We watched the first five minutes of "Teeth" over sandwiches, and then Nick had to leave the room. "I would run ten thousand miles to get away from this movie," he said. (This from a guy willing to pay full ticket price for both "Meet the Fockers" and "Alex & Emma.") His reaction is pretty consistent with most reviewers' – the San Francisco Chronicle called "Teeth" "the worst first-date movie ever," while the Village Voice said it was a movie "that every man in America will watch with his legs crossed." Having read that, I was, of course, totally psyched.
You might know the premise from the much-hyped trailer: abstinence-promoting teen comes of age just in time to find there's a 1950s B-movie monster living inside her junk. At first reverential of her sex (she earnestly explains to her classmates that it's because women have a "natural modesty" that a textbook's censored portrayal of vulvas makes sense), Dawn becomes afraid of its power when it suddenly chews up the penis of a boy who has decided to rape her. Dawn turns to her textbook for help and information, and the score plays a soaring "Hallelujah" as she pries loose the censorious sticker and gazes at the unsentimentalized, unpoliticized truth about what women really are.
This scene reminds me of both Ayaan Hirsi Ali's epiphanic realization about the political import of female purity, which led to her crusade towards curbing the doctrine of women's submission, and also the revolutionary moment of the Boston Women's Health Collective. The BWHC's "Our Bodies, Ourselves" marks their lesson this way: "As we talked and shared our experiences, we realized just how much we had to learn about our bodies… We learned that we were capable of collecting, understanding, and evaluating… information; that we could open up to one another and find strength and comfort through sharing some of our most private experiences; that what we learned from one another was every bit as important as what we read in medical texts." For Hirsi Ali and the BWHC, thus, the moment in which key information – that is, the fact that women are not mythical creatures who must be paternalistically protected from all the threat their sexuality implies – becomes available is the moment of dawning political consciousness and sisterly activism. For Dawn, whose community is peopled exclusively by the teen-horror-movie staples of evil dudes, useless girls, and barely-there authority figures, it is a moment in which her spiral toward narcissistic vengeance becomes fairly secured.
From this point, there's a couple more excellent gore shots of lacerated cocks, and a couple more hilarious scenes in which the super-awesome Jess Wiexler as Dawn skips blithely along in her day-glo "I'm Waiting" tee, acting like the twentieth century never happened, but the movie's early promise remains unfulfilled. Which kind of pisses me off, because there are so many cool directions the movie could have gone. This way, however, it's hard to tell whether we're supposed to be laughing at our victim-protagonist's cluelessness or cheering her newfound empowerment.
Still, the best parts of this film are all about Wiexler's face – everything she does with that face is hilarious. I especially liked the scene where Dawn slowly and methodically darkens only her lower eyelashes, attempting to work her seductive grimace like Alex from "A Clockwork Orange." She walks a perfectly calibrated line between realism and satire. Her coming-of-age story's pretty cool – for the first hour. And then it gets all conventional, and by the end, Dawn's just some directionless femme fatale who goes around killing guys who inappropriately flirt with her, and it's kind of hard to keep interest.
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