Jordan Buckley over the Resurgence commented on my earlier post on the Twilight vampire series linking to this interesting article from Wired magazine about unfortunate lessons girls learn from New Moon and the rest of the Twilight books and movies.
These start with:
1.) If a boy is aloof, stand-offish, ignores you or is just plain
rude, it is because he is secretly in love with you — and you are the
point of his existence.
These "lessons" move on to darker, abuse-enabling themes, such as:
7.) It is extremely romantic to put yourself in dangerous situations
in order to see your ex-boyfriend again. It’s even more romantic to
remember the sound of his voice when he yelled at you.
I don't think this is unique (at all) to the Twilight series,
but this is an area to which we ought to pay more attention. It's also
an area where Christians and some feminists can agree, at least on
diagnosing the problem.
Images given to our girls and young women often mask a pagan and
predatory patriarchy, one in which female worth is seen satanically in
terms of sexual availability and attractiveness to men.
The answer isn't just to "deconstruct" these images. The answer
means providing a compelling counter-narrative about the glory of
womanhood.
The answer is to tell girls that they’re important for their achievements and accomplishments, and creating a world where girls can have achievements and accomplishments. Telling boys that girls are completely human and worthy of respect is, if anything, more important.
Interesting. I read a review that came to most different conclusion about what is the negative message given to girls in this series. The upshot of it was that the character of Bella is a self-absorbed girl too wrapped up in her inability to feel loved or to love back that her lover must break through and save her or fix her. But she never will be fixed until she lets go of her self-absorbtion.
I have no idea whether this is at all an accurate depiction of Bella’s character, but I knew a girl it described and had to learn the hard way how painful it is to love a girl who doesn’t know how to love and be loved.
I would agree that issues of social malfunction with regard to boy/girl interaction is not unique to the Twilight series. Nor is misrepresentation of major Biblical themes with regard to theology even amongst the Christian genre of literature and movies. I also don’t think it solves those malfunctions to tell boys, “Hey girls are human and can accomplish things too”, or giving girls a false sense of ‘self esteem’ where it really isn’t necessary. I was one of those malfunctioning girls in my youth, and it does little good, if not more damage to approach it from angles of ‘empowerment’ or ‘entitlement’. I think Russell is on to something when he says that rather than ‘deconstructing’ these already flawed images, we need to focus on augmenting the appropriate images conveyed to us. Those being the ones in Scripture. Girls don’t sleep around with vampires, but they do sleep around. The Biblical principle applies. Vampires who abuse their girlfriends don’t exist (though I don’t see this in the books-just connecting with the comments made), but men who abuse their wives do. The Biblical principle applies. Our lives, and the experiences we face, will always have the backdrop of a worldly interface that is constantly sending us signals contrary to what we know and/or believe to be true. And we will always be battling that till we are perfected in the life to come. The battle therefore is not convincing people how wrong, or damaging books like the Twilight series are, the battle is convincing people that their hearts need to be transformed by the saving grace of the ultimate ‘Transformer’. And with that on going conviction (Holy Spirit driven) comes the ability to read literature and watch films from many genres and themes through the lens of that transformation. So it will be with anything we face, Twilight, Harry Potter, or Left Behind.