Infamous vampire franchises I watched instead of talking to you

So I left you again. On a cliffhanger, no less. Like an annoying British telly schedule from the days before Freeview, I got you hooked on an interesting and entertaining program of feminist delights before callously rescheduling for several weeks in favour of broadcasting the snooker of silence. We should not dwell on why I was gone, because it is not very interesting. What is important is that I am back, and more importantly, I got to watch more things and therefore have even more fascinating insights to impart- a win all around, I’m sure you will agree!

I don't care if you have pretty boyband hair, Stephen Hendry, you ruined the lives of early evening TV watchers all over my country.

Unfortunately, this also means that I am going to have to invoke the modern pop culture equivalent of Godwin’s Law. Yes, I’m sorry, I’m going to talk about Twilight now. I watched the final film on Monday and now it is on my mind, and not just because I want to talk about how they were only able to give it a decent climax by completely ignoring one of the most important rules of the second book, what’s with that*? I know, I know- the dead horse of Twilight hate has been beaten to a mushy pulp just as much as the dead horse of Twilight love. Blogs have been made, t-shirts have been printed, weird contrived rivalries with Harry Potter have played out, alt-universe BDSM fanfictions have become standalone bestsellers. It’s all so done these days, especially now the last movie is out and we can all move on with our lives. But hear me out. I promise I will make this worth your while.

I first learned of Twilight the day before my 20^th birthday, when an old friend asked me to go and see the movie with him. Neither of us really had any idea what to expect- unlike me, he’d actually heard of the books and the fact they were a teen sensation, but I’d not long come back from my first round in China so I was pretty out of touch. We arrived a bit late so had only just taken our seats when golden eyed R-Patz burst broodingly into the cafeteria, to a chorus of laughter and “wooo” from the rest of the audience. “OK,” I thought. “So this is how it’s going to be.”

Be still my beating heart.

Two hours later, we emerged, looked at each other, and went “OK, I legitimately enjoyed that.” And whilst we’ve already established that my tastes are a bit of a mess, my friend J.’s are significantly more developed. Sure, it’s all a bit faux-intense and having missed the first ten minutes, I was under the impression that I was watching a groundbreaking film about a protagonist with a legitimate motor disease rather than somebody whose childlike clumsiness is their biggest characterisation point. But beyond the silliness was something that actually did capture what it’s like being an awkward teenager with feelings. It was in many ways a perfect send-off to my own awkward teeny feeling era.

I went home to discover that my bookaholic librarian mother had already bought the book (yes, everyone in the world knew about Twilight before I did) and, though as we all know reading the book after seeing the film is a massive intellectual faux-pas, I was intrigued enough to do it anyway. And, again, I really enjoyed it, in a “yes this is exactly how it felt to be fourteen”** way. There’s some weird shit in it, sure (I especially liked the book’s one reference to sex, where it is called “being married” and it’s sort of implied that Rosalie and Emmett are refraining from having sex because they’re pretending to be schoolkids and not “married”) and it’s definitely not portraying a healthy relationship, but there’s enough of a sense of an unreliable narrator about Bella that it doesn’t really come across as problematic for the book in general.

Full disclosure: I had an ENORMOUS version of this poster hanging on my wall in second year. I'm not entirely sure why.

Then the other three books happened. And the other four movies. In all their stalky, disturbing, Mormon propaganda filled glory. Thousands of pages of mediocre prose about Edward’s Impossible Angelic Beauty and pissing contests over who loves who more (is it the person who wandered off like a dickhead because of a paper cut, or the person who literally stopped thinking after the wandering off happened? A compelling narrative) and contrived love triangles which are solved by having one of the parties actually be in love with an ovum that later gets born and fulfils everybody’s predestination requirements. Pages both loved and loathed the world over. If you’re not familiar with their contents, and want to be, I have been recommending this summary of them for years and I’ve never come across anything better.

So, an objectively mediocre book achieved unintentional brilliance and went on to resonate culturally with a large portion of a generation whilst simultaneously getting worse in its execution and message. Why is this actually considered novel or interesting? There have been rubbish and popular books for pretty much as long as there have been books, after all. I spent a considerable portion of my English literature A-level reading gothic novels, and I can personally attest that most of them are just as pulpy and awful in their execution, and often just as weird in their depictions of sexuality. The Mysteries of Udolpho, aka the 18^th century’s answer to Twilight (it’s the book that Catherine Morland is reading in Northanger Abbey), is one of very few books that I have physically thrown across the room with frustration- imagine every reference to Edward’s impossible perfection being replaced with the words “and then we had repast and repose” and you’ve pretty much got the idea. My copy of Dracula started with an introduction which has an entire section wondering why the book had become so classic when its prose style is so dismal. And if we’re worried about the poor relationship models we’re providing for our young women in Edward’s stalkery weirdness and Jacob’s overentitled nice guy overtures, then we should be really worried that books like Wuthering Heights are being rebranded specifically to appeal to Twilight-loving young women!

I suppose this is fine...

We can talk about almost all artistic endeavours in this way. Everything can be criticised, and everything can be hated. There is no film, song, book or TV show that can be held up as some sort of objective ideal of human culture. Some things objectively come closer (real Disney movies are better than those awful budget knockoff Video Brinquedo films) but with the majority of stuff, we can spend just as much time picking it apart and knocking it down as we can building it up as the Greatest Thing Ever. What’s more, even when we believe something is objectively “better” than another thing, we still might not get as much entertainment out of the better thing as we do from the worst! It’s why Tommy Wiseau’s The Room will always be one of my favourite films, and why my mother has spent countless futile hours trying to get teenagers to read Mortal Engines or Skulduggery Pleasant rather than Captain Underpants. Captain Underpants and Tommy Wiseau aren’t actually wrong! Unfortunately, we tend to regularly forget this, or are told to forget it by the various people who make a living telling us that there is a grand canon of human artistic achievements that we should be looking to in all our decisions.

One of these films is genuinely worth your time.

Because, surprise surprise, those people are men. Guardian critic Mark Kermode had a great article last month about how weird it is that we have to listen to the “collective mooing” of a whole load of middle aged men to tell us what is good for teenage girls. But for some reason we’ve set up that opinion as something objective, and it’s an opinion which is far less accommodating to anything made for young women than any male equivalent. As I said last week, I’m considered weird because of my lack of knowledge and interest about a whole range of what, in my head, just look like different permutations of Men  Doing Things (In The Parallel World Where Women Do Nothing). And as literally everything I directly experience in my life involves a woman doing something, I struggle to suspend my disbelief about this parallel world long enough to care about what exactly the men are doing. So I enjoyed Twilight, because it resonated with a way I remember feeling***, and I enjoyed the latter three books because I thought they were ridiculous and I enjoy reading ridiculous things. A lot of people presumably also enjoy them because they resonate and/or because they’re ridiculous; others dislike them because they’re poorly written, long-winded and have some really troubling implications- which are also important things to keep in mind, especially when talking about media that is aimed at minors. We can respect the taste and fantasies of girls and young women and provide information about what healthy relationships actually look like. But it’s really unfortunate that the discourse about these sorts of things isn’t really run by either of these groups (or by me personally, more’s the pity) but by the group of people to whom something that resonates with teenage girls can’t be enjoyed without derision because teenage girls (and people who have been teenage girls) don’t get to define what is “objectively awesome”. Old white men do.

            I can only imagine how terrified these people must be by what is happening to the world of art now that we have the internet. Because the difference between Twilight and the gothic novels I mentioned before is that, back in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, reading was still largely the province of the wealthy and distributions of books were, compared to now, absolutely tiny. Now, millions of people from around the world can read and watch the same things, and in many cases they can then go online and share their opinions on what they’ve read or watched with fellow fans everywhere- and even creators themselves. This creates the potential for a massive cash cow out of every vaguely popular fad- there were no Team Heathcliff and Team Linton t-shirts back in Emily Bronte’s day, more’s the pity- but on a less cynical note it also means that the forgotten, niche demographic of everyone who can’t be bothered to pretend the concerns of white men are universal to everyone for the duration of their media experience can actually have their voices heard. Teenage girls are being listened to, and whilst the ones doing the listening might be the same old dudes who have been making everything forever, having the voices there in the first place can only be a good thing.

Historical accuracy thanks to Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant

          And doing so raises another exciting possibility- that there are people who are currently wedded to this “objective canon” who are finally being proved wrong, and embracing the media that proves this to them. The adult fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic- bronies- are an interesting case study in this regard. Frankly, the fandom terrifies me with its constant pompous postulating on the nature of their own existence (yeah, yeah, you’re “uniquely studying a fandom from its inception”, not constantly trying to justify yourselves as Men Who Like A Cartoon With Female Main Characters), but the fact that this postulating is being used to celebrate their own existence rather than defending it is a really nice step forward in my eyes.

            So, having talked so much about things that other people like, I end this on an unreserved recommendation for my current favourite TV program- ABC’s Once Upon A Time. This program takes “Fairy Tale Retellings” and completely avoids any irritating stereotypes, and it’s one of the first programs I’ve watched where the gender equality is presented as pretty much unconscious- Snow White and Prince Charming are both badasses, their child (Jennifer Morrison, who is actually the same age as them all because of magical shenanigans) is even more badass and rocks the whole “hardened woman with trust issues” thing without it being stupid and stereotypical, motherhood is a key part of the story and discussed as a complicated issue which women tackle differently, and even the women who are subordinate to male characters have backbones and traits and aren’t just there to prop up the storylines of the men. Fairytale land even has gender neutral conscription, who knew! Basically, if you want to watch a TV program in which a woman pulls a sword on another woman within the first five minutes, and then it only gets better from that point on, ABC has finally made something for you. Personally, I’d go for that over Twilight any day- but hey, your choice!

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*I’m talking about the “Alice can’t see the future when it involves werewolves” thing. I can’t directly remember if it’s in the second movie or not but I can’t imagine how they get around Jacob saving Bella and Alice not figuring it out if not through that weird little plot point. And yet by film number five she can project an entire hypothetical of vampires and werewolves into Aro’s mind, right down to Jake’s salty wolfy tears when Seth dies (but not Leah because who the hell has ever cared about Leah, come on).

**The characters in the book are seventeen and over a hundred respectively, but they act like I did as a year 9 and I was by no means an emotional early developer, so I don’t know what that makes them.

***I’d just like to point out again that I went to see the film with a male friend who also really enjoyed it, so I’m not saying that lived experience as a teenage girl is necessary or sufficient for enjoyment. Just that it’s why I enjoyed it.

Telly I watched instead of talking to you

This entry has spoilers for Downton Abbey Season 3! Frances should not read it!

Long time no see (or, as we say in actual Chinese, 好久不见), comrades! Things all got a bit stressful over the last couple of weeks and unfortunately when you’ve got seventeen presentations and a debate to prepare and hundreds more characters to learn before your Chinese assessment and true Beijing winter has descended in all its smoggy, windy, painfully dry* glory, it’s the 2000-words-a-week feminist blog that is the first thing to fall by the wayside**. Thankfully, the presentations are over now, and whilst it’s still going to be an uphill struggle to the end of this wintry semester, I should at least be able to get there with some more feminism to keep me warm and you entertained every week.

Many things have happened, or not happened, in the world of feminism whilst I’ve been labouring away on non-gendered real life things. Both the US and China had political shake-ups with markedly different results for female representation- Washington DC is now looking more female than ever, thanks solely to an increasingly less white-man-dominated Democratic contingent (although perspective is key), whereas in China a new Standing Committee was appointed whose biggest cosmetic change is going from 9 middle aged Han Chinese men to 7 middle aged Han Chinese men, whilst female representation in the Central Committee decreased from 13/204 to 10/205, despite assertions from important people and some of my professors that China is totally interested in getting women into politics Adrienne, stop suggesting that the lack of women in leadership problems might indicate wider societal discrimination! So that’s a thing.

At least their ties are different colours? Image via Xinhua

Meanwhile, in the world of women in British politics- well actually the less said about Nadine Dorries the better, moving swiftly on. Elsewhere, Ireland’s legal system just killed a woman thanks to religious “respect” for the sanctity of life, which is also something I don’t want to talk about until there is some good news to put on the table. The rest of the world probably kept on turning as well, with most of its happenings shamefully off my radar as I buried myself in radicals (the linguistic construct, not the fun kind of people) and 19^th century liberal political thought and the fan-shaped development of Hefei.

When real life comes knocking hard, there’s only one thing that I, rather counterintuitively, manage to keep doing, and that’s watching the telly. Not the actual telly in my room, which is just full of bland uninspiring permutations of CCTV- the CC here being China Central rather than Closed-Circuit, although the fact that Chinese state TV shares its name with a form of surveillance is an irony that doesn’t escape me. Instead I try to keep up with an eclectic mix of British and American TV shows through means I don’t care to discuss here. Being as I am incapable of giving my concentration to one activity at once, particularly when that activity is learning 1,200 Chinese characters, having a constant stream of relatively unimportant audiovisual information intended to be understood by people half my IQ works to keep me away from more self-sabotaging methods of semi-distraction, like hours refreshing Facebook or Tumblr or starting a game of X-COM: UFO Defence only to discover I’ve sunk 6 hours into trying to capture a psychic alien without losing half of my fragile pixelated comrades in the process.

Important studies for a student of development. Source

There’s two side-effects to this. One is that I’ve become infamous in numerous circles over the years for an appalling lack of knowledge and experience with the cinematic canon, and I’m not much better where TV shows are concerned- if you want to talk about Avatar: the Last Airbender or Doctor Who I’m all over it, and the same goes for The Room or Studio Ghibili films, but I’ve only ever seen one James Bond film and got bored after two episodes of the Sopranos. Part of it is the aforementioned attention span- honestly, movies are just too long for me to sit and watch unattended unless they’re really fun, and I couldn’t keep track of all the generic New Jersey accented men in the Sopranos and write characters at the same time. I also have a growing scepticism for most media aimed solely at adults, which is most prevalent in my reading choices*** but definitely also spills over into my viewing decisions as well. Clever, well-written stories for children and young adults or “families” manage to skip so much of the “edgy”, self-conscious blustering of a lot of grown-up stuff gets mired in.

But a lot of it is also due to a wider malady suffered by many of us feminists, and illustrated beautifully by the incredible Kara Passey: I’m addicted to feminist media criticism.

Or, not quite. As I’ve covered before, feminism isn’t something I turn on and off when I decide I want to think about vaginas more or annoy people or start arguments with defensive femi-muggles. So I don’t think that being irritated by female representation in a lot of what I nevertheless avidly consume is an “addiction”, as such, because that implies that it’s a shortcoming in me rather than a problem with mainstream cultural thought. Unfortunately, having my feminist power switch permanently stuck in the “on” position even when I’m supposed to be enjoying entertainment leads to a lot of unintended and unhelpful side-effects- mostly rage, to be honest- when things on the screen don’t fit in with the way I’d like them to. And as a former English Literature student and one of comparatively few people in the world who has been able to write “playwright” on the job section of a US immigration form and get away with it, I’ve unfortunately got both the academic background and the delusional self-confidence to pretentiously analyse the shit out of the things I do spot.

Take, for example, the only decent thing to come out of ITV in the last decade: Downton Abbey. I love Downton Abbey. I want to get a civil union with Downton Abbey. Downton Abbey is full of interesting female characters with character flaws, one of whom is mired in a two season long unfulfilled romance that has been so successful at skipping my conscious thought processes and wooing my ovaries that I inexplicably find this man attractive and want to write stories about the two of them kissing.

(I was going to take screenshots to go with this but instead I'm just going to shamelessly thieve the hard work of one of my absolute favourite Tumblrs in the world, Telegrams from Downton. Seriously if you haven't seen it or its parent, Texts from Last Night, leave here now and read them in full. They're not desperately empowering but they are desperately amazing.)

Unfortunately, Downton Abbey also has the plotline of Sybil Crawley. The youngest, radicalest sister who joins the suffrage movement and wears trousers! She is also completely not class-conscious, despite being the daughter of an Earl, and helps the ginger maid from season one to get a sweet typist’s job and thus Social Mobility. How amazing for feminists have a character to relate to, in a time period where a significant number of people today seem to think we belong. Said character has a really fascinating relationship with a moderately attractive radical Irish chauffeur, and that’s where the feminist in me- the feminist that is me- starts to get a bit annoyed.

Exactly how it goes down in the real thing.

Radical Irish chauffeur is an interesting character, and the way he gets to demonstrate being an interesting character is by taking over the storyline of youngest radicalest sister. This starts in the first season- when, for example, she goes to a political rally despite being a weak upper-class woman, she of course gets injured and goes unconscious and he has to meaningfully carry her away- and is sort of an undercurrent in the second, although it’s subordinate to the several years of Sybil going to Branson’s garage and going “I can’t marry you yet I’m a posh nurse”. But by the third, Sybil turns into literally nothing but the pregnant wife of her more narratively prominent husband. Watch Tom be hilariously out of sync with upper class dress codes, and his wife be quietly conflicted! Watch him escape the country for being involved in separatist escapades, and then her follow him without having done anything interesting of her own (except be pregnant!). Then, for the grand finale, watch the previously really important feminist suffragette character die in childbirth because of the incompetence of a well-to-do male doctor and the snobbiness of her dad, and then watch the rest of the storyline be entirely about the Irish radical and his scandalous Catholicism (and also he watched whilst they burned down somebody’s house one time and he doesn’t know how to play cricket, what’s with that.)

Curse you, Julian Fellowes, for not only killing off everybody’s favourite character but also for doing it in a way that sends my feminism into paroxysms of endless amateur analysis. I was just trying to watch people with awesome hairdos make googly eyes at each other, why do you have to go and ruin it? Especially when other parts of the show and its creators impress me- Edith’s development has been a highlight for me, allowing to her find a place for herself in an in-character way that isn’t just about “OMG HUSBANDS”- and although it’s something that they should have fixed already, the fact that Fellowes’ response to being called out on a lack of racial diversity was “you’re right, we should include X and Y historically accurate but diversifying categories of people”- better than some “feminists”, isn’t that right LenaDurham. Perhaps my terrible lack of cinematic experience means that I just haven’t found the right thing to compare this to, but I can’t think of a gender reversed corollary where a pivotal male character gets shoved to the sidelines in favour of the woman who was originally a prop for his development.

Of course, the problem with getting mired in media criticism is that you can’t actually make a factual case for any of this. The actual circumstances that led to Downton Abbey sidelining and then killing off Jessica Findlay Brown’s character are probably super complicated and spread across both the real and fictional world, and much the same as my particular feminist reading leads to a strong dislike of the storyline, I’m sure there are probably decent interpretation, both feminist and patriarchal, which see the situation very differently. With this in mind, perhaps it is my fault that I can’t just sit down and weep over Lady Sybil like a good media consumer without breaking down the universal implications for female empowerment?

I’ve got other problems too. I can’t decide whether Chasing Amy (which I watched for the first time two weeks ago, I told you I was behind the times) is a fantastic subversion of lots of tired societal tropes about women and lesbians or whether that one scene in which Alicia’s lesbian friends universally deride her because Man Hating instead of being able to enjoy her self-professed happiness negates all the positive aspects. Merlin’s female representation has always been poor but since the knights became the prominent secondary cast I feel like it’s got even worse, and the loss of Morgause and the fact that none of the few female characters are allowed to exist without displaying gravity defying cleavage at all times really bothers me, especially as this slide is going on whilst the show as a whole is getting better. I enjoy How I Met Your Mother but I have no idea why- similarly, watching Spy on Sky 1 almost solely because of the beautiful majesty of Mat Baynton doesn’t really negate the fact that it’s two notable adult women are depressingly stereotypical (in fact, it makes it worse. I’m literally just watching it because it contains the fittest man ever to grace a children’s historical sketch comedy show. Also it is quite funny, in a patriarchal sort of way). And the less said about Doctor Who and Amy Pond, the better. I am very apprehensive about soufflé girl. You have no idea.

On that note, I hereby declare that this blog is ending on a cliffhanger- as befits my first entry about things I watch on telly. I’ve got more to say on representation, depth and also about something that’s it’s not possible for me to complain about (I know, right!), but even I can’t go on much longer in a single entry. Tune in next week!

Sentiments are not those of the author!

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*except during the freezing rain

**The second is my participation in National Novel Writing Month, which is definitely also a sore spot. Although there’s still time! I theoretically can write 3,333 words a day. It’s just unlikely.

*** Related: I’m almost to the end of the latest not-just-Percy Jackson book and oh my goodness I’m so worried how are they going to escape the nymphs aaah! Just had to get that off my chest.