Catherine Hardwicke – Bitch Flicks

Unpopular Opinions in Film: A Critical Re-Examination of ‘Twilight’

My intent is not to claim that ‘Twilight’ is a perfect movie, but rather, I want to argue that it has more virtues than it is given credit for, and to point out that its dismissal is frequently based on pervasive sexist attitudes. I am not speaking for the other films in the series — all directed by men — but rather, the first film, which was written and directed by women (Melissa Rosenberg and Catherine Hardwicke, respectively), based on a novel written by a woman. There are many valid reasons why one may not enjoy ‘Twilight,’ but it is important to recognize that it is unfair and sexist to dismiss the film and its fans based on the fact that it is a romance told from a female perspective.

This guest post written by Angela Morrison appears as part of our theme week on Unpopular Opinions.

“He looks at you like… you’re something to eat,” says Mike Newton (Michael Welch) to his friend Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), regarding her sparkly new beau, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). Mike’s comment serves as humorous dramatic irony, while also making it clear that Bella is desired by most of the men she comes in contact with. Mike’s simile is painfully, literally correct – Edward wants to drink Bella’s blood, and she knows it. Well, the foundation of any good relationship is honesty, right?

Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight (2008), based on Stephenie Meyer’s wildly popular novel of the same name, deals with teenage romance, vampirism, female agency, and desire. In her brilliant article on Twilight fans, Tanya Erzen outlines exactly who likes the series and how they show their devotion. She writes: “There have certainly been fan crazes before, but what differentiates the Twilight phenomenon is that its fan base consists almost entirely of girls and women.” The specifics of these girls and women – race, class, sexual orientation, religion – is not clear, but one thing is for sure: overwhelming numbers of women are vocal about their passion for the tales of Bella and Edward.

There is an insidious trend in our North American society wherein anything beloved by women – specifically young women – is automatically dismissed. Twilight is frequently looked down upon by both film critics and casual moviegoers, including people who have not seen the film or read the books. Erzen smartly observes that “denigrating these female fans as rabid, obsessed, and hysterical is a favorite pastime for many media outlets.”

My intent is not to claim that Twilight is a perfect movie, but rather, I want to argue that it has more virtues than it is given credit for, and to point out that its dismissal is frequently based on pervasive sexist attitudes. I am not speaking for the other films in the series – all directed by men – but rather, the first film, which was written and directed by women (Melissa Rosenberg and Catherine Hardwicke, respectively), based on a novel written by a woman. There are many valid reasons why one may not enjoy Twilight, but it is important to recognize that it is unfair and sexist to dismiss the film and its fans based on the fact that it is a romance told from a female perspective.

I am personally not a fan of the Twilight books, as I do not connect with Meyers’ writing style. She has many good ideas, but they often do not come across clearly in her writing. Where the book fails, Hardwicke and Rosenberg are successful. Some of the cheesy lines make it into the movie (“You’re like my own personal brand of heroin…”), but it is so well-made that this is easily forgiven. Hardwicke has a strong authorial voice and presence, often focusing her films on young female protagonists experiencing strange and sometimes painful events. Both Twilight and Thirteen (2003) feature washed-out cinematography shot by Elliot Davis, and deal with teenage female protagonists living with a single parent. The similarities between the images and themes in these films represent a through-line across Hardwicke’s filmography. Twilight‘s icy grey-blue and deep green images beautifully portray the damp, rainy, sometimes mysterious setting of Forks, Washington.

Writers, such as Dr. Natalie Wilson, argue that Twilight upholds traditional gender roles, and romanticizes unhealthy behavior in romantic relationships. Twilight sends the message that a woman’s only purpose in life is to love and be loved by the man of her dreams. Bella loves Edward obsessively – towards the end of the first film, she stutters profusely when Edward suggests she spend some time with her mother, and says, “We can’t be apart” Edward is frequently cold and distant, and constantly tells her they shouldn’t be together – while at the same time, proclaiming his everlasting devotion to her. These mixed signals are confusing and painful for Bella, but readers/viewers interpret their relationship as transcendently romantic. Bella is willing to give up her life and her soul to become a vampire, so she can be with Edward forever. This all-encompassing, obsessive relationship is clearly unhealthy, and borders on being emotionally abusive. While I argue that Twilight has merits, it is also important for me to reiterate feminist critiques of its outdated gender roles and dangerous romanticization of heterosexual and heteronormative monogamy as the only option for women.

Bella is frequently dismissed as weak and passive, but she is more interesting and complex than meets the eye. Brigit McCone at Bitch Flicks points out that Hardwicke’s camera privileges Bella’s point of view – the female gaze. Here, Edward is the spectacle to be looked at – he is an alluring, seductive vampire, and Bella spends a lot of time considering her desire for him. Edward takes off his shirt and reveals to Bella that his skin glitters in the sunlight, and she breathlessly tells him, “You’re beautiful.” The camera is with Bella in almost every scene, and the audience experiences things as Bella does. There are simply not many movies where female experiences are centered, especially not big-budget films like Twilight.

The film also features many female characters who support one another, such as Bella’s friends Jessica (Anna Kendrick) and Angela (Christian Serratos). Bella assures Angela she is a “strong, confident woman,” and urges her to subvert gender roles and ask Eric (Justin Chon) to the prom, instead of waiting for him to ask her. Edward’s sister Alice (Ashley Greene) immediately takes a liking to Bella, letting her know that she has seen the future, and they are going to be great friends. Bella also risks her life out of love and loyalty in order to try and save her mother from the violent vampire James (Cam Gigandet). Twilight not only centers individual female experience, but female friendship and support.

I previously outlined some of the ways in which Bella and Edward’s relationship is unhealthy, but what is particularly striking to me is how they get together in the first place. Bella is enchanted by Edward and his golden amber eyes in biology class, and does her best to strike up a friendship with him – she remains pleasant and engaged, even when he is incredibly rude to her. She slowly realizes that there is something different about him – something magical, possibly dangerous — and through her own research, pieces together that he is a vampire. She is active, not passive — she is the one that pursues him most of the time. Bella finds herself faced with creatures out of a horror movie, and instead of running away in fear, she bravely embraces and accepts them (particularly Edward). Edward can read everyone’s mind except Bella’s – this gives one the sense that she has hidden depth, and constantly leaves us questioning why she is not vulnerable to Edward’s probing vampire powers. Bella is open-minded, easily willing to accept that there is more to the world than meets the eye. She follows her heart, and does not shy away from her desires: she wants to be with Edward, so she pursues him. She doesn’t let Edward’s icy glares stop her from being friends with Jacob (Taylor Lautner), and conversely, she doesn’t let Jacob and his father convince her to stay away from Edward. She is played with vulnerability, wit, and quiet passion by the incredibly talented Kristen Stewart, an actress frequently criticized for not conforming to traditional ideas of femininity.

One of my favorite things about Meyers’ story is its core concept: a family of vampires living in the lush, chilly Pacific Northwest, where one of the vampires falls in love with a human. It is a romantic and interesting, if not particularly unique, take on the literary (and cinematic) vampire tradition. Catherine Hardwicke’s film is the strongest entry in the cinematic series, largely because of the way she privileges the female gaze and point of view. The film is visually beautiful — one can almost feel the cold, damp air of Forks – and it can be seen as part of a larger whole: Catherine Hardwicke’s cohesive filmography. The film is perfectly cast, and features strong performances from many women and people of color (Eric, Tyler, Angela, Jacob, Laurent, and Billy, to name a few). The film was wildly successful at the box office, despite being criticized and dismissed by people who do not take female-centric projects seriously.

Surely, there are ideological problems with Twilight, but it is worth taking a closer look at. There are complexities and subtleties within the film and its performances that are not visible on the surface. Erzen said it best when she noted that critics should “…begin taking the complicated practices and pleasures of female fans seriously.”

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Tanya Erzen’s ‘Fanpire’ Blog Tour: Fans of The Twilight Saga

YouTube Break: The Twilight Saga: An Interview with Dr. Natalie Wilson

Movie Review: The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Shishihokodan: Ice Prince/Wolf Rivalry as Female Madonna/Whore

Violence Against Indigenous Women: Fun, Sexy, and No Big Deal on the Big Screen

Angela Morrison is a queer Canadian cinephile and feminist, and she is Team Jacob. She has written for Bitch Flicks before and writes about film on her blog.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week – and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

Aziz Ansari’s Hilarious New Show Tells Stories Rarely Seen on TV by Amy Lam at Bitch Media

10 Awesome Feminist Films From the ’90s by Gisselli Rodriguez at Ms. blog

Documenting Women’s Stories: November 2015’s Crowdfunding Picks by Laura Nicholson at Women and Hollywood

For A Year, Shonda Rhimes Said ‘Yes’ To All The Things That Scared Her at NPR

Shonda Rhimes On Running 3 Hit Shows And The Limits Of Network TV at NPR

Watch 25-Minute Conversation with Gina Prince-Bythewood on ‘Love & Basketball’ & Indie Filmmaking Challenges by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

10 Female-Directed Movies on Netflix That You Need to Watch Now by Allyson Johnson at The Mary Sue

Reese Witherspoon Gives Glamour Awards Speech: Female-Driven Films “Are Not a Public Service Project” by Ashley Lee at The Hollywood Reporter

Why Catherine Hardwicke Started to Fight Back Against Hollywood Sexism by Ramin Setoodeh at Variety

The ‘Ishtar’ effect: When a film flops and its female director never works again by Rebecca Keegan at LA Times

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

Shishihokodan: The Destructive Female Gaze of YA Supernatural Action Romantic Comedy

This repost by Brigit McCone appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

YA Supernatural Action Romantic Comedy (SARCom) was created in 1987 by the manga artist Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma 1/2. Her mixture of kung-fu demon-of-the-week fights, romance and comedy, with a supernaturally strong heroine, dual shapeshifting supernaturally strong love interests and sarcastically quipping sidekicks, was then a completely unique format and rapidly became popular in the West and Japan. Takahashi’s creative control as visual and story artist (particularly after the success of the slapstick Urusei Yatsura) meant that the aesthetics of SARCom were shaped by the female gaze from the outset. Among its innovations, Ranma 1/2 introduces an Ice Prince/Wolf love rivalry between the hero Ranma and his rival Ryoga, a trope Takahashi would develop in her next SARCom Inuyasha. Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer popularized the SARCom in mainstream Western culture, developing its own Ice Prince/Wolf rivalry with the characters Angel and Spike. The Ice Prince/Wolf dynamic now dominates teen girl cinema, after Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight set a new record for commercially successful female directors.

Hardwicke’s camera continually privileges Kristen Stewart’s female gaze as Bella Swan, moving with her and focusing on her lip-biting lustful reactions, while offering Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen as erotic spectacle, the camera panning over him lovingly. Twilight also almost fails a reverse-Bechdel through the intense Bellacentrism of all its characters. Male viewers react with defensive ridicule to the uncomfortable sensation that they are supposed to be lustful fourteen-year-old girls when watching this film. In this moment, they have a brief sensation of what it is to be the female spectator of 90% of Hollywood films, uncomfortably reminded by the Male Gaze that you are somehow supposed to have the reactions and expectations of a heterosexual man. Their unfamiliarity with the mechanics of the female gaze became obvious when Hardwicke was replaced in Twilight sequels by male directors, who fumbled uncomfortably to recapture her intensity. Not only excluded as unintended spectator, the male viewer of SARCom is more likely to identify with the always defeated “Wolf” (sexual pursuer, equivalent to female “Whore”), the vulnerable, openly desiring rival. The victory of the unrealistic “Ice Prince” (sexual resistor, equivalent to female “Madonna”) is therefore destructive to the male viewer’s ego, often provoking a hostility barely concealed under sneering ridicule, just as the Male Gaze’s Madonna/Whore logic has always been destructive to the female ego. So what, actually, is going on?

Celebrating Celibacy: The “Ice Prince” Archetype

The defining characteristic of the “Ice Prince” is his combination of emotional fidelity and sexual unavailability, which amplifies gazing female desire and sexual frustration simultaneously, and is generally accompanied by his emphasized superiority and/or physical threat. That is, his sexual unavailability becomes a symptom of his overall domination. Ranma, the hero of Ranma 1/2, not only rivals the heroine Akane in martial arts, but periodically transforms into a girl more sexually attractive than she is. This tantalizing superiority enhances the character’s sexual unavailability; the world of Ranma 1/2 plays with gender but is strictly heteronormative with biological sex. Ranma 1/2 occupies an intermediate position between the shounen (boys’ manga) harem plot of Takahashi’s previous Urusei Yatsura and the love rivalries of her later Inuyasha: as a shounen hero, Ranma is the center of a harem of sex-crazed women, but as a shoujo (girls’ manga) hero, he must be sexually attracted to none of them. The sexual friction from these conflicting genre demands seems to have accidentally invented the “ice prince” archetype.

Inuyasha tames its threateningly feral hero, while maintaining his sexual unavailability, by making him frustratingly in love with a previous incarnation of the heroine Kagome – thus, he loves Kagome as a reincarnation, but cannot consummate this love due to his frustrating fidelity to her original.

The most extreme “Ice Prince” archetype in Takahashi’s work is Sesshomaru, the haughty, aristocratic pureblood demon introduced as a villain, accompanied by a sycophantic toady, who is attempting to cheat his socially inferior, half-brother Inuyasha out of his inheritance; that is, almost exactly the set-up of Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride & Prejudice. She may have intended to create a villain, but Takahashi falls into Austen’s tried and tested Darcy arc: Sesshomaru meets an open-hearted, mischievous and unintimidated girl whom he struggles to scorn as inferior; his flaws are contextualized by introducing his controlling, snobbish mother; finally, he risk everything to rescue the redeemer-girl. Introducing a poison-clawed Demon Dog Darcy, with the power to raise the dead and blast his enemies to hell as a supporting character, unbalances Inuyasha: Sesshomaru’s well-written redemption arc commences just as Inuyasha’s own arc grinds to a halt, spending a hundred chapters randomly upgrading his sword while the fandom sways toward the narratively marginalized Sesshomaru. Demon Dog Darcy is then forced to hand his emotionally-earned powers over to Inuyasha in an exasperatingly contrived plot twist. But Sesshomaru’s very marginalization in Inuyasha‘s narrative, and total detachment from the main heroine, function to intensify fangirl emotional and sexual frustration: the ultimate aim of any Ice Prince. Although Demon Dog Darcy progressively thaws emotionally, the character’s sexual unavailability is emphasized by spiked armor encircling his chest and maintained by filling the “Elizabeth Bennet” role with a pre-pubescent girl.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel loves and saves Buffy but is made sexually unavailable by a curse that he will lose his soul if he has sex with her. This loss of soul also allows the intensification of Angel’s dominating physical threat and sadism, while permitting the “real” Angel to remain a dutiful lover. Twilight likewise presents Edward Cullen as a deeply loving and loyal “Ice Prince” who threatens Bella repeatedly by mentioning his urge to devour her and, of course, is sexually unavailable through his fear of ‘losing control’. All these narrative devices intensify friction, rather than satisfaction. However, since a female viewer can never fulfil her own sexual desires for a fictional construct, her experience of frustrated sexual tension is most satisfyingly expressed by sexual tension within the narrative. Also, because society constructs men as permanent sexual pursuers, a woman is relieved of her need to resist, and able to fully and extravagantly express her lust in a safer space, when the male is reimagined as loving resistor.

Demon-in-Distress: The “Wolf” Archetype

The defining characteristic of the “Wolf,” the eternally rejected sexual pursuer, is his combination of desperate emotional and sexual availability with repeatedly emphasized vulnerability and animalism. The most exaggeratedly vulnerable is Ranma 1/2‘s Ryoga, a little boy lost in the literal sense that he farcically lacks any sense of direction. The fanged, impulsive Ryoga’s regular transformations into a small, cute piglet add to his vulnerability. His inability to tell the heroine Akane of his true nature and feelings, out of fear of losing his privileged access as her pet pig, forms a near-perfect satire of the “Friendzone” phenomenon.

Inuyasha‘s impulsive, hotheaded Koga is a wolf-demon. In contrast to the elusive, emotionally conflicted hero Inuyasha, Koga falls for the heroine Kagome almost immediately and pursues her consistently. The manga is notable for constantly placing Koga in helpless “demon-in-distress” situations requiring rescue, and for counterbalancing Sesshomaru’s spiked, hug-repellent armor and Inuyasha’s loose robes with Koga’s skimpy armor and furred micro-miniskirt, concealing his crotch only by careful choice of viewing angle. This ogling display of male flesh is characteristic of the Wolf, maximizing the friction between his overt desirability and the need to resist him.

Although Buffy‘s Spike is a vampire, theoretically an “ice prince” archetype, the character bears a dog’s name and typical “wolf” impulsiveness and romantic vulnerability. In his second season introduction, he is confined to a wheelchair and forced to watch his beloved Drusilla seduced by ‘Ice Prince’ rival Angel. In the third season, he’s pathetically dumped and weeping. In the fourth, he’s neutered by a brain chip that zaps him for attacking, so “he doesn’t chase the other puppies anymore.” In the fifth, the trope of Spike’s muscular nakedness is introduced as vulnerability; he bares his chest to Buffy’s stake and confesses his love. This sequence is revealed as Spike’s dream; he is stripped and Buffy is fully clothed even in his own sexual fantasies. Spike is also stripped and tortured for love of Buffy by the dominant, female deity Glory in this season. In the sixth, after their first sexual encounter, Buffy is again fully clothed, abusing Spike verbally while he sprawls naked and defenseless. She repeatedly violates his sexual boundaries from a position of dominance; his attempt to force himself on her is presented as a crime of pathetic desperation. Though ‘Ice Prince’ Angel wishes to torment and kill Buffy when he is soulless, Spike’s soulless state is no obstacle to his love – the emotional dependence of the “Wolf” knows no bounds.

Twilight’s Jacob Black is another wolf defined by constant loyalty, before attempting to force himself onto Bella in an act portrayed as pathetic desperation. Where Edward’s brief moment of toplessness is a dramatic, suicidal act that will dazzle a watching crowd, Jacob’s muscular toplessness and skimpy attire are chronic, underlining his tantalizing availability and maximizing mental friction in the female spectators, as the heroine resists.

Shishihokodan! Or, Why Team Jacob Loses

Comparing the fandom of all four series reveals an interesting trend: fangirls are roughly equally divided between Team Jacob and Team Edward, Team Spike and Team Angel, Team Ryoga and Team Ranma, Team Koga and Team Inuyasha; nonetheless, the “Ice Prince” always gets the girl. It would be easy to blame the creators. Yet, Stephenie Meyer claims to be “Team Jacob.” Both Marti Noxon and Jane Espenson, Buffy‘s major female writer/directors, have made statements in support of the Buffy/Spike (“Spuffy”) romance. Rumiko Takahashi’s writings in the romcom genre, Maison Ikkoku and One Pound Gospel, also reward and root for heroes in the vulnerable “Wolf” mode, and it is Takahashi who provides a structural explanation for ‘ice prince’ triumph with Ranma 1/2‘s Shishihokodan arc.

The “Shishihokodan” is a blast of energy which enables perpetual loser Ryoga to defeat the hero Ranma by harnessing his own heartbreak. Ranma attempts to defeat the all-powerful Shishihokodan with a confidence-blast, but can only triumph by giving Ryoga momentary hope of sexual opportunity. In other words, Ryoga loses not because he is inferior, but because losing is the paradoxical source of his power. Any woman attracted to the “Wolf'” archetype is inherently drawn to vulnerability; her attraction is intensified by the wolf’s heartbroken rejection, her frustration intensified by the heroine’s resistance. Any woman attracted to the “Ice Prince” is inherently drawn to dominance; her attraction would be reduced by his loss of mastery if he were defeated. As such, pursuing the resistant hero, and resisting the pursuing hero, create positively and negatively charged polarities to an explosive battery of sexual tension; a narrative trap which dooms the “wolf,” as Takahashi showed herself sympathetically aware with the Shishihokodan arc.

The wolf is difficult to dispose of: any alternative love interest would undermine his painful availability, thus one could only be introduced with unsatisfactory suddenness at the last minute to make a weak consolation price. The sudden arrival of a pig-fetishist marks Ryoga’s sidelining in Ranma 1/2; a wolf-girl for Koga is a last-minute addition to the Inuyasha anime, while Koga simply loses his previously foolhardy fighting spirit, forgets his long-established vengeance vendetta and slinks out of the original manga after admitting that Kagome should be with Inuyasha. Abandoning pursuit annihilates a Wolf’s narrative role. Most disturbingly, the newly arrived love interest for Jacob Black is literally newly-arrived as a newborn; his obsessive need to psychologically groom an infant into a future bride doesn’t bother the infant’s parents, presumably merely relieved that the wolf has been disposed of. More satisfyingly, rather than slinking away Koga-style, Spike’s acceptance that Buffy can’t love him “but thanks for saying” allows him to destroy the Hellmouth and be redeemed, incinerating himself in a spectacular blast of purest self-destructive Shishihokodan.

Recognizing the function of Ice Prince/Wolf in YA SARCom implies the continual defeat of the Whore as structural necessity in male writings also – as a pursuing character she must be resisted to generate sexual tension, regardless of whether the male author is Team Madonna or Team Whore. The destructive impact on the self-image of female viewers is pure collateral damage, just as our SARCom is poisonously emasculating for male viewers. In fact, mankind’s Whore is generally more empowered than womankind’s Wolf, probably because culture sees male sexuality as common weakness but female sexuality as social rebellion. It is the female gaze’s model of dominant-resistor/submissive-pursuer that aligns the rivalry dynamic of triumphant dominant with the love dynamic of triumphant resistor in a perfect feedback loop, structurally maximizing sexual tension (hence the squealing). But the collateral damage for a male viewer is the destruction of the character he most identifies with, in a blast of purest Shishihokodan. As women well know, it sucks to be the unintended spectator.

Brigit McCone is unapologetically Team Wolf, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and making weird Pride and Prejudice analogies.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Fairy Tales and Female Sexuality

This guest post by Sarah Seltzer originally appeared at RH Reality Check.

Don’t go out into the woods. Beware ugly older women bearing strange gifts. Only a princely kiss can resurrect you.

The anti-feminist messages in fairy tales, both in their classic forms from the tales of Grimm, Anderson and Perrault, and their sanitized Disneyfied versions, abound. Heroines are frequently passive, resisting even Disney’s “spunkification” and lose their voices or fall into slumbers. They are rescued by princes or kindly huntsmen. Evil befalls them during puberty. Many fairy tales that have permeated the collective unconsciousness are known for these misogynist tropes and particularly for their warnings about female sexuality and its existence as both a threat and as threatened.

Red Riding Hood, which has just been remade into a (by all accounts mediocre) Twilight-esque tale of a dangerous teen love triangle by Catherine Hardwicke, draws on one of the more symbolically rich of these stories. As Hardwicke herself said, “When you have problems when you’re five years old, it’s just like ‘Red Riding Hood.’ ‘I’m scared to go in the woods’…Later on, when you’re 12 or 13, you really notice the sexual implications. The wolf is in bed, inviting her into bed. You start reading it on a different level, once you hit that sexual awakening.”

Charles Perrault, who popularized the “Little Red Riding Hood” story, made it pretty clear from the outset that the “wolf” is a seducer, and the story a metaphor for women staying away from sex.

From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers, And it is not an unheard thing if the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner. I say Wolf, for all wolves are not of the same sort; there is one kind with an amenable disposition—neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry, but tame, obliging and gentle, following the young maids in the streets, even into their homes. Alas! Who does not know that these gentle wolves are of all such creatures the most dangerous!

It’s quite explicit, isn’t it?

Susan Brownmiller goes even further in her seminal book Against Our Will, writing that “little Red Riding Hood is a parable of rape,” with the main character an utterly passive victim. The story serves as a warning to girls about the menace in the woods and is an early indicator of “rape culture.”

Indeed, as Paul Harris of the Guardian wrote in an article about Hollywood’s resurgent interest in fairy-stories, “Beneath the magical surface of a fairytale, with its castles and princesses, often lurk ideas around sexuality, the dangers of growing up and leaving home, relationships between children and parents, and the threat that adult strangers can pose.” And in particular, he notes, there’s a “conservative” streak about female sexuality in these stories which is one of the reasons they continue to get resurrected, retold and deconstructed.

Along with Red Riding Hood, archetypical tales like Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Bluebeard’s Castle all share concerns about female sexuality. In Beauty and the Beast, the chaste beauty can tame the male beast—even when she’s imprisoned against her will. In Sleeping Beauty a bitter old fairy punishes the heroine with slumber when she pricks her finger, a symbol for menstruation (as is Red Riding Hood’s cloak). In Snow White the lovely young queen also pricks her finger, becomes sexual and has a child. Then suddenly she “dies” and is replaced by a wicked queen, a witch. Every day this queen gets a talk from her mirror who feeds on her jealousy and her obsession with her youth and beauty until she feels compelled to kill the younger, more beautiful and more sexually alluring young woman. Both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty require resurrection by a man. Similar symbolism is at work in The Little Mermaid, in which a young woman, besotted by a handsome prince, goes to an older witch and exchanges her soul for a pair of legs that hurt her to use and even make her bleed.

Still, ever since there have been fairy tales, there has been feminist re-appropriation of fairy tales. As with the myths around creatures like vampires and werewolves which sometimes intersect with fairy tales, the moral of the story often shifts with the mores of the time. From Anne Sexton’s twisted fairy tale poems to Angela Carter’s brilliant stories to the new tumblr meme which turns Disney heroines into glasses-wearing, irony-spouting hipsters, fairy tales have been fertile ground for re-imaginings and inversions.

As Catherine Orenstein wrote in Ms. magazine about the re-appropriation of Red Riding Hood:

Storytellers from the women’s movement and beyond also reclaimed the heroine from male-dominated literary tradition, recasting her as the physical or sexual aggressor and questioning the machismo of the wolf. In the 1984 movie The Company of Wolves, inspired by playwright Angela Carter, the heroine claims a libido equal to that of her lascivious stalker and becomes a wolf herself. In the Internet tale “Red Riding Hood Redux,” the heroine unloads a 9mm Beretta into the wolf and, as tufts of wolf fur waft down, sends the hunter off to a self-help group, White Male Oppressors Anonymous.

Orenstein went to the origins of the “Riding Hood” myth and discovered that in its original incarnations, the heroine is much less passive and more of a trickster who ends up outwitting the wolf without the aid of any huntsman. She is just one of many writers who devote an entire book to analyzing Red Riding Hood from a gendered lens, while Carter is one of many artists to re-write the story with an entirely new agenda.

Fairy tales will always be with us, whether being sugarcoated and Disneyfied or fed to us as subversive fare. Feminists should continue to embrace the retelling and transformation of these tales as part of our ritual for contending with the myths and tropes of patriarchy. Even if Catherine Hardwicke sexualizes the story in a muddled way, she’s taking part in a proud tradition.

—–

Sarah Seltzer is an RH Reality Check staff writer and resident pop culture expert based in New York City. She’s an Associate Editor at AlterNet and her work has been published in The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, and the LA Times and on the websites of The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal and Jezebel. She formerly taught English in a Bronx public school.