The Craft x Feminist Rage

Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson star in Die My Love, a ferocious portrait of a woman engulfed by love and madness. Lawrence and Pattinson play a passionate couple who, after moving to an isolated house in the country, find their relationship unraveling following the birth of

of their first child. Vanity Fair hails Lawrence's performance as astonishing, and Time calls it the kind of performance you go to the movies for. From director Lynne Ramsey, Die My Love is only in theaters November 7th, rated R.

Hello and welcome to Material Girls, a pop culture podcast that uses critical theory to understand the zeitgeist. I'm Marcel Kosman. And I'm Hannah McGregor. And Marcel... Today, we are talking about the 1996 cult classic film, The Craft. And before we get into it, I need to know, Marcel, if as a teen girl coming of age in the 90s.

You had a witch face. Of course I had a witch face. Tell me about your witch face. Of course I had a witch face. This movie was very important to me at the time. It didn't stay with me the way that... I know that it did for you. Yeah, this lives in my bones. And that is good and right. I think my witch phase ended in grade 10. So early.

I know. I know. Really early. But it started in grade seven. Okay. So, you know, seven, eight, and nine were witch phase years. And then in grade 10, I think I was just so depressed. That's the best time to be a witch. I know. I know. What character has your witch phase? What did that look like for the three years you were being a witch? I mean, so here's the thing. My tarot phase. continued well beyond my witch phase years. So just to be clear, I did maintain certain essential witch practices.

was accused multiple times by numerous men of being a witch, like well past my official witch phase. So when I say witch phase, I think I'm really just saying craft phase.

Yeah, the period of your life when the movie The Craft was your personality. Yeah, exactly. It was like I dressed in black. I wore a lot of like... black lacy slips over top of other slips and with like big jackets on top and I guess what I'm trying to say is I think that my visible witch phase was largely aesthetic, but my internal witch phase continues to this day.

Does that make sense? Yeah, that absolutely does. Okay. Even if you couldn't tell by looking at me. Black lace overdresses come and go, but being a real witch lasts forever. It lives in your heart. Yeah, exactly. Having conversations with the animals, that's permanent. That's forever. Yeah. Kind of believing that like if a butterfly lands on your finger, it's because you did a magic about it.

And sort of always believing that in your heart forever. Yeah, that's eternal. Exactly. Just going into the weekend when you have an important event planned and knowing that the weekend weather will hold for you, that's witch power. Yeah, exactly. How about you, Hannah? It never ended, obviously. It never ended. Of course. But it certainly came on. with a kind of lived intensity starting in grade seven after I saw the craft. Obviously very important, which was the dawn of black lipstick.

tarot cards, really believing that I had access to knowledge of my past lives, really believing I could see ghosts, and for sure going into fields with friends and calling the four quarters. Good. My friends never did that with me. Well, I'll do it with you anytime. Okay. Just let me know. Next time I'm in Vancouver, we're going to a field. Next time you're in Vancouver, we're heading to a beach. We're going to call the Four Corners.

And we won't kill even a single shark as a result. There's a scene where a bunch of sharks. I don't remember that at all. Anyway, guys, I did not rewatch this movie for this episode because I don't need to.

Incredible. Incredible. It's time for Why This? Why Now? the segment that asks the materialist question, what are or were the historical, ideological, and material conditions for our object of study to become zeitgeisty? Okay, and we are going to be talking about the craft today in a particular context, which is the context of... Third wave feminism. Oh. It's time we talk about the third wave. Oh. We've put it off too long. We talked about the second wave.

We talked about the first wave. We're always going on about suffrage. So it's time for us finally to get to the third. You know us. Votes for women. That's one of our classic interests. So we're going to get more into what third wave or riot girl feminism actually entailed. Entails. Not sure what.

tense to put that in because my self spoiler in my heart I think I'm still just a third wave feminist whoa you know whoa anyway but first we're gonna uh get some sort of context on the ground for the film the craft um And like girl culture in the 1990s. So, Marcel, would you start us off, please, by reading the opening of this Huffington Post oral history of the craft? I would be thrilled.

Quote, teen film in the 1990s and early 2000s was largely defined by titles like Clueless, Scream, Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, and Cruel Intentions, all movies I saw in the theater. homages to preppy party kids with expensive clothes and trendy taste. For as often as it is mentioned in the same breath as these hits, the craft was something different.

Released on May 3, 1996, The Witchy Wonder became an ode to the fringes of the high school experience that Hollywood favored. Among its contemporaries, the movie was a departure. The four young girls at the center, Nancy, Faruza Balk, Sarah, Robin Tunney, Rochelle, Rachel True, and Bonnie, Nev Campbell.

didn't go to any cool parties, and their goth-oriented fashion certainly didn't channel the same preppy ideal as Cher, Dion, and Ty. If anything, the movie was a spiritual extension of Carrie and The Breakfast Club. two films that tackled the social stratification of high school, and Heathers, a dark comedy that turned wealth into a blood sport. End quote. Okay, so the production history of The Craft.

speaks to the fact that it was a really unconventional film in the filmic landscape of the time. In that same oral history, the director, Andy Fleming, gay, important, gay.

Listen, I actually think it's really important that he was gay. No, I'm sure it is. It's just that the first time he said it, it sounded like it was an insult. You were like, character Andy Fleming, gay. He also did some pretty... significant gay rewrites and he in the oral history talks about how hard it was to get the movie cast oh interesting because

This was before like Buffy or Scream or really the rise of YA film as a genre in general. And the idea of like a girl-fronted movie that was also a horror movie. was like they didn't know who to put in it. Like there wasn't like that type of actor working. See, this is incredible because I feel like they really nailed it. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. The casting's phenomenal. It surprises me that these four weren't types already. They weren't, and they were mostly unknowns. Like, Neve Campbell was the closest to... kind of a star because she had a season of Party of Five under her belt. The rest of them were like, Robin Tunney had done Empire Records. Yes, importantly.

Her head was, in fact, still shaved from Empire Records, so she's wearing a wig through this whole movie. That's so funny. I didn't know. And then Faruza Balk was mostly known for doing that incredibly creepy...

sequel to The Wizard of Oz. Yes. Return to Oz. Return to Oz. Yes. But like, they were not big A-list celebrities by any means. Yeah. And the movie itself got pretty mixed reviews with critics. Like, it wasn't... critically popular they thought it was campy and that the special effects in the second half were like over the top which agree to disagree critics but

Audiences loved it. It was a sleeper hit. It made $55.6 million worldwide against a budget of $15 million. Nice. And it has had like a steadily growing cult classic status since.

Marvelous. Okay. So I wonder if it would be useful to give a little bit of a plot summary for folks who haven't seen the craft and maybe for some of us who, even though it was really important to us as youth, we only really remember the pencil. floating, sort of not floating, but turning scene. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pencil turning scene. Okay, so The Craft is about four teenage girls who are all social outcasts in different ways. So, our villain…

My favorite character, Nancy, played by Farisa Balk, is working class. She lives in a trailer. She has a neglectful mother and an abusive stepfather. Nev Campbell plays Bonnie, who has... burn scars all over her body. And we see her getting really, really painful treatments to try to deal with these burn scars.

And then Rachel True plays Rochelle, who is a really talented swimmer who is also subject to constant anti-Black racism from the popular white girls at her school. The three of them are friends. They're like... dabbling in witchcraft. And then Sarah, played by Robin Tunney, arrives, new girl at school. Her father and stepmother have just relocated to, you know, whatever.

LA proximate town this is supposed to be, in the wake of Sarah's mother dying and Sarah attempting suicide. So she also has sort of this like trauma, is also a bit of an outcast. She arrives and Nancy and Bonnie and Rochelle decide that Sarah is the fourth they've been looking for to complete their coven after they see her sort of...

do some light pencil-based magic in class one day. That scene really stayed with me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really, really important. And then there's this really pivotal scene where the four of them are out hanging out and... Sarah is getting street harassed by a man who's like trying to show her a snake. Like, is it a metaphor? Probably. And he gets hit by a car and they are like, we did that.

And so they start more actively practicing magic and using their magic to reclaim the power that has been denied to them for the various ways in which they are outcasts. until Nancy's deep, deep well of inner rage pushes them into some more extreme acts that lead us to a thrilling climax. Are you going to tell us what those acts are? I don't want to. I want people to watch this movie. Okay. All right. You know what? That's so fair. So here's what I will say.

When I started researching this episode, I assumed that the craft was just like part of a larger trend in the 1990s of like expressing girls' experience of the world through the metaphor of witchcraft. Because that's like a thing I remember there being a lot of culture about in the 90s. Absolutely. From what I can tell, it wasn't part of that trend. It was the thing that started that trend.

Oh, cool. Oh, that's so interesting. Because yeah, like you, I really remember this being part of as opposed to maybe that's how those like movement starters. happen right they just like it's the right time and so it feels like it's of the time Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Like, and we'll talk more about why it fits so well into sort of what else is happening in terms of like feminism and girl culture in the moment.

But reading about the production history of it, it was very much like, oh, I met a pig in one time. Maybe we could put that in this movie. The people making this movie were like, hey.

Did you know? Like, rather than we're picking up on something that's already zeitgeisty. Interesting. That's so interesting. Okay. Yeah. So. On the topic of the appropriateness of witchcraft for sort of expressing something true about the 1990s, I'm wondering if you could read this quote from Angelica Jade Bastien's

2017 vulture piece about the craft's enduring legacy. Quote, witchcraft is more than mere teenage rebellion for these young girls. It's a means to attain what at first glance appears unattainable. The ability to live beyond the various oppressive forces that govern their lives. For many girls, witches are our first brush with any depiction of feminism and the price women pay in searching for control over our lives, end quote. Okay, that really resonates with me.

I really remember the period of my life leading up to the craft as one of like... curiosity with like the 16th century witch burnings. Same. Yes. Same. I have such a vivid memory of having a fight with my dad. Oh no. In a car. about whether or not the witch burnings constituted a genocide. So just so you know, I've been fighting with people about genocide for a long time. Yes.

Yes. But like, I remember it being a sort of early radicalizing thing I learned about. Sorry, shit, they were just murdering women? Mm-hmm. For like, knowing how to read? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to ask you to read one more quote right away because I think this fits in really well with it. This is from screenwriter Peter Filardi about his interest in writing a movie about teen witches. Okay. Quote, Producer Doug Wick and I spoke for hours about magic, mushrooms and ecstasy.

I remember there is, importantly, a comma between magic and mushrooms. I need people to know that. I tried to read it so that you could hear the comma. I remember telling him that magic is historically a weapon of the underclass. It was originally practiced by people of the heath, or heathens. Poor people without the power of a king, army, or church behind them. Our characters could not be popular, beautiful overlords of their school.

For real magic to work, they would have to be outsiders with more than desires. Real magic requires need. End quote. Wow. Okay, so clearly the craft was tapping into something in the zeitgeist that had to do with girlhood and power and our young radical selves. Yes, yes, 100%. And that's something that I think a lot of other girl culture of the 1990s was also tapping into at the same time. Mm-hmm.

Marcel, what do you think of when you think of third-wave feminism? I mean... Oh, such a hard question. Like you don't need to have a like theory of it. Just like what are the images, practices, ideas that sort of come to mind for you? When I think of third wave feminism. Part of me thinks a little bit of self-righteousness in that it is a departure in the sense of this is no longer enough. So like there are certain accomplishments of the previous waves.

that are valuable, but I feel like third-wave feminism, at least in the way that I experienced it and was brought into it for all of its limitations, was also one of like being critical of... the existing structures. So rather than trying to fit into them, being critical of them. Rather than trying to attain rights and power within the existing structures, criticizing them.

at every opportunity as being insufficient. So, like, very countercultural. Yes. Right? Very resistant. Very, like, it's the system that's broken, man. Exactly. Yes. Quite Gen X inspired for sure. For sure. Yes. Did you know? I did not know this. I found this out during my research for this episode. Did you know that the term was coined by writer and activist Rebecca Walker in a piece she wrote for Ms. Magazine in 1992?

So no, I didn't. But I knew that third wave feminism and Ms. Magazine had some kind of relationship. Incredible. But that's only because I wrote a book review about a book called Making Feminist Media that had a whole chapter on Ms. Magazine. Heck yeah. Heck yeah. Anyway, so this short answer is no, kind of. But you remember that Ms. Magazine was really important. It was. Yes. Did you know what political events spurred Walker to write this piece?

I'm going to say I don't remember because I peeked ahead and that's not what I would have guessed. Okay. It was Anita Hill's public testimony against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Say more about that. That is what Rebecca Walker was writing about when she coined the term third wave feminism. So would you please read this passage from Walker's piece from Ms. Magazine? Yes, I will.

Quote, to me, the hearings were not about determining whether or not Clarence Thomas did in fact harass Anita Hill. They were about checking and redefining the extent of women's credibility and power. Can a woman's experience undermine a man's career? Can a woman's voice, a woman's sense of self-worth and injustice challenge a structure predicated upon the subjugation of our gender?

Anita Hill's testimony threatened to do that and more. While some may laud the whole spectacle for the consciousness it raised around sexual harassment, its very real outcome is more informative. He was promoted. She was repudiated. Men were assured of the inviolability of their penis slash power. Women were admonished. to keep their experiences to themselves, end quote. Yeah, so this was striking to me because...

It's not a history I remembered. It's a history that is sort of before my own political memory. It's a history I've learned about since, but I had no idea of the sort of formative role that it played in the emergence of third wave feminism, like literally the emergence of the term. Yeah. And in a lot of the affect that accompanied third wave feminism, particularly this burgeoning politicized anger. So I'm going to ask you to read a little bit more from this Rebecca Walker piece.

Just a touch of context here. She's talking about a couple of days after seeing Anita Hill's testimony, being on like a subway and seeing a mother and her young daughter. And then these men coming onto the train and starting to talk about like fucking chicks and like all the chicks they're going to fuck and like watching how quiet this mother and her young daughter.

And her trying to like stand up to these men and ultimately having to disengage, like having to change cars because you actually can't stand up to men without risking getting hurt. So she's describing. the moment after that. Okay, quote, I am so angry that thoughts of murder, of physically retaliating against them, of separatism engulf me. I am almost out of body. just shy of being pure force. I am sick of the way women are negated, violated, devalued, ignored.

I am livid, unrelenting in my anger at those who invade my space, who wish to take away my rights, who refuse to hear my voice. As the days pass I push myself to figure out what it means to be part of the third wave of feminism. I begin to realize that I owe it to myself, to my little sister on the train, to all of the daughters yet to be born.

to push beyond my rage and articulate an agenda, end quote. Okay, so now we're talking about rage. Yes, we are going to talk about rage in the next segment. Let's go!

This segment is called The Theory We Need. Hannah, please... Tell us what theory we need to make sense of why girls were so danged angry in the 1990s. Okay, so I'm going to be drawing primarily on two articles here. The first is... by Stacey Gillis and Rebecca Munford. It's called Genealogies and Generations, the Politics and Praxis of Third-Wave Feminism, published in Women's History Review in 2004. That's going to be our kind of like...

here's what third wave feminism was source. And then the second is Jessica Rosenberg and Jitana Garofalo's Riot Girl, Revolutions from Within, published in Signs in 1998, which we'll use a little bit to talk. more about sort of Riot Grrrl and its role in third wave feminism. That piece in particular has like a short description of Riot Grrrl and then interviews with a bunch of like

practicing teen girls who were part of riot girl culture in 1998. And it's an absolute delight. So like we won't get into those interviews, but. Seriously, if you're interested in feminist history, it's so worth the read just to hear teenage girls in 1998 articulating their politics around things like, do we think boys should be allowed to come to riot girl conventions? Why or why not? I just, I loved it. But I also want to give a shout out to some other major works in the feminist rage.

oeuvre, including Soraya Chimali's Rage Becomes Her, Rebecca Traister's Good and Mad, and of course, Audre Lorde's iconic essay, The Uses of Anger. There's a proud history of feminist writing about anger. Beautiful. Okay. So, Hannah, my first question, if I may. You may. Was third wave feminism especially concerned with anger? I don't really think so. Not more than other feminisms. Right? There has been anger in all feminism. Surprise!

And most scholars who like even take the idea of waves seriously in the first place, because like a lot of scholars of feminism are just like, waves aren't real. But those who are thinking about the third wave. Think about it in terms of things like its embrace of pop culture, its sex positivity and related focus on sexual violence, and its deliberate intersectionality. So we get like...

eco-feminism and more thoughtful engagement with Black feminism and more sort of queer feminism, like a lot more of those movements attempting to be integrated. Cool. But for Gillis and Munford, one of the... primary characteristics of the third wave was the centrality of what they call girl culture. Okay. So I'm going to ask you to read a little bit of their description of what girl culture was.

Okay. Quote, in spite of its homogenized media representation and second wave reception, girl culture is an extremely eclectic phenomenon, which includes the riot girls of the punk movement. The Hello Kitty accessorized and lip glossed girlies, exemplified by the writers of zines such as Bitch and Bust, that was like me, as well as the more anodyne mainstream popo- as well as the more anodyne mainstream proponents of girl power identified with the Spice Girls.

Although these various groups are not always politically aligned, they do have in common a vigorous reclamation and recuperation of the word. girl as no longer a simply derogatory and disrespectful term, but one that captures the contradictions shaping female identity for young women whose world has been informed.

by the struggles and gains of second wave feminism, end quote. Beautifully read. So we can see that there are... all of these interesting internal contradictions in this embrace of girlhood and its pop culture iconography, particularly via like girl power figures like the Spice Girls.

And we can probably see why that kind of like winky feminism, right? The winky girl power feminism led to some. collapse between the concepts of third-wave feminism and post-feminism. Mm-hmm, right? This like, is third-wave feminism actually about being like, girls are so powerful now, we don't even need rights. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that contradiction for a lot of scholars of the third wave really coalesces around a particular figure.

That comes up again and again when you read about this period. Marcel. Yeah. Another quote from Gillis and Munford, please. Okay. Quote, debates around the contradiction and conflict. crucial to the configurations of third-way feminist identities, have been centered on one of the most prominent and public girl heroines. Courtney Love. the lead singer of punk rock band Hole and proponent of the kinder horror aesthetic. Listen, we'll get into it. Okay. Love has been positioned as a mouthpiece.

for both the riot girls and the girlies and embraced by third-wave feminists more generally for her dramatic subversion of the polarity. between power and victim feminisms, end quote. Whoa, okay. Yeah, we got some stuff done back here, huh? Oh my God. I don't even want to take a guess. You just go right ahead and please explain to me power and victim feminisms because I can't. Okay. So power and victim feminisms were this frame of...

Thinking about the role of feminism in the 1990s that also characterized this tension between third wave feminism and post feminism. And it essentially was, there was kind of a. conservative feminist voice being put forth by figures like Naomi Wolf that was saying that, like, women need to stop taking the position of victims. And instead embrace our power and claim our power, hence girl power. And so for them talking about things like rape culture.

is victim feminism. Okay. Because it's women positioning ourselves as victims. Because I was going to say, victim feminism sounds like an accusation and not an empowering label. No, no, no, not at all. Okay, good. Right? But it's this tension between, like, victim feminism, quote unquote, is the feminism that is angry a lot of the time, right? It's like grievance. It's like... I am fucking pissed at things that are happening. Yes. Power feminism is girl power. Okay.

For a lot of theorists of the third wave, Courtney Love sort of represents this space between, like, the anger. The anger of the third wave, the anger of the punk rock movement, the sort of ironic deployment of a term like hole. Right? Which I never put together, but is in fact a pretty filthy thing to call your band. And deliberately so.

And so, like, there's a lot connected to sort of Riot Grrrl and, like, punk feminism happening here. But then we also have in Courtney Love a little bit of the Spice Girls girl power aesthetic. A little bit of the, like... part of my embrace of my own sexuality as a source of my power is to, like, self-exploit. And that tension really comes together in the... kinder whore aesthetic which is what we used to call being a sexy baby oh fuck yeah so remember in the 90s how much

People like to wear like little baby doll dresses and combat boots. Yep. Kinder whore. Okay. Kinder whore. Right? So it was this aesthetic play on like, I'm just a widow girl, but also I have a knife. Yeah, I'm just a little girl, but I'm going to use these boots to kick you in the balls. Exactly. It really sort of gets at this tension in third wave feminism.

Between like girl power and I need to burn the world down. Okay. So the girl power of say the Spice Girls becomes like a media friendly incarnation of. power feminism that's about like girls can do whatever they want and dress however they want and be as sexy as they want they can be sexy babies and that's cool and Part of that is like destigmatizing and embracing and celebrating girlishness and girl stuff and being like a whole band can all be girls, which was, if you may recall, radical.

The very premise that women could be musicians was like, whoa. Whoa, are you kidding? A whole band, all girls? Wild. Whoa. Okay. Oh, man. But then we also have... Riot girl feminism, punk feminism, right? The kind of feminism figures like Courtney Love embodied having this more ambivalent relationship to power and victimization where like... awareness of yourself as a victim of patriarchal violence meets this belief in the power of girlhood, and we get this particular brand of feminist anger.

that takes forms more like the riot girl manifesto, you know, insisting on the page of a zine that like girl doesn't mean bad. Yeah. Right? Girl punk is not bad punk. Girl things are also cool. Yeah. And we get things like girl-only mosh pits at Bikini Kill shows, right? Like these girl-led punk bands saying, like, girls to the front.

so that the girls could all dance right at the front so that the members of the band could see them and make sure they were safe at the shows. So these like celebrations of space for girls.

that were really engaged with, like, awareness of how dangerous the world was for girls. So, to get a little more context around the Riot Grrrl movement... Which holds such a very important place in my personal heart. Could you read us this quote from Rosenberg and Garofalo's article, Riot Girl? Yes, I can. Quote.

Led by bands such as Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy, And zines such as Girl Germs, Jigsaw, and Chainsaw, more bands and more zines came into being and a network of Riot Girls was created, based largely on those zines. Chapters were started across the country. Girls held conventions where riot girls met and exchanged zines. Bands performed and workshops were held on topics such as eating disorders, rape.

abuse, self-mutilation, racism, self-defense, and zine production. Perhaps because it was based on the punk scene, Riot Grrrl is much angrier than was the second-wave feminism of the 1970s. Riot girls are loud and, through zines, music, and spoken word, express themselves honestly and straightforwardly. At a time in their lives when girls are taught to be silent, Riot girl. That sounds nice. Yeah, it's screaming feminism. I love it. I love that they had conventions. Yes.

And at the conventions, they had workshops. Yes. It's incredible. Yeah, it's amazing. And the workshops positioned, like, making music and making scenes. as a comparable form of empowerment to self-defense. Right? That it was this like... What we are doing is taking up space and insisting that we have a right to be in spaces. And how we do that is like both by seizing the means of production.

And by like literally learning how to like kick somebody in the nuts. So as like a microcosm of third wave feminism, Riot Grrrl has a lot of the same. aesthetics and political concerns of third wave feminism in general and a lot of the same problems. So like most mainstream feminist movements, despite The interest in intersectionality and the foundational role of Anita Hill and Rebecca Walker, both Black women. Third wave feminism skewed very white. And Riot Grrrl also.

skewed very white there's an excellent new wish podcast called starting a riot which is a history of the riot girl movement but from the perspective of people of color okay but cool strong strong recommend it's Great history. Very well done. Rosenberg and Groffalo describe Riot Grrrl in particular as focusing, quote, more on the individual and the emotional than on marches, legislation, and public policy, end quote.

So like Riot Grrrl is about empowering girls through equipping them with like concrete skills and almost more importantly, the confidence to deploy them. Right? So like... Zine making isn't about becoming good at making zines. Zine making is about believing that you have the right to take up space. Yes. that your perspective and your particular story and your particular voice matters. Yes. Just like the Riot Grrrl music movement wasn't necessarily about teaching girls to be...

good at playing the guitar, but rather teaching girls that they were also allowed to get up on stage and play guitar badly like men were doing all the time. Yes. So there's a lot of focus on... taking up space and seizing the means of production and insisting on the significance of your lived experience and insisting on your right to make noise and insisting on your right to be.

And to be publicly angry and messily angry, right? Insisting that there is stuff to be angry about. Yes. And we are allowed to be fucking furious about it in public. Yes.

Okay. That was a huge part of it. And that combination of DIY practices and female anger, for me, has a lot to do with witchcraft. Okay. Well, Hannah. I think it's time for a thesis. Okay. Okay. Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson star in Die My Love, a ferocious portrait of a woman engulfed by love and madness. Lawrence and Pattinson play a passionate couple who, after moving to an isolated house in the country, find their relationship unraveling following the birth of

of their first child. Vanity Fair hails Lawrence's performance as astonishing, and Time calls it the kind of performance you go to the movies for. From director Lynn Ramsey, Die My Love is only in theaters November 7th, rated R.

Okay, Hannah, I want to make zines and scream together. But first, I want to hear your thesis about witches making zines. Okay, here we go. 1996 cult classic film The Craft may have... baffled studio executives and film reviewers alike, but it quickly became a favorite with a certain generation of girls and young women coming of age in the 1990s amid the politically messy landscape of third-wave feminism.

A direct response to Anita Hill's 1991 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which she accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, Third wave feminism was characterized from the beginning by outspoken anger alongside an embrace of girl culture that was only sometimes ironic. Perhaps the subculture that most powerfully communicated this anger was Riot Grrrl.

a response to the male-dominated punk scene that used punk music and zine making as tools for girls' loud, messy self-expression. At the same time... The Riot Grrrl movement often failed to turn anger into direct political action. The ambivalence of this political moment is captured in the contentious public figure of Courtney Love and her kinder-whore aesthetic, think baby doll dresses and combat boots.

And, of course, in the ambivalent feminism of the craft itself. It's no mere speculation that Love's aesthetic inspired the craft. In HuffPost's oral history of the movie, director and co-screenwriter Andy Fleming, gay... says that Hole's album, Live Through This, was the soundtrack of his work on the script.

More than that, though, The Craft demonstrates third-wave feminism's deep messiness by portraying girls whose anger initially gives them power, but ultimately destroys them. In this essay...

I will argue that Hannah, you didn't even talk about zines. Yeah, I know. I know. I wrote the segue and then I wrote the thesis and there weren't zines in there, so no way of going back. But you see the DIY, right? I do. That like, in the context of the movie, it's significant that the craft is set at a Catholic school. Mm-hmm. And that Catholicism, like, they are not Satanists.

Catholicism is like the background patriarchal institution against which these girls are like, this has nothing to do with us. We're going to go find something. that gives us actual access to power, and it will be something that we make. Like witchcraft. It's a craft. The movie's called The Craft. It's about making crafts. It's literally about crafting, right? It's like, we go, we get some candles, and we stand in a circle, and we make something happen. And the middle of the movie...

is like the incredible experience these girls have of like we created a community together. We had the audacity to believe that we... had the right to access power, and we used that power to get the things that we want. And the things that they want are complicated because the things that they want are still... framed around their presence within a patriarchal structure, right? So, like, Rochelle wants the shitty racist white girl to suffer and...

curses her and makes her go bald. I do remember that scene too. Her hair just coming out in clumps. Yeah, where her hair starts coming out and she's like sobbing in the change room. And you watch her be like, oh. Maybe I don't feel super good about this. Mm-hmm. Right? But like Bonnie wants to not be covered in scars. Yeah. Like she wants to be hot. Yeah. Like they want to be hot.

and powerful and desired by the most popular boys in school, right? They want access to power, but their conception of what that power is. is still so profoundly framed by the sort of structure of girlhood that they live within. And by the forms of harm that they have experienced. Yes. What does... Nancy want. Because she's the angriest, right? She's the angriest, yeah. Yeah. Nancy wants power itself. And that is part of, I think, what makes her such a...

sort of beloved movie villain is that she is a teenage girl who is interested in power. Because we watch... the way in which she has been rendered powerless, right? There's part of the backstory of how she became this sort of goth outcast was that she was assaulted by the most popular boy at school. Yeah. who then like went around and told everybody. Right. Right. And this is also the way that.

they become friends with Sarah in the first place, is that she also goes on a date with the most popular boy in school, and when she won't put out, he just spreads the rumor that she slept with him. And so… Like, part of their original bonding is the experience of being, like, sexually harassed or assaulted or just having lies spread by the boys in their school.

We see Nancy at home in a very sort of insecure, unsafe environment, right? An abusive stepfather, a mother who is not paying attention. And what she wants... is to not be a victim anymore. What she wants is to be able to change whatever she wants to change. Like, she wants the power itself, right? And so... The others have a kind of, like, a specific desire. And I really do think it's the fact that, like, her desire is for power that, like, ultimately leads.

to her downfall, but is also what makes her such a sympathetic and appealing character. Because, like, I think for girls, the idea of... The audacity of wanting power in the first place. Not wanting to be pretty. Not wanting the boys to like you. Not wanting to succeed at your sport. Wanting power for power's sake.

We know it's not allowed. We know that we're not allowed to just want power. We know that that power is always supposed to be like, well, I don't want it. I want it to be in service of a thing. Right? The idea of just wanting it. We know it's bad. But when you have been powerless, when you have been powerless for your entire life, you can see the appeal.

Absolutely. What is this movie's perspective on feminism? If this movie teaches the girls watching it something about feminism, and if power is the thing that ultimately leads to their downfall, what is it teaching us? Yeah, I mean, part... of what contemporary critics took issue with is the fact that ultimately it's like about girls being mean to other girls. Right?

When Sarah realizes that Nancy is going too far, she attempts to bind her magic and the rest of the coven turns on Sarah. And the... final battle is between two different ideas of how power can be used. So on the one hand, we've got... sort of Nancy's ideal of like, power is there to be seized and turned to the ends that I want to turn it to. And then on the other hand, we've got Sarah representing...

Like a pretty sort of fundamental premise of Wicca, which is that anything that you put out, I mean, it's karma essentially, right? It's anything you put out into the world comes back on you. So it's this idea of sort of balance and... moderation and that power has to be used responsibly and in the service of maintaining balance.

And so you can kind of see that, like, insofar as it's making an argument about feminism, which I don't think it's doing particularly coherently. So it's a movie made entirely by men. So, you know, maybe not the most coherent theory about feminism. But I do think it's making an argument about power. Okay. And it's making an argument about power in the hands of girls. And it's making a very...

popular argument about power in the hands of girls and women, which is that if we had the power that men have, we would abuse it in exactly the same way. Which you see a lot in.

These kind of imagined reversal narratives. And what do you think about that, Hannah? I don't fucking know. Are you the type who believes that power ultimately corrupts? Yeah, yeah. I am. And I believe that seeking power for its own sake is always very dangerous. And I think that in the history of feminism... White women using feminism as an opportunity to seek power for its own sake has only led to the perpetuating of greater harms. Like, I think this is why we see this pattern.

White women are historically huge opportunists and will sort of take what the available means are to get access to power. And I think we see right now, like... yet another reminder, as though we needed another one, how many white women will side with fascism if that's the thing that gives us access to power. And so it's like, women having power is not...

inherently good. Wow, you're on record. You know, it makes me think of a conversation that I had with my friend Kay about which one was our favorite. right? Sorry, in what context? Like, which political right is your favorite right? And...

Like, which one was the most important for women? And she was like, I'm going to say voting. Like, I think that that's the most important. And I was like, I'm going to say abortion because I think that women vote against abortion all the time. And so we can't be trusted. And it's a ridiculous thought experiment, right? Because in no world are women being asked to choose one right. And neither Kay nor I would ever be on the side that like one right is inherently more important.

that like it's part of what we require as a society for everybody to like live and thrive is a society where everybody has.

equal access to rights and safety and security and healthcare and housing and all of those things. Yeah. I would say that I think your argument's more evidence-based because when women have... reproductive freedom, including, you know, safe and legal abortion, but also just access to family planning and access to contraceptives, that the trickle-down effect of that in terms of like...

reduced poverty rates, increased literacy rates. Like, it's so good across the board. It's such a massive sort of shift in like overall levels of equity and human well-being. to just ensure that women have bodily autonomy, particularly when it comes to reproduction. Huge. Absolutely huge for us. Huge. Huge.

Yeah, yeah. Huge for us, huge for children, huge for all of society. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's part of why third wave feminism both like... I see its failures. I see the way, for example, it was like primarily ended up being a cultural feminist movement. Yeah. And cultural feminism. is based on the premise that the culture can get us on board with the ideals and then we will use them to do politics.

And what I see is a generation of women who don't know how to do politics. Like, who don't know how to organize an action. Who don't know how to translate their... beliefs into material change, right? So it's like that line doesn't always cross as nicely as we would like it to or like to imagine that it would. And, you know, like, girls rule feminism. I think we all sort of got a real good taste of how far that actually gets us in terms of our human rights. And the answer is not that.

far not that far yeah but the right to be fucking furious and the premise that that is not contradictory to a political movement, right? That it's not like, well, you're not doing feminism any favors by being angry about it. Yeah. Or I just can't take your demand seriously because you're so emotional. If you used fewer swear words, maybe I'd be able to understand you better. I just think that you would have a much more enjoyable life if you just like weren't so angry all the time. Hey, baby.

Why don't you smile a little? All shit that men have said to me. Men in my life who have suggested that I could stand to be less angry. Yeah. Or have said, like, have you noticed this person? She always just has a glow to her. You know? I also have a glow to me. That glow is rage. That glow is my incandescent rage. Like that is still so important to me. The right to be angry, the right to take up space, the right to be loud about it. Yeah. The right to take up tools and change.

the circumstances you are living within in ways that might be messy and ugly and imperfect. But like... Too fucking bad. Everything's messy and ugly and imperfect. Yeah. Why does my movement need to have a perfect theory of how to make the world better? I think it's because whenever a marginalized group attempts to have a coordinated organized movement, white people with power, usually men, will tend to expect a much higher threshold of perfection.

You know, just like how no matter what the group is that's trying to like claim a little bit of power, we are always being asked to reach a higher threshold than the mediocrity that we're constantly consuming all the time. Yep. Yep. Because if you want to change things, you have to be able to demonstrate that what you're changing will be better than how things are right now. Yeah. And I don't know, guys.

That kind of passive inertia hasn't gotten us anywhere good. No, no. Can we talk just sort of briefly about the idea of waves? Yeah, absolutely. Like, contrary to what we said at the outset of this episode, it's actually not something that we really talk about very often. And you are right that there are scholars who are quite dismissive of the concept of waves, and I don't think that that's unreasonable. But I also at the same time think that it is really helpful.

to have a concept of waves when we're thinking about a large-scale movement that has major shifts over time. Yeah, I think the language of waves is useful. in the sense that it helps us distinguish different major feminist movements across history. And to see that, like, feminism's not actually a sort of... single unified thing but like has taken different forms at different moments and has been useful for understanding how like feminism is

almost always responding to feminism itself. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah. So it's like picking up and sort of responding to the movements that came before. I think the downside of thinking in waves is that it... creates an idea of isolated movements rather than seeing that they actually overlap with each other. I mean, that is how waves work. That is how, I mean, it's ironic that. That is in fact what waves are like.

But I also think after the third wave, any attempt to name waves starts to fall apart really quickly. And that's because starting in the 1990s, feminism becomes... It's like the waves are moving too rapidly to distinguish them now. Yeah. Pulling off and becoming these sort of subcultures and evolving really differently in different cultural contexts and different political contexts.

So what we end up with is something much more like a kind of... Tapestry? Yeah, a network, a tapestry, a whole bunch of different nodes operating in different temporalities and with different relations to each other and not like... a single coherent like suffrage. Yeah. Next up. Some civil rights, please. I saw a clip on Instagram recently where two straight white men were finding out for the first time that in the U.S., women could only get credit cards for themselves in 1975.

And these men just being like, what? What? It's like, yeah, what do you think we're mad about? Like, it's so funny, but at the same time. I feel like my students now are like, well, that was ages ago. That was in the previous century. That's a hundred years ago. All right. Well, you're right. I know. I know. I know. You're right. Great point. It's been 50 years. That's basically 100 lifetimes. That was in like the mid-late 1900s. Nobody's ever lived to be 50 years old, so this isn't relevant.

Time. And that's girl culture. Material Girls is a Witch Please production and is distributed by Acast. If we've successfully enchanted you with this episode, why don't you check out our website, ohwitchplease.ca, where you can find past episodes, transcripts, reading lists, and merch. as well as our other two shows, Gender Playground, a podcast about gender-affirming care for kids, and Making Worlds, a video podcast about sci-fi, fantasy, and the radical power of imagining otherwise.

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Our show is produced by Hannah Rehack, a.k.a. Coach. Thanks to the whole Witch Please Productions coven. Gabby Iori. Zoe Mix. Malika Gumpankum and Ruth Ormiston. And of course, thank you to Auto Syndicate for the use of our theme song, Shopping Mall. At the end of every episode, we will thank all of our new Patreon Coven members and every member who has boosted their tier. We would never use our witchcraft against you. We promise.

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Later, witches. Screaming. Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson star in Die My Love, a ferocious portrait of a woman engulfed by love and madness. Lawrence and Pattinson play a passionate couple who, after moving to an isolated house in the country, find their relationship unraveling following the birth of

of their first child. Vanity Fair hails Lawrence's performance as astonishing, and Time calls it the kind of performance you go to the movies for. From director Lynn Ramsey, Die My Love is only in theaters November 7th, rated R.