What about the Eastwick witches?
Celebrating Friday the 17th with thoughts on how one man can seduce three (witch) women, tales of eighties fashion and another string of pearls.
A few nights ago I watched The Witches of Eastwick, by George Miller, for the first time. Since the movie was released in June 1987, I am obviously late to the party.
The cast alone makes it worth watching (or rewatching): the film features Jack Nicholson, Susan Saradon, a young Cher, an even younger Michelle Pfeiffer and a brilliant Veronica Cartwright.
The movie is based on a 1984 novel by John Updik (here in the Italian translation), and tells the story of three women, two divorced and one widowed, who live in the fictional, conservative town of Eastwick, New England, USA. They spend their lives between church services and bourgeois gatherings, until one night they express their wish that a stranger would come to town and rescue them from their boredom and lack of interesting male company.
As the three “witches” are apparently endowed with magical powers previously unknown to them, the stranger arrives in the form of Jack Nicholson, who is as rich, witty and fascinating ("not handsome, but rather fascinating") as they had hoped.
In the end, Jack Nicholson manages to seduce all three of them. But how does he do it?
The woman of reason
Of the three women, Cher's character Alexandra is portrayed as the most openly sexual (she is the one who declares that she actually misses the company of men), but also as the most rational. While the other women of Eastwick seem to be immediately captivated by Mr Van Horne's charm, Alexandra sees him as the epitome of all that is wrong with the male sex when she first meets him. As she bluntly states after his first attempt to seduce her, she finds him ugly, stupid, sexually unattractive and even stinky. She is also unimpressed by his wealth.
However, it only takes a powerful monologue from Daryl about the disadvantages of being a single woman for Alexandra to change her mind. “Don't go home,” he says, “there's no one waiting for you there. You have already done your part as a wife, as a mother. You have done coffee with a friend in the morning, a few cocktails, a couple of pills... the world keeps growing and you keep feeding it. It goes through you like a cleansing, it wastes you, the woman is nothing but a hole, they say?”.
Daryl asks Alexandra to let him look after her for a change. She gives in: after all, she is rational. “Who are you?” she asks, before letting Daryl take her to bed. “Just your average horny little devil,” he answers.
The prudish music genius
To seduce Jane, the buttoned-up music teacher played by Susan Saradon, might at first seem like a rather difficult undertaking. At the beginning of the film, Jane is not really interested in finding a new man after her husband has left her because of her infertility.
Daryl, however, finds the (violin) key to her heart: by demonstrating his impressive musical talent on both piano and cello, he encourages her to overcome her fear of letting go. She ends up playing for him with such passion that a chord from the cello bursts into flames. After the intimate concert, Jane also surrenders to another kind of intimacy.
The cello scene reminded me of a monologue by the main character (the husband who, in short, kills his wife for playing Beethoven with a friend) from Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata: “Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that is not my own: under the influence of music I have the illusion of feeling things that I don't really feel, of understanding things that I don't understand, of being able to do things that I'm not able to do (...) Can it really be permitted for anyone who feels like it to hypnotise another person, or many other people, and then to do whatever he wants with them? Especially if the hypnotist is the first unscrupulous person who comes along?”
The goddess of fertility
The last to fall under Daryl's spell is Sukie Ridgemont, played by Michelle Pfiffer. Sukie was divorced by her husband for the opposite reason to Jane: she is too fertile and has given birth to six children. Sukie is obviously a classic beauty. She always wears pastels and sometimes carries flowers, like an eighties Aphrodite or the Nynph of Spring (any reference to Botticelli's paintings in this sentence is entirely intentional).
While swimming in Daryl's pool, Sukie asks her supposed suitor if he intends to seduce her (yes) and how (he doesn't know yet). Ironically, in the following minutes of the film it becomes clear that Sukie does not need to be seduced: she followsDaryl around the pool, tells him how easily she usually gets pregnant, and compliments him on not being afraid of it, unlike "other men". In short, she is the one who seduces him. Daryl, of course, lets her.
The other woman
I will not say much about the fourth woman in the film, the non-witch (but bewitched) Felicia Alden, as I prefer to leave her entirely to the on-screen portrayal.
One thing I will say, however, is that at one point she falls down the church steps and breaks her leg. This incident marks the beginning of her (hmm) character development. What causes her fall? Pearls. More specifically, a broken string of pearls. Almost every woman in the film wears pearls, which is ironic given the subject of my last substack post.
Bringing back the Eighties
I think that every picture in this post is an endorsement of how good the fashion of the movie is. I loved every single outfit that Jane (both before and after the makeover), Sukie and Felicia (!) wore in the film. Cher's, however good, are not really my style.
I have two style highlights to report. The first is a pair of red high-heeled sandals worn over white socks by Jane in a supermarket, commented on by the other women present (“what on earth is she wearing”):
The other consists of the pretty flowered dresses that Felicia and all the other lovely church ladies wore to the Sunday morning services. In this sense, Felicia solved my dilemma concerning an eighties flowered dress I had bought for myself a few days before seeing the film: what do you wear with the high round necklines typical of the period? Simple: a (pearl) necklace!
That's all I have to say for now. If you haven't already, go and watch The Witches of Eastwick now, it's available on Prime Video. You will find that I have not done much spoiling.
Bye!
Pia