“The Witches of Eastwick”: The Agony of Straight-Washed Witchy Cinema
On Halloween, we make martinis and CAVORT around in silk PJs to John Williams!
The Witches of Eastwick is, hands-down, my all-time favorite novel. I first encountered it when I was 18. I was spending New Years in Boston with my best friend, and noticed a paperback copy on the bookshelf in her dad’s study where I was sleeping that week. I was familiar with the film, having rented it in high school during my post-The Craft witchy phase, but had more or less rejected it as NOT WITCHY ENOUGH: not enough actual, practical spellcraft, literal intentional witchery, etc.! But I hadn’t realized until then that it was based on a novel by John Updike, a name I vaguely recognized as a BIG IMPORTANT LITERARY MAN.
When I finally got around to reading it a few years later, I was surprised to find that, unlike the movie, the book was full of literal witchcraft! The characters all self-identified as witches from the start and were an actual coven and cast little spells and everything!
This kind of jumpstarted my second witchy phase, which was more about, like, aesthetics and vibe than any spiritual or metaphysical beliefs or whatever, and in the years since, I’ve either re-read or listened to Kate Reading’s absolutely flawless audiobook recording of The Witches of Eastwick and its 2008 sequel The Widows of Eastwick dozens of times. It contains some of the most evocative, clever writing I’ve ever read. Lines like: “Always, coming here, night or day, she expected to meet the momentous someone who was, she realized, herself, herself unadorned and untrammelled, forgiven and nude, erect and perfect in weight and open to any courteous offer: the beautiful stranger, her secret self.” Or: “The margarita and marijuana mixing their absolving poisons in the sensitive hungry black realm beneath her skin.” Or: “Sukie’s body in her hands seemed silk, seemed heavy slick fruit, Alexandra so dissolved in melancholy triumphant affectionate feelings there was no telling the difference between caresses given and caresses received.”
Also, it’s…kind of queer? I mean, insofar as a novel written by a straight, misogynistic, homophobic author can be, which I guess, strictly speaking, is not at all. I tried to address all that in this piece I wrote last year.
Of course, director George Miller’s 1987 film adaptation, which we are revisiting today because it is Spooky Witchy Season, contains exactly zero of the novel’s...ostensible queerness. And that’s just one of the many, many significant changes, which I’m probably going to note throughout. (Also, sidebar: George Miller! Director of Mad Max, Babe: Pig in the City, and Happy Feet!? Truly, people contain multitudes!)
We open on an aerial shot of picturesque Eastwick. Has this same coastal town been used in establishing shots in a bazillion movies? Probably! Also, this John Williams score unequivocally slaps, as the kids say. Like, definitely you should play it while dancing around a fire naked in the woods under a full moon with your friends while the devil plays the fiddle or whatever!
In Eastwick, there live three single ladies who are just trying to have it all. They are Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Cher lives in an old watermill shack and makes millions of little copies of the Venus of Willendorf. That’s her whole job! What was the economy in 1980s??? Meanwhile, Susan Sarandon is a music teacher whose whole thing is she’s a scared little mousy schoolmarm with glasses who gets constantly sexually harassed by her gross boss; and Michelle Pfeiffer is a reporter with a billion blond kids who all look like Village of the Damned. They are single because Cher’s husband died, SS’s divorced her for being BARREN, and MP’s just up and ran off I guess? Why isn’t she also divorced? I guess with so many demon spawn running around, who has the time? (In the book, all three are divorced and they all have kids, and they’re bad, neglectful moms because I guess that’s what John Updike thinks feminism is all about. Oh, also in the book it is the early mid-70s, but not in the movie.)
One day, all three of them are at this boring ass outdoor snoozefest school assembly for some reason—I guess because it’s a small town and there is fuck all else to do—where SS’s gross boss is giving an endless neocon speech about Make America Olde Times Againe, and it is soooooo boooooooring! Everyone is yawing and going braindead! But then just when it seems like they’re all going to pass away due to Regan-era conservatism, a thunderstorm just comes out of nowhere! It’s like, Hey! Where did all this raining come from it was just sunshining Morning in America two seconds ago!!! Could it be…EVIL FEMINIST MAGIIIIIIICCCCC??? Or just climate change-induced unpredictable weather? Of course, everyone is too busy running away to consider any of that.
But then, that night, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer are over at the Cher shack having martinis and Cheez-Whiz, and they’re all like, “We were all thinking about how boring that speech was at the same time!” And Michelle Pfeiffer is like, “Isn’t that weird?!?” LOLzzzz! No, hon, literally everyone was thinking that! So maybe the whole town is a witch?
Several martinis later, Cher is still so bored! She’s like, “We are all in a rut of sexless boredom! We should invent a man!” (Book Note Number The First: in the novel, these ladies fuck. Like, apparently according to John Updike, part of being a witch is sleeping with lots of married men.) So, they all start talking about how they wish a mysterious, dark, handsome stranger with a huge or also maybe not so huge boner would show up in town, and they toast their martinis and lightning crashes BECAUSE THEY’RE CONJURING WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING IT!
All the while, a mysterious car is driving up to a big mysterious mansion bearing a mysterious stranger… So mysterious!
Back at Cher’s, Michelle Pfeiffer is like, “Actually, I don’t think men are the answer to everything.” And Susan Sarandon is like, “Bernie Sanders is. Then why do we always end up talking about them?” And what few people realize is, that is the exact moment Alison Bechdel was conceived!
The next day, MP calls up Cher from her newspaper office to tell her that someone has bought the Big Haunted Mansion at the edge of town. AND IT’S A MAN! With no wife! But lots of pianos? Is it Elton John? Barry Manilow? We don’t know, because spooky Sukie (aka Michelle Pfeiffer) cannot remember his name! Then Cher is like, “Is that your boss Clyde and his wife Felicia walking in?” And that is spooky also, because THEY HAVEN’T EVEN WALKED IN YET! See how psychic and witchy Cher is already! So, then MP has to hang up and tell Clyde all about the mansion-buying mystery man, which freaks Felicia out so much she drops the flowers and massive pot of honey she is inexplicably carrying. (What was she planning to do with those, we ask ourselves.) Anyway, Felicia is all DISTURBED about the mansion and is convinced something evil is afoot!
Elsewhere, the olde broad who runs the Ye Olde Timey Gift Shoppe that sells Cher’s Willendorfs is like, “A mysterious man came in and bought every single one of your naked lady dolls! Also, he made me super horny and I CAN’T REMEMBER HIS NAME EITHER!”
No one can! So OMINOUS!
Later, the whole town is at a recital where Susan Sarandon is sawing away at her cello like a good girl, when suddenly everyone starts hearing hideous noises from the back of the auditorium. It is Jack Nicholson, whose name everyone still can’t remember, snoring like a depraved beast. He sounds so unwell! That man needs one of those sleep apnea mask things or he will surely die! Anyway, SS and her musical pals finish their fiddling and everyone claps, which wakes Jack Nicholson up, so he makes a big production of clapping the loudest of all and crying “BRAVEEEEEEEEEESSSSE!” at SS.
Afterward, I guess Jackie Boy fucks off, because he’s nowhere to be found when everyone is still milling about trying to remember his name. Then, all of a sudden, they all remember it all at once! DARYL VAN HORNE! The evilest sounding name you ever did hear! So evil, in fact, that the mere mention of it makes Michelle Pfeiffer’s pearl necklace break, and pearls go scattering everywhere and Felicia slips on them and goes tumbling down the stairs, breaking her leg horribly! WITCHCRAFT!
The next day, poor Cher is still so bored and also can’t stop thinking about Devil Von Hornyman, so she bikes on over to have look at his house. And there he is, inviting her to lunch and trying to SEDUCE her. See, Daryl’s whole thing is mansplaining…uh…second wave white feminism (???) and gender essentialism to ladies. He’s constantly like, “There are two genders, and they are 1) women, which are beautiful sexy awesome sauce, and 2) sucktown loserville bad news, i.e. MEN, and there’s nothing anyone can ever do about any of that, obviously, because NATURE / Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, etc., but I’m a #MaleFeminist so have sex with me now.” And it works! Largely, I assume, due to how bored Cher is.
So, then Daryl moves on to poor sweet chaste bespectacled Susan Sarandon. He shows up at her house one day and freaks her out with his insatiable appetite for sugar. Then he makes her play her cello so hard it bursts into flames along with her loins! They also have straight sex, which transforms SS from a meek little nerd into a big-haired, glutinous sex-pot.
While all that seducing is going on, Felicia is fully losing her mind in the hospital, ranting about evil while Clyde tries to shut her up by shoveling gruel into her mouth. Her doctor is like, “Oh, don’t worry, this is totally normal! People who break their legs get bone marrow in their brain and go crazy all the time!” Pardon me? Is that…science? That can’t be right! Get this poor deranged woman a different doctor!
Anyway, now it is Michelle Pfeiffer’s turn to be SEDUCED! She and Cher head over to Daryl’s haunted sex mansion one day to play tennis, and Cher is just tickled to death for her friends to meet her new gross rich boyfriend. But when they get there, they are confronted with the new and improved (?) Susan Sarandon being all sultry and acting like she basically owns the place because she too is getting that Van Horne. This pisses Cher off because I guess she thought she and Daryl were doing monogamy. So, all three of our Strong Female Leads are like, “You are a giant lecherous man pig and we are leaving directly, goodbye forever, sir!”
Psych! That is not at all what happens! Instead, Cher and SS start sniping at each other, because witches be catty or whatever, until they realize that Daryl is now ignoring them both and drooling all over Michelle Pfeiffer. So, then they all go play tennis, which in this instance appears to be a sport in which you try to grievously injure your enemies by whacking fuzzy orange balls at them. They’re all being so pissy and aggressive that I guess their undiagnosed magical powers start making the ball just kind of hover in the air and then float around inexplicably slowly and then zoom around too fast, and it’s all chaos until finally the ball flies up into the air and causes another thunderstorm. That’s their specialty! When in doubt, start a thunderstorm!
“Maleficia!” Daryl cries, which is Latin for #MaleFeminist, and they all run into the mansion for a dip in the opulent indoor pool, where Daryl does his whole spiel on Michelle Pfeiffer and they have sexy time underwater.
Now Daryl’s sex cult is complete, and they all have a big party with millions of pink balloons and rock out to “Nessun dorma” blasting from a very 1980s boom box. Oh, the glamor! Also, Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer’s kids are there briefly, which, like, I’m the last person to be all judgmental about nontraditional familial arrangements, but I do kinda feel like a sex cult situation is not a great environment for kids. Luckily, the kiddos kinda just disappear right before Daryl starts making out with all his sister wives and spinning them around on some wheely cart thing. Then he sends SS careening off towards the pool. She flies off the cart and is just hanging from the chandelier and everyone starts laughing, which is how Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon learn that if they laugh and think happy thoughts they can fly. WITCHY! But then Daryl’s butler rings a bell for no reason and they all fall into the pool.
Later, the three of them are lounging around in bathrobes talking about their fears or whatever while Daryl films them on a giant 1980s camcorder, which seems totally fine and normal. Your creepy polygamist boyfriend wants to film you in literally any context? What could go wrong!
(Note: still no actual spells! WTF!? By roughly this point in the book, the various characters have already: made a wooden spoon crawl around the floor, read each other’s minds constantly, made an old lady’s shoelaces come undone, been super judgmental about other people’s auras, turned a wineglass into a rose, cast a love spell, actively conjured a thunderstorm, turned a tennis ball into a toad, etc. Also, they’re having full-on orgies where the witches fool around with each other plus Daryl, not just doing it with him individually on their own time. Aren’t you bummed that we don’t get to see Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer so much as make out with each other!? What a crime against LGBTQ+ culture, cinema, humanity, etc.!)
Ok, so while our heterosexually satanic foursome is living it up, Felicia is still having a huge bummer of a time with her broken-leg-induced dementia or whatever. For some reason they let her out of the hospital, so now she’s free to go to church and start screaming “Whores! WHORES!” At everyone out of nowhere.
Everyone in church is like, “Whores? Tell us more…” And Felicia does! “CAVORTING! DILDOES! SPANISH FLIES! ANAL INTERCORSE!” she croaks at the top of her lungs! And then Clyde starts dragging her out of there before she can rattle off any more of his PornHub search history. (Who doesn’t love a good cavorting video! Also, LOL. Spanish flies???)
Outside, Felicia is like, “Oh hang on, Clyde! Michelle Pfeiffer is your employee!” And Clyde is like, “Yeah, well, what my employees do in the privacy of their cult leader’s mansion is none of my business…” But Felicia will have none of that! “Somebody has to slut-shame these hussies into submission!” she threatens, and hobbles off on her crutches.
Elsewhere, Susan Sarandon is just now realizing that she might be a terrible music teacher because her students can’t play for shit. They’re like, “BWAAAH bwah BWAAAAAHH bwahhh BWAAAH BWAHHH BWWWAAAHHH bwwahh BWWWWAAAAAAHHHH,” which as you can tell is Beethoven (?), but terrible. So, she decides to…I guess magic them into being good at music? Is this spell? Unclear! Are they all child prodigies now forever? Also unclear! Anyway, they’re all having the time of their little lives playing their adorable precious hearts out, when that skeevy principal who was sexually harassing SS earlier peeks in and gets so scared by their brilliant new musical abilities that he runs away as fast as his dumb legs can carry him dumbly. Like, you’d think he saw them all spewing bile from their possessed mouths and murdering each other with their tubas, but no! It was just this:
After work, SS goes to the grocery store, and is just stuffing her face with everything, because now she’s a SENSUAL epicurean libertine just like Daryl! And all the other ladies (they are all ladies because groceries are women’s work, zero men in this scene) are APPALLED! I mean, her behavior and whole persona now are kinda annoying, but also they’re like, “You big slut!” Which is uncalled for! Also, SS picks up a copy of the newspaper and there’s a big front-page above the fold exposé about how she and her friends are in a sex cult. FRONT PAGE NEWS in this town!
Meanwhile, Michelle Pfeiffer is also royally pissed about the story PRINTED IN THE PAPER SHE LITERALLY WORKS FOR BY HER BOSS. She’s like, “Clyde, this is libel and I will be suing you.” And he’s like, “Well, you’re fired for your private consensual sexual activity,” which was probably legal in the 80s. But then he gets all sad because of how Felicia is going crazy, which is real stressful for him, and MP feels bad for him.
So that night at Daryl’s (the dress code was apparently big hair and shoulder pads), she’s like, “Gang, maybe we better tone it down.” Susan Sarandon is like “NOOOOO!” because being in a sex cult is her whole identity now and she CANNOT go back to being a frigid bespectacled vegan and there’s no way she’s ever getting that hair back into her old good-girl tight braid again.
Luckily, Daryl has a solution: eat some cherries.
Huh? Cherries? YES! CHERRIES! They are so good for you! But very bad for Felicia, because it turns out, due to MAGIC, every time our gals eat cherries, Felicia barfs them up! (Is this a spell? Or curse? It is super unclear whether the “witches” even know what they’re doing. I RESENT HOW PASSIVE THEY ALWAYS ARE IN THEIR SORCERY!)
So, over at Clyde and Felicia’s conservative house, Felicia is being super weird and creepy and then starts spewing cherry barf everywhere, which is the last straw for poor, sad, henpecked, put-upon Clyde. And he just straight up murders her with a fire poker.
Ok, here is where I assume George Miller or whoever just stopped reading the book, because the whole rest of the movie is completely different. In the book, Clyde and Felicia’s adult son and daughter come to town following their parents’ murder/suicide, and Daryl and the gang bring them into the fold, which causes PROBLEMS! Daryl up and marries the daughter, so the witches get mad and put a curse on her and she dies of cancer. And THEN, Daryl runs off with the son to be gay butt buddies! Defeated by homosexuality, the witches all give up feminism, conjure husbands for themselves, and leave Eastwick as well, never to return until the sequel in 2008. Obviously, none of that gay stuff happens in the movie. Instead we get all of this:
The next day, Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon are watching the police take away Felicia’s body, and they are super disturbed by what they hath wrought! MP is like, “We make things happen!” But Cher is all in denial about being a closeted witch, and Susan Sarandon just wants more Daryl dong, so they all start fighting, and then the ground beneath their feet starts to rumble and crack, and they get freaked out and all run away screaming.
Then for the next few days, they all try to ghost Daryl. He calls up Cher and she’s like, “New phone, who dis?” Then he shows up creepily in the rain at Michelle Pfeiffer’s house and she’s like, “I am getting a restraining order.”
He also goes to Susan Sarandon’s, but she’s not there because she is at the doctor (not the one who diagnosed Felicia with bone marrow brain, thank god). It turns out she’s preggo! Daryl’s demon sperms have defeated her barrenness, and she’s so thrilled she runs right over to Toad Hall to tell him he’s fathered an antichrist super pooper. But when she gets there, she finds him watching that video he creepily made of them all talking about how they are a-sceered of things and using his evil magic powers to make their worstest fears come true! In SS’s case, that is turning into an old lady! UUUUGGHHH! WHAT COULD POSSIBLY IN ALL THE WORLD BE MORE HORRIFYING THAN THAT?!
So, she flees the mansion and I guess Daryl’s witch-fi signal isn’t super strong, because as soon as she’s out of there she’s back to being a gorgeous brassy-haired vixen again. Then she realizes she has to save Cher next, whose fear is…waking up in bed covered in snakes. Which she does, but Susan Sarandon is there to calm her down.
Poor Michelle Pfeiffer tho! She’s all alone in her house when suddenly she is struck by crippling pain, which is her big fear. And then she starts bleeding, I think from her vagina maybe? But then it, like, splatters everywhere? Which, like, WTF Daryl? This seems extremely disproportionate! Why are you singling poor Michelle Pfeiffer out like this??? And unlike the other two, her thing doesn’t just go away! She ends up in the hospital! (But, again, thankfully not in the care of that bone marrow madness specialist.)
Cher and SS go visit MP, who is like writhing and screaming in pain and looking rough. (The cold sores on her lip were…certainly a choice!) And MP is like, “I’m pregnant.” And SS is like, “Me too!” And, you guessed it: SO IS CHER!
So, Cher goes to Daryl’s house to yell at him about slowly murdering MP with magic, and finds him all disheveled and growling while trying to do his laundry and ranting about how there aren’t enough “Orientals” (racist!) in town to do his shirts. He throws a big tantrum about how he’s been a VERY GOOD #MaleFeminist and what the hell did he get out of it??? NOTHING! All he wanted was for his trio of girlfriends to be completely devoted to him all the time in every way and do his laundry!
Cher is like, “Awe, come ‘ere, ya big gross lug!” And they kiss and make up, but Cher doesn’t look 100% psyched about that, and who would be!?
But back at the hospital, MP’s pain suddenly stops, and she looks at Susan Sarandon portentously, and SS looks back at her ominously, so maybe they’re all plotting something?
If so, their plot goes like this: All three women get all gussied up in 1980s formalwear and tease their hair for the gods and go over to Daryl’s for an orgy! But because this is a heterosexual sex cult, they all remain a tasteful distance from each other on this bed.
The next day, Daryl puts on his best pink smock and is like, “Time for shopping, Fidel!” And they go to town to buy bagels and ice cream, two normal things that I guess he just doesn’t keep in his massive house on a regular basis?
While they’re gone, the witches start running around the mansion in extremely fabulous silk pajamas gathering up Daryl’s hair and other stuff because THEY ARE FINALLY DOING AN ACTUAL SPELL! Cher throws a bunch of candles in a pot to melt (I tried this once in high school and it was a goddamn MESS!) and then they burn all of Daryl’s stuff. Remember how Cher does sculpting? Well, she molds the melted candles into a Daryl doll and they sprinkle the ashes from his burnt up stuff into it. Then they make martinis (at, like, 10am because they are CHAMPS!) because that is what they were drinking when they drew Daryl to Eastwick or whatever.
They stick pins in the doll, and at the ice cream parlor, Daryl starts screaming in agony and smashing things! And, LOL, the poor ice cream parlor worker is like “Geez whiz mister, are you having a conniption?” WHY DOESN’T HE CALL AN AMBULANCE!?
Then the witches sprinkle the doll with feathers and blow them away, which blows Daryl all the way across town to church, where he goes all #MENSRIGHTS and starts monologuing about what bitches all women are and also they are a curse from god. And all the good god-fearing church-going people of Eastwick just let him rant, because I guess they’re too polite to be like, “Sir, you are clearly in crisis, please leave and seek help.” (In the book, Daryl actually gives a guest sermon at the Unitarian church at one point, and it’s all about how nature/God is weird and gross because tapeworms and diseases and stuff.)
Speaking of weird and gross: TIME FOR CHERRIES! The witches are gobbling them up and spitting them at the doll, so Daryl, naturally, starts barfing cherry vom on all the congregants. Then he hightails it out of there back to the mansion, leaving poor Fidel behind with all this stuff he was buying:
Back at the mansion, the witches are like, “Eeeek, we made a big mess!” So they start frantically trying to clean up just in case they didn’t actually kill/banish Daryl or whatever. They start tossing around the was doll, which throws Daryl all over the place as he’s speeding home in his car. So, some 1980s studio execs. got the car chase chaos action they always have a boner for in every movie. (Sweet christ, I hate car stuff in movies!)
Daryl arrives home in full-on beast mode, and the witches realize they are in DEEP SHIT. So the go scrambling back to the kitchen to find the doll where they hid it in a cookie jar. But Daryl…explodes them down the hall? And SS falls off the big main hall gallery or whatever, and MP is like “HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! That is hilarious!” And Cher looks at her like she is a psychopath, but then remembers that they can all fly when they laugh. (MP really is this movie’s MVP witch!)
SS gently floats to the ground and they all skeeeeedaddle, gorgeous robes fluttering, to the kitchen for the doll, which they toss start tossing around again like a hot potato, sending Daryl flying back away from them. Cher and MP slam the kitchen doors shut, and MP throws the doll back at SS, who fumbles it, because GOD, what is she good for?! It falls to the floor and breaks into three pieces, and suddenly Daryl stops pounding on the door. So…is he fully dismembered now?
No! The whole house starts shaking because I guess Daryl is unleashed from his corporeal form? What even IS Daryl Van Horne actually? In the book, he is just a kinda spooky conman, but I guess in this movie he is a literal supernatural entity? The actual devil? UNCLEAR! But he shows up as a weird stretch armstrong giant outside and bursts through the kitchen window to get at the witches. So they all throw the pieces of the doll into a fire that has started in there, which melts Daryl into a little Cronenberg foetus bug thing, which then disappears in a little ping!
Then: 18 MONTHS LATER! Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon have all given birth to bouncing baby boys and are somehow living in Daryl’s mansion? (Did he…put them in his will? How did they explain his death/disappearance?! I guess by witchery? Who knows!) One day, they are all sitting around the pool and SS gets all horny eyed, and the other two are like, “Stop having Van Horny fantasies about Daryl around us!” Because I guess that could summon him back?
Which it kinda does, because upstairs the creepy baby boys all toddle into the TV room where Daryl appears to them on the billions of TVs. But luckily, their witch mommies show up and switch off the TVs. THE END!
Now we all make witchy (dirty) martinis and CAVORT around in silk PJs to John Williams! Happy Halloween!