They’re Just Being Girls

I watched Practical Magic for the first time a couple of weeks ago, because my wife loves it, and for most of its run time I was doing what I imagine most first-time male viewers do: waiting for the plot to arrive. The elements were all present. A family curse, a murder, a burial in the back garden, a resurrection gone wrong, a police investigation, an exorcism, a romance. Any two of those could anchor a film. This one keeps all seven in the air and refuses to let any of them organize the others, and I kept reaching for a spine that was not there. By any structural accounting, the whole thing is a mess.

The critics of 1998 reached for the same spine and wrote their reviews about not finding it. Roger Ebert said the film went “veering uncertainly from horror to laughs to romance” and judged it “too scary for children and too childish for adults.” The Rotten Tomatoes consensus still blames its “jarring tonal shifts.” None of that is wrong, exactly. It is measurement error.

The messiness only reads as disorder through an instrument built for structure. That instrument is a masculine one. Ebert was peering through it in 1998, and I was peering through it on my couch, tracking plot points while the woman beside me was having an experience. Mine and Ebert’s error was measuring a cloud on a butcher’s scale and reporting, accurately, that it failed to register.

What changed the film for me was one sentence from my wife. Early on there is a scene of Sally and Gillian as young girls, up past bedtime, whispering about boys. Sally, who has decided never to fall in love, casts a spell for a man who cannot exist: he will whistle her favorite song, ride a pony backwards, flip pancakes in the air, and have one green eye and one blue. I was audit-watching, hunting structure, and I said something out loud, laughing, about how whimsical this movie already was. My wife replied, “They’re just being girls.” She had told me what I was watching. It took me a couple weeks to catch on.

From that point I stopped watching Practical Magic as a story and tried watching it the way you watch a girl you love: moody, whimsical, silly, not always making sense, making big things small and small things big, adorable precisely where she is least explicable. I was watching something my wife loves, with her, trying to keep my judgment set down, and half of what I was really watching was her. When the credits rolled I would not have told you the movie was good. But pieces of it had lodged. Chocolate cake for breakfast is a moral instruction. A dead man freshly buried in the garden coexists with margaritas at midnight, because grief and giddiness were never enemies to begin with; anyone who has watched women closely knows the two keep close company. A demonic possession is handled with the class phone tree, because in this cosmology the PTA and the coven were always the same institution. When the evil is finally dispatched, the women of the town sweep him out of the house with their kitchen brooms. Big things small, small things big.

Her sentence stayed too, and it would not settle. “They’re just being girls.” For two weeks I kept coming back to the movie, off and on, trying to work out why so many women loved it so much. Then this morning, in the shower, of all unmagical places, the answer surfaced whole, almost like magic: remembering the plot of Practical Magic was not like remembering a movie at all. There were characters, moods, feelings: golden light, a warm kitchen, two sisters, a shiver, a song. It was exactly like remembering a dream: each scene vivid and complete, the joints between them missing, the whole organized by feeling rather than cause. The moment I saw that, the entire film made sense, and I stopped needing the spine.

Nobody had set out to make a dream. The director wanted The Exorcist; he has said so in as many words. The screenwriter who began it wanted a grounded story of generational witches, and so disliked the resulting movie that she distanced herself from the film for twenty-five years. Three credited writers passed the script around, the studio cut the darker material, and the completed score was discarded on the way to release, so the music that stitches the film together was the last-minute work of a second composer. No single intention survived the process. That is why you never notice how Sally can fly across the country in only a couple of hours, or how the girls drive the whole way back in a single night with a dead man in the car, or how Jimmy’s tequila bottle is simply there on the counter come margarita night. Dreams don’t dally on those details. This one doesn’t either.

The sisters wear the two halves of the dream. Sally dresses in cardigans and floral maxi dresses, Gillian wears slips and velvet chokers. They are one girlhood imagination split into its two selves, the one who stays inside the walls and the one who runs out to test them. You can tell where you are in the dream by the light. The first act is a golden hour that never ends, lit the way memory lights the summers of childhood. When Jimmy enters, the palette bruises. No title card announces the change and none is needed, because this is the register-shift every dreamer knows, the pleasant dream souring into the fever dream without asking permission. The soundtrack does the same work. The last-minute score loops small themes so that each new scene arrives pre-remembered, familiar the way dream places are familiar. The pop songs drift up as if the women themselves were dreaming them, Stevie Nicks presiding like a household saint, Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut” carrying the margaritas. A film this disjointed on paper should by all rights feel broken. Yet it feels continuous, and the continuity is entirely sensory: the sisterhood, the light, the music, holding hands beneath a story that cannot do the same. Altogether, meaning drained out but the vivid moods remained, emerging as a different kind of art.

That art has an architecture, and the film knows where its heart is: it spends more loving attention on the house than on any face in the cast. The kitchen is the center of it, the great Aga radiating like a hearth, white plates stacked out in the open, everything on shelves and nothing behind doors, a room with no secrets in a family made of them. Off the kitchen, a greenhouse, where nature itself is on the family’s side and anything can be grown, brewed, or undone. No one in this house keeps office hours; no one ever wonders how the pantry stays full. The critics docked points for that. They should have asked what the house is for. It is ground that holds. Every silly, radiant thing in this film happens inside those walls, the dancing, the midnight drinking, the spells, the girls being girls, because that is where the women are safe enough to be light. Brightness is what a woman does with safety. The house does not shelter the femininity. It produces it. Gillian goes out beyond the sanctuary and finds Jimmy, which is what the dream always suspected was out there. Sally has to venture out to bring her back, and the horror follows the two of them home, into the house, into the bright kitchen itself, and ends up buried in the yard. Its first move back into the world is an inexplicably feminine one: rose bushes, growing wild over the grave. Even the horror, in the end, respects the house’s floor plan.

Gary Hallet arrives doing what I was doing on the couch: investigating. He has a file, a timeline, a missing person, and a set of questions that assume the world runs on cause and effect. But he’s slowly and then abruptly disabused of that notion. The dream absorbs him as the film absorbs its audience, and in the end he does solve the case, in the only way this film lets anything be solved: he cannot prove Jimmy’s death was an accident, but he feels that it was, and belief is enough; the file closes on a feeling. He is the film’s own instruction manual. Watch him closely and you learn how to watch the movie. Ebert, in this light, is the detective who filed his report and went home, never stopped long enough to wonder.

And what the dream is about, once you stop asking it to be about a plot, is the feminine itself, or at least one loving, sun-struck portrait of it. Sisterhood as the only reliable covenant. Kitchens as chapels. Gossip as liturgy. Power disguised as domesticity so thoroughly that the whole town mistakes it for mere eccentricity. Even the villain presents this way: Jimmy Angelov is a boogeyman, a Bulgarian who dresses as a cowboy, every dangerous-man signifier stacked into one pair of boots, how a girl’s imagination might file danger before she has met him. The one intrusion into this otherwise dreamworld, the Arizona detective with his badge and his questions, is rapidly converted to fantasy: his badge repels the demon not because badges are magic but because, faced with an undead entity, he sets his skepticism down long enough to give belief a desperate try. His frame he keeps; the steadiness never wavers. What he drops is the skeptical judgment, the kind that arises absent emotion, the kind men are most prone to precisely when they are trying to understand women. It does not work that way, and it cannot, or the feminine would not be. The moment passes and he picks the skepticism back up; conversion does not come that cheap. I recognize the rhythm. The film says its thesis out loud, and it is not a throwaway line: a curse only has power if you believe it.

Before ever meeting her, Gary has fallen in love with a letter Sally wrote. Sally brightens around him scene by scene, not because he rescues her, for he never does, but because his frame holds steady; her lightness is the measure of his steadiness. And in that steadiness the feminine home blossoms as never before: a man brought forth from a girl’s spell, designed to be impossible, survives the curse that kills the men who love Owens women. It took the both of them to make that possible. He had to suspend his skepticism, she had to stop believing in the curse; together, it had no power. A fairytale dream love.

Some of my pleasure in the viewing was watching my wife watch it, and her joy was part of the film’s content for me, the way the warmth of the person beside you is part of a fire. Practical Magic underperformed in theaters and was buried by its reviews, then rose on VHS and cable and streaming into an annual October rite, watched not for what happens next but for the pleasure of being in that house again. People revisit places and moods, not plots. A plot only works once or twice. They come back the way you return to a recurring dream, and a generation of women quietly voted this film into that category while the critics’ verdicts sat in the archive, irrelevant.

Go back to the spell that opens the film, because the film states its own theory of wishing there and then obeys it for two hours. Amas veritas: the girl designs a man who cannot exist, on the reasoning that a wish made impossible is a wish made safe. That is the engineering of every daydream, which must be unreal enough to never be tested. The film then does to its audience what Sally did to herself. It assembles a world too impossible to be believed, the aunts, the house, the coven of school mothers, and therefore safe to want. And then, like the spell, it works anyway. Sally gets her impossible man after all, down to his favorite shape, which arrives pinned to his chest. The audience gets to revisit the house, every October, for two hours at a time.

The house itself, the most beloved house in the iconography of American movie witchcraft, never existed. The exterior was a shell raised over six months on a bluff on San Juan Island; every interior scene was a soundstage in Los Angeles; and the whole structure was torn down the day after filming ended. You cannot visit it. There is nothing to visit. It stood for the camera and was struck like the set it was, which is to say it was only ever a place you could dream. That seems right to me. Sally’s spell was for a man who could not exist, cast so that love could never find her, and love found her anyway. The film works the same way. It assembled a world that could not exist, and a few million people believed in it anyway — which, by its own stated rule, is the only way any of this works.

They’re just being girls. I took that for a shrug when my wife said it, and it took me two weeks to hear it for what it was: the whole review in four words.

They’re just being girls. And perfectly so.