Categories
Catch-All/Student Discussion Questions

Bias against the religious in “The VVitch”?

It has long been known that Hollywood and ‘big entertainment’ producers often have a significant bias against religious people. One classic example is Fox cartoons, in which the religious people, Ned Flanders from the Simpsons, Mort from Family Guy, and so on are portrayed negatively. Whether they are made to look unsophisticated, unrealistic, unintelligent, “pie in the sky,” or whatever, this trend is so prevalent as to infer that in some cases it is being purposely done. 

The Witch is a far cry from any of the cartoons I mentioned previously and most other films coming out of Hollywood in terms of its characters and subject matter. These religious dissidents in the new world are very different from the religious people of today or 50 years ago who are frequently lampooned in popular media. I tend to think that the film did a good job for the most part of not making the characters with a bias. The belief in witches, demons, curses, and other such things were quite normal in the time period this movie was about, especially amongst the less educated. I also think the film portrayed the characters as religious visionaries similar to thousands of other real families who came to the land that would become America seeking “the kingdom of God,” even down to the ‘dialect’ of English the characters speak.

There is, however, one element of this film that stood out to me when I watched as potentially likely that someone at some level of the creation of the plotline put in this detail to cast the religious in a negative light. I am specifically referring to the perverse sexual attraction of the younger boy to his older sister. There are two times where the focus on the screen is the brother admiring his sister’s body in an explicitly sexual way. 

The reason why I am suspicious about the motives for these scenes is that they do not fit in with the broader plotline of the movie at all. There is never an insinuation that the parents were brother and sister or close cousins or something of that nature. If the child is has a sexual desire for his sister, it had to come from somewhere, and I believe there is definitely the chance that this scene was designed to accomplish the goal of casting religious people as creepily inclined towards incestuousness, or at the very least, extremely morally backwards relating to sexuality. 

While this is my hunch, I’m not about to bet my life savings on this theory. It could have simply been an element to freak audiences out to prime them for more horror to come, or it could have been tied to the plot in a way I missed. If you picked up on this too, even if you didn’t, and you think I’m dead wrong or dead right, feel free to comment.