Teeth
Teeth (2007) — dir. by Mitchell Lichtenstein
Teeth is a campy, offbeat horror-comedy, now a cult-classic. The film focuses on the teenage Dawn, an average, white high-school girl and a spokesperson for her local Christian abstinence group. She lives in a dangerous, deeply misogynistic household, constantly avoiding the sexual abuse of her older stepbrother. She forms an attraction to one of her abstinence-group members, Tobey, and eventually they meet up at a secret swimming hole, where they begin to kiss, until Dawn pulls away, asking to stop, and he begins to assault her. In the midst of this violence, Tobey screams in pain, and Dawn realizes that her vagina bit off his penis. After the assault, she researches the the cultural myth of the "vagina dentata," and goes to a male gynecologist to see if she has it. During the exam, the doctor violates and assaults her, and in the midst of this traumatic experience, he starts screaming, his hand stuck inside of Dawn, as her vagina bites off his hand. These experiences of sexual violence and cruel, routine male intrusions upon her body even in consensual intercourse accumulate, nearly always resulting in a severed penis. Only during consensual, equally fulfilling, wholly desired sexual interactions, her vagina does not bite. Ultimately Dawn realizes that while there is no cure for her condition, there is an opportunity to weaponize herself and embrace the "monstrosity" as protection and retaliation in experiences of invasion. Her sickly mother finally dies, and Dawn realizes that her stepbrother heard her cries and did nothing. She purposely seduces him, and mid-coitus, her vagina bites his penis off, wounding him, and she lets him bleed to death on the carpet. The end of the film shows Dawn hitchhiking, getting a ride from an old man, falls asleep, and awakens in the parking lot of a gas station, and the man locks the doors, trapping Dawn, staring at her and making vulgar expressions of sexual predation. Dawn balks in fear before the slow realization of her power falls upon her face, and she smiles back at him in mock seduction.
Birthplace(s) of Monstrosity
The gendered, "female" body arises as the most obvious site of monstrosity in Teeth, its very namesake. However, the monstrosity of her vagina dentata only emerges as a response to violence and violation, thus, the film troubles the woman's body-as-monstrous and implies that the invasion of the body is the real site of monstrosity. The ritualized, normalized encounters with patriarchal violence override the normatively human and flux towards the inhuman, anatomy misplaced, teeth where there should be none. The vagina dentata mythology then reads as a result of monstrosity thrusted upon femininity and women, even as a reasonable, literal manifestation of the gnawing rage and trauma patriarchy demands femininity carry. Creed describes the unique terror of the toothed vagina, and writes, "The myth about woman as castrator clearly points to male fears and phantasies about the female genitals as a trap, a black hole which threatens to swallow them up and cut them into pieces. The vagina dentata is the mouth of hell – a terrifying symbol of woman as the ‘devil’s gateway' "(Creed 106). Woman as abyss, as inescapable void, is a certain metaphor still plaguing contemporary American pop culture. The fervent, hegemonic belief in male entitlement to that abyss, mainly to its governance, is unsettled and goaded in Teeth. In an essay for Granta, entitled "The Resurgence of the Monstrous Feminine," Hannah Williams writes, "For Freud, the female body is defined by its fundamental lack: uncanny, strange, and unfinished. It’s why so many euphemisms for the vagina focus on the female genitals as a wound: cleft, axe-wound, gash – the woman is always a site of violence." That imagined fundamental absence is subverted in Teeth, in the very myth of the toothed vagina, as such anatomy asserts that rather than being a site of unfininishedness, of lacking, the vagina may not exist only in relationship to the sacred phallic. Rather, the vagina's ferocity can devour and destroy the phallic with ease in this world. The monstrous anatomy reclaims itself. As a spatial configuration, the vagina is culturally metaphorized, constantly invaded, poked, prodded at, wounded, deified, made abject, and censored. The gore of Teeth's depiction of the vagina dentata refuses any easy viewership, and while its male gaze still holds onto the reins, in its incapacity to venture outside of the vagina as existing wholly separate from the phallic, the spatter of blood and castrated imagery still juxtapose the revered penis in the ways vaginas are usually depicted. These penises are rendered laughable and weak, bloodied and easily torn, fundamentally unpretty. These penises inhabit the position of the abject, dislocated from the body.
Visible and Invisible Monsters
The body-horror of the film is designed to stoke a specific fear directed at cisgender men. In its cheesy, overamped gore, specifically its unforgettable imagery of maimed, severed penises, the film overtly mocks the cultural fear of castration. Creed invokes Medusa when discussing the hidden fears of female-enacted castration, critiquing Freud's interpretations of the vagina as castrated: "The belief that woman terrifies because her genitals appear castrated is crucial to the Freudian theory of the castration complex. The argument that woman’s genitals terrify because they might castrate challenges the Freudian and Lacanian view and its association of the symbolic order with the masculine" (Creed 110).
Yet gender as fluid and anatomy as irrelevant to its expression must be considered here. While radical, Creed's assertions still rely on Freudian essentialism, and so we can view the monstrous-feminine in Teeth as more of a constructed imagery than a "real" one. The turbulenrt space of femininity, regardless of anatomy, is, within this film, embodied through the toothed vagina, but the repressed rage and trauma that non-normative gender identities experience, particularly femme identities, is not idiosyncratic to those with vaginas. Womanhood, especially, appears to reluctantly define itself in Teeth. Dawn's initial obsession with purity, as an identity, allows her to grab onto a false sense of control over the unwieldy monstrous of patriarchy, and convinces her that if she obeys, and guards her sexuality, keeping it closed off for the benefit of men, she will be able to be a person rather than the dehumanized, powerless category of woman. Ultimately, Dawn invokes the monstrous-feminine not only as a survival mechanism but as a weapon arsenal, as a rebuttal to the abject feminine. Yet even in this claiming of monstrosity, agency is fundamentally limited. The monstrousness-beneath-the-monstrousness surfaces in the fact of Dawn's inability to completely protect herself from patriarchy and misogyny. The use of her toothed vagina is not a decision, not in a world in which guarantees invasion above all else.
