The Vagina Dentata Next Door, Too.

(Movie spoiler- and possible trigger-warnings.)



After a few years of wanting to see the film Teeth, I was gifted a copy of it this week, by someone very special to me. I tore open the shrink-wrap and popped it into my DVD player, almost right away, not sure what to expect, but hoping I would love it as much as I thought I might.

I wasn't disappointed in the least.

The film begins as shallowly detailing the life of the story's heroine, Dawn - a caricature of the classic goodie-two-shoes All-American-Girl-Next-Door, with her remarkable innocence, devout Christian belief structures, abstinence-until-marriage/pro-purity attitudes, and petite-white-blonde-blue-eyedness. A high school student, she spends her time sketching wedding gowns and speaking to her peers at pro-abstinence rallies about the importance of maintaining a "pure" lifestyle until marriage. Dawn is, without question, a parent's wet dream. But she has a secret, a defect, a mutation; one she isn't even aware of. YES! Vagina Dentata. She has teeth in her vulva. TEETH.

After recognizing that she has an attraction to one of her pro-purity allies - Tobey - Dawn finds herself fantasizing about him, thinking of their wedding night and the sex they might have, almost going so far as to *GASP* masturbate. However, she quickly withdraws, mentally berates herself for having even-slightly-impure thoughts, and concludes that it isn't wise for she and Tobey to be in close proximity any longer. Tobey agrees. However, they soon break their mutual vow, and meet at a waterhole, where they strip down to their bathing suits and go swimming. Venturing off to a cave to warm up, the twosome find themselves locked in a brief kissing session, before Tobey begins to force himself on her, claiming that he "hadn't jerked off since Easter!" and insisting that she "wouldn't have to do anything but lie there," all while ignoring her pleading for him to stop and covering her mouth to muffle the screams; hard enough to knock her out for a few minutes.

Now, under normal circumstances, I go out of my way to avoid films with rape scenes. I don't need to see that shit, and I don't think anyone else does, either. Aside from the fact that it could possibly trigger some members of the film's audience, I've always found the way in which rape is depicted in film... unsettling. And not just because it's rape, but because it's rape that's meant to conjure conflicting feelings in its viewer. Forced intercourse under sexy lighting. Designed to make you feel disgusted, but turned on. Horrified, but horny. More often than not, I absolutely refuse to support that kind of shit.

However, this was a special case. And I knew it would be.

As Tobey forces himself upon her, Dawn panics and screams and flails. Tobey, having no intentions of stopping, soon pauses, crying and screaming in horror. The camera pans down to a monstrosity of bloody gunk where his penis should be. And so is the beginning of what will be a beautiful journey from sugary-sweet high school girl to full-fledged independent womanhood.

What I also found interesting about this film - to throw in a random non-sequitur, as I am wont to do - was that it was NOT the women who were exposed and exploited. At all. It was the men. When Tobey was talking to Dawn over the phone in the men's locker room, it was the men who were in the background, parading around naked, while in Dawn's portion of the split-screened view, in the opposite locker room, all the women are covered or fully clothed. There are dismembered penises - low-budget and wickedly hilarious - and extensive male nudity throughout the film. There is merely one scene in which we saw Dawn's breasts. Otherwise, there was absolutely no female nudity.

The thing I liked most about this film is watching a young woman taking something that's strange and unaccepted and imperfect about herself, and utilizing it to not only exercise her innate female strength and protect herself from the harm that others - namely, men - attempt to inflict upon her, but to achieve a grander sense of self, and the power that she harbors BECAUSE she's a woman; not in spite of it. She holds the crowned jewel, exacts her revenge, takes all the power without apology, and gives men a proverbial "dose of their own medicine" BECAUSE of her vulva and the power it has granted her; not in spite of it.

The Vagina Dentata, as I mentioned in my previous Vagina Dentata entry, is a testament to male weakness and feminine power. Teeth - instead of using the myth to shame women and deem our genitals inferior or perpetuate the male view of sex as a simple "longing to return to the womb," or brand female sexuality as dangerous and insatiable, as was the myth's original intention - uses it to EMPOWER women; or, in particular, a young woman who is in rare possession of it. And the film itself is, I believe, one giant metaphor of patriarchy and feminist politics; men, with their smug sense of self-entitlement, blended with the typical unchecked male privilege. Men use their dicks for power and dominance; the dick IS a symbol of power and dominance in the eyes of most, because dicks are automatically associated with men, and men are associated with power; women, and vulvas, are not, in a typical, bourgeois sense. Get rid of the dick, and men are just a screamin', bloody mess; a mess that quickly unravels into a thousand little ribbons and falls the fuck apart, crying for its mommy; a woman.

Teeth is bold, crude, hilarious, dark, has real artistic merit, and is much deeper than its surface. The layers of metaphor, combined with the palpable modern feminist undertones and the twist on an out-dated, sexist myth, make it edgy and give it a sense of social and political responsibility that's real and raw and completely unexpected, but wonderful all the same. Teeth, for me, has tremendous re-watch value, because I simply loved the way it made me feel. I loved seeing a woman taking control of her destiny and turning a societal negative into a personal positive. I loved seeing a woman tossing her modesty aside - modesty she'd been socially-conditioned to have - and asserting her newfound power, instead of being ashamed of it, and trying to rid herself of it. I don't think I could possibly have enough good things to say about this film.

In closing, all I have to say is this:

Teeth is a must see. Five stars. Two thumbs up. A-plus. If you want to see a film that keeps you on the edge of your seat, wondering where this journey will progress to next; a compelling film with brains and ovaries to spare, rich with metaphor; if you want to see a unique and edgy film that actually makes you think and feel and write movie reviews on your Blogger page, Teeth is the film for you.