mellysblog

Yay!! A trailer for a film that I can't wait to see and will drag my bf to, god damn it. (After watching Ichi the Killer this week, he kinda owes me one.) Those of you who know me well, know that I spent five months writing a paper for a Freud class at Yale on the depiction of female genitalia through visual art and media... not exactly a thrilling read, but something I'm pretty passionate about. Regretfully, I didn't come across Tammy Oler's paper on pubescent female adolescents in the modern horror genre until I had finished up at Yale, but man, there's some really good stuff in there, unfortunately, no links to available content on the web. Anyways, I'm beginning to watch horror films in a new light, that is, from the perspective of a feminist... and horror is a film genre that's unchartered territory for me.

While, I'm all about the exploring, exploiting, identifying, exposing and debunking sexist myth and urban legend in media, it's been a while since I've seen a trailer for something that has the potential to be this powerful, and hopefully will provide some interesting feminist theory critique....this is truly the kind of stuff I live for. Here's what Sundance had to say about Teeth:

If you get over the rather distasteful subject matter and focus on what's beneath the surface, you'll find a flick that's got a whole lot to say about young women and their fear of burgeoning sexuality, society's general distaste (and, let's face it, fear) of the female sex organ, and the ways in which men do a serious disservice to womankind by treating their "naughty bits" as if they're something to be ashamed of. Teeth covers all this ground (and a whole lot more), and I suspect it's more open-minded and honest than most of what passes for "sex ed" these days. This movie offers enough meaty subtext to fill three semesters and it does so in a shocking, humorous and strangely compassionate fashion.

Sex as power, or as a weapon is not a new notion, but what director Michael Lichtenstein has done here is sheer brilliance, he's taken the vagina dentata myth, and flipped it upside down.... while most vagina dentata narratives end with the male warrior conquering/slaying the woman with teeth/monster, (think Medusa in the cave) in Teeth it is the toothed woman/monster-turned-heroine that the audience is left rooting for.