‘Agatha All Along’ Gives An Unusually Accurate Picture Of Witchcraft
Warning: This review contains spoilers.
(REVIEW) “Agatha All Along” somehow manages to be one of the best acted Marvel shows in ages – and serves up an unusually honest portrayal of the occult.
Movies about witches have long been popular – from “Sabrina: The Teenage Witch” to “Harry Potter’” “Hocus Pocus” and the musical (and now movie) “Wicked.” It’s no wonder, as magic has always had an appeal, whether it’s something to admire (such as heroes like Merlin or Gandalf) or something to fear.
Typically, these portrayals are treated as fantasy, with little relation to real-world occult or magic users. In the real world, witchcraft and occult practices are on the rise. According to witchcraft scholar Helen Berger, there could be as many as 80,000 practicing witches in the U.S., a group that’s on the rise. In the 2021 census conducted in England and Wales, 74,000 people referred to themselves as pagans (up from 57,000 in 2011), while 13,000 people listed their religion as Wicca.
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This is largely due to the highly publicized rise of the “nones” – those who don’t identify with any religion in particular. About half of those who identify as “nones” say they engage in New Age spirituality practices. And most of those practitioners believe spirits, or spiritual energies, reside in animals, cemeteries, aspects of nature and objects such as crystals.
A major reason is the occult’s promise of connection to spirituality without the baggage of organized religion. According to Diane Purkiss, a professor at the University of Oxford who specializes in women’s literature and witchcraft, “The point here is the rejection of organized religion, because many people under 30 associate it with misogyny, homophobia, negative right-wing politics and racism.
Spirituality is something that ordinary people can access, because we’re revolting against traditional religions but we’re not necessarily wanting to base our lives on the material world either. Witchcraft is a way for people to find a spiritual tradition that will sustain rather than threaten them.”
“Agatha” obviously benefits from this interest in magic and spirituality. But it also is a bit more honest about the dynamics of magic than most wizardly content is.
“Agatha All Along” picks up after the events of “Wandavision” and “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.” The witch Agatha (played by Kathryn Hahn) regains her memories and, with the help of a mysterious boy she calls “Teen” (Joe Locke) and pursued by a femme fatale named Rio (Aubrey Plaza) and the deadly “Salem Seven” witches, Agatha takes a new coven down the “Witches Road” to regain her powers.
“Agatha” is easily one of the best Marvel projects in a long time from a storytelling perspective. A shocking thing to say about a show about an antihero few people have heard of and even fewer people care about. So many things about the show make it one that shouldn’t work. It’s almost exclusively about incredibly dislikeable characters, and the plots involve them sitting around in different rooms unpacking their trauma before moving on to the next one.
What makes the show work are the incredible performances and writing. Hahn gives a tour de force as Agatha Harkness, playing it both big as a charismatic witch and subtle as a woman still running from her own trauma. She’s surrounded by a great ensemble, too.
Locke is fittingly earnest and an excellent contrast to Agatha’s constant duplicity, and he easily carries more dramatic weight as the story progresses. The rest of Agatha’s covent strikes that perfect balance of empathetic and untrustworthy mean girls. Patti LuPone carries one of the best episodes of Marvel ever; Aubrey Plaza is quintessential Aubrey Plaza.
The script is smart and witty, such that even when the plot of the story is dragging, the characters’ dialogue makes it entertaining. The characters are multi-layered and engage in dynamic growth. Teen starts out as a fanboy, but becomes a grim and confident wizard. LuPone’s character seems batty at first, but ends up being one of the most profound figures in the series.
The show also has an ability to sow breadcrumbs for what’s happening in the series, and then subvert them in a way that completely makes sense in retrospect. The revelation about “The Road” is a great example. Unlike other Marvel shows, which start out with intriguing premises and then fall into cliches, this series twists make you more curious about what will happen next.
It’s also refreshingly one of the first female-led Marvel projects that doesn’t try to clumsily map male characters and storylines onto female characters. Projects like “Captain Marvel,” “She-Hulk” and “Black Widow” would portray as rip offs of their male characters — overtly arrogant or stoic heroes who bonded by roasting each other and solved problems by smashing stuff. But “Agatha” feels authentic partly because it feels very distinctly feminine.
For example, women are much more likely to try to socially bond by sitting in a circle talking about their feelings, whereas men are more likely to bond side-by-side accomplishing a goal. Hence the male-centric Avengers is built around guys standing side by side together to fight monsters and Agatha’s set pieces revolve around being in a circle verbally unpacking their issues. Women are much more likely to compete or do battle with others based on backhanded verbal degradation (rather than overt roasting like men) or secret manipulation (rather than overt,often physical, competition) and this is just what “Agatha” portrays.
This embrace of the characters’ femininity highlights some of the reasons women tend to adopt witchcraft more than men. As “Agatha” portrays it, witchcraft is built around seeing things with your intuition — such as when LuPone’s character reads the tarot cards – and reshaping reality with your words. Women trust their intuition to lead them to truth more than men do. And much of women’s conflict is determined by who can verbally win the game of relationships, so that other people accept their interpretation of reality instead of their enemies.
The show also, unexpectedly, turns out to be a meditation on loss and the inevitability of death. Jac Schaeffer — also the showrunner of the amazing “WandaVision” – is shaping up to be one of the best TV writers to talk about grief within a sci-fi and TV format. “WandaVision” was all about the unhealthy ways we process the death of loved ones, and gave us the iconic line, “What is grief if not love persevering?”
As “Agatha” goes on, it turns out to be about grief as well – as we see how much this motivates Agatha as a character.
This finality of death becomes a primary theme in the show, as nearly every character has to grapple with the pointlessness of trying to escape death forever. Death is the one thing that magic has no ultimate power over. Attempting to stave it off can only be done by exploiting others. Self-sacrifice, on the other hand, for others is praised as a noble way to live and the path to redemption. These moments, when the characters stand up to each other to stop each other’s selfish plans or overcome their selfishness for the sake of each other, are some of the most inspiring.
This means one of the big similarities between witchcraft in “Agatha” and real life is its ultimate powerlessness. Agatha may be able to shoot purple beams from her hands, but she can’t keep her loved ones from dying. This was actually one of the big selling points of early Christianity over paganism in Ancient Rome: Christianity offered a way out of death, as Luc Ferry’s “A Brief History of Thought” points out. According to historian Robert Knapp (as detailed in Rod Dreher’s recent book “Awaken Wonder”), a main reason Christianity spread was that it was able to cast out demons and heal diseases that magic-users at the time could not.
Witchcraft’s ability to live up to its promises has always been dubious. Both C.S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man” and recently Spencer Klavan’s “Light of the Mind, Light of the World” note that the Western movements that spurred the scientific revolution also tried to trigger a magic revolution. They did these both for the same reason: The promise for being able to control the natural world.
The reason the scientific revolution took off and the magic one didn’t is simple: Science worked and magic didn’t. Studying the stars in astronomy gave us reliable ways to navigate oceans and helped us build radar. Astrology still doesn’t predict personality or life outcomes better than chance. Likewise, it took Christianity spreading around the world to elevate the status of women in society — despite witcraft existing for a lot longer. Put more bluntly: if witchcraft had the power it claims, witches would never have been burned.
Today’s occult practices also give little hard evidence of internal spiritual benefits. All the evidence we have is that most of the mental health benefits – and positive life outcomes – of faith are tied to organized religion. The only group in America who’s mental health actually got better in America during the pandemic, were those who went to church weekly. Loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 packs of cigarettes a day. But modern witchcraft is built around personalized spirituality without the stabilizing force of a solid community.
As Dr. Jonathan Haidt explained in “The Anxious Generation,” this customizable approach to beliefs and community makes our identity and relationships fragile, which wreaks havoc on our mental health.
World magazine journalist Mary Jackson interviewed several young people who got involved in the occult and later left it (we recently had her on The Overthinkers podcast as well).
Most of them described how it made their mental health problems worse, not better.
“Castañeda’s fascination with the occult led her on road trips across the country and travels to South America to off-the-grid communities or ceremonies promoting “higher consciousness.” But by 2019, she was suffering from crippling night terrors, sleep paralysis, and demons she says tormented her constantly, urging her to commit suicide. Still, friends kept telling her to go deeper and “embrace her demons.”
‘I was like a dog chasing its own tail, trying to unlock the inner divine powers I thought I possessed,” Castañeda told me. “It only took me into more and more darkness and despair.’”
Agatha’s coven reflects these dynamics. Everyone in the story is trying to use magic to meet their own perceived individual and customizable needs, rather than submitting to a higher spiritual calling or story. Despite claims of sisterhood, the partnerships are, at best, mutual convenience and ultimately dissolvable. It’s partly for this reason that most of the witches end up dead or alone.
That said, this is a fantasy show. So the series does affirm that if you pursue the occult it will give you the kind of power it promises. And whatever flaws it portrays in the characters who practice magic, it blames it on the individuals — not witchcraft itself.
The show isn’t perfect from the artistic side either. The first episodes take a while to get interesting, buoyed only by great dialogue and performances. Like a lot of Marvel content, it often relies upon you remembering a lot of other movies and shows that came out years ago. And a lot of the final episode feels more like a set up for the next one than a finish for this one.
Despite its flaws, “Agatha All Along” gives a refreshingly honest look at grief, relationships, the false promises of power and selfishness. In a world that churns out superhero movies with nothing to say, this is a welcome thing. And in a world that tries to idealize the witch lifestyle, this show gives a far more accurate take than most forms of media have the guts to. The world of “Agatha” is one without hope in the face of death and is wrestling with how to live in light of that. It’s doing so honestly — and that’s praiseworthy in and of itself.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.