The Original Twitch

Samantha Stephens, my Witch and Savior

Samantha Stephens, the fairest of them all…

Where do I begin? 

If you find yourself following me, you’ll discover I like to go to the root of everything. I want to find the beginning point to understand what I’m looking at. My little maxim is “the roots beget the fruits.” 

The premise behind the Mirror House is to examine how Hollywood has shaped where we are today as a human society, and to bring ourselves more consciously into the picture. Even cultures that have no access to entertainment media are radically impacted by it (shout out to The Gods Must be Crazy). So my tendency is to look to the root of things. After “where do I begin?” there’s “where does society begin?” Obviously, with the individual. Which makes it important for individuals to know themselves. The individual I know best is myself — kinda. So I have to look at how I have been shaped by the entertainment industry, from the root of my own life.

TV today is a virtual jungle. Everyone’s got their mental machetes hacking away at the vines to simply carve out a pathway, let alone find a root system. As I grew up, TV, all three networks of it, was a captivating, but contained landscape. There was one show I would have jumped into — where I would've planted myself and taken root: Bewitched. 

I lived for that show — it was like water in the desert of my existence. As a preacher’s kid in a church world that just did not add up, I worshiped Samantha Stephens. I mean, I guess I loved Jesus as much as the next person in the pew. But what Jesus did for me then was to put a familiar face on a mystery I couldn’t name, so that “prince of peace” made the mystery more accessible, more palpable. Same with Samantha. Only moreso.

When Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) came swooping into my life on her broom that spelled Bewitched in the sky, I was hooked like a trout. 

First, at an age where I was just starting to glimpse the fuckery of American life — war, social injustice, sanctioned inhumanity — she gave me hope that this dimension of reality isn’t all there is, as much as “reasonable, rational people” try to content themselves with, and convince others of, that notion.

Second, as I began to recognize that my mom — “the preacher’s wife” — was the true minister in our family, Samantha gave me a model of femininity I could relate to. Not only was she confused about how to live in a mortal world, she had to figure out how to be herself in a man’s world.

Third, that broomstick acted as her bridge — between the mundane and the magical, the masculine and feminine, and the moral and the immoral. The mother-daughter tug of war with Endora was also super satisfying to me. Endora wielded her wand with reckless abandon. Samantha’s discernment, her questioning, went soul deep in me. Does the fact that you have power justify using it for your own ends? The way she answered those questions fascinated me, and for her, would ripple into infinity — because she was also teaching her daughter Tabatha how to use that power, and that discernment. 

Riffing off of that, and more present tense (because yes! I still watch this show): I love that Samantha and Darrin were both grappling with issues similar to my own: when is it ok to use words — cast spells through witchcraft or advertising — to manipulate others in order to achieve a desired outcome?

Samantha offered me a sense of magic that went far beyond the bounds of witchcraft. As I try to put words to that ineffable magic, I sense that it lies inside this two-faceted question, one all of us must answer: what do you do with your power, and would you give up that power to be loved? Gulp. Twitch.