Swift is the crazy girlfriend, and we like it

Snark Week: 'Twilight' and 'Gone Girl:' Sex, blood and violence

In November 2008, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis reviewed Catherine Hardwicke’s “Twilight,” calling the film “a deeply sincere, outright goofy vampire romance for the hot-not-to-trot abstinence set...sighs and whispers, raging instincts, high school dramas and oh-so-confusing feelings, like, OMG he’s SO HOT!! Does he like ME?? Will he KILL me??? I don’t CARE!!! :)”
The Friday after this review came out, I joined the hot-not-to-trotters in line at a downtown Berkeley movie theater. It was early in the afternoon. I cut sixth period to make the 4 p.m. showing.
I’d been given Twilight by a high school English teacher earlier that year. I think she thought I needed some sort of anti-sexual awakening. If so, it worked. The mental image of Bella in bed in her underwear with Edward haunted me for months. Every time I thought of it, I tried not to blush. (Relatedly, vampires don’t blush. You need blood to do it, and vampires are dead and therefore bloodless. This plot point brings up other questions about other things you need blood to do, but I won’t delve into all that).
Still, the inherent bloodlessness and deadness is part of the problem with “Twilight.” It hinges on a basic “will they or won’t they?” plot. Will Edward succumb to his instincts and snack on Bella’s neck? Will they have sex? Are neck-snacking and sex inherently intertwined? And is the threat of becoming a vampire all that alarming if the worst thing that happens is you become a super-hot—albeit paler—invincible version of your former self?
In “Twilight,” marriage—especially the consummating part—kills Bella. When she and Edward finally boink (in the fourth book) on an island off the coast of Brazil, things don’t go so well: Edward eats a down pillow, Bella eats fried chicken and vomits profusely, and then Bella is eaten from the inside out by her half-vampire half-human child. Her buddy Jacob begs her to save herself, but she refuses to abort the monster baby. Eventually, she starts drinking blood from a sippy cup in order to survive.
Moral? Sex kills, kiddos. Especially if you’re boning the undead.
Moments like these are echoed in “Gone Girl,” Gillian Flynn’s runaway bestseller turned film. In “Gone Girl,” (spoiler alert!) Amy Dunne fakes her own death and frames her husband Nick Dunne for the murder. Halfway through the film, Amy comes back from the pretend dead, sets out alone, and becomes a vampire-like murderess when she slits her high school boyfriend Desi’s throat after rocking his world in bed.
In some ways, “Twilight” is the little sister of “Gone Girl.” Both novels feature youthful romantic relationships that turn sour: Bella gets screwed when she literally gets screwed, while Amy believes she gets screwed after tying the knot.
These novels tell us that marriage makes women bloodthirsty: literally in Bella’s case (see the aforementioned sippy cup) and pretty close to that for Amy (see her moral deadness, lack of friends, pale beauty and skills with a box-cutter).
Maybe Elif Batuman was thinking about this when he wrote his October 10 article in The New Yorker discussing marriage in Gone Girl as an abduction or “violent crime.” But I wonder how much marriage can actually be abduction for a beautiful, privileged, well-off American woman. Sure, there is a societal pressure for women to marry, but there isn’t there as much pressure for men to do it as well?
The spinster stereotype seems as unwanted as that of the perennial bachelor. Maybe what these two books are getting at is that a married man can still be that bachelor—eating ice cream from the carton and swigging booze before lunch in Nick’s case, or heading off to eat grizzly bears in Edward’s—while the woman is forced to fundamentally and physically change with marriage and childbirth.
Near the end of the first “Twilight” film, Edward and Bella dance in a gazebo surrounded by fairy lights. “I’m dying already,” Bella says. “Every second I get closer. Older.”
These books signal that the closer you get to sex and marriage, the more of yourself you leave behind. If sex is giving something up (as “Twilight” implies), wait until you get to marriage. “Twilight” tells us you have to be dead to have sex. “Gone Girl” says it might be better to be dead than be married.
Both films warn against intimacy by saying it’s hard. Maybe it’s time to push the cynicism aside and instead empower all partners in relationships to actually be alive.

Snark Week

Swift is the crazy girlfriend, and we like it

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Ally Glass-Katz

Columnist

November 21, 2014

This week’s column was co-authored by Katherine Churchill ’16.

We have been the crazy girlfriend. Some of us might still be the crazy girlfriend. We’ve booked last minute international plane flights and gained 20 pounds and lost 15. We’ve drunk dialed our ex-boyfriends at 4 a.m. to tell them how “incredibly happy we are” for them and that new girl they’re dating.

We—like Taylor Swift—have a long list of ex-lovers. And they’ll tell you we’re insane.
In the music video for “Blank Space,” the second song on Taylor’s chart-topping new album “1989,” she takes on the media’s misrepresentations of women in relationships. A shot in the first 15 seconds places a lace-clad Swift on a white bed flanked by two horses. Perhaps these beasts act as homage to her earlier days of “Love Story” and “White Horse.” Perhaps they’re an allusion to Katy Perry (with whom she has an alleged feud) and Katy’s appropriative hit “Dark Horse” with rapper Juicy J.

In “1989,” Taylor distances herself from all that. She proves she doesn’t need the backing of Juicy J or country music to sell 1.3 million albums in her first week. Instead, she creates her make-believe version of ’80s music—the kind of faux-innocent pop we wished existed but never did.
“Blank Space” is a great song to groove to (see Katherine’s thirty plus iTunes play count), but it does more than abate our insatiable desire for pop. It addresses the pervasive and damaging stereotype of the “crazy (ex-) girlfriend.”

In the music video Taylor moves from serial dater to serial killer. In the style of Henry VIII, queen Taylor brunches and boozes with beautiful men before threatening to kill them. She golf-clubs a car a la Elin Nordegren. She cuts nipple holes a la “Mean Girls,” and then proceeds to slice tiny female figures out of her boo-thang’s shirt—feminizing him while also suggesting space for comment on fashion industry’s treatment of women.

Late in the video, Taylor handles a poison apple, proving she is Snow White and Eve all at once. By making so many cultural references, Taylor clues in the viewer. “I am in on the joke,” she seems to say. “I know what you think about me. I know you love to play.”

And speaking of play, when Taylor croons, “you love the game,” is she talking about the men she’s with? Or is she talking about us?

With her knowing glances through the fourth wall, Taylor comments on the way we track her dating life and relationships, printing timelines and discussions of her many men in magazines like Business Insider, Billboard and Vanity Fair. Taylor one ups all of our references. She knows the cultural chatter. She knows what we say about her and she laughs about it. We call her crazy, and in turn, she shows us what insanity actually looks like.

Spoiler alert: it isn’t pretty.

In boldly calling out the media myths surrounding her experiences with men, Taylor creates a blank space to revise the expectations of women and power dynamics in relationships. She shows us what’s truly insane—car clubbing, picture slashing, deers by fireplaces, etc.—so that we can understand that emotional fulfillment, honesty and writing as process isn’t crazy at all.

The truly chilling thing about “Blank Space” is that domestic violence (which is actually what she is portraying in her video—think of the scene in which Taylor throws a potted plant at her lover’s head) happens every day, disproportionately to women, and very few people call that crazy. If a woman gets mad when her boyfriend isn’t fulfilling her emotional needs, she’s insane. Domestic violence, on the other hand, is “wrong” and “bad” but never “crazy.”

The sad truth is that, while a woman asserting her personhood in a relationship is abnormal in our society, hurting women is not. We only notice the “insanity” of domestic violence when the assumed gender roles are switched. We should point out that Chris Brown has never been called crazy. He’s bad, but not “psychotic.”

Back in the day, each of Taylor’s relationships may have served as a creative blank space. But now Taylor’s all grown up. Now, each man is a literal blank space—a well-dressed, well-off brunette who’s picture will add nothing to the hall of mirrors Taylor already has built with her immense talent and cultural savvy.

When one man’s picture is slashed, she’ll add on another. The biggest picture she’s slashing? Her portrait as painted by the media and society’s expectations of women. Taylor’s tearing it down and painting her own.

So, as we were saying: we may be the crazy girlfriend. But in a world that defines “crazy girlfriend” as “self-actualized woman” and normalizes domestic violence, maybe that’s what we want to be. Either way, with Taylor at our side, we know we’re in good company.

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