ABSTRACT
Folks in the U.S. enjoy watching witches get killed on fi lm-from classic fi lms like The Wizard of Oz or Snow White to more recent fl icks like The Craft, we happily attend cinematic screenings and replay DVDs in our homes where witches are melted, thrown off cliffs, or blown into bits. You’ve seen this happen, although you may not have responded as ambivalently as I did. You see, I never wanted the witch to die. Diane Purkiss writes of her early encounters with the fi lm, The Wizard of Oz (1939): “I always cast my long-suffering mother as the Witch, as if in an early effort to prove the connections between witch-stories and images of maternity” (1).1 Purkiss made her mother the Witch, but when I acted out scenes from the movie, I was the Witch. I screeched my favorite line, “I’m melting, melting,” with empathetic abandon.2 Really, what is so terribly wicked about this green-skinned woman? Sure, she looks a little different, and she has a crystal ball that gives her an edge on long-distance communications, but this is hardly grounds for execution. She tries in vain to acquire her sister’s shoes (to which she is the rightful heiress), frightening Dorothy in an attempt to get them back, but doesn’t actually harm the young girl. In fact, she doesn’t kill anyone, preferring to incapacitate them, making her worst crime a series of (empty?) threats. The movie doesn’t even try to present a case for her wickedness: the fi lm instead marks her visually, inscribing “witch-ness” on her body through signifi ers like her long, warty nose and dark (green) skin, so that her wickedness becomes a physiognomic fact. She’s wicked because she looks wicked.
