemporary film critic who also finds an intense passion for particular television shows. I have argued against the dominance of a filmic model of narrative for the analysis of television. I also argued that it would be impossible to appreciate Bewitched without considering its intertextual relationship to classical Hollywood films, such as Bell, Book and Candle and I Married a Witch. However, something larger is at stake. As a popular culture analyst, I make no distinction between loving Bewitched and the cinema. To me, they are the same thing, audio-visual worlds in which meaning is contested. I conclude this study with a reflection on its contributions to media criticism. I know of no better place to turn than a neglected film studies book that expresses the importance of hermeneutic interpretation for declaring one’s opinions about the culture as well as one’s love of audio-visual texts. In Film in the Aura of Art, Dudley Andrew explores art cinema in intertextual dialogue with high culture. While Andrew ’s topic could not be further from my focus here, an examination of a low culture telefilm sitcom beloved by generations of American children, the passion with which Andrew argues is indeed congruent with my passion for Bewitched. Andrew concludes his book with a startling inspiration: “[W]e shall not hesitate to call interpretation an ‘art’ and to be satisfied with it as a way, the best way, of participating in 131 Conclusion: Television in the Aura of Film history. It is after all just as insubstantial and as important as the art of living” (201). As I spent year after year coming back to my Bewitched notes, watching and rewatching episodes, alone and with my family, I always knew that the show, for all its silliness, was in fact engaged in a meaningful cultural project, about feminism , about history, about the cold war. This book has argued for similar intertextual connections between the audiovisual texts, the 254 episodes of the show that are Bewitched, and its cultural contexts (the space race, the Salem witch trials , the hippie movement), a similar pursuit to Andrew’s analysis of the relationship between Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1944) and medieval art (131–51). I do not mean to gloss over the differences in content between this work and Andrew’s. Clearly Andrew finds value in a higher range of artifacts than I do. But at the heart of his hermeneutic method is the idea that one should let what is interesting about the text before you lead where it may. The many episodes of Bewitched led me to so many places that I had to write about them or find myself incapable of expressing what I saw to be their cultural value. What Andrew means by aura in his book—a Benjaminian redemption—I find in Bewitched and its confluence with popular Hollywood cinema. Andrew finds that value elsewhere, higher on the cultural chain of being. But if we are to fully understand our culture, we need to appreciate both interests. While Bewitched should not be valorized at the expense of Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1951) and the films of Kenji Mizoguchi, other Andrew case studies, it should be recognized as culturally valuable in tandem with them. Bewitched can be seen rightly within an aura that is more popular than that of painting, theater, and the traditional arts. I want to reflect on the significance of using such a Benjaminian term as aura to describe television’s contact with the cinema via an analysis of the recent Hollywood film version of 132 Bewitched Bewitched (Nora Ephron, 2005). For not only was the 1960s Bewitched constructed under the aura of Hollywood cinema (its intertextual reworking of I Married a Witch and Bell, Book and Candle), but it also has become a cultural benchmark through which we understand ourselves at present. The film version of Bewitched exists in the aura of this fundamentally important television show. It cannot be measured separately from that aura, as its critics have assumed. In his relatively positive review of the film...