Jacob Black
Last time, I wrote about Twilight I wrote about gender, romance, and power in the series, but it is impossible to talk about romance without mentioning the biggest battle of all time: Team Edward vs Team Jacob. No matter which team you rooted for, there was no denying that Jacob Black was the original simp. For four books, he played protector, friend, chauffeur, and eventually best man to a woman that only cared for him when her main love interest was gone.
While you might feel bad for Jacob because he never gets the girl, he also provides a secondary lens into understanding gender dynamics in the book. Jacob wants Bella because she is kind, innocent, and ultimately weak. He feels an imperative to protect her from the bloodsucking Cullens by keeping her under his own thumb. Bella wasn’t really deciding who she loved, but rather which jailkeeper she preferred. The problematic nature of this dynamic is immediately recognizable because it is an overplayed fictional trope rooted in deep history of men controlling women.
What really caught my attention about Jacob’s role in the books is the ending. Jacob doesn’t get Bella by the end of the book, but he gets her daughter. Through some mystical werewolf custom, Jacob “imprints” on Bella’s newborn daughter Renesmee (the ugliest CGI baby ever). In the book, this explains why he was so obsessed with Bella and there are no consequences for this. The imprint gives Jacob ownership of a girl before she has even spoken her first word. It’s eerily reminiscent of the commodification of women and the ongoing battle of bodily autonomy. This is even without speaking on the pedophilic undertones in knowing that a newborn baby will be your soulmate one day. But hey, these things are totally normalized in society. Think Scott Disick, Leonardo DiCaprio, and the worst possible case of this: Jeffrey Epstein.
However, Jacob is not only a symbol of unrealized love. He is also a member of the Quileute tribe (based on a real tribe) and a werewolf, one of the few characters of this group that we really get to know. First things first, Taylor Lautner is not Native (aside from the “distant” Native American ancestry through his mother that was conveniently unearthed before the movie was released) His casting in this role when so few Native Americans are seen on the screen is an act of erasure. There are Native people. Native actors. Why weren’t they chosen?
Even if we consider the book character of Jacob Black, his Native identity is never really explored except to mark him as “other” and explain his werewolf background. Twilight’s version of Native identity is sexy people aggressively running through the woods. Like Meyer’s concept of romance, her portrayal of the Quileute tribe is uncreative and historically violent. In life, the construction of the “savage Native” was used to justify the eradication of a group of people. On the big screen, the “savage Native” is the textbook villain, a senseless murderer who only yells war cries, representing a group of people frozen in the past.
Even worse, Jacob is completely defined in relation to white people whether that is his love for Bella or his hate for the Cullens. While the vampires get to be beautiful, popular, and rich creatures that literally sparkle in the light, the werewolves are dangerous and poor (abet while still being sexy). Hot and cold. Black and white. These dichotomies further serve to “other” the Quileute tribe. They are one dimensional, flattening a vibrant culture, centuries old resilience, and the still ongoing battle against the settler colonial project.
With that said, I’m definitely Team Twilight should have never become a thing.
- Jess
P.S I speak about gender as a binary in this, but gender is a spectrum. Also, there is so much Native scholarship that people (including myself) should check out and at minimum, there is an epidemic of missing and murdered indigenious women. Also, COVID-19 has had a disproportionate impact on these communities and the US government has repeatedly ignored their requests for life-saving supplies. Here are some links to donations. 1) Navajo Nation COVID-19 fund 2) Navajo and Hopi families relief fund 3) Northern Diné Relief Fund
