Young heroines entering a strange, dystopian world and becoming warriors for their causes seems like the hottest box office trend in Hollywood. Rumors persist that the lead in Star Wars Episode 7 will be a young woman—Kick Ass‘s Chloe Grace Moretz is rumored—who has more in common with Katniss Everdeen than Luke Skywalker. Each of these new movies—almost exclusively based on popular young adult fiction titles—are some combination of George Orwell’s 1984, Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game, and a large dose of teenage lust. It’s simply Hollywood giving young people are clamoring for, or so it seems, except that these films aren’t just embraced by the young.
Remember “Twilight Moms”? The fantasy-lit block of Cougartown blew past max capacity sometime between Stephenie Meyer’s debut novel cracking the top ten on the New York Times‘ “Children’s Chapter Books” list and Taylor Lautner taking off his shirt that time. Oh wait, that was lots of times.
No, there’s a deeper current pulling audiences into these kinds of stories. But what messages are these new heroines sending to young girls and women?
Perhaps Twilight is so appealing to so many because the lure of an everlasting puppy love—one without real world disagreements or doldrums or desires—does not dissipate with age. After all, Bella and Edward’s mutual infatuation has a lot going for it. It is unbreakably strong (she actually craves death to be with him), tension-filled (so much nervous staring!), dangerous (read: wolves), and about absolutely nothing. For most of the series, their romance is a non-physical fantasia of expectant emotional ecstasy, with the two leads not so much gazing into each other’s eyes as looking in unison at the same mirage; just two pretty people who are in love with the idea of being in love.
Shailene Woodley, star of Divergent—the latest future-set young adult fantasy arriving in theaters Friday, addressed this great Twilight fault in her own way last week when she called the relationship in the hit vampire film “toxic.” In case one would label her a run-of-the-mill finger-pointer jealous of the box office Twilight had that Divergent, no matter its success, will be hard-pressed to surpass, Woodley has been critical of the messages sent by her own work before when she admitted that the plots of the Secret Life of an American Teenager, the ABC Family series she once starred in, conflicted with her personal morals.
Like the Districts of Hunger Games or the Clans of Twilight, the world of Divergent is neatly ordered into Factions based on human traits—a kind of caste system taken to draconian levels of geography. Woodley, playing Tris, doesn’t fit the mold and goes to a boot camp to train before falling hard for her older, tatted-up instructor. And it is nearly two-and-a-half hours. That’s a protracted introduction into a new world.
Regardless if its underlying romantic messages act counter to Twilight‘s or not—and some of the trailer’s clips in this regard are kind of appallingly awkward, actually—Divergent could be seen as a net positive for handing young women a noble figure who finds herself through adversity, who challenges the status quo—albeit with odd, perhaps forced, parallels to the conformity and financial strain of the modern education system—and in future installments, inspires others to do the same. Or something like that.
The fact is this morass of morality is really just stuff for parents and critics to pick through. Most teenagers probably watch these movies the same way they listen to rap music. They don’t care all that much about the lyrics—if they even know them. They just want to hear some hot beats. In that way, these movies are much more about how they make the audience feel, instead of what they make the audience think. And like Jean-Luc Godard once said, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.”
