No wait I’m rewatching The Love Witch and I could just be stoned but I think I really “get it” now, like I get the character and why an ostensibly feminist film with feminist theming would feature a protagonist that repeatedly asserts her commitment to upholding traditional roles and whose ultimate goal is to retain the affections of a man. Rewatching Samantha Robinson’s performance, her interactions with the men she goes through over the course of the film don’t read as infatuated, they read as contemptuous, almost ironic. Hateful. Her dropping her sugary voice and aggressively insisting that Wayne drink from the flask, almost how a man might pressure a young woman. Her affectlessly crooning “that must have been so hard for you” when he bitches about his troubles with women, all obviously of his own making. Her pointed question as to whether the high priest is still teaching sex classes. Elaine is delusional, this much is made clear to the audience. Elaine is delusional, Elaine is boy crazy, Elaine loves love. This is how Elaine is characterized on the surface, this is how she presents herself even to herself. In fact, Elaine is constantly narrating her own internal monologue to the audience, reasserting her intentions, over and over.
Yes, Elaine is delusional. But Elaine hates men. And Elaine doesn’t want to be in love.
Or at least, carries a primordial rage inside her about her own mistreatment by men that her internalized misogyny won’t let her come to grips with. So she justifies it using the most socially acceptable reasoning a woman can have to kill. Elaine would have us believe that she is an incidental murderer, and maybe this is the only way she can justify her actions to herself. But in this reality, Elaine is giving men tests she know they’ll fail, deliberately setting herself up with a motive and setting them up to exploit themselves as predators, cheaters and misogynists, then killing them off in revenge for their collective culpability. She goes after Wayne when she sees him flirting with a young student, she seduces Trish’s husband to prove the point to Trish that Richard isn’t any different from or less scummy than your average cheating, self-indulgent scumbag. “I understand you perfectly” she says to him before seducing and killing him.
Elaine is chafing against patriarchal rule, but even taking up witchcraft doesn’t provide the means of escape she was searching for, because the coven she’s pledged to is basically just a sex trafficking operation masquerading as a feminist movement. It is run by men who use biological essentialist rhetoric to assault women under the guise of feminism, and when the high priest lays out his philosophy on witchcraft as it relates to gender and sexuality, he ends up just reciting the most traditionalist terfy bullshit under a thin veneer of “sexual empowerment” and “innately different but equal”. In the context of “The Love Witch” witchcraft is an allegory for the feminism that has been appropriated by terfs and men who parrot these talking points to get laid. Elaine isn’t trying and failing to find love via witchcraft. She’s trying and failing to find a way out.
