Why I Am Indebted to Charmed (Yes, the TV Show)
Whenever I hear The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now” I go back in time. Not to when I used to listen to The Smiths in college but to the song’s time as the theme song for Charmed, my favorite guilty pleasure TV show of the late 90s and early 2000s. I was embarrassed by how much I loved Charmed. The women’s outfits were ridiculously classic WB silliness (really? You’re going to fight evil in those shoes, in that dress?!) and the plots tended to get pretty soapy but damned if I didn’t love watching three witchy sisters (the Charmed Ones) fighting dark forces while also trying to maintain businesses and appearances of normality.
And I soon discovered that two of my dearest friends were also charmed by Charmed. Those two friends and I started watching the show together and (I think, not incidentally) we also started a theatre company together. We were a three woman team and I think we got a lot of strength from regularly watching a three woman team of witches. The Power of Three was real for us. Charmed helped us feel charmed even if we didn’t have a magical Book of Shadows. I think our company’s existence is wrapped up in the Charmed Ones.
I wanted to tell you about this now because it feels to me as though witches in general are having a bit of a moment and two of the actors who played the witches on Charmed have become powerful voices in the movement for justice for women. I don’t think this is an accident, actually. I think that embodying powerful women, even if that power is fictional, helps show you that you do have power, even if it isn’t actual magic. I think the feeling of pushing back “evil spirits” teaches you how to push back on more pedestrian evil, the kind of evil most of us run into every day.
Once you know what it feels like to shoot magic fire from your hands, I think it is hard to go back into hiding. I’m not saying Alyssa Milano and Rose McGowan are activists for women because they once played witches on TV. I mean maybe they are but I think they probably had that strength in them in the first place, which helped them get those parts as Charmed Ones. (Also, to my knowledge, Tarana Burke never played a witch and she is the originator of the #MeToo campaign and is so badass.)
Of course witches are not the only way to access feminine power – but it does seem like witches are the primary way we culturally will allow women power. This goes way back, of course. And the impulse to burn witches is directly related to the impulse to limit women’s power. The sign at the Women’s March that made me cry the hardest was the “We are the Granddaughters of the Witches You Failed to Burn.”
Witchcraft is growing like hotcakes right about now. Like, there are hexes and spells and gatherings to push back the patriarchal horrors growing around us all the time. That’s a thing that people are actually doing. I love it. I don’t really BELIEVE in it – but anything that makes women feel powerful in a world that tells us we are not is A-OKAY with me.
Back in January, I was invited to a participate in a photo shoot and asked to say when I felt powerful and it took me forever to find an answer. I could not think of a single instance in which I had the thought “I feel powerful.” I could think of a dozen other sort of empowering things I have felt but I couldn’t think of when I felt actually powerful. It felt entirely out of my wheelhouse.
But it occurs to me now that I felt powerful in my Charmed years. That I felt powerful with two sisters by my side, practicing theatre magic, believing I was casting spells of art. It felt good to feel witchy, to feel like Charmed ones. Just recently, I cackled with glee, like full witchy cackled, when I read Lindy West’s article about Weinstein and Allen, et al and she said, “Yes this is a witch hunt. I’m a witch and I’m hunting you.”
In real life, we watch our powerful women get attacked in a multitude of ways. We watch women lose so often. Our victories are small – Rep. Maxine Waters’ “Reclaiming My Time” is about the top of what we can dream of. We watch the Women’s March organizers bring together a record breaking group of women in January but then we watch them get arrested at Trump Tower in NYC. We watched Hillary Rodham Clinton get the historic nomination but then had to watch her eviscerated by the media and painfully lose to a ridiculous man.
So we need our witches. We need to see women who can win. Every time. We need to pretend to be them and know what it feels like to win so we can keep winning. We need our Charmed, even if it might be a little silly.
Some of the lyrics from “How Soon Is Now?” that were in the titles of Charmed were “I am the sun and the air” and “I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does.” And now that I think about it, it’s actually one of the sweetly potent parts about Charmed. It was three exceptionally powerful witches (the sun and air) but they got to be human (just like everybody else does.) They dated or got married, or slept around and just generally had a fun human time while fighting the forces of evil with their magic. The charm of Charmed was being both witch and human, both powerful and woman.
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And a little coda to this post: As many of you know, I record an audio version of this blog via my podcast. At the end of (almost) every post, I include a song. For this one, it was obvious that I needed to do “How Soon Is Now?” so I looked up the lyrics/chords to start learning it and had a funny revelation. The lyric is not “I am the sun and the air;” it is “I am the son and the heir.” All these years, I was sure it was the sun and air and it’s the son and heir. What I thought was a sort of pagan animistic declaration is, in fact, a lineage of male-ness. Hilarious.
But I think the show’s title sequence is edited in such a way to suggest the more pagan reading of those words. For example, on the word, “sun/son” a much brighter shot appears in the titles, like a light turning on and moments before “air/heir” a candle is lit. So, on a show about the witchy power of women, the theme song takes on a different meaning. That is, Morrissey may be the son and heir but the Charmed Ones are the sun and air.
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Second coda: I more recently wrote about the new Charmed, which I also very much enjoy. You can find that here.
To listen to me read this blog and hear the song, click here or find it on any podcast app.
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
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November 4, 2017, 1:28 pm
Filed under: feminism, resistance, TV | Tags: #MeToo, Alyssa Milano, Charmed, How Soon Is Now?, Lindy West, resist, Rose McGowan, Tarana Burke, The Smiths, The WB, The Women's March, witch hunt, witches
Filed under: feminism, resistance, TV | Tags: #MeToo, Alyssa Milano, Charmed, How Soon Is Now?, Lindy West, resist, Rose McGowan, Tarana Burke, The Smiths, The WB, The Women's March, witch hunt, witches
Whenever I hear The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now” I go back in time. Not to when I used to listen to The Smiths in college but to the song’s time as the theme song for Charmed, my favorite guilty pleasure TV show of the late 90s and early 2000s. I was embarrassed by how much I loved Charmed. The women’s outfits were ridiculously classic WB silliness (really? You’re going to fight evil in those shoes, in that dress?!) and the plots tended to get pretty soapy but damned if I didn’t love watching three witchy sisters (the Charmed Ones) fighting dark forces while also trying to maintain businesses and appearances of normality.
And I soon discovered that two of my dearest friends were also charmed by Charmed. Those two friends and I started watching the show together and (I think, not incidentally) we also started a theatre company together. We were a three woman team and I think we got a lot of strength from regularly watching a three woman team of witches. The Power of Three was real for us. Charmed helped us feel charmed even if we didn’t have a magical Book of Shadows. I think our company’s existence is wrapped up in the Charmed Ones.
I wanted to tell you about this now because it feels to me as though witches in general are having a bit of a moment and two of the actors who played the witches on Charmed have become powerful voices in the movement for justice for women. I don’t think this is an accident, actually. I think that embodying powerful women, even if that power is fictional, helps show you that you do have power, even if it isn’t actual magic. I think the feeling of pushing back “evil spirits” teaches you how to push back on more pedestrian evil, the kind of evil most of us run into every day.
Once you know what it feels like to shoot magic fire from your hands, I think it is hard to go back into hiding. I’m not saying Alyssa Milano and Rose McGowan are activists for women because they once played witches on TV. I mean maybe they are but I think they probably had that strength in them in the first place, which helped them get those parts as Charmed Ones. (Also, to my knowledge, Tarana Burke never played a witch and she is the originator of the #MeToo campaign and is so badass.)
Of course witches are not the only way to access feminine power – but it does seem like witches are the primary way we culturally will allow women power. This goes way back, of course. And the impulse to burn witches is directly related to the impulse to limit women’s power. The sign at the Women’s March that made me cry the hardest was the “We are the Granddaughters of the Witches You Failed to Burn.”
Witchcraft is growing like hotcakes right about now. Like, there are hexes and spells and gatherings to push back the patriarchal horrors growing around us all the time. That’s a thing that people are actually doing. I love it. I don’t really BELIEVE in it – but anything that makes women feel powerful in a world that tells us we are not is A-OKAY with me.
Back in January, I was invited to a participate in a photo shoot and asked to say when I felt powerful and it took me forever to find an answer. I could not think of a single instance in which I had the thought “I feel powerful.” I could think of a dozen other sort of empowering things I have felt but I couldn’t think of when I felt actually powerful. It felt entirely out of my wheelhouse.
But it occurs to me now that I felt powerful in my Charmed years. That I felt powerful with two sisters by my side, practicing theatre magic, believing I was casting spells of art. It felt good to feel witchy, to feel like Charmed ones. Just recently, I cackled with glee, like full witchy cackled, when I read Lindy West’s article about Weinstein and Allen, et al and she said, “Yes this is a witch hunt. I’m a witch and I’m hunting you.”
In real life, we watch our powerful women get attacked in a multitude of ways. We watch women lose so often. Our victories are small – Rep. Maxine Waters’ “Reclaiming My Time” is about the top of what we can dream of. We watch the Women’s March organizers bring together a record breaking group of women in January but then we watch them get arrested at Trump Tower in NYC. We watched Hillary Rodham Clinton get the historic nomination but then had to watch her eviscerated by the media and painfully lose to a ridiculous man.
So we need our witches. We need to see women who can win. Every time. We need to pretend to be them and know what it feels like to win so we can keep winning. We need our Charmed, even if it might be a little silly.
Some of the lyrics from “How Soon Is Now?” that were in the titles of Charmed were “I am the sun and the air” and “I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does.” And now that I think about it, it’s actually one of the sweetly potent parts about Charmed. It was three exceptionally powerful witches (the sun and air) but they got to be human (just like everybody else does.) They dated or got married, or slept around and just generally had a fun human time while fighting the forces of evil with their magic. The charm of Charmed was being both witch and human, both powerful and woman.
*
And a little coda to this post: As many of you know, I record an audio version of this blog via my podcast. At the end of (almost) every post, I include a song. For this one, it was obvious that I needed to do “How Soon Is Now?” so I looked up the lyrics/chords to start learning it and had a funny revelation. The lyric is not “I am the sun and the air;” it is “I am the son and the heir.” All these years, I was sure it was the sun and air and it’s the son and heir. What I thought was a sort of pagan animistic declaration is, in fact, a lineage of male-ness. Hilarious.
But I think the show’s title sequence is edited in such a way to suggest the more pagan reading of those words. For example, on the word, “sun/son” a much brighter shot appears in the titles, like a light turning on and moments before “air/heir” a candle is lit. So, on a show about the witchy power of women, the theme song takes on a different meaning. That is, Morrissey may be the son and heir but the Charmed Ones are the sun and air.
*
Second coda: I more recently wrote about the new Charmed, which I also very much enjoy. You can find that here.
To listen to me read this blog and hear the song, click here or find it on any podcast app.
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
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Songs for the Struggling Artist 