Commercialism in the good old US of A amuck again.
------- Forwarded message -------
From: "Margo Burns" <margo(a)ogram.org>
To: SALEM-WITCH-L(a)rootsweb.com
Subject: [SALEM-WITCH-L] Bewitched in Salem
Date: Wed, 04 May 2005 05:17:37 -0700
from: The Boston Globe
Bewitched in Salem
By Thomas Doherty | May 3, 2005
AS BOTH a longtime Salem resident and a sometime television scholar, I
believe I can claim the requisite credentials to weigh in on the
momentous controversy currently roiling our community: whether a statue
of actress Elizabeth Montgomery should be erected in town to honor her
performance as the proboscis-twitching witch Samantha on the television
series ''Bewitched."
The proposed bronze monument to the perky blonde is a publicity scheme
concocted by the cable network TV Land, which has already mounted
video-inspired statues of characters from beloved (or just regularly
syndicated) series such as ''The Honeymooners" (Ralph Kramden at the
New York bus terminal), ''The Mary Tyler Moore Show" (Mary Richards in
Minneapolis), and ''The Andy Griffith Show" (Andy and Opie in Raleigh,
N.C.)
Salem's Mayor Stanley J. Usovicz thinks a statue of Samantha is a grand
way to sucker in tourists more likely to know their reruns than their
Hawthorne. Other Salemites believe that devoting prime real estate to a
faux witch from a minor league sitcom that was, not incidentally, set
in Hartford, trivializes the memory of the legal murders committed
during the Salem witch trials of 1692, a spasm of judicial activism
that made the city a byword for intolerance and hysteria.
Contrary to popular perception, no witches were burned in Salem.
Nineteen accused witches were hanged, and one, the taciturn Giles Cory,
was pressed to death with stones. His eloquent last words: ''More
weight."
For a city whose official emblem is a smiling witch sitting astride a
broomstick, it may be wise not to tut-tut too loudly about the crass
commercialism and bogus historicity of a ''Bewitched" homage. After
all, local hucksters have been milking the ancillary marketing
opportunities from the Salem witch trials since Cotton Mather knocked
off a true crime tie-in entitled ''The Wonders of the Invisible World"
in 1693. ''I shall no longer detain my reader from his expected
entertainment," writes Mather in the prologue, eager to get down to the
good stuff like spectral evidence and blood oaths with Satan.
From the time of Mather to Nathaniel Hawthorne's ''The Scarlet Letter"
and down through Arthur Miller's ''The Crucible," the Salem witch
trials have been grist for all kinds of literary and cultural
annexations.
In ''Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory," a recent collection of essays
edited by Salem State College professors Dane Anthony Morrison and
Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Salem emerges as ground zero for a
constellation of meanings and metaphors that live far beyond its modest
tax base. ''The witch trials have so seized the American imagination,"
conclude the authors, ''that the event has come to stand for the place
itself, consecrating Salem as a civic shrine."
Or a civic bacchanalia. In 1992, upon the 300th anniversary of the
Salem witch trials, an unprecedented orgy of festivities, parades, and
commemorations blasted the usual exploitation into a whole new level of
raucous notoriety.
Now, every October, in a real devil's bargain, the city unleashes
''Haunted Happenings," an open invitation for battalions of Goth kids
and Halloween revelers to turn the town into a chilly version of New
Orleans during Mardi Gras, only without the great cuisine and exposed
breasts. Two alternative visions of Salem -- solemn shrine to a grim
past and open-air block party boogalooing down Derby Street -- have
been at war ever since.
Hence, the brouhaha over ''Bewitched." Telecast on ABC from 1964 to
1972, the show was the most Nielsen-friendly of a weird subspecies of
the sitcom genre that TV critic David Marc has dubbed the ''magicom"
(see also, ''My Favorite Martian").
On ''Bewitched," however, the supernatural shenanigans were laced with
generous doses of down-to-earth sexism. Every week, Samantha's prig of
a husband Darrin insisted she clean and cook like any mortal housewife
rather than escape the drudgery by wrinkling her nose.
''Here's a woman with unimaginable magical power, and she uses it
entirely to shore up her husband's ego, make him look good, help him
keep his job, beat down his enemies," complained science fiction writer
Isaac Asimov, his own nose bent out of joint.
Yet even in the retrograde realm of the 1960s sitcom, Samantha's
indentured servitude incited a gendered insurrection in the form of her
troublemaking mother, Endora (Agnes Moorehead), who regularly
materialized to torment Darrin and get Samantha back in touch with her
rhinoplasticity. Aficionados of the show also relish the episodes
featuring Samantha's impish, mini-skirted cousin Serena.
But does any of this deserve to be set in bronze on the streets of
Salem? Figuring that the Puritan fathers who presided over the
courtroom drama of 1692 would be more appalled by a statue of a
spectral witch than by a purist fidelity to Salem tradition, I have to
side with the pro-Samantha coven. Just as long as they don't try to
erect a statue to either of those guys who played Darrin.
Thomas Doherty is chairman of the Film Studies Program at Brandeis
University.
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