Day Four: Teeth

I'd had Teeth--which I have always thought of as The Vagina Dentata Movie--in my Netflix queue for months now, intrigued by its premise and by its fairly decent reviews. The movie follows a girl's rapid transformation from an obsessively abstinent goody two-shoes to newly empowered fighter when she discovers her own toothed genitalia. The main character's wide-eyed performance and the bloody scenes of horror make the film deliciously campy. I laughed out loud many times, especially when the gynecologist played by Josh Pais was writhing on the floor screaming "Vagina dentata! Vagina dentata! It's real!" Horror spoofs aren't usually my thing, mostly because I don't watch that many horror movies and am easily scared. As I told a friend the other day, I don't like movies that are scary-funny or action-funny; I want my funny movies just funny. But I loved Teeth.

One of my favorite aspects was the depiction of the abstinence group in which main character Dawn is a leader. Though their cult-like chanting is somewhat exaggerated, the characters' earnest plans to avoid temptation and even sexual pop culture, like seeing a kids' cartoon on a double date because "even the PG-13 will have some heavy making out," felt realistic as well as funny. I was certainly never as single-minded or starry-eyed about abstinence as Dawn and her friends, but the rhetoric felt familiar from my high school youth group days. Though parts of the film were over-the-top, Dawn's conviction in saving herself for marriage, her automatic judgment of people who do engage in premarital sex, and her guilt at feeling physically attracted to a classmate were all real and sympathetic.

I think the vagina dentata works as an interesting and even subversive metaphor for female sexuality. Discovering this new part of herself is frightening for Dawn, but it becomes empowering and liberating. Abstinence isn't the only way to avoid being taken advantage of and made an object. The camera largely avoids objectifying her as it does to women in so many movies, including a lot of horror films. It's much more brutal to the men here. My film classes in college have often touched on the idea that Hollywood film is inherently masculine and objectifies women, cutting them up and putting them on display for male gratification (Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" is the main source of these ideas). As someone who hopes to make movies, or be part of the filmmaking process, I've wondered how a feminist filmmaker might get around that. I don't know if any film can completely succeed when it uses the film conventions created by men, but I think Teeth does a fairly good job of not playing into female objectification.

I certainly consider myself a feminist, and I groan and cringe when my friends, male and female, dismiss feminism. Not long ago, I got in a vehement and slightly drunken argument with a couple of male friends about the need for women's liberation in today's society, the sexism and mistreatment of women that is still quite prevalent, despite their scoffing. So I appreciated Teeth's message of women discovering their own resources, couched as it was in gore and camp.