片中两个女孩的家庭,看似温馨和睦,实际上也是问题重重。父母子女好似从未真正生活在一个房子中,就像是陌生人。那个炮灰女,四处希望引起人们注意,却只能和狗做伴。而且丢了就丢了,找不到也就算了,好像从来就没有存在过这个人似的。这些奇怪之事应该不是偶然出现的,而是 John Foster 有意设置的伏笔,个人认为他暗示了这些少年从未真正的有人关心过。联系片头Ginger 要通过死亡来摆脱小镇女人的生活模式,可以让我们看出当时社会的人文主义关怀严重缺失的问题。
Ginger Snaps and Linda Williams's "When the woman looks"
This film is a perfect example of the punishment for gazing and the affinity between monster and woman. Obviously, the two sisters, Brigitte and Ginger are the objects of male gaze. They are being looked at by men from teenage students to an old man, the cleaner. Ginger is particularly characterized as the “desiring look of the male-voyeur-object”, especially when she begins to menstruate for the first time. The slow motion of her nice figure as she walks into the school is an erotic object for the characters. Traditionally, a woman would be punished when she actively looks at the monster. In the film, Ginger is bitten and turns into a werewolf-the “other”. That is the punishment for her looking at the unknown monster in the park at night. Also men in the film who have gazed at the two sisters are punished, either killed or turned into a werewolf. Men are the main victims in the film because they are punished for their voyeuristic gaze. Their vulnerabilities compared to the power of monstrous-feminine Ginger make them afraid of the mutilation and transformation, which prevents them from being “normal" males anymore.
In the reading, Williams says that there exists an “affinity between monster and woman, the sense in which her look at the monster recognizes their similar status within patriarchal structures of seeing” (62). In the film, it is not only because Brigitte recognizes their similar status as “other”, but also because they are “together forever” sisters. In school, they are different from the majority students in terms of their crazy interests and personality; they stay isolated from other students and are always jeered and bullied by arrogant girls. So their similar unpleasant experiences allow Brigitte to have more compassion to Ginger. After Ginger becomes infected, Brigitte knows her fears and anxiety about the unknown change happening to her. With the bond of family that linked them, Brigitte is more sympathetic to Ginger than fearful. The different relationship between monster and man or woman is also implied by Ginger’s father and mother. Even though the father doesn’t show up very often, he is the one who always doubts and questions his daughters’ uncommon behaviors. While the mother is always believes and tolerates her daughters. After she finds out her daughters are the murderer of the dead girl, she doesn’t send them to jail or make them take responsibility, but she choose to let them go and destroy the evidence of everything they have done wrong. Thus though both father and mother have a family bond with their daughters, the woman is more sympathetic to the monster.