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A short short in the Tibetan sense.
Can you cover my shift?
No. I got my grandfather’s funeral. He’s died and been reborn so many times he’s just about Hindu. I love him. He’s magic. He’s died seven times this semester alone and might go ten if I need an extension from Dr. Iltis on my Media and Society paper.
He keeps on giving.
Yeah, but I’m in class with some of the guys here. I can’t be coming to work if I’m saying I need to be at the crematorium in Lemoore. The illusion must be preserved.
You mean the lie.
I’m an illusionist. Lying takes no skill. Any idiot can lie.
But it takes a special kind of idiot to do what you do.
Exactly.
My girlfriend, Francine, she’s gorgeous. She took Media and Soceity three years ago. So I might use her paper. She’s really smart. She had a Cowgirl Up! sticker on the back of her F150 until Iltis. Then she got into State and got that internship at KFSR. Now she knows everything. It’s amazing.
No more Cowgirl Up?
Well, she got a hybrid. She doesn’t know EVERYTHING, but she can explain anything. Like, she knows why class polarization has created a false consciousness in the economically intersectioned urban underclass.
Damn, dude.
Right? I don’t even know what the fuck that means.
She still bartending at the club?
Yeah. I go out there on Friday afternoon and I drink for free.
The world is a wondrous place, my son.
Actually, grampa’s still alive. But, you know, any day now . . .
And you won’t have to lie about it.
I’m not lying, actually. Francine says we’re already dead in the Tibetan sense. The minute we’re born, we’re dying. And if we’re dying, we’re dead. Think about it.
That’s pretty fucked up.
That’s the Tibetan sense.
Don’t send me to Tibet. Where did she learn all that? Media and Society?
I don’t know. Maybe. I haven’t learned anything in that class. Then again, I haven’t bought the textbook, done any reading, or gone to it after the first meeting.
[laughter]
Man, I needed the credits. Had to pull a jack move.
That’s all you do. Pulling jack moves. You’re a jack puller from way back.
You don’t even know.
I don’t. And I don’t want to.
Ask Francine. You know what she did? We were in bed and—
Is this something I need to hear?
Just relax. So we’re in bed and she rolls over and says, “Tell me about me.”
Tell you what?
That’s what I said. But she’s like, “Tell me all about me.” I mean, what’s there to say that we don’t already know?
About Francine?
Yeah. I’ve been thinking about this. If I told her something she knew I knew, it would have been pointless. And if I told her something she didn’t know I knew, I’d be saying I was some creepy stalking motherfucker. You know? You can’t win.
So what’d you do?
I said it would be unromantic. It would ruin the mystery.
Damn. You’re good.
That, grasshopper, is a jack move.
So what’d she say?
She said she knew I’d say that.
She probably did. In the Tibetan sense.
Doesn’t matter. The situation was circumvented. With a girl like Francine, with a mind like she’s got, you’ve got to stay awake. You’ve got to keep her entertained. She gets bored and it’s all over. You wouldn’t believe the shit I have to come up with.
One slip and it’s back to Bob’s on Friday night.
I’ve got nothing against Bob. Or the fact that I know you sad fuckers get shitfaced there three times a week.
We talked about you the other night.
Yeah?
Bob came out at bar time and we sat up maybe ’till five. And somebody was like “Where’s Les?” And then Bob goes, “I bet he’s with that college cutie works out at the radio station.”
That all?
We were pretty drunk by then. It’s kind of a haze.
I go to college, too, you know.
No, you don’t. City college doesn’t count. And you have to attend your classes and actually learn things.
I’ve learned plenty.
You ain’t learned your ass from a hole in the ground.
[laughter]
Well, I know one thing. This dock won’t sweep itself.
See, that’s your problem. You think small. I bet Francine would come up with a bunch of drones with little brushes on the bottoms and they’d sweep the dock in like 30 seconds.
You think you know what she’d do. But you don’t know shit. Sweep, my young apprentice, sweep—if we want payroll to work this month.
Exactly. Only then. Only then can we get paid.
[laughter]
(or: Footage of a Canadian Treeline in a Time of Goats and Perdition)
I watched it last night and was going to write a review entitled, “Why Snakes on a Plane is Better than The Witch” but I realized there is no comparison. Snakes on a Plane has snakes, Samuel Jackson, and a plane. The Witch has . . . the treeline and a message at the end informing the audience that it was based on actual accounts of 17th 
century witchcraft, making us wish they’d studied plot structure a little more closely back in the 17th century.
Oh and everybody dies except Thomasin, the ingenue, who has two expressions: dumbfounded fear and hysteria. Because, you know, there’s a witch out there who lives in a hut like Baba Yaga and likes to get dolled-up as Snow White with lip implants. But that’s neither here nor there. She’s got a veiny beast-arm with which she kills children. Sometimes shit floats in the dark. This is some serious business. It’s a witch, people. Come on, now.
I’d warn about spoilers, but it’s not possible to spoil something that has been rendered un-spoilable by stripping it down so far that the possessed family goat has more gravitas than the entire cast. Katie Dickie is a brilliant 
actress, reprising her nutcase mother role from Game of Thrones, but now in a bonnet. She gets three expressions: dumbfounded fear, hysteria, and maniacal hostility. William, the bewrayed, misunderstood husband, who knows a lot about scripture but who is somehow as effective in life as a suburban husband in a Lorrie Moore short story, gets two: grief-stricken and fearfully enraged.
The rest of the family—the spooky eyeliner-wearing siblings, the chickens, the brother whose sole purpose is to eventually meet the beast-arm—are plot furniture. They each get one expression: ye oulde dumbfounded fear. Maybe the chickens also get the poultry version of bitterness, since they happen to be better actors but, due to species-bias, they are relegated to supporting roles. Hollywood, man. The sickness is deep.
Overall, The Witch is a lot like the Big Alligator in the Sewer movie you go to see in the afternoon when your air-conditioning breaks down. Only Snow White isn’t that scary, the 
Devil isn’t very present as a supernatural menace, and the treeline is under-utilized as a character. I almost want to say that Deborah Harkness could have written a better screenplay—which is saying something, since A Discovery of Witches is one of the worst novels I’ve ever had the misfortune to attempt. Yet it seems better than this.
Where is the Devil? Out there, in the woods, right? Oh yeah, that’s the beast-arm’s function in the story. Wow. Or possibly the Devil is hiding in the fear-wilderness of the human unconscious? Sure, that works. That’s what Hawthorne gives us in “Young Goodman Brown,” a story that manages to make you feel a little more paranoid and insane every time you read it. And then there’s WGN America’s Salem, in which evil is a very real, very tangible, very transformative presence—which is what we need in a movie like this. And that is definitely what’s missing–aside from, you know, an interesting plot and characters. Hence, the superiority of Snakes on a Plane, which doesn’t even try.
You can’t rely on repeated expressions of dumbfounded fear to make the audience feel something. You can’t explain the flatness away by saying, “Well, these backward rubes were religious fanatics. So, you know, there’s your paranoia and human unconscious at work!” No. I don’t care if they were a settlement of Juggalos who fell out of a time machine. It doesn’t matter who we think they are. What matters is how rounded they are as representations of real human beings to whom we can relate.
We have to feel what the characters feel. And we can’t feel anything if all we get is constant two-dimensional dread. Put simply, in order to feel afraid we have to have the experience of not feeling afraid as well. We have to know and relate to the characters as extensions (projections) of what we feel and what we care 
about. But there is no balance in this film.
At the very end, when the ingenue decides to join up with the goat, who speaks like Sir Lawrence Olivier with strep throat, we think there’s going to be some big reveal, some payoff that’s going to transform all the open-and-shut dumbfounded fear into something else. Maybe Thomasin will show us something new about herself that adds depth and ultimately makes us give a damn.
Nope. She’s buck naked, floating, laughing like Janis Joplin. Roll credits. And you just wasted 93 minutes you could have spent walking through the woods of Ontario. So mote it be.
