This guest post by Colleen Lutz Clemens appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.
Mitchell Lichtenstein’s 2007 comedic horror film Teeth plays to and with the audience’s anxiety about a young girl’s burgeoning sexuality. In a town flanked by a nuclear power plant, the main character, Dawn, grows into her sexuality while coming to terms with having a vagina dentata–a toothed vagina. In a time when toothed condoms called Rapex to prevent rape are coming onto the market, Dawn’s travails force the viewer to consider what is necessary for a woman to survive as a sexual being in a climate of violence and rape.
Early in the film, Dawn is a nymph-like virgin committed to “saving herself” until marriage. She is the poster child for the “good” girl: a loving daughter who obeys the doctrines of the church and spends her time spreading the gospel of virginity. Everything Dawn knows about the world and herself changes when her falsely pious boyfriend Tobey takes her to a far off swimming hole and tries to rape her. A confused and terrified Dawn reacts by screaming and then—much to everyone’s surprise—cutting off his penis to interrupt the rape. Little does Dawn know that her lessons about Darwin in her biology classes are taking hold in her own body.
Dawn turns to the Internet to learn what has happened to her body (and I suggest you, dear reader, might want to avoid Googling “vagina dentata” if you are faint of heart) and learns that her vagina—something she didn’t want to see the picture of even before the rape—is a tool of terror, in her opinion.
In a desire to learn about her body, to confirm what is normal or abnormal biology, she goes to another man whom should be trusted—her gynecologist. During the exam, he also takes advantage of Dawn’s vulnerabilities and assaults her. When he doesn’t listen to her protests, he loses a finger, and Dawn flees screaming at the fear she now has over her own body and it sexual nature. With little to no information about her own body brought upon by her abstinence-only education, Dawn is left confused while her curiosity mirrors that of any young woman starting to learn about sex.
Viewers finally relax when they see Dawn in the hands of a loving partner, Ryan, who seems to care for her. With loving embraces and tenderness, Ryan takes a nervous Dawn to bed. Her vagina dentata seems to be reserved only for instances in which Dawn needs protection, so Ryan is safe in her embrace. But when Dawn learns that Ryan has bedded her as part of a bet while he is still inside of her, Dawn’s evolutionary adaptation intercedes and Ryan is punished for his use and abuse of Dawn. So now two trusted boyfriends and a doctor have initiated Dawn into the world of oppressive sex and violence, and all three times her vagina—the thing that has left her most vulnerable—has acted as a protector.
Finally, upon the death of her mother, Dawn starts to see her vagina as a tool not only for survival but also for justice. Her awful stepbrother Brad is the first to be the victim of the vagina dentata used purposefully. Having ignored the cries of his dying stepmother, Brad allows the most important woman in Dawn’s life to die a horrible death. A coy Dawn seduces Brad to punish him. His vicious dog gets to eat the spoils of the sexual encounter Brad had been taunting Dawn with for years.
The final scene does the most interesting work in terms of considering Teeth as part of the rape-revenge genre (spoiler alert). Dawn has left her home to begin a new life as she can no longer survive in her town. After a succession of men whom Dawn should be able to trust take advantage of her, Dawn finally embraces her toothed vagina and uses it as a tool of resistance and justice as she works to protect other women from the awful men roaming the world. When hitchhiking, she is picked up by the archetypal “dirty old man” that solicits sex from her as his dry tongue licks his even dryer lips.
In the film’s final moments, the audience sees Dawn smile and go toward this encounter, and we know that Dawn will use her vagina dentata as an act of vigilante justice. She will sever the penis of this man so he cannot use it again and hurt other girls. Instead of being surprised by her vagina or using it as a form of reactive self-protection, Dawn is now being proactive and seeking out the opportunity to use her “teeth” to act as a fighter. She goes toward the encounter and accepts her body for what it is: a powerful sexual being that has adapted to a world that is often harsh and dangerous for the female species.
I have taught this film several times in my college courses. If I were to make a generalization, at the end of the film, the male students groan and the female students cheer. I suppose that is a natural response to some degree. After all, we did just witness a dog eat a severed penis as if it were a Milk-Bone. However, this film always leads me to ask the question: Is this the kind of agency that we as women want—access to violent acts? Is Dawn, as Tammy Oler calls Dawn in her Bitch article on rape-revenge films “The Brave Ones,” a “satisfying fantas[y] of power and fortitude”?
The film seems to argue that Dawn’s growth is a requirement, a form of natural selection–that a young woman growing up in a white, suburban, Christian, capitalist society MUST develop such a “mutation” in order to survive a patriarchal world. Dawn’s vagina dentata is the epitome of her biology teacher’s earlier lesson on natural selection, that along with the help of the effects of the nuclear power plant combined with the need to survive, women will start to adapt and grow vaginal teeth. Though she is still monstrous (the film isn’t called “Dawn,” but is instead named after the thing that makes her a monster), she also has access to mobility—she is leaving—and sexual power—she is about to control the sexual situation for the only the second time in her sexual life. Sadly, though this situation is one of power, not of love.
We do see earlier in the film that she can control her teeth when having sex in a loving environment, so the adaption will not hold her back from having a healthy sexual encounter that is safe for both partners. But when that safety is compromised, the audience is to assume that Dawn will always have the upper hand. Or should we say the upper jaw?
Colleen Lutz Clemens is assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.
This is such a random thought, but wouldn’t this, erm, justice-fighting adaptation put her at high risk for HIV?