Totally Charmed

The neat division of the Halliwells’ world into Good and Evil has a few narrative flaws, Richard Garfinkle says. The Evils are all petty jerks. Unfortunately, so are the Goods.

WHY DID THE ELDERS try to prevent Piper and Leo’s marriage? Why, all through the series, do they come across as insufferable twits? What accounts for the abuse Leo’s character has taken in the last two seasons? Why can’t he or any other Whitelighter handle a simple crisis of faith? In short, why are the “good guys” so annoying when they are good and so prone to falling toward the bad when adversity strikes?

While stated in terms of Charmed, I do not think these questions can be fully answered within the context of the series. However, the show does give excellent illustrations and illuminations of what seems to me a large-scale problem in modern writing. The examples above are symptoms of a difficulty present in nearly all modern literature and certainly all pop culture. That difficulty is this: Modern writers appear to have an extraordinarily hard time depicting transcendental good. This trouble is partially rooted in the nature of writing, but even more so in modern views of people and what makes them good and interesting.

“Good” and “evil” are terms thrown around with reckless abandon in shows such as Charmed, but what they mean—indeed, what it is to be good or evil—are fuzzy concepts for both the creators and the audiences of such shows. Sometimes it seems that good and evil are nothing but t-shirts that mark out which side is which. There is a video game psychology in this: As long as the target is wearing the correct t-shirt you can blow them up with impunity.

Generally a moral code is outlined that declares whom you get to blast and whom you must leave alone. But this morality is usually racist, speciesist or dimensionalist (the humans-good/other-dimensional-creatures-bad prejudice). Charmed shares with Buffy the Vampire Slayer the concept that killing demons is good and killing humans is bad. This is regardless of the actions the demon or human takes. In Charmed there was the classic case of Prue’s contempt for Cole when he killed a human who was trying to kill him (this showed Cole descending back into “evil”). It is true that the human could not have hurt Cole, but if he had vanquished a demon too weak to harm him, Prue would not have blinked a mascara-ed eyelash.

It might be argued that this black hat/white hat simplicity is necessary for the purposes of an hour-long drama, since good and evil are complex concepts. I don’t agree. It seems to me that there are simple definitions of good and evil that fit most people’s ideas of these concepts and which hold up even in the rarified reaches of Heaven and the pits of Hell:

GOOD: Seeking to reduce unnecessary suffering.

EVIL: Seeking to create, or not caring about the creation of, unnecessary suffering.

In other words, a good person or entity would work to cut down the amount of suffering in the world. An evil person or entity would either seek to increase suffering or simply not care about the suffering of others.

These two definitions also illuminate the inherent opposition between good and evil beings. A good being would oppose the actions of someone who created suffering, regardless of whether the action was deliberate or through indifference. An evil being who sought to increase suffering would oppose a good being’s attempts to alleviate it. An evil being who was indifferent to the suffering of others might—might—oppose one who works against such suffering, assuming there was some other reason to do so.

Indifferent villains may sound wimpier than actively evil ones, but some of the best nasty characters (as well as the worst nasty real people) come to their evil through indifference. A well-known example is Ebenezer Scrooge, who created suffering by not caring about the fate of the poor.

This opposition between good and evil also exists within each human being. Nearly all of us have desires to ease the suffering of others. But we also have desires to create suffering in those we hate and are often indifferent to the pain of others, particularly if they are far away from us or not the “right” sort of people. This internal battleground is the source of the mythological conflicts between good and evil, the struggle for the human soul.

Stories that take this internal struggle and paint it across the real world are as old as storytelling itself. The major point of such stories is the overcoming of evil or the effects of failing to overcome it. The former tales are hero/saint stories; the latter are morality plays.

In the process of overcoming evil, a hero or saint transforms himself—or herself— individually and the world universally. One of the basic principles of such spiritual tales is that a person who defeats the evil within becomes capable of helping others overcome that evil. This kind of story is almost never shown on TV. The last example I can think of was on the show Northern Exposure in the shamanic education of Ed.

Shows like Charmed are necessarily set on the battlefield of such conflicts. The characters are the warriors of good and evil. Traditionally, such characters would be allegories for virtues in the forms of gods, demons, etc. The demons and other nasties (warlocks and Darklighters, in Charmed’s case) would represent particular dangers to the human soul. The gods (or, here, their witch and Whitelighter analogs) would stand for particular human and divine capacities that could overcome the dangers. The means of defeating them (that is, the plots of the stories) would illuminate processes by which people could free themselves from those ills in the real world. In other words, such tales are instruction manuals that exist to aid people in living good lives.

In Charmed, however, allegory has been supplanted by butt-kicking and spell-chucking. The dangers are dramatic, the heroes are . . . well, we’ll get to the heroes later, and the means of defeat are clever and visually exciting but rarely enlightening.

This kind of cool but meaningless conflict takes us away from these instructive stories and puts us into the realm of the modern superhero story. The ongoing conflict between good and evil is watered down into an episodic battling between nice and nasty. The characters on Charmed are much like the postmodern superheroes who populate today’s comics. The characters on Charmed are cool to look at; they kick butts and take names, are vaguely concerned with good and are on the whole nicer than their opponents for a given value of “nicer,” but most of the fundamental distinctions between good and evil have fallen by the wayside. Instead, good and evil are separated by distinct special effects (Whitelighter orbing versus demonic fading), costumes (demons have funny-looking heads) and occasional bouts of motivation (we save innocents, they harm them).

The transformative character of the allegories is completely lost. People in Charmed do not become better for overcoming evil. The Charmed Ones did not attain any greater goodness for their defeat of the Source (which in an allegory would generate sainthood). Nor have they gained any control over themselves for all the evils they have vanquished. They have grown some as human beings over the course of the series, but there is no correlation between that growth and their triumphs and tragedies.

A lengthy but worthwhile example of this failure to transform can be seen in Phoebe, who presented an opportunity for a story great in goodness. Phoebe, who began as the most airheaded of the Charmed Ones and who went through the messiest interactions with evil (i.e., Cole), could have been a source of fascinating tales illuminating many elements of human life.

Phoebe’s basic power was to see the future, allowing her to act to prevent the dangers she foresaw. Given this great gift, she griped that she couldn’t blow stuff up. But suppose instead of complaining she had embraced her power, let it into her soul and, delving deep into forethought, developed an understanding of the consequences of actions both human and spiritual. She could have learned from her gift, could have come to understand how people affect other people and how good and evil work in the world. She could have become a larger force for good if she had realized she had the greatest of the Charmed Ones’ gifts. She could have guided her sisters, the Whitelighters, other witches, even the Elders themselves in their conflict with evil.

Okay, you might say, so Phoebe becomes a great oracle. What then? Doesn’t that end her plot line since she now has no flaws or conflicts?

No. Now Phoebe, who sees so much, would have to deal with her physical limitations. She would see more suffering than she could act to prevent. How would she chart the course of doing good while always knowing more suffering than she could affect? That is a long-term, complex character arc that can last for seasons without once falling into maudlin wallowing.

Furthermore, when this Phoebe discovered (as she would have) that she was married to the Source but that Cole still existed inside it, her true task would unfold. She would have a titanic struggle ahead of her, to help her husband overcome what had been placed in him and to make him master and subjugator of the Evil Source. This Phoebe would have had a fascinating magical and moral challenge. A battle would have ensued between her and the Source for Cole’s soul that could have had a place in an entire season’s worth of episodes.

Instead, we were presented with Phoebe having a crummy marriage, being manipulated by the Source, losing the child she never really had, losing Cole, etc. All perfectly normal soap opera stuff, nothing charmed about it. And her foresight, her great gift, has done nothing but push her into being a watered-down oracle: an advice columnist.

The Charmed Ones’ battle against evil is not really a conflict with evil, because no evil is truly overcome. Rather than there being any deeper meaning to their conflict, the characters are relegated to the roles of foot soldiers in a magical war. Instead of Phoebe’s struggle being to win Cole’s soul back from evil, it was to survive the emotional tragedy of losing her husband to evil. Phoebe’s growth and changes have come about because of her attempts to retain her humanity despite her place on the front lines.

This struggle to stay human in the face of battle is an important story, well worth the telling. But it is better told about real soldiers fighting other real soldiers in the moral ambiguity of the human battlefield than about black and white conflicts between demons and angels.

But the main reason Charmed fails as an allegory, despite its good-versus-evil premise, lies in its depiction of good—particularly good that goes beyond human niceness.

Evil, consisting as it does of jerks, is largely the same whether on a human or transcendental scale. A jerk is a jerk regardless of whether he wants to stomp on anthills or cover the world in darkness. The creation of suffering is always a petty goal. It may succeed on a horrific scale and create vast pain for millions of people, but the originator of that goal remains petty in mind. Despite his hype, the Devil (or whatever name you choose to give to a large spirit of evil) is a whiny jerk who said, “Whaa, I want to sit on the shiny throne. It’s not fair! You can’t kick me out! All right, I’ll kick over your sand castle, see if I don’t!” All the black clothes, fiery special effects and menacing plans cannot undo the fundamental pettiness of evil.

Evil is the same regardless of scale, but good is not. The scope and depth of suffering that one can overcome depends greatly on the depth and complexity of one’s goodness. Any doctor can tell you that while it is very easy to cause damage, it can be very difficult to undo it. A brutish punch in the face may require a highly trained surgical team to repair. The necessary skill of the surgeon does not glorify that of the puncher. Likewise, the deep goodness needed to rescue a person who is wracked with wrath and fear over tortures they have suffered does not magnify the torturer into some vast figure of demonic grandeur. A bully is still a bully.

Since one of the major elements of storytelling is the transformation of characters, it is on the side of good that the struggle works or does not, since only in good will there be real and subtle change. (Conversion from evil to good—or vice versa—can be a real change, but often it is portrayed as simply swapping t-shirts; the characters act the same way but for the other side.) And in Charmed, as in so many modern tellings, good and the change in good are weakly represented.

In Charmed the side of good is composed mostly of witches and Whitelighters. The Whitelighters include everyday guides for mortal witches and future Whitelighters (what Leo was when he started out) and Elders, who direct the actions of the side of good. There is an implication that there is something greater that can be called God for whom the Whitelighters work.

This structure of mortals with angelic guidance is classical, as is the distinction between lesser and greater angels. What is modern and weak about the Charmed version is that the Whitelighters, especially the Elders, act like obnoxious prats.

This is not unique to Charmed. On Angel, for example, the Powers that Be, whenever they manifested or spoke through some oracle or set a test, were always shown as snooty, self-righteous twits.

Herein we find the crux of the modern image of good: self-righteousness, the arrogant sense that one has a complete monopoly on right and wrong.

Where does this idea of good come from?

I believe it comes from the self-righteous humans who declare themselves the messengers and speakers for God, the self-anointed prophets, the ones who show up on TV all the time. These persons tend toward extreme overconfidence in their own goodness and in the truth of their own words. But if you know any really good people (as opposed to self-declared good people), you may have noticed that they tend not toward confidence but toward caution. While they may speak with clear conviction, they will be careful in what they say and do and will rarely render harsh judgment on anyone except themselves. Of all the virtues the self-righteous claim to themselves, none has an ounce of humility.

One might object that angelic figures like the Elders cannot, as agents of the divine, have humility. But if we consider them as agents of a power that seeks to end suffering, then clearly they must be humble. The first principle of ending suffering is to do no harm. One must be careful in one’s actions, cautious in order to make sure one does not harm another unnecessarily.

Human beings have a hard time being humble because they tend to live alone in their own heads. Unless they stretch out their attention they need never feel the suffering of another person. This means that the most self-absorbed person can feel like the center of the universe, because he or she never needs to realize that there are others in the world.

But the Elders, who exist in a divine presence, should feel their own smallness, sensing as they would the vast majesty and depth of all around them and the great honor and difficulty of the task laid before them. Traditionally, even the greatest of angels understand how small they are compared to the omnipotence that guides them, and how humbly they must undertake the holy tasks which are set for them.

Let us examine the actions of the Elders in the case of Leo and Piper’s romance. The Elders did everything they could to try and stop it because they had a rule: “No nookie between witches and Whitelighters.” They declared the Rule more important than Love. This is a military attitude—No fraternization between officers and grunts!—rather than a holy one, in which love is more important than nearly anything.

Even if, in humility, the Elders could enforce their rule in general, the Charmed Ones were prophesied as being unlike regular witches. Classical angels would have been cautious and humble and wondered if the love between a Whitelighter and one of the Charmed Ones might have a higher purpose than they could understand. And they certainly would not have made deals with evil in order to crush this love.

But, being self-righteous, the Elders did whatever harm they thought necessary in order to enforce the rule. This too comes from our everyday experience of the self-declared good people. They will stomp as hard as they want on people’s lives and make whatever alliances are needed in order to ensure their rules are followed. Rarely do the self-righteous take any notice of the pain they create, or the degradation of their principles that often comes from their enforcement of them. This is a crucial difference between real and apparent good. Real good, whenever it must create suffering (and sometimes it must) feels pain at doing so and seeks to minimize the suffering. Any good parent who has had to punish a child feels the punishment and wishes they did not have to inflict it.

The depiction of transcendental good, which derives from the worst examples of the self-righteous, is not uncommon these days. It is frustrating, from the writing perspective, that this is the dominant view of goodness. It is particularly annoying because all modern writers have had in the last century examples of really good people to draw upon in creating holy characters.

In part the problem may be that the best public people of the last century—I would note for example Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Pope John XXIII and Mother Teresa—do not make good warrior figures, so they do not fit well into the aforementioned butt-kicking-spell-chucking kinds of shows. But Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. fought against empires using love; John XXIII fought against damaging teachings; Mother Teresa fought against the direct manifestations of human suffering. In allegorical terms, each of them was stronger and more terrible to behold than the greatest dragon-slaying knight or the most babe-like, spell-wielding witch.

Another difficulty in stories like Charmed lies in the lack of implications for the characters’ accomplishments. In a world like the one depicted in the show, much evil comes from demonic influence. Therefore, if a demon is vanquished, there should be a lessening of the evil that demon represents. Each vanquishing should make the world a better place. When the Source was destroyed the world should have become transcendentally more hospitable and people should have become better, at least until a new Source was crowned.

This did not happen for two writing reasons: First, it is difficult for many people these days to conceive of what a truly better world would be like. Second, the world of Charmed is supposed to be sort of like ours. In our world evil comes from people, and the only demons are the ones in those people’s minds (the bad thoughts and ideas they accept). Therefore, while it is dramatically necessary for demons to be defeated on Charmed, it could be argued that it is impossible to put the consequences into effect.

Even if one accepts that argument, the battles should at least have implications for the Charmed Ones themselves, making them better people and increasing their ability to confront evil both inside and outside of themselves. In short, each demon overcome should bring the Charmed Ones closer to goodness and make better their lives and the lives of those they later help. It has not done so, and here lies the real writing difficulty as well as the point of this essay (finally).

Today’s writers are taught to see their characters in the framework of psychology. Psychology as a branch of medicine is capable of seeing what is wrong with an individual person, but not what is right with them. Hence there is a blindness to goodness, one inherent in the creation and evolution of characters.

More simply, writers are taught to see their characters as masses of problems, as bundles of flaws. This is because messed-up people are, supposedly, more “realistic” than people who are not juggling neurosis grenades. Some writers argue that no one wants to read about or see healthy, well-adjusted people going about their lives handling things capably. But if you look at the world we live in or any of its fictionalized parallel worlds (such as the world of Charmed), you will see that there are enough inherent difficulties and challenges for even the most capable person, and that a trial of the good within someone is at least as interesting as the repeated hammering of that person’s flaws. The above discussion of Phoebe serves as an example of this as well.

There is another writing problem invisibly coupled with the conception of characters as flaw-packets. Modern writing is based on the unstated assertion that the best solutions available for people’s difficulties are those that already exist in our world.

To take an example: When Leo and Piper were having marriage difficulties they went to a mortal marriage counselor. Angst and minor humor ensued as they translated their magical problems into commonplace marriage gripes punctuated with scenes from earlier episodes.

Surely somewhere in Heaven there was a Whitelighter so deeply imbued with transcendental love that he or she could have offered better assistance than some mortal with a medical degree. Had there been such an Elder, the confrontation between them would have made for a very different episode. Rather than a semi-humorous retelling of past events, Leo and Piper could have confronted the mind-shattering reality of true love, unencumbered by the petty problems of their lives. They would have seen each other as they are and known how much they meant to each other. This is actually much scarier, and makes for better viewing, than just sniping at each other for forty minutes before the inevitable reconciliation.

Charmed is not alone in resorting to everyday psychology in the face of characters who should have deeper insights into the mind than students of Freud and Jung. I would cite as annoying examples the telepaths on Star Trek and Babylon 5 who, despite an ability to roam around in and mess with other people’s minds, have no advice or assistance beyond that available in self-help books today.

Let’s take another charming example of an inconsequential matter: Death. In particular, life after death. The Charmed Ones not only know there is life after death, they also know that the dead (particularly dead witches) can come back and bug the living. Prue died, but apart from actress problems there is no reason she could not come and offer advice from time to time. Leo is dead, but that doesn’t stop him from having post-mortem children. The Charmed Ones’ mother and grandmother are dead, but they can come and go on occasion, nudge the Three as they need to be nudged and see their living descendants presumably unto the nth generation. (Imagine Grams butting into the lives of generation after generation of Halliwells. Shudder.) Death in Charmed is not the ineffable tragedy it is in the real world. But all the characters act as if it were, because it is an implicit rule of modern writing that one cannot do better than what is available in real life. In real life death is “that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” On Charmed they not only return, they bring souvenirs.

If nothing better than what exists commonly in the real world is permitted, then one cannot actually depict any real good beyond the superhero-ish rescuing of people in distress and the smacking down of nasty things. Holding to this rule means no great good can ever be shown. Great evil, no problem. All that is necessary for great evil is for someone to be mean to lots of people, or intensely mean to one person. The more people or the more intensely mean, the more evil.

There is one more writing principle which gets in the way of the depiction of goodness. All writers today are taught that stories need “conflict.” This dictum is pounded so deeply that few question what it means. Rarely does anyone ask what conflict is and why stories need it. Unchecked conflict writing means that stories written according to modern precepts will always have a heavy dose of characters going at each other, one way or another.

The dogma of conflict is such that the most desirable story is the one in which there is as much conflict as possible—not just fights between good guys and bad guys, but struggles between friends (and sisters), disputes between inferiors and superiors (such as Leo and the Elders), bouts of internal torment (as with Leo and Cole) and so on ad nauseam. The need for varieties of conflict means that no character can rise above the everyday pettiness that creates most character conflict, nor can anybody master him—or herself—well enough to transcend self-flagellating angst. The idea that conflict is necessary to stories means that no character can be good enough to minimize the conflicts in his or her life.

If I may continue my heretical views, I venture the opinion that conflict is not a needed element of stories. What is necessary is an unresolved element that comes to resolution, in whatever form the writer chooses. Conflict is only one kind of unresolved condition, the easiest kind to show and the one best adapted to the use of gaudy special effects. But that by no means makes it the only or the best kind.

The case for the weakness of conflict can best be made in the matter of love stories, of which Charmed has had quite a few. Traditional romance is filled with conflict: struggles over desire, over which member of a triangle gets cast out into the cold, over subordination of one person to another and so on. Television has presented many such conflicted romances, some of them quite well. But it has routinely run into trouble when romance ends successfully and life together begins. As many an analyst of television has pointed out, romances that were fun to watch fall flat when the couple gets together. Writers presented with these situations usually resort to the introduction of artificial troubles, of which temptation and adultery head the list, followed by having children and griping about the life changes needed to rear them. In short, they create artificial conflict to keep the tension of romance going long after it should have been replaced by the unresolved matters of life.

The mistake here is in thinking that a story about two people growing together is inherently boring. But in reality the fitting together of two lives is such a great undertaking that nothing compares with it in terms of commitment and character change and flow. There are stories to be told of all elements of life and many of those stories really only start when two people get together. There have been occasional movies and TV shows about this sort of thing, but they are rare because they are not very visual and require skilled acting. Charmed would actually be one of the few shows where such things could be shown, with as many special effects as desired. Allegorically, there is as much drama going on in the everyday reconciling of two people’s different customs as there is in the most violent demon-whacking.

Spiritually, most cultures have a handful of gods, angels or saints devoted to warfare, but often thousands devoted to everyday living. The struggle against evil and the doing of good is found more vividly in the hearth than on the battlefield. In order to save an innocent, the Charmed Ones might need to mend a family, or fight some demon that exploits hunger and poverty, or overcome an evil teaching that pervades a particular family or business. Even on just a personal level, they might begin by seeking to unify their destinies and their personal lives—instead of whining about them—or preparing the world for the coming of the next generation of Halliwells.

I do not wish to sound too missionary on the matter of writing methods, but I do think it necessary to compile the factors that have weakened the depiction of good, and from that demonstrate why it is possible to do better. Here are the weakening elements: a superhero view of the conflict between good and evil; an image of good that comes from self-righteousness; characterization that relies on personal weaknesses rather than strengths; a refusal to have the world or the characters change in accord with their actions; and a reliance on conflict as the most vital element of storytelling.

Put together, these chains hobble the good characters and give them no hope of reaching any greater good. Even stasis in goodness is too much to hope for. In order to sustain the conflict, anyone who is greatly good and not a jerk (such as Leo) must undergo crises of faith and fall from grace in order to fit into the kinds of stories that fit those constraints. Paradoxically, the characters in Charmed, white robed or black, are all stuck in a hell of faux-goodness.

None of these constraints are truly necessary. Any and all of them can be thrown away, to the betterment of storytelling and character development, and to save the good name of goodness, which has been badly sullied over the years.

Great good requires depth. To save a soul involves deeply dredging out the darkness within someone and showing them how to replace it with light. That takes more than a well-placed boot to the backside or a quatrain delivered in the last five minutes.

Some might argue that you can’t do that in a one-hour (okay, forty-minute) TV show. That is true, but in the long span of a season there is plenty of time to both kick backside and explore the deeper recesses of the human heart. What could be more proper in a show rooted in Heaven, Hell and Magic?

Richard Garfinkle is the author of two science fiction novels: Celestial Matters (which won the 1996 Compton Crook Award for best first novel in science fiction) and All of an Instant. At present he is engaged in the more dubious practice of writing non-fiction science popularization. He lives in Chicago with his wife and children.