FILM REVIEW - "SEASON OF THE WITCH" aka "JACK'S WIFE" (dir. George A. Romero - 1972)
Just in time for Halloween... I watched one of the lesser-known films from George Romero's oeuvre known variously as Season of the Witch, Jack's Wife or (best of all) Hungry Wives. I'm a fan of Romero's zombie films, for the outrageous gore and for the evolving social commentary that reflected the decades they were made in, so I was curious to see some of his earlier, more obscure work. Night of the Living Dead may be one of the most history-securing first films ever made - the Citizen Kane of zombie films - and surely for Romero it must have felt hard to top, since its success was largely serendipitous (a film whose subversive style and content was informed in part by its small budget). In fact, most of Romero's other films did not share Night's box-office success. Jack's Wife floats somewhere in that era of films made between Night and Dawn of the Dead, before he would become more widely recognized as an auteur, and/or as a commercial filmmaker. (Romero directed seven features before landing a deal to make Creepshow with a major Hollywood studio.)
Perhaps it is because of the success of Night that Romero was anxious about being pigeon-holed as a horror film director. One of the most interesting things about Jack's Wife is how it flirts with the horror genre without totally fulfilling on the thrills and chills of a horror movie. It employs a creepy soundtrack and shadowy imagery to tell the story of an ordinary housewife, trapped in a rigid suburban lifestyle. In tone it is similar to Romero's later film Martin, although the conventional shadows and spiderwebs seem to find their way even less into this film. Both films deal with a supernatural archetype, the witch and the vampire respectively, and tell their stories in contemporary settings where fangs are replaced by syringes and cabals are replaced by bridge parties. The same way Martin makes you doubt whether its main character is really a vampire or just a disturbed teenager, Jack's Wife delves much deeper into the anxieties and neuroses of suburban home-keepers than it does into the occult. I actually noticed that nearly an hour had passed until I finally saw the main character, Joan, crack open a book of spells. I was not frustrated by this genre subversion, but I imagine this did not help the film to find an audience. Supplemental content on the DVD explains that the film's distributor (the legendary pulp-king Jack Harris) had no idea how to market the movie, finally opting for a soft-core exploitation approach - a kind of early 70's forbear of the current TV hit "Desperate Housewives." It is easy to see why the distributor thought this would be the best way to go, since the film brims with sexual frustration. However, other than some minor nudity and sexual suggestiveness, there is not enough pay-off for potential audiences of a sexploitation flick.
The film's genre subversion begins with the opening titles - a strange dream sequence accompanied by eerie sound effects. 
The dream imagery is rife with symbolism, which along with the hair and costumes, refers strongly to the film's early 70's time period, when filmmakers, writers and students all freely quoted from the theories of Freud and Jung. The dream depicts a woman (our main character, Joan) following a suited man (her husband) through a forest of bare trees. He is oblivious to her, parting dead branches for himself and letting them slam backwards into her face. She subserviently fixes his coffee for him, which he takes without acknowledgment, and watches as he bites a hard-boiled egg. The dream communicates the woman's isolation vividly. The sequence is starkly expressionistic, recalling not specific films to my mind, but a familiar catalog of scary images from old black-and-white creature-features. (It's unfortunate to note here that the master this DVD was made from is horribly faded. Perhaps it is the de-saturated look of the print in addition to the autumnal setting that suggests a black-and-white palette. Mysteriously this version is also letter-boxed. The film was shot on 16mm and framed for 1.33.)
The dream sequence continues past the opening credits (of which there are three versions on the DVD - for each of the three attempts at marketing the film) to show Joan's husband slapping her in the face with a newspaper and then leading her to a large suburban home on a leash, where she is placed in a cage.
A clearly satiric tone begins to be established, remniscent of "The Stepford Wives," as Joan is given a tour of her home by a salesman-ish figure with a clipboard. Many faces are introduced that will later reappear in her waking life as significant characters and the tour showcases not just the rooms and the appliances but the "errand boy" (Greg, a local college professor with whom she later forms an adulterous relationship) and "the ladies" (the neighborhood gossip circle). "Don't forget to pay your bills," the man with the clipboard advises with a smile as a shriveled mummified-looking version of Joan stares back at her from the mirror.
As the dream ends, the film moves into the comfort of an advising psychoanalyst's office. Although the setting is meant to convey a sense of trust, the doctor's face is recognizable from the dream as one of Joan's captors. During this short scene, I noticed Joan had not yet uttered a single word of dialogue. The visual ideas of Joan's oppressed, silenced, and isolated state were accentuated by the absence of her own voice. However, despite the narrative's attempt to cast suspicion on the doctor, he reasons with Joan. "The only person imprisoning Joanie is Joanie," he advises. As viewers we are thus made distrustful of which narrative to believe - whether to sympathize with our protagonist's psychological perspective or believe the omniscient perspective of "realism" that we are being introduced to.
Witchcraft is introduced during conversation among wives at a cocktail party. Shirley, a neighborhood wife, begins to gossip that another neighbor, Marion, is a self-proclaimed witch. "Isn't that wild? I've got my next party all planned." The women giggle over visions of one of their own dancing naked and casting spells. However, curiosity has hooked Joan and her friend Shirley into paying the witch a visit. 
The scene in Marion's house does not have much menace to it, aside from some mildly creepy organ music on the soundtrack. Marion's den is adorned in the same shag carpeting as the other suburban interiors we've seen. The truth is, their witchy neighbor is nothing more than mildly kooky - a notion that Romero reinforces with the humorous sound effect of a chiming cuckoo clock. She comes off as more of a spiritual advisor, a consejera, offering a Tarot reading to Shirley which is less a prophecy of the future than an observation that "romantic love has failed," a verdict applicable to most of the neighborhood women. Shirley seems fascinated by the reading.
As it happens, the visit to the witch's house is framed by two rather revealing conversations between Shirley and Joan; the first in which Joan wonders aloud how many dissatisfied women actually commit adultery (to Shirley's shock), and the second, during their return, where Shirley reveals she has herself had a failed affair, and she seems emotionally worse for wear because of it.
The two women's views towards extramarital affairs and witchcraft differ in similar ways. Shirley is amused with witchcraft, viewing it as a kind of "therapy" or diversion, less dangerous than that which she has already tried. Joan is disgusted that it could be widely adopted by bored, dilettante housewives. "Sex without love" is a philosophical divide that separates Joan and Shirley. Deeply dissatisfied with her life, such that it plagues her subconsciousness, Joan takes the idea of a coven of women bonded and empowered by magic seriously.
Although minor characters, Joan's relationships to her family (husband Jack and daughter Nicki) provide valuable insights into her psychology. Nicki is a young adult, perhaps 18 - 20. She is old enough that her father Jack's idea of parenting her has dwindled to off-handedly advising her to "Try to stay a virgin," as he rips off his tie and storms through the house to prepare for the evening's cocktail party. The truth is that Jack, true to his depiction in Joan's dream, is minimally invested in his family's well-being. He sees it as his job to step forward only when he feels that Joan is somehow inadequate. When Jack discovers Nicki has had sex in the house while Joan was present, he places full responsibility on Joan, slapping her and proclaiming that more effective parenting could be enacted by "[-]kicking ass." It is the first time, outside of Joan's dreams, that we see Jack hit her, but the cumulative impression is that it may be a habit.
Joan's relationship with her husband is typified in dreams and waking life with his back turned toward her, or...
...his hand turned toward her.
In one conversation with Nicki, it is revealed that Joan suffered a miscarriage before Nicki's conception. This idea of a "lost child" resonates when Nicki herself runs away from home. It comes after Nicki discovers Joan has overheard her having sex with Greg and suggests that the bond between mother and daughter is strained by generational differences in attitude towards sex, drugs and lifestyle in general. In one exchange, she tells her mom, "You have a nice body." It illuminates her own sexual awareness and makes Joan self-conscious yet flattered, despite her anxiety regarding aging. It is also one of the first overt references the film makes to a woman's sexuality as a source of power.
The character of Greg becomes the largest male figure looming in Joan's life because he represents a freedom from the responsibilities that imprison her. On first meeting, he tricks Shirley into thinking she has smoked pot, which starts off as an innocent prank, or experiment in the "power of the mind." Shirley appears tragi-comic as she feigns intoxication, desperate in her bid to take part in something taboo. But the joke turns into an emotional psychoanalysis session in which Shirley, in a semi-hysterical state, confesses her deepest anxieties about growing old. This cruel experiment reveals Greg's underlying egocentrism, an aggressive confidence in his worldview, which Joan sees and disapproves of.
When Joan returns from escorting Shirley home and overhears Nicki and Greg having sex, she is unsure of how to respond. She tiptoes into her room and thrashes about as the sound of thunder and flashes of lighting are used to accentuate her frustration. It is a mildly comical editing device which re-focuses the sights and sounds of horror's "dark and stormy night" on the sexual frustrations of a woman in her 40's.
Nicki discovers Joan has been listening.
As Jack heads off for another business trip, Joan decides to visit Greg's classroom, although she again feels shocked and ashamed when exposed to his candor regarding sex. He mocks her unapologetically for coming onto his turf with a feigned aura of naivete. She leaves in a huff, but is unable to turn away from her own needs as easily. Perhaps it is Joan's shame, or morals, that separate her from women like Shirley, who would not agonize over a decision like whether to have an affair. Greg tells her freely, "I'm available." But Joan cannot concede to a cocky, arrogant kid.
Still, Greg charms her. He contains danger and bravado, but he is like Joan and her neighbors, a product of suburbia. He is clean-cut enough to play the role of Nicki's college boyfriend and dangerous enough to be tempting to Joan. Jack's Wife was made 5 years after the Graduate, but Joan bears no resemblance to Mrs. Robinson, nor Greg to Benjamin other than in the incestuous love triangle that develops. If anything, there's almost a reversal of the roles of The Graduate, where Joan is the one seeking some kind of life fulfillment that neither sex nor stability can provide.
It is her need to feel in control that draws her to witchcraft. She commits herself to the practice in the hope that it will reward her piety with power. Joan has not just been at the mercy of men, but of the changing values of society in general. Having achieved the highest ideal of her upbringing, Joan finds herself feeling unrewarded and out of place with the changing social mores sweeping through the culture.
When Joan finally employs the power of the occult to lure Greg into her charms, nothing actually happens. She sits before her candles, waiting for him to arrive in some kind of love-spell stupor, until finally giving in to more practical means. Modern technology, in the form of the telephone, proves a more reliable method of bringing Greg to her husbandless house. While they are together, Greg cautions Joan to understand what is happening. But it becomes increasingly apparent, as Joan returns to visit Marion, that she is losing touch with reality.
Romero's Mrs. Robinson.
"I've caused things to happen," she says, believing that her witchcraft, and not her local phone carrier, was the method by which she contacted Greg. "Fear is necessary to believe," the witch tells Joan. And Joan is hounded by fear. It is her loneliness turned into insecurity, which gradually becomes paranoia. Her nightmares evolve to depict her trapped in her house while an intruder breaks in. The intruder could be seen variously as Greg's confident and threatening sexuality, or her flirtation with the unknown power of witchcraft - for even though witchcraft is her tool of control, it also represents her breaking away from her traditional code of values. Ironically, as the fear within her builds, she confesses her practice of magic to Greg, who begins to see echoes of Shirley in Joan. To him she is another tragic unloved housewife, driven mad by her neurotic inability to accept responsibility for her desires.
In the film's climax, Jack returns at night from a business trip and meets his fate at the wrong end of a shotgun as he comes through the door. Joan's nightmares of an intruder have fatally taken shape in reality, as she plunges into her occult-inspired fantasy of free-will. Jack's death is inter-cut with Joan being ceremoniously inducted into a coven of witches. The final scene brings the film full-circle to yet another cocktail party where Joan is the subject of gossip. "It was terrible when it happened... but now I must admit I'm just a bit envious," chats one wife to another. The comments that echo throughout the party clash with those of the police officers heard over the preceding images of Jack's death. "Whether she's lying or not, she'll get away with it. Goddamn women get it all from us in the end. They get everything." In a grand guignol fait accompli worthy of Roald Dahl, Joan has emerged victorious, conquering her nightmares, overcoming her oppression, seemingly defying even age itself. "I can't get over how young you look," she is told by another admiring housewife.
Although it all wraps up rather pat, I can willingly excuse whatever narrative gaps Romero may have left in the superficial elements of the plotting for the stylistic and thematic tidbits he has stewed together (whatever did happen to daughter Nicki?). As I have maintained, although this film uses the language of the horror genre, its true subject matter is harder to classify. The NY Times described it as a Psychological Drama/Feminist Film, but I have mulled over whether it can truly be defined as "feminist." Certainly having a female protagonist is enough to make it uncommon amongst most American narrative films, and the voice of all of the female characters consistently speak toward their dissatisfaction in the traditional married wife roles. However, this is a film made by a man which still contains the fears and insecurities of men toward women. Therefore is it feminist or, like Fellini's Città Delle Donne, is it about fear of feminism? Romero's original title for the film was Jack's Wife, which I appreciate for its irony, since it is consistent with Joan's conflict of being identified only by her social status. Although Jack's wife's assertion of her own identity involves murdering her husband, women after the feminist era have not found the Y-chromosome irrelevant. However, to males encountering radical feminism for the first time in the early 1970s it must have seemed they would. With all of the turmoil on the streets from the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam war protests, and the assassinations of prominent leaders, the prospect of unrest within the home, and within the bedroom, must have seemed like the stuff of nightmares indeed.
Although Romero himself has claimed that this film was a failure, I would recommend it. It may not be his finest hour, but it stands in the shadows of his more famous "Dead" series as a clever overlooked gem with good ideas and moments that are more reminiscent of Cassavetes' Faces than some of Romero's later (and lesser) work in the horror genre.
