Ginger Snaps As Some Sort Of Roundabout Conclusion

And so as our brief class draws to a close, we sit around eating leftover pizza and watching the Canadian horror classic Ginger Snaps to bring this semester to some sort of roundabout conclusion. I discovered this little gem in highschool when some of my more angst-ridden pseudo-goth classmates consumed Ginger Snaps and movies like it with a wide-eyed fervor usually reserved for black eyeliner and new Nine Inch Nails records. This film has obvious cult appeal for any slightly offbeat teenagers starved for popular culture artifacts populated by young people even remotely like them, and like any potent underground teen flick Ginger Snaps offers its core demographic the giddy pleasure of seeing its social outcast protagonists romanticized for rejecting the pressures of conformity and striking defiant counter-culture stances that win them coveted power over their despicably mainstream peers. And so this is pure fantasy escapism for kids who clearly can't relate to American Pie or Never Been Kissed's jock/bimbo binaries and who nevertheless refuse to resign themselves to the traditional Breakfast Club roles of nerd or loser—these are the kids for whom Ghost World represents the greatest cinematic acheivement in American history, and maybe I'm generalizing but I swear I'm not deriding because, hey, these are the teens that wind up infinitely more likable than the She's All That set ever could.

Predicatible demographics aside, I think Ginger Snaps is considerably better constructed than most other horror/slasher films from the past decade and a half, and beyond that I think it's just generally pretty interesting to think about and discuss. Like Joe made clear in class, Ginger Snaps is the go-to film for pedantic film essays about superficial feminist readings and so on, but its obvious menstration allegory, despite hitting you over the head with its point, is still pretty fun. I think it's great that the presenters drew that comparison to Cronenberg's The Fly, because I think it's true that there are a lot of really interesting similarities, even beyond the way that the transformations in both resembled one another. The slow process of deterioration and the initial growth in physical/sexual prowess is echoed, though in a slightly more extreme way (Goldblum's character in The Fly finds he has nearly superhuman physical strength and acrobatic ability before his body begins to lose its human qualities), and where Ginger Snaps sees its transformation as metaphor for menstration and the "transformation" into womanhood, The Fly has been read as an allegory for the AIDS pandemic, where Goldblum's alienation after "catching" his disease seems to echo some of the anxieties over HIV pervading North America in the 80s.

Like Hostel, Battle Royale, River's Edge, Elephant, The Faculty and most especially Bugcrush, Ginger Snaps actualizes extreme anxieties felt by teens and the elder generations, realizing what occassionally feels like semi-satirical interpretations of fears we find deeply rooted in the social discourse about the current state of American youth. Almost all of the films screened this semester take realistic and relevant social concerns to their logical conclusions, offering reasoned critiques of these issues while ironically providing concerned parents and media representatives with further material to condemn in the continued war on the roots of social evils; these films have worthwhile things to say about the state of North American teenagers and their position in a world overrun not simply by actual danger but by a prevailing tendency to fearmonger, and yet the bulk of these productions find themselves dismissed or banned or both.