Bewitched

Contextualizing Bewitched: Witches, Film, and Television

18 Bewitched Contextualizing Bewitched: Witches, Film, and Television Such a discussion of Bewitched in continuity with the history of television allows us to study how a mature form of comedy developed from one era to the next. Bewitched, after all, came out of distinct traditions, televisual certainly, but also filmic and more generally cultural. On this latter front, Bewitched ’s position has much to do with the popular history of postwar American feminism. In February 1964, Betty Friedan, the by-then famous author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), published an application of her book’s liberal feminist method to the history of television. The essay, “Television and the Feminine Mystique,” lambasted American television ’s representation of women: “Television’s image of the American woman, 1964, is a stupid, unattractive, insecure little household drudge who spends her martyred, mindless, boring days dreaming of love—and plotting nasty revenge against her husband” (93). Few moments in cultural history mark when a clarion call for social change has been met with the kind of force through which Bewitched responded to Friedan’s critique. Samantha on Bewitched represented an antidote to the kind of women Friedan lamented about being on American television; in fact, Endora uses Friedan’s exact words, such as “drudge” and “boring,” to describe Sam’s life with Darrin. In her reflections on Bewitched, Susan Douglas studies an early episode of the series, “Eat at Mario’s” (#35, 5/27/65), in which Sam and Endora befriend an Italian immigrant who refuses the commercialization of pizza, instead demanding that his customers eat his sophisticated continental cuisine. Endora particularly delights in defending Mario against the crass commercialism represented by Darrin, who is running the ad campaign for a rival Americanized pizza franchiser in town. Douglas analyzes a scene in which Endora and Saman- 19 Contextualizing Bewitched tha (before she knows Mario’s is in direct competition with one of Darrin’s clients) use their witchcraft to ensure the Italian restaurant’s success. Endora and Samantha revel in their transgressions. Douglas argues, “The delight they take in orchestrating this ad campaign is clear as each tackles a new medium, giggling and saying, ‘It’s your turn,’ and ‘Now, yours’” (“Genies and Witches” 130). In this way, Douglas delights in the women taking an active, aggressive role in the public space, the ideal antidote to the kinds of representations that angered Friedan. Bewitched’s place in cultural history can also be analyzed through its sophistication as a filmed representation of witches. Unlike other sitcoms of the era—Gilligan’s Island, for example—Bewitched was written and filmed with the sophistication of Hollywood romantic comedies. The first episodes feature a voice-over narrator performing comic sociological analyses of Sam’s role as a witch in middle-class suburbia, similar in tone to such 1950s film comedies as Will Endora smokes opium in Sam's suburban home, in “Divided He Falls” (5/5/66). 20 Bewitched Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Frank Tashlin, 1958), a film critical of men’s roles in advertising culture. Two films about witches stand out as precursors to Bewitched ’s genial representation of female witches: I Married a Witch (Rene Clair, 1942) and Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958). As a romantic comedy, Bewitched offers a textual synthesis of these two films, mixing the down-home Americana of Clair’s film with the celebration of the modern urban style featured in Quine’s. Bewitched, in all its textual complexity, can be read as an extended intertextual adaptation of these two films. Featuring an interest in the melodramatization of history that Bewitched would also pursue, I Married a Witch shows how romance can undo the historical sins of a culture. In the film, Fredric March plays Wallace Wooley, whose ancestors burned witches at Salem. As revenge , the witch victim, Jennifer (Veronica Lake), attempts to curse Jonathan with a love potion. Instead, screwball hilarity ensues, and she mistakenly takes the potion and falls in love with Wallace. This produces a love triangle complication , as Wallace is supposed to marry Estelle (Susan Hayward ) in order to secure his political ambitions and allow him to run for public office. From beginning to end, I Married a Witch produces a framework for fusing a romantic comedy about a witch falling in love with a mortal to a meditation on core American themes. As with a number of Bewitched episodes, the film begins in Puritan...