Every Story Doesn’t Have to be Everything
Recently I wrote an article about how mainstream media has taken the wrong messages from the genre that successfully started with Wicked – namely, “bad guys aren’t bad.” While this was done with great nuance with Wicked (which Gregory Maguire, author of the novel, set out to write in a desire to explore the genesis of evil), it’s now largely been relegated to “everyone is just a misunderstood hero” – even extending to the likes of Dahmer. I primarily examined this through the lens of Hocus Pocus vs. Hocus Pocus 2. You can read the article here.
Now I absolutely believe that characters should be looked at with complexity and nuance. No human being is “evil” in the frequent fantasy definition of the word, and, as I said in the article, we’ve all seen the horrors that come from treating people as if they were.
But that’s not the conversation I was trying to have in this specific instance. What I was trying to explore are the dangers that come from literally erasing good and evil from narratives and treating everyone and everything as if they’re just a “misunderstood” child on the playground who really is sorry about being naughty at the end of the day. Just as we should never dismiss someone as “just being evil” there is danger in saying, say, Hitler was just misunderstood and needed a hug.
One of the comments I received in response to my article, which I think is a good and valid one, is – in the instance of Hocus Pocus specifically, which opens in 1600’s Salem – the days of the very real Salem witch trials, we shouldn’t be perpetuating the story that Salem was full of “evil” witches who had to be gotten rid of. In reality, the witch trials were a horrific period where incredible abuse was enacted toward innocents (largely women.) This was a time when you could be accused by anyone for any reason, and women especially were suspected for everything from the way they looked at you to, literally, their anatomy.
That’s a very important story to tell. And we should. Everyone studying American history should know the truth about the Salem witch trials and other events that have often been glossed over.
But this brings me to another point – the subject of this article.
Not every story can or should be about everything.
Not every fantastical story about witches has also to be a historical analysis of how witchcraft and the crimes against women happened in the real world.
Not every superhero story also has to be a deconstruction of vigilantism and how people shouldn’t be trusted with superpowers.
The same for any story you might be telling – as long as the story is strong and works within the framework of what it’s trying to be.
Part of the problem with a lot of modern entertainment is that it’s trying so hard to be everything that it ends up being nothing.
And part of that is we don’t seem to separate stories that are meant to be metaphoric from stories that are meant to be literal.
Metaphor is part of what makes fairy tales and myths so persistent and powerful. They can mean a lot of different things to different people, and at their heart, they’re exploring deep, human truths that you can’t really get to on a literal level.
Here’s one of my favorite examples.
One deeply human story that has followed us throughout time is the idea that humans are more powerful than we know. We all have power within us that can be both scary and liberating. We can do things beyond our wildest imagining and, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Now, if we tell that on a literal level, it may be true, but it doesn’t really affect us in a deep way.
Now throughout history there have been two metaphors that have been able to let this story resonate in a far more potent way than anything literal: Superheroes (or demigods) and Witches (Wizards.)
It’s one of the reasons I get so frustrated when groups call for a ban of anything that has a witch as a character, or the learning of magic, because it might be “teaching children witchcraft.” That is, once again, a literal interpretation of what is meant to be a metaphoric story. Let’s take Harry Potter.
The magic in Harry Potter is all about metaphor. A metaphor for what makes us special and powerful. Harry is a normal kid living in an abusive situation. Suddenly he finds out he’s a wizard. He’s special. He’s powerful. He’s not a nobody. He goes to wizard school and learns the depths of his new abilities – yes, it provides his liberation from his previous horrible existence. Still, it also puts him directly in the path of immense danger and evil. Not only that, but he must come to terms with the fact that he has the potential for that evil inside of him. Ultimately he embraces his specialness and uses it to overcome the treacherous obstacles in his path and make the world a better place.
Now, try telling that story again, but make it literal.
You can do it. Of course, you can. But there’s something that doesn’t resonate in you in quite the same way.
Finding out you are magical or you have superpowers is a brilliant metaphor for discovering the power inside you.
But imagine if Harry Potter had tried to be a fantastical allegory, AND a story about how Wiccans have been maligned for centuries and what exactly the real-life practice is, AND a story about how Voldemort wasn’t really that bad, he just needed a hug, AND about how witchcraft has historically been an excuse to oppress and abuse women.
Those are all important things (maybe not exactly the Voldemort one…) but they can’t coexist in the same story because that would be like trying to combine the narratives of The Lord of the Rings, The People’s History of the United States, the collected works of Virginia Woolf, and Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and have them all still retain what made them great individual stories in the first place.
Not every story needs to be everything.
This is why we need LOTS of different stories from different perspectives. And yes, it is possible to accept a metaphor or allegory for what it is, be affected by the story it’s telling you, and still understand what history has told us about similar real-world situations.
In the case of Hocus Pocus, the witches are serving as a metaphor – in this instance, they are functioning as a warning of what can happen when selfishness, ego, and a desire for power are left unchecked. Hocus Pocus 2 is trying to have its cake and eat it too by having the witches function both as a metaphor, and real-life girl bosses who were oppressed by the patriarchy in Salem in the 1600s and are misunderstood. They cancel each other out. I actually find it interesting that in the original, one of the young people fighting against the witches, Allison, uses magic (namely “a circle of salt will protect thy victims from thy power”) to protect herself and her friends from the witches. Winnie’s response is to look at her and say:
“What a clever little white witch.”
That one line does more for combining the rules of the world with the fact that women (and witches) aren’t inherently evil then the entirety of Hocus Pocus 2.
It is possible to create a world that functions both as a metaphor and addresses the complexities of said metaphor. If Disney really wanted to address the real-world implications of the Salem witch trials, I actually think it could have been really interesting to say that the evil Sandersons were a driving force behind the atrocities that were committed in Salem against women. One could imagine the town becoming so terrified that there were more “Sandersons” in their midst that they started executing innocent people – having the Sandersons’ “evilness” start to seep into the very town itself.
There are lots of things they could have done.
What they did instead was make a sequel that erased good and evil from the equation, leaving a world and a cast of characters that live in a murky no man’s land. Hocus Pocus 2 might be funny, it might be entertaining, but it doesn’t leave you with a lot of substance. In the original, after the laughs had died down you were left with the deep resonance of the fact that family really matters and selfishness leads down a dark road. I don’t know what we’re supposed to get from Hocus Pocus 2 other than the platitudes that were preached at us (“You Should Share Power,” “Sisters Are What Matter Most”) that feel just like that – hollow preaching.
When a story tries to be everything, it ends up being nothing. And when we are slaves to literalism, we lose those things that can speak very deeply to our hearts and souls. As Neil Gaiman said: “Fairy tales are more than true, not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” And they tell it directly to our hearts. Not our heads.
Hocus Pocus is not a story about the Salem witch trials. It never was. The reason it was set in 1600’s Salem is that that was a time when “witchcraft” was taken so seriously you could be executed for it, and the Sanderson Sisters needed to be executed so that they could be resurrected by three unsuspecting kids three hundred years later.
But we do need stories about the Salem witch trials, and not just The Crucible, which itself is not actually a story about the Salem witch trials, but a metaphor for McCarthyism and has a lot of inaccuracies itself.
We need to tell the story that needs to be told in the form it should be told in.
And we need LOTS of different stories by LOTS of different voices so we can get a full picture, both metaphoric and literal, of any given theme, event, or issue. When I was a child, Disney’s The Little Mermaid sent me into a years-long trek through the library reading literally everything ever written about fairy tales - from reading all the originals cover to cover, to books by Joseph Campbell, to reimaginings to histories about how the stories were originally transcribed, collected or written. That should be part of the point, the galvanization of stories is partially to desire to hear more stories.