Ginger Snaps (2000), Puberty, Menstruation and Werewolves
Once upon a time, before puberty came dripping two sisters made a pact. Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Bridgette (Emily Perkins) declared their fidelity to each other unto death. Immediately slipping into a montage of photographs where Ginger and Bridgette are posing in staged crime scene photos that they took for a class project. Ginger Snaps declares being a teenage girl is like caught in a loop of your public suicide. Puberty explodes your body. Boobs and hair appear ex nihilo. Hormonally induced neurosis spills anarchy into her self-esteem and combines with a counterproductive sex drive that declares a new found compulsion. Puberty is a traumatic transformation, not unlike a werewolf emerging from your skin.
The call of Ginger's curse calls her into the popular to find the social recognition for her psycho-sexual development. There is a genius scene where Ginger is walking down a hallway for the first time after being werewolf-ed. The scene is a close-up of her face as she walks down a crowded high school hallway. Donning the clothes of her sexual liberation, she begins with her head down, shy and worried, and as she transgresses the crowd, she gains recognition from her peers which lift her head and strengths her pace. By the end of the scene, she is walking with a purpose constituted and reinforced by peer pressure.
Ginger: I get this ache... And I, I thought it was for sex, but it's to tear everything to #!&ing pieces.

Remember the opening moments of Carrie. Carrie White is ignorant of her biology, she flails upon herself, terrified of her own existence. Becoming a sinned thing in the eyes of her mother and god, the two pivots in which structure her reality collapsed in an intervention of the real that destabilizes their power to control her reality. On the other side of the puberty binary, let’s look at the transformation of the boy Ginger ate. While the initial, puberty leaking terrified him, he soon adapted to the power that came with the werewolf curse (and hormones). Raged, he flings himself forward into testosterone base decisions without the guilt that fills Ginger's story line. Covered in zits and sweat, he did not face the reality fragmenting trauma that Ginger was persevering though. The lesson here is in the way that girls and boys are socialized into their gender and sex. Boys are and instilled with a stupid confidence that propels their sexual exploits from pubic hair to their first lay as achievements of social status, while girls are guilt-ed into hiding their anatomy for it may rouse the beast in men, and pushed into a psychological corner where bodily changes are a radically private affair that needs to be kept shadowed or be labeled whorish.
Ginger: [to Brigitte] A girl can only be a slut, a bitch, a tease, or the virgin next door.
Comments
Post a Comment