Meeting The Beast: Ginger Snaps and Feminist Werewolves
For Lupercalia, I thought I'd give you an essay about blood, sex, and wolves. Seems appropriate.
I saw Ginger Snaps last night, finally, after being a bad werewolf fan and waiting way too long to see it. I really, really liked the movie. It was very sharply-scripted and incredibly funny. It hit some wonderfully dark notes without losing its deft touch. I probably will buy it.
That said, the people who have claimed that this is a masterpiece of feminist awesomeness are wrong.
This was the same nonsense we always see: sex used as a metaphor for degeneration and moral decay. The end result was more of the same body-fearing, sexuality-fearing bullshit that I'm accustomed to seeing in horror movies, and despite some sharp writing, really excellent acting, and a genuinely interesting exploration of what happens when one of a pair of friends (in this case, sisters) begins spiraling into self-destructive behavior, it brought nothing new to the table. Hey, why break with tradition now?
Coming-of-age stories for women are pretty limited. Many are cautionary tales warning of the dangers of sex and sexuality. This kind of story at least hints at pleasure-driven sexuality, which a lot of surviving women's stories do not. I'm much more likely to give a thumbs-up to a story that has the character suffer horribly for fucking than I am to give a thumbs-up to a story that shows the character being rewarded for settling down with a husband and popping out a litter after a brief excursion into adventure and free-will. To my mind, better fucking and dead than live and enslaved. Make of that what you will. At least you get that moment of freedom before you go to the bitch-whore's culturally-mandated demise.
The good things about the movie were very good.
Both lead actresses were fabulous. Ginger was a total bitch in a really fun way. The actress managed to show what is so alluring about people like that - they aren't likeable, but they are incredibly charismatic people, and that kind of force is hard to deny. The movie didn't lean on it, but in the few scenes where she was horrified by what she was becoming it was truly pitiable. She managed to convey the awful vulnerability of a wounded thing that is still dangerous. She did sexy very well, too. In one of the most unexpectedly erotic yet disturbing moments I've seen in a long time, she is coming on to Sam and pulling her shirt up to show her belly, and we see the extra wolf-nipples among the fur that is growing there. It's disturbing because it was not played purely for horror, as a turnoff, but was intended to be sexy . . . and it was.
Bridget was great, too. I don't know that I've ever seen an actress exude that much discomfort from every pore. She embodied teenage dork awkwardness with a perfection that was alternately funny and sad. Her eyes were amazing. Incredibly expressive. Her love for her sister was obvious, and equally obvious was that it wasn't stupid or thoughtless. Bridget knew what Ginger was, and loved her anyway. I like that she was very, very slow to give up hope for her sister, and I like, too, that the script made it obvious that this wasn't because Bridget had any illusions about Ginger at all.
What annoys me about movies like this is that they conflate the bestial and sexual in us with what is most damaging and dangerous. That isn't right or accurate or fair. Never mind the negative press that gives to wild animals, the negative press it gives to women is enough. IT's not that our bestial side cannot destroy us, it's that those tropes are so often used against women attempting to grow up that employing them even in the service of a structurally sound tale is morally problematic, and calls the ethical underpinnings of the entire tale into question. Because no alternative is presented beyond "don't be sexual, don't do these forbidden things," and because these things are not, in themselves, harmful, this "lesson" is something that we are culturally going to have to stop reinforcing, or we are at least going to have to examine how we reinforce it, and who truly needs it enforced.
It's easy to call up the image of the beast in a woman, to tell a story about a girl-child finding her teeth, and it is easy to find power in those stories. It's also easy to endow the beast-woman with the most alluring womanly features and the most terrifying features of the animal/monster. It's not so easy to resolve the questions that doing so raises, because it's very hard not to bow to the cultural training that says that female sexuality is horrifying and dangerous. It's not easy to resolve those questions without taking that power away again, and pulling the wolf's teeth. We aren't told how else the story might end, so we are left repeating the same ending over and over.
I've read people defending this as feminist art, but I have to put a bullet in that one. If it was meant as parody, it fails to subvert; it is such a close reproduction of what it's parodying that it lays the whole concept of destructive female sexuality bare in its stark ridiculousness, yes, but it does not turn that on its ears. It has value, I think, for all that - this movie could easily be used as a very entertaining and watchable example of everything that is wrong with stories about girls gone wild.
I don't really think it worked as feminist, though. Just because something is funny, fun, sharply-written, sexy, thoroughly enjoyable, and written by a woman does not mean it's feminist.
Come on. It's the oldest story in the book: Girl has sex for fun, girl is punished, girl dies. Nothing feminist about that.
Tellingly, Ginger does not choose to be what she is -- not even by choosing poorly. It is thrust upon her as a very obvious metaphor for the horrors of puberty and the onset of sexual maturity and the dawn of sexual behavior. So now, we have changed the elements, and the naked bones of the story go like this: Girl becomes woman. Girl tries to enjoy being a woman. Girl cannot control herself. Girl becomes a monster and has to die.
In the original story, when Little Red Riding Hood was cornered by the wolf in the forest, he asked her "Which way are you going? By the path of pins or the path of needles?" Red takes one path, la Béte, the bzou, the man-wolf, takes the other. When she arrives at the cottage, he is already waiting. He serves her Grandmother's flesh and seduces her into bed, where he eats her right up.
Not every version punishes the wolf for this - the wolf is only being a wolf, after all; it's the girl who shouldn't have gone into the woods dressed like that, who should have known better - but most people are familiar with the huntsman, and so the wolf must go to his fate and his belly full of rocks, too, for being a carnivorous and sexual being.
So, you see, no matter which version you read, the one where she chooses the path of pins, the one where she chooses the path of needles, the one where she lets the wolf choose for her, the end is the same: both paths led to the same cottage, the same act of cannibalism, the same cleaving axe. Once Red has met the wolf, has experienced temptation, has been asked to come away, come away into the dark woods, she is already damned. Damned just for meeting the wolf.
What bothers me most about the movie is that Ginger is only offered one choice: continue unchecked down the path which, we are given to understand, can only lead to murder, cannibalism, and quite possibly lesbian incest . . . or cease to be what she is and go back to the powerlessness she had before. Be condemned for being an animal, or remain a child forever. Path of pins, path of needles.
What the fuck kind of choice is that?
But so it is, so it always is. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Whether you are the girl or the wolf - or both - the end is always the same, no matter which path you choose . . . and one cannot choose not to meet the beast.
And now my fur has turned to skin
And I've been quickly ushered in
To a world that I confess I do not know,
But I still dream of running careless through the snow
And through the howlin' winds that blow
Across the ancient distant flow,
It fills our bodies up like water till we know.
-- Blitzen Trapper, Furr
From the dark into the black,
Throwbacks always have to go,
But now I know it's painless.
-- Tarot, Painless
I would recommend, if you want to see a very good movie that discusses these things in a more approachably female way, that you see A Company of Wolves, based on the peerless Angela Carter story of the same name. And while you're at it, reading the rest of the book in which it appears, The Bloody Chamber, is probably a good idea.
I saw Ginger Snaps last night, finally, after being a bad werewolf fan and waiting way too long to see it. I really, really liked the movie. It was very sharply-scripted and incredibly funny. It hit some wonderfully dark notes without losing its deft touch. I probably will buy it.
That said, the people who have claimed that this is a masterpiece of feminist awesomeness are wrong.
This was the same nonsense we always see: sex used as a metaphor for degeneration and moral decay. The end result was more of the same body-fearing, sexuality-fearing bullshit that I'm accustomed to seeing in horror movies, and despite some sharp writing, really excellent acting, and a genuinely interesting exploration of what happens when one of a pair of friends (in this case, sisters) begins spiraling into self-destructive behavior, it brought nothing new to the table. Hey, why break with tradition now?
Coming-of-age stories for women are pretty limited. Many are cautionary tales warning of the dangers of sex and sexuality. This kind of story at least hints at pleasure-driven sexuality, which a lot of surviving women's stories do not. I'm much more likely to give a thumbs-up to a story that has the character suffer horribly for fucking than I am to give a thumbs-up to a story that shows the character being rewarded for settling down with a husband and popping out a litter after a brief excursion into adventure and free-will. To my mind, better fucking and dead than live and enslaved. Make of that what you will. At least you get that moment of freedom before you go to the bitch-whore's culturally-mandated demise.
The good things about the movie were very good.
Both lead actresses were fabulous. Ginger was a total bitch in a really fun way. The actress managed to show what is so alluring about people like that - they aren't likeable, but they are incredibly charismatic people, and that kind of force is hard to deny. The movie didn't lean on it, but in the few scenes where she was horrified by what she was becoming it was truly pitiable. She managed to convey the awful vulnerability of a wounded thing that is still dangerous. She did sexy very well, too. In one of the most unexpectedly erotic yet disturbing moments I've seen in a long time, she is coming on to Sam and pulling her shirt up to show her belly, and we see the extra wolf-nipples among the fur that is growing there. It's disturbing because it was not played purely for horror, as a turnoff, but was intended to be sexy . . . and it was.
Bridget was great, too. I don't know that I've ever seen an actress exude that much discomfort from every pore. She embodied teenage dork awkwardness with a perfection that was alternately funny and sad. Her eyes were amazing. Incredibly expressive. Her love for her sister was obvious, and equally obvious was that it wasn't stupid or thoughtless. Bridget knew what Ginger was, and loved her anyway. I like that she was very, very slow to give up hope for her sister, and I like, too, that the script made it obvious that this wasn't because Bridget had any illusions about Ginger at all.
What annoys me about movies like this is that they conflate the bestial and sexual in us with what is most damaging and dangerous. That isn't right or accurate or fair. Never mind the negative press that gives to wild animals, the negative press it gives to women is enough. IT's not that our bestial side cannot destroy us, it's that those tropes are so often used against women attempting to grow up that employing them even in the service of a structurally sound tale is morally problematic, and calls the ethical underpinnings of the entire tale into question. Because no alternative is presented beyond "don't be sexual, don't do these forbidden things," and because these things are not, in themselves, harmful, this "lesson" is something that we are culturally going to have to stop reinforcing, or we are at least going to have to examine how we reinforce it, and who truly needs it enforced.
It's easy to call up the image of the beast in a woman, to tell a story about a girl-child finding her teeth, and it is easy to find power in those stories. It's also easy to endow the beast-woman with the most alluring womanly features and the most terrifying features of the animal/monster. It's not so easy to resolve the questions that doing so raises, because it's very hard not to bow to the cultural training that says that female sexuality is horrifying and dangerous. It's not easy to resolve those questions without taking that power away again, and pulling the wolf's teeth. We aren't told how else the story might end, so we are left repeating the same ending over and over.
I've read people defending this as feminist art, but I have to put a bullet in that one. If it was meant as parody, it fails to subvert; it is such a close reproduction of what it's parodying that it lays the whole concept of destructive female sexuality bare in its stark ridiculousness, yes, but it does not turn that on its ears. It has value, I think, for all that - this movie could easily be used as a very entertaining and watchable example of everything that is wrong with stories about girls gone wild.
I don't really think it worked as feminist, though. Just because something is funny, fun, sharply-written, sexy, thoroughly enjoyable, and written by a woman does not mean it's feminist.
Come on. It's the oldest story in the book: Girl has sex for fun, girl is punished, girl dies. Nothing feminist about that.
Tellingly, Ginger does not choose to be what she is -- not even by choosing poorly. It is thrust upon her as a very obvious metaphor for the horrors of puberty and the onset of sexual maturity and the dawn of sexual behavior. So now, we have changed the elements, and the naked bones of the story go like this: Girl becomes woman. Girl tries to enjoy being a woman. Girl cannot control herself. Girl becomes a monster and has to die.
In the original story, when Little Red Riding Hood was cornered by the wolf in the forest, he asked her "Which way are you going? By the path of pins or the path of needles?" Red takes one path, la Béte, the bzou, the man-wolf, takes the other. When she arrives at the cottage, he is already waiting. He serves her Grandmother's flesh and seduces her into bed, where he eats her right up.
Not every version punishes the wolf for this - the wolf is only being a wolf, after all; it's the girl who shouldn't have gone into the woods dressed like that, who should have known better - but most people are familiar with the huntsman, and so the wolf must go to his fate and his belly full of rocks, too, for being a carnivorous and sexual being.
So, you see, no matter which version you read, the one where she chooses the path of pins, the one where she chooses the path of needles, the one where she lets the wolf choose for her, the end is the same: both paths led to the same cottage, the same act of cannibalism, the same cleaving axe. Once Red has met the wolf, has experienced temptation, has been asked to come away, come away into the dark woods, she is already damned. Damned just for meeting the wolf.
What bothers me most about the movie is that Ginger is only offered one choice: continue unchecked down the path which, we are given to understand, can only lead to murder, cannibalism, and quite possibly lesbian incest . . . or cease to be what she is and go back to the powerlessness she had before. Be condemned for being an animal, or remain a child forever. Path of pins, path of needles.
What the fuck kind of choice is that?
But so it is, so it always is. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Whether you are the girl or the wolf - or both - the end is always the same, no matter which path you choose . . . and one cannot choose not to meet the beast.
And now my fur has turned to skin
And I've been quickly ushered in
To a world that I confess I do not know,
But I still dream of running careless through the snow
And through the howlin' winds that blow
Across the ancient distant flow,
It fills our bodies up like water till we know.
-- Blitzen Trapper, Furr
From the dark into the black,
Throwbacks always have to go,
But now I know it's painless.
-- Tarot, Painless
I would recommend, if you want to see a very good movie that discusses these things in a more approachably female way, that you see A Company of Wolves, based on the peerless Angela Carter story of the same name. And while you're at it, reading the rest of the book in which it appears, The Bloody Chamber, is probably a good idea.