This week sees the launch of another new column, Genevieve Valentine's Intertitles. I've been an admirer of Genevieve's writing, both her fiction and nonfiction, for a while, and it's a great treat to see her joining the Strange Horizons family. The first Intertitles column is a discussion of recent Oscar nominee and Sundance winner Winter's Bone, which Genevieve argues can be read as a fairy tale.

While the movie's noir tropes are undoubted (the mysterious missing person, antagonistic police, a decidedly unforthcoming supporting cast, the hero finding out at movie's end what everyone else has known all along), Winter's Bone's use of archetypes goes beyond simply noir. Though dealing with contemporary problems and presented with all the grit the setting deserves, the film has so many fairy-tale elements that it gains resonance when viewed through the lens of the mythic.

This is not to say Winter's Bone is a direct fairy-tale retelling. Instead, it uses fairy-tale archetypes to define its stakes and provide markers for its hero's journey; the film's overt subject matter is modern, and the performances and production design are rendered with dogged realism, right down to its leading lady skinning a squirrel on camera. And though the overt plot is undoubtedly noir, much of its thematic resonance comes from its clever use of fairy-tale traditions and archetypes, in an unexpected—and unexpectedly mythic—context.

Genevieve connects Winter's Bone to the upcoming glut of fairy tale films coming out of Hollywood (the first, Red Riding Hood, is already upon us—see Genevieve's lighthearted review of that film on her LJ), which strikes me as an interesting point because the associations I've been making with Winter's Bone since seeing it at the theater last week are with another cinematic glut of the last few years—movies about young girls making the journey to adulthood. Winter's Bone is interestingly companioned by another of this year's Oscar nominees, True Grit, in which 14-year-old Mattie Ross sets out to avenge the death of her father in much the same way that Winter's Bone's 17-year-old Ree sets out to find hers—with determination, a certainty of the rightness of her cause, and an unwillingness to be gainsaid. In 2009, three very different films—An Education, Fish Tank, and Precious—portrayed young women stifled by their environments and coming to terms with their sexuality and the way that it can be used against them.

Is it possible that these two phenomenon are two sides of the same coin? Goaded by Twilight, Hollywood is slowly coming to terms with the fact that women, and young women in particular, are a buying power. If the various fairy tale retellings, which are surely an attempt to cash in on the Twilight craze by telling yet more stories about teenage girls falling for beautiful, dangerous young men, are one attempt to appeal to that audience, are highbrow films like An Education and Winter's Bone another? This, of course, raises the question of whether Winter's Bone and films like it are aimed at women. I would argue that another 2009 film about a young woman, Bright Star, could easily be read as a literate, mature version of the Twilight story, and thus presumably was intended to appeal, if not to the same audience, then to the same romantic impulses that we associate with girlishness, and which are at the core of Twilight's success.

One of the problems that women face when they try to find themselves in (or write themselves into) fiction is how few stories are available to them. Genevieve touches on this, I think, when she points out that Ree plays the roles of the Maiden and Mother, while her antagonist, Merab, plays the Crone. In an early scene in the film, Ree visits the local high school (which she no longer seems to attend) and looks in on two classes: a parenting class and an ROTC drill. This (slightly heavy-handed) scene articulates the two options laid before Ree—she can try to escape into the traditionally unfeminine occupation of soldiery, or she can, like her best friend, surrender to a fate of young motherhood and perpetuate the cycle of poverty she was born into (though as Genevieve also points out, Ree is a curiously asexual character, whose role as Mother is achieved when she takes responsibility for her young siblings, and there is no one in the film who might conceivably father her hypothetical child). One way of addressing this lack is to try to find new meanings in the old stories that are available to us, to repurpose old roles for a new world—for example, fairy tales. That may very well be, as Genevieve argues, what Debra Granik has tries to do in Winter's Bone.