![]() ![]() (Not that either of them thinks of it this way they are both confused, scared, and experimenting, and the actors are totally convincing as they convey the characters’ inchoate desires, fears, and fumbling confusions). As their relationship develops, they continually both arouse each other and hold each other back it’s like trying to see how close to the edge they can get without actually having sex. Anyway, Dawn feels a mutual attraction with a boy who is also an enthusiastic abstinence-pledger. (If anything, the Christians, although creepy, don’t come off in the film as badly as the heavy-metal stepbrother does). ![]() To the movie’s credit, it doesn’t take any cheap shots at this it rather views it as a symptom, both of Dawn’s confusion at her own surging hormones, and at our society’s overall difficulties with sexual expression. Initially, Dawn is an enthusiastic member, and indeed organizer, of the teenage “abstinence” movement she addresses pep rallies in which (mostly white) clean-cut teems take vows of chastity until marriage. Not to mention that the family house is virtually next door to a power plant continually spewing noxious fumes. In addition, at home she has to deal with the fact that her mother is dying, as well as with her obnoxious stepbrother, who apparently has the hots for her, and who is always playing loud heavy metal music while he abuses his girlfriend and trains his killer Rottweiler. She is unable to manage the rush of feelings and desires that seem to take possession of her. Teeth centers on the figure of Dawn (brilliantly played by Jess Weixler, who is actually in her 20s but manages to convey the look and feel of a teenager, and the affective confusions and ambivalences that people of such an age are prone to), a young high-school-age woman made anxious by her burgeoning sexuality. (Mitchell Lichtenstein is the son of pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, and he contrasts to Cronenberg much in the way that his father contrasts to, say, Jackson Pollock). Conceptually, Teeth is body horror on a level with early Cronenberg (think especially of The Brood), but affectively it eschews Cronenberg’s extremity and anguish in favor of something much gentler and lighter (and I do not mean these words as veiled criticisms). But Teeth is rather different, both because the vagina dentata is literalized as the point of the “horror,” and because of the way the film focuses on the ambivalent feelings of the female protagonist who does not realize what she has within her. ![]() (Carol Clover wrote the book on those movies). Sure, there are lots of misogynistic movies where women are (metaphorically, and sometimes literally) castrating bitches from hell, or where alien monsters are devouring vaginas and in the 1980s in particular there was the rape/revenge subgenre (most notable example: I Spit On Your Grave) in which a sometimes literal castration was the punishment meted out to the scumbag rapists. Indeed, a horror-comedy about the vagina dentata is such a rich and clever idea that it’s surprising nobody has ever done it before. Although it was made in 2007, and is set in the present, Teeth has a real 1980s-horror feel to it - which is a good thing, since the 80s were the great decade for horror films with smart socio-politico-sexual subtexts. It might be more accurate to say that it’s gruesome, campy, and affecting in more or less equal measure - though the affectingness ultimately wins out, I think. ![]() Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth is actually a delightful movie - to the extent that a horror film about the vagina dentata and castration can be delightful. ![]()
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