Thinking about identity in Ginger Snaps… the thing about the Fitzgerald sisters is that they begin the story rejecting society and structure and what is considered normal and normative. It’s a premature rejection for they’ve not yet been brought into the fold of society, to be consumed and reduced, but they turn that social expansion inwards inwards, finding fulfilment in mutual obsession, doubleness, solipsism, regression and death, they form their identities and purposes within themselves and their bond, a bond that itself is a ‘fuck you’ to those structures because it’s socially impossible, society has no space for it to reside it, and dictates it as transgressive and regressive for their lesbianism and incest. And so the sister decide that if they’re unable to ‘get out’, find a space where they can reside unrestrained and untainted from the structures they revile, then they will find it in death. But the onset of puberty and lycanthropy bridges the gap between them, and brings into question that bond and mutually constructed and dependent identities; Brigitte attempts for reconciliation and to retreat back into their childhood bubble however Ginger advocates to reconstruct their relationship through the violence, power, transgressive sexuality and monstrous femininity that she’s found within her own lycanthropy, that alternative space where they can reside together, regain their likeness and similarity that was lost through the transformation. However, reconciliation was always doomed to fail because they were never like that, not really, Ginger’s imposition and control had meant their relationship was always imbalanced and unequal. And by the end it was unable to truly inhabit Brigitte, which is why that ‘I’d rather be dead than what you are’ (I’d rather be dead rather than to become you, to form us) is such a turning point for them. Even in their attempt to once again rejoin, Ginger says ‘I don’t even know you’ and ‘(Now I am you) I know you are but what am I?’, because there’s this dissonance between them, that they can’t come back from. And the movie could’ve only ever ended with Brigitte breaking apart from her sister to save herself and her identity from being destroyed in that reductive, inadequate relationship.
kianamaiart
gummygunk
vaporwave
stormborns
