Trina Sinclair is a minor antagonist in Ginger Snaps. Trina is a bully and rival to Brigitte and Ginger Fitzgerald. She later accidently dies during a scuffle with Ginger.
Background[]
Trina and her friends in front of the school.
Trina is a high school student and manages to maintain a good image with a relatively large group of friends. She is good at field hockey, and she wants to be at the center of attention. She has a crush on Sam, who actively ignores and seems to dislike her. She has a disdain for the Fitzgerald sisters who she deems freaky outcasts.
She is often seen walking her dog Morley. Sometimes close to the school.
History[]
Trina first becomes hostile to the Fitzgerald sisters after overhearing from her friend that Brigitte was making fun of her while the sisters were playing "Search and Destroy"[1]. Trina instantly retaliated during the following hockey match when she pushed Brigitte who then fell not just onto the ground but also into the remains of a mauled dog that was presumably killed by the Beast of Bailey Downs. Ginger immediately confronts Trina but has to relent when Ms. Sykes goes between them. She still vows to get revenge for what happened to her sister.
After school, Trina shows up in front of the school surrounded by her posse and accompanied by her dog Morley. Together with Jason McCardy, they wait for the arrival of Sam. Jason wants to buy drugs from him, Trina wants use the opportunity to talk to Sam, who is her crush, in the hope of scoring a date with him. But when he arrives, he ignores her. On the other side of the parking lot, the Fitzgerald sisters observe the scene, displaying disdain for her romantic interest in a "drug dealer" and plan to kidnap her dog as a prank.
On the next day[2], Trina walks past Sam's truck, that is parked near the school, right when Sam throws out Jason, his friends Ben and Tim and also Ginger after the four were smoking a joint inside without his knowledge. Trina friendly greets Sam and asks why the truck is damaged, but also can't hold back a snide remark towards Ginger, who promptly retorts fittingly. When her dog reacts to Ginger's recently acquired lycanthropy, he starts to bark uncontrollably and Ginger kicks him to make him stop. Trina is angry but the sisters leave the scene quickly.
In the following days and weeks, Ginger's personality changes drastically and she now has a sexual interest in Jason. When the two make out in front of his car on the school parking lot[3], Jason's friends and Trina and her posse sit on the bleachers and notice the scene. Brigitte walks by and Trina tells her to "get her b*tch sister a leash". On the following day[4], during gym class, Sam, who recently got acquainted to Brigitte and has now taken an interest in assisting her to solve her lycanthropy crisis, shows up near the field and calls for Brigitte. Trina initially thought he was calling for her instead but is shocked when she realized that he meant indeed Brigitte. In a following field hockey unit, a heated 1v1 between Brigitte and Trina ensues, fueled by the latters jealousy. As a result, Trina pushes Brigitte and she falls. Ginger furiously retaliates and beats Trina bloody until Ms. Sykes can pull her away.
Later on the same day, Trina notices Ginger taking away her dog Morley and she follows her to her home where she encounters a clueless Brigitte and confronts her about her presumed relationship with Sam, calling him a "cherry hound".
Ginger holding Trina's mouth shut.
Ginger suddenly appears and grabs Trina in a headlock, dragging her inside the house. Brigitte tries to get her sister to stop, but Ginger kept pestering Trina until she threw up, forcing Ginger to let go of her. Trina managed to scoop up a steak knife and waved it in front of the sisters, forcing them back. As she walked towards them, she slipped in a puddle of spilled milk and fell backwards, slamming her head against the corner of the counter-top, causing a fatal blow. When their parents suddenly returned from a trip to the supermarket in the same moment, Ginger and Brigitte quickly hid Trina's body inside a freezer until they were able to clandestinely relocate her. While trying to take her out again, the sisters discover her body frozen stiff and in the course of removing the surrounding ice, Brigitte accidentally broke off two of Trina's frozen fingers. They extradited the rest of the body from the ice and then buried it in the backyard toolshed, but the two severed fingers fell onto the lawn.
Missing poster for Trina Sinclair
In the following days, missing posters of Trina were distributed all over the town and school and the police started questioning students about her disappearance. The sisters decided to lay low until the events passed.
On Halloween, Henry Fitzgerald discovered the fingers, alerting his wife Pamela, who instantly told him they were merely fake fingers for their daughters school project. But she already knew better and placed the fingers in a tupperware container before putting them into the fridge. Later that evening, she started digging in the tool shed and discovered Trina's body, prompting her to start looking for her daughters to prevent them from getting arrested by the police, and planning to run away with them.
Significance[]
"She's your standard, cumbuckety date-bait."
Brigitte on Trina
Trina is the primary antagonist to the Fitzgerald sisters. After her accidental death, the tension switches to the sisters laying low and not attracting police attention, but Ginger's lycanthropy transformation threatens to expose them and makes "living a normal life" difficult.
Trina also represents a hint of irony when she unsuccessfully tries to court Sam but fails to grab her attention. However, quiet Brigitte manages to speak to him, causing jealousy for Trina and further making her bully Brigitte. Ironically, Trina is also the source of jealousy of Brigitte and Ginger, who may not directly show it. They express hatred of her self-promotion and admonish how she probably makes out with several guys, but this may stem from their desire to be accepted like Trina is by her friends.
Trina is a symbol for a normative feminity which the sisters reject[5] and acts as marker of the sisters' marginalization in society. In their first confrontation on the hockey field, Trina calls Ginger a "freak". Later, she calls her "Fitzenstein", an allusion to the literal monster Frankenstein, and tells her to "stick to her own species", implying a fundamental divide between how Trina sees herself and the people she socializes with on one side and the Fitzgerald sisters on the other. Even after Ginger sheds her self-imposed existence as outcast and becomes a sexually active woman pursued by men, Trina still doesn't accept her as equal and tells Brigitte to get her "b*tch-sister a leash", furthering how Trina still considers her a beast rather than a fellow human being. Now Trina as a representation of normal society becomes a symbol for Ginger's descent into the abject when Trina is turned into prey and potential food for an increasingly inhuman individual. In their next encounter on the hockey field, Ginger becomes the very beast that Trina metaphorically claims her to be when she attacks her like a predator its prey. On the same evening, Ginger greets Trina by calling her "meat", further solidifying the predator-prey analogy. And traps her in her claws while dragging her into the kitchen of all places, the place where usually food is prepared. She then tells her she smells "yummy". After Trina's death she is hidden in the freezer, a place for food storage, where Pam literally stores the freshly bought meat just moments after. When Trina is burried, Brigitte confronts her sister and makes the analogy clear by asking her if she would actually eat Trina. Which she promptly denies and deflects, equating the process of devouring her with a sexual act, which she apparently would not like to engage in with Trina.
Trivia[]
- In a deleted scene ("Let's Kill Them All!"), Pamela Fitzgerald, the Fitzgeralds' mother, presents the fingers in a plastic box to the police at the Halloween party to get them to arrest her so they wouldn't detain her daughters, as Pamela presumed.
- The character of Trina Sinclair was created by director and screenwriter John Fawcett as well as Karen Walton.
- It is unknown when she started bullying the Fitzgerald sisters, but she actively did so after she overheard Brigitte making fun of her.
- In the original draft of the script, in the lead-up to her death, Trina was actively tortured by Ginger who tied her to a chair in the basement and force-fed her tacks and shards of glass. But already in this first version, her death is purely accidental as she falls over in her chair and hits her head on a desk. Later, Ginger ends up partially eating her.
- In previous script versions, Sam was Trina's boyfriend. But the completed movie as it is contains no substantial hints that point to anything beyond a one-sided crush by Trina and jealousy towards Sam's interest in Brigitte.
- Two different stuntwomen doubled for Danielle Hampton. One in the scene where Trina gets hit by Ginger on the hockey field and another one when she hits her head on the kitchen counter.
Notes[]
- ↑ This happens on October 2, 1999. See Timeline.
- ↑ October 3, 1999.
- ↑ This happens on October 23, 1999.
- ↑ This is the day of Trina's death and disappearance. October 24, 1999.
- ↑ The scene on the hockey field is filled with notions about how Brigitte rejects the "hormonal toilet" and "mindless breeder's machine" they see in high school. Later, Ginger says she'd rather be dead then to participate in sexuality with "a gonad [who] gets his zipper going". In the game of "search and destroy" where both make up obituaries of classmates they ridicule how Trina is conscious of her external appearance.
| Characters in Ginger Snaps |
|---|
| Brigitte Fitzgerald • Ginger Fitzgerald |
| Sam • Pamela Fitzgerald • Jason McCardy • Trina Sinclair Henry Fitzgerald • Mister Wayne • Ben • Tim • Nurse Ferry • Ms. Sykes • Janitor |
| Hockey kid • Mother • Toddler • Puppy Kid • Announcer • uncredited characters |