Warning:
Spoilers.
Teeth is a
film that didn’t seem like something I would rush to see; it didn’t seem like
it would be particularly flattering for women considering the film’s premise
was that a woman had a scary vagina filled with teeth. But as I put it on to
review this week I soon found myself laughing, loving the character, and I
quickly realised that the film’s writer, Mitchell Lichtenstein, was very much
on the side of our female lead Dawn. It is surprisingly a film you could call
feminist in that it understands sexual assault, the mind-set of those who
commit it but also those of whom suffer from it all whilst being unapologetic
in its condemnation of those who commit sexual violence, admittedly in a unique
way.
I also didn’t
realise it was going to be so funny, not realising until I was on imdb that it
is listed as a black comedy. The film was hilarious in many ways, Dawn could be
a bit melodramatic in her innocence and it definitely didn’t treat the male
genitals like some god given gift like pretty much everything else does. It was
nice to watch a film that played on the horror trope of the ‘monstrous feminine’
body, the apparently petrifying vagina, and actually give the power back to
women to show how ridiculous that all is – even when in this case it was well
founded. I defy you, even as a man who perhaps squirmed their way through this
film, to not laugh at the man who shouted “Vagina dentata!” over and over.
Before I
get to the awful male characters depicted in this film, awful in their actions,
I would like to just write about how brilliant Dawn is. She is very much a cliché,
a playing on many tropes of how women are portrayed in films overall but horror
films in particular; she is very chaste as we see her begin the film wearing a
red promise ring and talking at a club telling the joys of celibacy and saving
yourself until marriage. She often wears t-shirts she seems to have bought in
this club, warning about the dangers of sex; her room is full of pictures of
fairies and flowers, her bathroom is pink, and fitting with the films very much
on the nose metaphors there is a cherry sticker on the wall to match the cherry
patterned cup by the sink. We slowly see her innocence and naivety taken away
as the film progresses yet she remains a good person, not falling into another cliché
of going completely to the other side.
Dawn seems
like a simple person, talking about a girl’s natural modesty in response to a
flustered sex ed teacher who is trying to explain why in their textbook the
picture of the vulva is covered by a sticker but that the diagram of the penis
is not. She loves her parents, and is there for her Mum as she is very sick –
which leads to a confused Dawn not having anyone to ask about her very
confusing anatomy; in the same way that boys may be confused asking their
mothers about their body there is only so much her father might be able to help
her with her body – though even he would be able to explain that having teeth
down there is not natural. Dawn’s body is used by the men in this film as an
object yet the film never joins in, it very much keeps her a fully realised
character with great acting keeping her interesting and sympathetic.
The film
explores the way we view the female body, in the past and in the present; its
whole premise is based off an old myth that many cultures wrote about, that
there was a woman who has teeth in her vagina, vagina dentata, and that this
woman must be conquered by a hero to defeat her – more on that later. As with
the sex ed lesson trying hard to avoid displaying the vulva, something a
student actually accurately describes as such which shows that even if you try
not to teach it in schools students will learn about it. It also shows the
cognitive dissonance that exists in a culture that is obsessed with women’s
bodies as sexual objects whilst trying their best to be ignorant about the
realities of female anatomy; as is shown by the brother’s arguable fear of the
vagina, again more on that later, despite the many posters of naked and half
naked women all over his walls. This insistence on making the female body a
mystery, of giving it a sexual power that many women don’t want or ask for –
Dawn’s vow of celibacy means she is even averse to watch kissing etc. in films.
By denying
teenager’s sexuality we create a curiosity that could easily be sated with
knowledge, with teaching boys and girls about their own bodies and urges. If we
pretend that by teaching all teenagers about sex will mean they all go straight
out and do it we can’t properly protect those who already are. Teenagers, and
older, need to be properly educated about the very real risks of sex such as
STDs and pregnancy. Many studies have shown time and again that education along
with access to affordable protection and birth control can prevent the spread
of STIs and teen pregnancy but still it is something many ignorant people
insist is something that shouldn’t be available. Children will find it a lot
easier to remain children if they’re not having to raise their own.
Following
this avenue of thought we meet Tobey, a man who meets Dawn at the celibacy club
The Promise, and straight away I knew he would be the one to first assault her.
He told her he agreed that they should wait until marriage to have sex, he would
accompany her to the cinema and on a trip to the lake with friends and repeated
The Promise’s beliefs back to her. Yet later when they are alone he explains to
her that he is only ‘pure’ in ‘his eyes’ and explains that he has already had
sex once, a year ago. Back at the lake they go swimming, with a little bit of
shock from Dawn at seeing Tobey only in his swimming trunks and they both laugh
at how they had both already imagined each other’s naked bodies. Whilst in the
water they kiss, Dawn laughing, and Tobey feels her breasts but she immediately
stops him. She swims away, not wanting Tobey to follow, and goes into a cave
that was earlier mentioned as being a place people come to “you know”.
Dawn’s face
was one of wonder, happy to be intrigued by the mini-waterfall and the cave as
a whole. She seems confused by the blanket and pillows in the cave but uses one
to keep her warm; Tobey begins to swim towards her and ignores her protests
after he explains that he’s freezing. He sits with her and they begin kissing,
they lay down together and he turns her over and goes on top of her. As he’s
kissing her neck she makes it very clear she wants him to stop, she shouts no
and yet he ignores her; he fights her, covering her mouth to shut her up and in
doing so smacks her head off the cave floor and knocks her slightly
unconscious. He immediately takes advantage of her dazed state by removing his
trunks and he starts to rape her. It is clear it’s unwanted, she fights and
screams and he carries on, shouting that he hadn’t even jerked off since Easter
– as though his celibacy is something to be rewarded by Dawn, regardless of
whether she wants it or not.
It is
during the rape that Tobey begins screaming, the audience hearing a crunch
sound that is heard throughout the film and no doubt in men’s nightmares, and
then we see the place where his penis used to be. The film is very open about
showing the blood and devastation that is a consequence of each men’s sexual
assault and abuse and with its 18 rating it is also happy to show the removed
penis, often applying humour in many, often disturbing ways. After Tobey flees
Dawn does too and we see her being extremely confused, horrified and worried
that she hasn’t heard anything from him since; we later find out that Tobey
died, either from the shock, blood loss or simply falling and drowning in
trying to get away. It is a very unique consequence to rape but the fact that a
rape in a film has an immediate, negative consequence for the rapist is
something that is important to show (many rapes in real life often have no
consequences and a majority often go un-convicted). As you’d expect with the
premise of the film we unfortunately follow Dawn get taken advantage of
throughout.
The next
time her vagina uses its teeth is on a male gynaecologist who was causing her
pain by forcing four fingers into her, it is a gruesome scene as his hand gets
trapped inside her as she tries to push him away; it is another example of a
male character ignoring her requests to stop, her obvious pain and discomfort
in the pursuit of forcing something into her vagina and its end result is
similar. This is the scene that leads to him shouting “Vagina dentata! It’s
true”; it is unclear whether he knows of this myth due to his job or whether his
research on the female vagina in pursuit of his career lead him to come across
it. Either way we later see him in surgery getting his fingers reattached. I
won’t even go into his comment about how tight she was but let’s just say it’s
more of a comment on the man and his sexual skills than it ever really is about
the female body.
The next
time her downstairs teeth are used it is with a new Dawn, pun not intended. She
is more aware of her body, learning to explore it sexually after thinking she
is no longer pure after her rape. This idea of women being uniquely modest is
one simply designed to ensure that women are not as sexually attractive as men
are; moreover men used to use rape as a way to steal women away from being the
property of their father or another man and to make them their property instead
and so putting the blame for this act purely on the immodest, promiscuous woman.
People, women especially, are neither pure nor impure and the idea of virginity
is simply yet another way to treat men and women as being something that is
irrevocably changed by sex; this ignores many things such as the fact that a
man’s penis is not a magic sword that can change anything it touches but also
that things that are used to signify female virginity such as the hymen can be
broken in many other ways and even not broken through sex.
Dawn finally
has sex of her own choice, after going to him when she has no one else to turn
to. She even tells him about her downstairs teeth, though he brushes her off
and jokes that he is the hero who will conquer her. However there are many
problems with this sexual encounter such as the fact that he may very well have
drugged her, he hands her a pill whilst she is in the bath that his mother
apparently uses to relax, and when we see her later open her eyes her towel is
undone and he is using a sex toy on her. This already starts the sexual encounter
with an extreme lack of consent, very much being sexual assault, and Dawn,
inexperienced but happy to have someone touch her intimately despite knowing
about her teeth, consents to further sex. The next day they have sex again and
whilst she is on top of him he gets a call and answers it, he laughs and
promises that he did it and tells her to say something into the phone. As the
audience may have already figured out he only slept with her for a bet.
He saw Dawn
as a challenge, something to conquer not due to her teeth but due to her vow of
celibacy; he tells her that he had a feeling it wasn’t something she was too
serious about. Not only does this once again reduce Dawn to an object, ignoring
any choice she may have, it treats her as forbidden fruit – there are a lot of
serpent metaphors in this film, and a mention of Eve. Women, despite popular
belief, are in fact people, with full lives and interests and autonomy and we
exist in and of ourselves. We don’t need a man to see us to exist, we don’t
need him to touch us to be solid, and we don’t need to be fucked to be whole. This
is something that the film tries to teach as this disrespect of Dawn results in
yet another severed penis, leaving him literally crying for his mother and
clambering around trying to collect his penis.
By now Dawn
has very much learnt how to control her teeth, a weaponised vagina if you will.
She has learnt, the hard way, that there are men in her life who are happy to
treat her as an object for sex rather than a human being and she now has a tool
to deal with it. The film also argues, briefly, that humans and animals evolve
over time to change their anatomy to protect themselves. The implication is
that Dawn – “it’s about you Dawn” – has adapted to protect herself from the men
who would inevitably sexually abuse and assault her. Whilst this argument
implies that men are destined to sexually assault the film itself tries to show
men that that route is not without its very real consequences; this is
something you think would be obvious yet the threat of prison does nothing to
deter men from rape and instead we’ve happily created a world where the social,
emotional, and physical consequences are much, much worse for the victims of
rape than for the rapists themselves.
As the
final act of the film begins Dawn’s mother has sadly passed away, her step
brother Brad ignored her screams to have sex with his girlfriend, and Dawn is
setting out to get revenge on him for letting her die, as well as for setting
his dog on his Dad after he tells him to move out. Throughout the film her step
brother is heard arguing with his girlfriend, he refuses to do anything other
than anal intercourse with her and there is even a weird and uncomfortable
scene where he uses a dog biscuit to simulate raping her mouth. She is there
when he makes his dog attack his father and as she learns what the audience
might have guessed – that Brad is ‘in love’ with Dawn. The film opened on Brad
and Dawn sitting in an inflatable pool in their front garden, him complaining
about her and saying he doesn’t like her; after Dawn’s Mum stops Brad’s Dad
from having a go at him for saying he hates her we are, almost casually,
introduced to the premise of the film in the context of him sexually assaulting
her. Young Brad holds up his bloodied bitten finger and we know that it’s
because he had assaulted her and she bit back.
It’s this
bitten finger that is used to show his feelings for her as we see him pretend
perhaps to not remember what happened to it, and we even later see him sucking
it. He explains to his father that he wishes he hadn’t made Dawn his sister and
that he always wanted her. Dawn, after realising his feelings and what she can
do with them, dresses in a thin white dress and comes onto him. He protests
ever so slightly, only to ask why now, and immediately flips her over as he
knows exactly what is down there. Yet she turns back around and lifts her dress
up, and after he spends time trying to get a look he decides it is worth the
risk to finally sleep with her and he does. However he quickly realises what a
mistake that was as again we hear the crunch, see his face of realisation and
pain and he gets what has always been coming to him as his penis is very much
bitten right off. What follows is a rather disturbing and gross, but
surprisingly funny, scene of his dog then eating his penis and Dawn leaving him
to bleed and realise exactly what he did.
Teeth draws
to a close and we see Dawn having to hitch-hike a ride out of town after her
bike tire gets punctured. As soon as she stuck her thumb into the air it was
obvious what was coming; the old man driving the car later pulls up, locks the
doors, and simply smiles at her and sticks out his tongue. Dawn starts off pissed
off, annoyed that yet another man is deciding to sexually assault her, and the
film ends with her looking provocatively at him and at the camera as we are
left knowing that now every single man who hurts her will get utterly and
exactly what he deserves.
