Twilight’s Gender Divide
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Ashley Greene, Billy Burke
(Summit Entertainment; US theatrical: 20 Nov 2009 (General release); UK theatrical: 20 Nov 2009 (General release); 2009)
Trailer
Official Site
In an article on Prospect.org, writer Sady Doyle posits that the backlash against the wildly popular Twilight series of books and film adaptations isn’t so much based on the poor writing, overwrought performances and anti-feminist message, as it is on the fact that its fan base is almost exclusively female.
Doyle concedes the series’ many faults, but also points out that Twilight engenders a different kind of derision than nerdy fan-boy fare.
“Twilight is more than a teen dream. It’s a massive cultural force. Yet the very girliness that has made it such a success has resulted in its being marginalized and mocked. Of course, you won’t find many critics lining up to defend Dan Brown or Tom Clancy, either; mass-market success rarely coincides with literary acclaim. But male escapist fantasies—which, as anyone who has seen Die Hard or read those Tom Clancy novels can confirm, are not unilaterally sophisticated, complex, or forward-thinking—tend to be greeted with shrugs, not sneers. The Twilight backlash is vehement, and it is just as much about the fans as it is about the books. Specifically, it’s about the fact that those fans are young women.”
It’s an interesting take on the Twilight phenomenon—one that I hadn’t really considered because, well, there are plenty of perfectly valid reasons to scorn Twilight: the central message of the story aimed at teen girls seems to be that if you really, really, really like a boy, you should seriously consider giving up your soul for him. Franchise stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson spend most of their time together onscreen staring dolefully at each other for interminable stretches. Author Stephenie Meyer never met an adjective she didn’t like and her prose is uniformly awful. (The sentence, “He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare,” simply should not occur in the English language. Ever.) Gender issues aside, all of this makes the series ripe for mocking.
Still, it’s undeniable that entertainment aimed specifically at women is often relegated to a fluffy, pink ghetto. For years, I listened to male friends carp about the vapidity and silliness of Sex and The City, although it never occurred to them that their beloved Entourage was essentially the same show re-packaged and targeted to a different gender. Doyle raises a good point in questioning whether Harry Potter would have been such a universally embraced phenomenon if it had a more feminine perspective.
I may not understand theTwilight obsession, but I can empathize with it. After all, I was once a 16-year-old who saw Titanic three times in the theater. I know a little something about falling head-over-heals for a cinematic hero who is tailor-made to appeal to adolescent girls and bored housewives.
What is also undeniable is that The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the second installment in the saga, made $140 million last weekend—the third highest opening ever behind The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3. If there were any lingering questions, it’s now clear that the vampire-loving ladies now have just as much power to set the cultural agenda as the superhero-worshipping lads.
The rest of us had better either get on board, or get out of the way.
Comments
Maligned yes, but marginalized? How does one presuppose that a genuine cultural juggernaut can be treated as peripheral? I do not remember critics lining up to shine the boots of the last Die Hard outing either. One wonders how this backlash is any different from previous teen marketing monoliths. From the Spice Girls and Eminem to Elvis and early Beatles, hell, even Star Wars, critics has ‘marginalized’ in the discourse of artistic merit such works while they burrowed into the popular conscience and were allowed to gestate and grow into relevant works in retrospect after decades.
Perhaps Ms. Lewit has been conditioned too much by the dearth of quality cinema towards the late nineties, especially as this pertains to mainstream cinema and popular culture. That decade in some ways can be seen as the peak of mass media solidarity - the democracy of the internet was still in its pupae form while the conglomeration of media ownership was already in full swing. Over the next decade we would see an (arguable but demonstrable) rise in the quality of mainstream cinema, and a general rise of financially viable independent music and cinema not seen since the 1970s.
Perhaps the supposed backlash against Twilight is not so much an issue of the “pink ghetto” as a response to a movie which functions as a reminder movies that pander to lowest common denominators, be the intended audience male, female, American, white, or otherwise, are still the most culturally-viable commodities. Cinema has grown more intelligent over the past few years - who remembers the last time movies as bleak and difficult as Precious and The Road were primed as the big pictures of the winter season? But it turns out that maybe we haven’t grown as quickly as our cinema. If cinema were a high school, Twilight would be the horribly attractive high school girl or boy who made most of our lives miserable, but who was a hero for her or his ability to fit tightly to the stereotypes that gave them their power. Granted, the heroes and heroines of Twilight are a tad darker on the surface than in Titanic, but the issue remains that these ‘outcast’ characters are glued to their gender roles, where the predatory supermen fight for proprietary right to their women, and the fragile heroine who uses her femininity and perseverance will change them.
Fittingly, this second installment of Twilight ends by pretending to empower Bella. She must decide whether she is to become a vampire at the hands of the family or at the hands of her vampire crush. Rather than be able to strike out on her own, she is given a choice of marriage as the woman subsumed by the man - will she be the family’s property or Edwards? Ms. Lewit, the kids are not alright. They may never have been, but Twilight still deserves its thrashing at the hands of those who would wish for something more, in cinema and in the world at large.
Comment by C.B. Langer from Toronto, Canada — November 24, 2009 @ 3:08 pm