Badass Ladies of the Twilight Universe: Catherine Hardwicke

“I’ve had meetings where there were literally, like, 12 angry men in a room and me.  And even when everyone shot me down, I somehow dug in one more time.  You don’t want to be a badass and you don’t want to go in there so hard-core, but if you don’t fight for it you won’t get it and it won’t be on the screen.” (Elle, November 2008, p.351)

I like to read a lot of entertainment-focused sites because I’m a media junkie.  On more hipster-y sites like The A.V. Club, postings about Twilight frequently turn into a piling-on of dismissive smack talk.  While, as a fan who would devote myself to writing this crazy-ass treatise, I obviously disagree with this judgment, I also think that there is a fundamental aspect of the film that people outside the fandom ignore.  That aspect is director Catherine Hardwicke.  She does not make disposable cotton-candy films.  Though all of her films thus far have focused on young people, she is not a teen-movie maker in the vein of John Hughes.  While I like Hughes’ teen opuses as much as the next person, they ultimately are focused on similar kinds of kids in essentially the same suburban environment.  Hardwicke’s films – Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown, The Nativity Story and now Twilight – take place in different environments and eras, drawing from different source materials.  The first three, which I watched this summer, all strike at a universality in the experience of youth and finding one’s way to adulthood.  Her work on Lords of Dogtown is particularly confidence-inspiring: like Twilight, Lords of Dogtown invited comparisons with a popular source material, in that case the critically acclaimed documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys.  Actors seem to genuinely love her, as do her creative collaborators.  The trailers thus far have looked beautiful - I can’t wait to see what she’s done with Twilight.