Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part II

When I started this blog, I imagined I might deal with the Twilight film once I was through eviscerating the novel. As it's developed, I've found myself referencing the film version regularly, calling into question the need to address it separately. Writing up the other films hadn't even entered my mind, as I was not (and am not) sure I'll have the strength to dig into their respective source novels. The first one is trying enough.

Yet this blog concerns itself with two things: Twilight and terrible movies. What could be more appropriate, then, than reviewing a Twilight movie? Plus I thought, considering my love-hate relationship with this series, I ought to see at least one of the films in cinema, surrounded by Twihards. So on the film's opening night, I went eagerly to see Twilight, Part 4: Part 2.

Yes, Breaking Dawn, the epic story that could not be contained in one movie, split in two and made shamelessly cheaply to maximize profits. Warning: This review is spoiler-heavy, including the one genuine surprise at the film's climax (along with its subsequent ruination). If you have any intention of seeing this film--and God help you if you do--I strongly recommend you read no further. Those who prefer moving slowly through the novel along with this blog will also want to avoid the rest of this review, as it's sure to give away plot points from throughout the series.

Having said that, let's get into Breaking Wind. Since this is the fifth and final in the series of films that make up THE TWILIGHT SAGA (you have to say it in all caps), let me bring you up to speed on what happened in the previous four films.

Edward and Bella got married and had sex, resulting in Bella's pregnancy.

You can see why they needed four movies to tell such an epic tale. And now we have the finale, and it is every bit the sputtering anticlimax you expect from a series of novels that gave away its inevitable conclusion in the first fifty pages but insisted on dragging the story out across three thousand.

Stephenie Meyer's manipulation of her series mythology--such as it is--to suit her plot comes out in full force in Breaking Bad. Vampires don't blink, or breathe, or eat, but they do continue to produce viable sperm and the semen to deliver it, and their hearts continue to pump blood. That's an odd mix of biological processes there. Why, it's almost as if the author hasn't thought through the whole vampire thing and just makes it work however her plot needs it to work.

The fetus develops so rapidly I thought maybe I'd missed Bella drinking the Water of Life, so the newly married couple decides to conceal her pregnancy from Mustache Dad. It sure is lucky they did, because Bella dies giving birth to the half-vampire child. Edward is devastated, but then he remembers that in the Meyerverse, vampire blood not only turns living people into vampires, but dead people, too! So even though she's already dead, Edward makes like the Re-Animator, and Bella's eyes open, vampire-red. End of Part 4, Part 1.

Part 4, Part 2 picks up directly from there. The power fantasy of Twilight's vampirism reaches completion in this installment, as we're treated to annoying zoom shots of Bella Swan's (Kristen Stewart) super-human senses: She can see the tiniest drop of water, hear the movement of air, see the dust motes between the carpet fibers, smell the slightest of farts. Instead of reacting in horror and despair that she is now condemned to the same damnation of attending high school over and over again until the end of time that Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) has endured for a century, she's ecstatic to be a walking corpse that feasts on the blood of the living. Now she can live her suburban white American upper-middle-class unlife until the end of time! Plus, she can run really, really fast by way of a terribly rendered CGI effect, smash slabs of granite with her bare hands without having to, you know, put in any effort to build muscles, and have sex literally constantly since vampires don't sleep or become fatigued.

And every vampire has a special vampire power, on top of all their other powers, so that Meyer can rely on mind-reading, clairvoyance, and seeing the future whenever she can't think of a plausible way to get the characters out of a situation. If you guessed that Bella's special power (which is that other vampires' special powers don't work on her, except when the filmmakers forget and have a power affect her) is the most special-est one of all, give yourself a cookie.

So Bella's the strongest vampire of all the Cullens, and has the best-est power, and is definitely--with the Twilight vampire make-up job and those red colored contact lenses--the hottest. There's the little trouble of bloodlust, though, since newly-turned vampires in the Meyerverse are very difficult to keep from eating people. Edward takes her out to hunt an animal instead, but she gets a whiff of some poor bastard who's just gashed himself open while rock-climbing, and she's off to eat him. Uh-oh, conflict! But this is Twilight, so conflict is either never brought up at all or brought up and then immediately resolved. This time it's option b: Edward runs after her and tells her she shouldn't eat this guy, so she doesn't, and the idea that she'll eat people is never mentioned in the film again; in fact, she's allowed to meet Mustache Dad (Billy Burke), alone, the next day. Man, Edward's one minute of training sure paid off! Bella is about to eat a deer, but not only are these vampires so neutered they don't eat people, they don't even eat cute cuddley-wuddley animals. So Bella instead eats a mountain lion that was just about to eat the deer. She vampire-jumps and hits the beast from the side, taking it down and tearing its neck open with her teeth. And yes, it looks just as ridiculous as it sounds.

Speaking of Mustache Dad, he is now the only actual human being left in Twilight, since Bella's high school friends are absent this film. Progressively through the series, these friends have become more and more apart from Bella until they disappear entirely after her wedding, since her marriage signified her becoming a full member of the Mormon church Cullen clan and so she has no connection to these people from her pre-Cullen life. I don't think Meyer was going for the Cullens as a symbolic dangerous cult, but that's what she gave us. Bella's okay with the Cullens' telling her father she's dead, since she has Edward and is a vampire now and that's all that's important. Spurned suitor Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), though, says she'll want to have her father in her life, so, in a genuinely funny scene--in part due to Burke's acting, which I've already praised elsewhere--Jacob reveals he is a werewolf to Mustache Dad. He does this by stripping off his clothes, making this the obligatory "Jacob takes off his shirt" scene, much to Mustache Dad's annoyance. Somehow this means it's okay for Bella to continue to see her father. Whew, that was...too close. Another conflict raised and immediately hand-waved away!

But why is Jacob there, you ask? Well, the werewolves have this thing called "imprinting". Long story short, it's "there's someone out there just for you" taken to its Meyerverse extreme. A werewolf sees a person of the opposite sex (despite all the shirtless male horseplay throughout the series, these dogs don't roll with teh gay!) and becomes that person's creepy stalker: He has to be with that person, and no other, and the obsession can't be changed or removed. Jacob doesn't imprint on Bella because that would've brought about a genuine conflict with no easy resolution, and we'll have none of that. No, he imprints--and I can't believe I'm going to write this--he imprints...on...the baby.

The baby.

This man witnesses a birth, and upon seeing the bloody, squalling infant, he falls in love with it.

Which means that, throughout the film, he's constantly hovering around the little girl, looking at her with naked longing in his eyes. (It's very, very odd that Taylor Lautner's best acting in the entire series is giving creepy sex looks to a 7-year-old girl.) It was disturbing every time I saw it, astonished that the director filmed those scenes and included them in the final print. I mean, it just has to be seen to be believed. Wait no, because I saw it and I still don't believe it.

The plot, what little there is, is exactly the same as that of Part 3. In that film, Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard) and her horde of vampires were coming to destroy the Cullen family, who had to turn to the underwearwolves for help. In this film, Aro (Michael Sheen) and his horde of vampires are coming to destroy the Cullen family, who have to turn to their other vampire friends for help. Most of these vampires are just names and faces that leave no impression, and they don't have much impact on the story. I laughed when one of them proved to be the Last Airbender, and it was nice to see some of the "good" vampires being vampires (i.e., eating people) when the Cullens go to ask for their help.

Now I've beaten up on Twilight a lot. Certainly it sucks, and it deserves all the scorn that has been and continues to be heaped upon it. But I do want to give credit where I can, and two of these new vampires are fabulous. These are Hanz and Franz--I don't know what their real names are, but to me they're Hanz and Franz--Romanian vampires who used to be in charge of the vampire world until the Italian Volturi overthrew them. These guys, with their best Bela Lugosi accents and the way they finish each other's thoughts, are only matched in the shameless overacting department by Michael Sheen--yes, that Michael Sheen--as Aro, the leader of the Volturi. These three men slice the ham thick, and I love them for it. Hanz and Franz are pushing the Cullens and their friends to fight the Volturi, but nobody but Edward is having it, since the Volturi are so powerful no-one can stand against them. Edward gives a "we few, we happy few" speech (consisting of maybe three lines) that won't have Shakespeare looking over his shoulder, and they're all ready to fight. (Personally, the hell with Edward, but I'd fight for Hanz and Franz.)

Carlisle (Peter Facinelli), the head of the Cullen family, exposits that the Volturi are coming to destroy the Cullens so they can force Alice Cullen (Ashley Greene), the vampire who sees the future, to become part of their clan. To disguise this naked power grab, however, the Volturi need an excuse, and they decide to use as their pretext a report that Edward and Bella's daughter, who has the hilariously stupid name "Reneesme", is an "immortal child". That is, a child turned into a vampire, for such are forbidden by the Volturi as too dangerous to be allowed to exist, since they have all the powers of a vampire but the minds of children. Carlisle decides to gather up as many of his vampire friends as he can to "witness" to the Volturi that Alia Reneesme isn't an immortal child. No one points out that this is a fantastically moronic plan, because Carlisle just said the immortal child thing is a pretext. But they carry out the plan anyway, because it's Twilight and Meyer had to fill up four novels despite telling a story that doesn't have a shred of tension or drama.

So we're set for the final confrontation, the climax of Twilight, the showdown between the Good Cullens and the Evil People-Eating Vampires (never mind that the Cullens' allies also eat people) to close out the THE TWILIGHT SAGA. But it's Twilight, so people have to yack first. Carlisle offers Aro his witnesses. Aro's special vampire power is to look into the minds of those he touches, so he says forget the witnesses and asks to touch the child. Of course he discovers the kid isn't an immortal child. Well, she is immortal, and a child, but what she's not is an immortal child. He then declares she is to be destroyed anyway, since they don't know exactly what she is and that makes her dangerous. The Cullens react as if this is some big betrayal, but Carlisle earlier said the whole thing was just a pretext to get to Alice. What did you expect Aro to do? Say "Oops, our mistake!" and turn around and go home? What's surprising is that he's even talking about this, and that he doesn't lie after working the mind-mojo on the kid. But we have to pad, pad, pad, so now Alice shows up and says that she's seen the future and the child isn't dangerous, allowing Aro to touch her and see her visions for himself as proof. He does and sees she's right, but now he does lie about it and declares the child is to be destroyed because the whole thing is a pretext. God, this is so dumb.

The big fight begins, and something impressive happens. No, really. The fight begins with Carlisle charging Aro, and Aro kills him. That's right, in this series in which nothing bad has happened to any of the Cullens, in which no one is ever really in danger, in which none of the good guys has even been hurt except the time Bella was bitten by James in the first movie, the Cullen patriarch gets kacked. This doesn't happen in the Breaking Down novel, and let me tell you, there were gasps in the audience. This film series has so far proceeded more or less in lockstep with the books--changing minor details but forbidden from tinkering with anything important--but Part 4, Part 2 threw the Twihards a curveball, and they didn't know what to do. I myself couldn't believe it was happening (for good reason, as it turned out). Meyer produced this film, so she had to approve Carlisle's death. Not only that, they kill Harpo and some of the werewolves in the ensuing bloodbath, before finally Aro himself falls and the Volturi retreat. Finally, some actual stakes. Finally, genuine consequences. Finally, triumph at least tinged with sadness and loss. Finally, everything doesn't turn out all right in the end, not totally. Even though the good guys won, there was a cost. A price to be paid.

The entire fight was just Alice's vision, showing Aro what would happen if he fights the battle. Since the result is his own death, Aro takes his army and goes home.

Fuck. This. Movie.

The old "it was all a dream" is the cheapest and laziest way to manufacture drama in the hack writer's handbook. No artistic work has ever been improved by it. All it does is piss off the audience because it means everything we just saw wasn't real and so nothing was ever really at stake. That's what infuriates me the most about Twilight. It's lazy. It doesn't even try to be any good. It doesn't put any effort into being believable or memorable or effective in any way. All it does is pander to the fantasies of a particular demographic to rake in the cash. It's the gender-reverse of the Michael Bay Transformers series. And people buy into it. As long as your product works my fetish, I'll pay you for it, no matter how cheap and lazy and sloppy it is. People, I don't hate romantic films. I don't hate action films. I don't hate superhero films. I hate lazy films. And I hate people who don't hate lazy films. Have some goddamned standards, ya heathens! Make 'em earn it!

Some critics are praising the film for its climax, even as they also criticize it for chickening out in the end. But by making it all just a vision, the filmmakers destroy all the interest they've crassly manufactured. In the end, it's the same old Twilight: toothless, neutered, non-threatening, status quo-affirming, consequence-free.

Still, the Twihards' reactions were damn fun. I mean, they even killed Harpo!

Twilight: Crazy Talk

Twilight, pp. 136-139.

Bella, becoming enraged with herself for reading about vampires on the Internet, storms out of her house and plunges into the forest.

It was all so stupid. I was sitting in my room, researching vampires. What was wrong with me?

Well, your old friend Jake did say the Cullens were vampires, and they certainly are an odd family, and oh yeah, you did personally witness Edward stopping a van with his bare hands. I think Meyer got her characters mixed up. Shouldn't Bella be trying in vain to get other people to believe her? She watched him do something superhuman! I don't think it's unreasonable to do a little Googling.

The next couple of pages are a description of the forest, as Bella wanders in the woods until her frankly unwarranted anger and embarrassment subside. She takes shelter under a fallen tree when it begins to rain and regrets fleeing into the forest, considering she just had a nightmare about vampire Edward that took place in a forest. There's nothing particularly wrong with these passages, except that they're clumsy, again making it seem the book was never shown to a professional editor. Credit where it's due, though: There is one well-written paragraph on these pages. Just one, but hey, that's one more than we've had since Chapter 1:

Here in the trees, it was much easier to believe the absurdities that embarrassed me indoors. Nothing had changed in this forest for thousands of years, and all the myths and legends of a hundred different lands seemed much more likely in this green haze than they had in my clear-cut bedroom.

Not bad, particularly the "green haze" bit. Sure, Meyer misuses the phrase "clear-cut", but what, you expect a writer to be able to use words properly? Geez, you people are so demanding. If you think this writing stuff is easy, where's your bestselling novel, huh?

Of course, Meyer immediately ruins my goodwill with the very next sentence: "I forced myself to focus on the two most vital questions I had to answer, but I did so unwillingly." Um, if you're forcing yourself to do something, then by definition you're doing it willingly. In fact, you could replace "forced" with "willed" in the sentence and the meaning would be exactly the same! "I willed myself to do it unwillingly." Meyer really needs to get a handle on this whole "knowing what words mean" thing.

Bella finally, finally mentions Edward's "impossible strength" as a reason to think he might be a vampire, though I immediately put head to desk when it became obvious she puts "impossible strength" on the same level as "his eyes change colour".

I again listed in my head the things I'd observed myself: the impossible speed and strength, the eye colour shifting from black to gold and back again, the inhuman beauty, the pale, frigid skin.

You know, one of these things is not like the others. If you take out "impossible speed and strength", Meyer is telling me that if I see Winona Ryder wearing coloured contact lenses, I should assume she's a vampire.

I think this goes back to my old hobby-horse of Meyer not knowing her vampire lore, nor making effective use of what little she does know. Observe how Fright Night (the real, Colin Farrell-less one) slowly reveals to its protagonist that Jerry is a vampire. There are plenty of little things that suggest vampirism to one in the know, and with the power of the Internet at her fingertips (on her dial-up modem!), Bella has instant access to all that knowledge. Oh wait, I'm sorry, part of the way Jerry reveals his true nature is by killing people, and since Edward is a Good Vampire (I throw up in my mouth a little every time I have to put those two words together), that's off the table. So yeah, his skin is cold, so he's a vampire. That sure is an airtight case. No wonder Bella doesn't want to tell anyone about her suspicion. (Hilariously, it never occurs to her to talk to Jacob about this, even though he told her that his tribe believes the Cullens are vampires!)

And more--small things that registered slowly--how they never seemed to eat, the disturbing grace with which they moved. And the way he sometimes spoke, with unfamiliar cadences and phrases that better fit the style of a turn-of-the-century novel than that of a twenty-first century classroom.

Wait a minute, back this crazy train up! I've already mentioned that plenty of kids I went to high school with didn't eat, at least not at school. Once again, Bella went to high school in a major city, and she never knew of any girl with an eating disorder, or a guy who used the lunch period to smoke? And since when was the grace of the perfect Cullens "disturbing"? Bella never indicated anything disturbing about it! And speaking of no indication, what's this about Edward talking like he's from the 19th-century? When did this happen? When has he ever said anything that "better fit the style of a turn-of-the-century novel"? I think somebody just tried to sneak in a little ret-con. Wait, no, actually, he doesn't say any "unfamiliar phrase" from the 1800s from this point on, either. I believe we have ourselves a jin-yoo-wine example of an Informed Attribute.

Don't get me wrong, Edward does use unfamiliar cadences and phrases, but they're less "turn-of-the-century" and more "written by a hack writer".

Bella also notes that Edward "seemed to know what everyone around him was thinking...except me." Well if he can't read you, how do you know he can read anyone else? What if he just made it up? It's not like you talked to anyone he read to see if he was right. And do I really need to point out that not only is telepathy not a vampiric power, but it didn't even come up on the "academic-looking" web site Bella Googled up earlier?

For all her protestations of its absurdity (the lady doth protest too much, methinks), Bella pretty quickly decides Edward is a vampire, at long last catching up to the slow 8-year-old who figured this out 6 chapters ago.

And then the most important question of all. What was I going to do if it was true?

If Edward was a vampire--I could hardly make myself think the words--then what should I do? Involving someone else was definitely out. I couldn't even believe myself; anyone I told would have me committed.

There's an "if" there, but it doesn't matter. Bella is convinced she has three options, and none of them is "Find out if Edward is really a vampire." She doesn't consider this option because she already knows he is, because Meyer knows he is, and all this hand-wringing over how unbelievable it all is has been much ado about nothing. Bella doesn't have any more information about Edward than she had before, and her Google search militated against his being a vampire (because, of course, he's a Twilight vampire, so the traditional vampire legends are of little help in identifying him as a creature of the night). But she accepts it now because Meyer says she does.

Bella, being an amoral narcissist, immediately rejects the option any sane person with any modicum of concern for their fellow human beings would choose because of how it might reflect on her. Again, referencing Fright Night, when the protagonist (who, like Bella, is a high school student) discovers Jerry is a vampire, he tells everyone: his mother, the police, his girlfriend, the actor who played his favourite vampire hunter, everybody. They all think he's crazy, but that doesn't stop him from trying to get people to listen. Because vampires are dangerous. Vampires kill people. And trying to warn people they're in danger is the right thing to do. Even if it means people think you're crazy. Even if it might get you locked up.

Now, we readers know Edward is a Good Vampire (*ulp*), but Bella doesn't have any reason to believe that. She's heard Jacob's telling of the legend that the Cullens don't eat people (and even Jacob is sceptical that the Cullens are Good) but that isn't supported or backed up by anything else, not even by Edward himself. Bella was just thinking about how he'd told her he's "the villain, dangerous..." and now she knows this is more than just adolescent posturing. Edward really is a villain. He really is dangerous, because he really is a vampire, and so are all the other Cullens.

But Bella isn't concerned that the Cullens are eating people. She isn't worried that her father, as chief of police, would likely be the first to die if word of the Cullens' true nature got out and they decided to strike first. She's not troubled that the boy she likes is a walking corpse who, for all she knows, has killed thousands of people and will continue to kill thousands more.

Nope, all she's concerned about is what might happen to her. She might be committed if she tells anyone (as if "the Cullens are vampires!" would even warrant a mandatory visit from the school guidance counselor, much less institutionalisation), so telling anyone is right out, not even considered.

Now, some commentators have taken me to task for continually pointing out Bella's selfishness, saying it's unfair to single her out for behaviour that's typical of teen-age girls. That may be a fair criticism elsewhere in the novel, but not this time. After all, there's normal selfishness, there's extreme selfishness, and there's pathological narcissism, and that last one is the level Bella Swan is on. To ignore what appears to be a clear danger to the people around you--including your own father--due to fear of a wildly exaggerated negative outcome for oneself isn't just unusual, it's inhuman. Now I know why Bella, having discovered that her crush is a vampire, isn't afraid for her immortal soul.

She doesn't have one.

Twilight: Guess Who's Back, Back Again?

Twilight, pp. 37-42
Edward Cullen didn't come back to school.

Every day, I watched anxiously until the rest of the Cullens entered the cafeteria without him. Then I could relax and join in the lunchtime conversation. Mostly it centred around a trip to the La Push Ocean Park in two weeks that Mike was putting together. I was invited, and I had agreed to go, more out of politeness than desire.

So we open in typical Bella fashion: pining for the missing Edward, but still keeping another guy on the line just in case. (To paraphrase Chris Rock, Mike is Bella's Penis In A Glass Case: Open in case of loneliness.) I hope you like this paragraph, because New Moon is just those four awkward sentences stretched into one awkward novel.

In the next paragraph, though, she's fine with Edward not being in Biology and feels '[m]ore comfortable than I had ever expected to feel here.' Of course, as soon as her abuser makes the scene, her heart will again be all aflutter. So she worries about having to deal with him and is happier when he's not there, but she'll be thrilled when he reappears.

I might be getting into some dangerous speculation here, but I think Bella might just be a Drama Queen.

We interrupt this examination of the protagonist's thorough unlikeability for this special look at the novel's bad writing.

Got extra adverbs you've no use for? Trying to get rid of them? Send them over to Stephenie Meyer! She'll find a way to use them, whether they're needed or not!

'I...wrote my mom a bogusly cheerful email.' (Bonus points for inventing an entirely new adverb to use unnecessarily!)
'Haven't you ever seen snow fall before?' he asked incredulously.

Try to have one per page. And hey, how about nonsensical narration?

Sure, [snow] was drier than rain -- until it melted in your socks.

What does that mean? What does that even mean? Snow, which is water, is drier than rain, which is also water. Huh? Did Paul W.S. Anderson do a draft of this novel? Snow...is drier than rain. Wow. I can't believe somebody wrote that. Mrs. Meyer failed grade school science, right? I mean, her degree is in English.* So she may not know that ice can no more be drier than water than a cow can be meatier than beef. But the editor should have cau--oh, that's right. I forget sometimes.

Anyway, back to the Bella-bashing.

So Bella, who is totally okay with Edward not being there, immediately checks his table in the cafeteria. (Again, why do the vampires sit in the cafeteria every day not-eating?) To the shock of absolutely no-one, Edward is now there, and Bella of course immediately flips out. (teh drama!) Her friends ask her what's wrong with her. They're asking with, we're told, 'unnecessary concern', even though she stares at the floor, refuses to eat, and tells them she feels sick. I'd say it's time for an intervention by the Drama Police.

[The Cullens] were laughing. Edward, Jasper, and Emmett all had their hair entirely saturated with melting snow. Alice and Rosalie were leaning away from Emmett as Edward shook his dripping hair toward them. They were enjoying the snowy day, just like everyone else--only they looked more like a scene from a movie than the rest of us.

But aside from the laughter and playfulness, there was something different....

Let's ignore yet another unnecessary adverb ('entirely'). Let's ignore the contrast between Bella's inability to remember the names of her supposed friends while she's in conversation with them and her ability to remember and recite the vampires' names after once hearing her friend list them a week ago. I want to focus on two things here: the laughter and *shudder* the playfulness.

Yes, these are two words that immediately spring to mind when I think of vampires. The eternally damned are nothing if not fun-loving types who live unlife to the fullest.

You know, I've had a few people tell me they enjoy Twilight because it's the first time they were exposed to vampires. Every time I hear this, I don't know whether to weep in despair or scream in rage. (Pretty much the same reaction I have to any given Lady Gaga song.) Imagine that you were a huge fan of Jackie Chan, and every once in a while you met another fan. Only these fans' first Jackie Chan movie was The Tuxedo. They've never heard of Police Story or Drunken Master, but man, that Spy Next Door was some great stuff. You're a little crestfallen. The spring goes out of your step. Because not only have these 'fans' only seen Chan at his worst, but now that they have, they may not be able to un-see his worst when--no, if--they ever get round to seeing Armour of God.

That's how I feel every time someone tells me their first exposure to vampires was this trash. Not because it's bad. Yes, it's bad, but that's not enough. No, like Chan in The Spy Next Door, its vampires are nothing like what made them legends. They're not dangerous. They're not menacing. They don't threaten your soul with spiritual destruction, a far greater horror than merely being killed. All the subtext is gone, and with it, all interest. These vamposters are boring.

Oh, and playful. Don't forget playful.

It's one thing to be a pale shadow of your former self. It's another to be something else entirely, with no connection to what you once were.


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* No, really! The writer of this tripe has a degree in creative writing. The mind boggles. Now, one of those screenplay classes Charlie Kaufman had to sit through to get ideas for adapting The Orchid Thief--that I could buy. Maybe.

Twilight: O Edward, Where art Thou?

Twilight, pp. 29-36

We have arrived at chapter 2. It gets a little better for a while, because Edward is absent. He's already begun to take over the story, since Bella has to moon over him, but at least he's off-screen for a few pages. Still, we have to read about Bella thinking incessantly about a man who has so far acted like an utter tool towards her for no discernible reason.*

First, we get a little reminder of how thoroughly unlikeable our main character is.

Mike came to sit by me in English, and walked me to my next class, with Chess Club Eric glaring at him all the while; that was flattering.

Oh, just ignore the incorrect comma use. And the pretentious (and unnecessary) semicolon. I'm talking about the 'I like it when guys fight over me' attitude. It's all the more interesting because Bella has no interest in these two boys (she will 'successfully evade' Mike when she leaves school for the day), but she's still flattered by one's resentment towards the other. There's an element of foreshadowing here, as Bella will have precisely the same reaction in Book 2 when Jacob Black enters the picture as a romantic rival. (Only in that case, she is interested in both men, so she...well, I'll steal a line from The Foywonder's hilarious and spot-on Eclipse review and say that what she does rhymes with 'rock peas'.) When good writers use foreshadowing, it's intentional, but we're talking Meyer here, so it's probably unconscious (i.e., she only knows one type of twisted relationship behaviour and so that's the one Bella has).

Bella's confidence boost from the jealousy of one person she doesn't want towards another person she doesn't want is disturbing enough, but it's compounded by chapter 2's beginning with day 2 at Forks High. These two boys have known her for at best a couple of hours and have talked to her for, what, five minutes? Ten minutes? Each? And one of them is already shooting the other jealous looks? I feel like I'm reading the Cliff's Notes of The Great Gatsby.

Do I even need to mention that neither of these guys (but especially Eric) got anywhere with Bells on day 1? They didn't exactly hit it off right away.

Bella then proceeds to whine about what makes today worse than yesterday before we reach this bombshell.

And [today] was worse because Edward Cullen wasn't in school at all.

In the name of Great Cthulhu who lies dreaming in the sunken city of R'lyeh, why? I really don't understand this. Why is she sad he isn't there? He's been inexplicably cruel for the whole hour or so that she's seen him. She has never spoken a word to him, nor he to her. Please, someone tell me how this day could possibly be worse than the previous day because the guy who looked at her like he wanted her to die at every opportunity is absent?

Yes, she is clearly physically attracted to him. In fact, as TheSpoonyOne has pointed out in his wonderful reviews of New Moon and Eclipse (warning: strong language), Edward and Bella's attraction never goes beyond the purely physical. We'll delve into this more later, but trust me that these two never share anything deeper than the desire to have sex with one another because they're both hot. (But Meyer is Mormon and, as I noted in my first entry, her writing keeps The Faith even though her characters inexplicably don't profess it, so they Wait.)

This is totally out of place for the goth subculture, which rejects relationships like this, but I'm sure the pseudo-goths eat it up. All the sexy black clothes and dark eye shadow and freedom from having to go outside or exercise without any of that 'hard' stuff like writing bad poetry and suicide attempts.

The next page has Bella ignoring her supposed friends' conversations (get used to it) while she pines for the stranger that looks at her with hate-filled eyes, hoping he will appear to ignore her rather than barely tolerate her very existence or, worse, not appear at all (oh come on, now). This comes complete with the worst simile** I've read in a published novel: 'I made the Cowardly Lion look like the terminator [sic].' Oh, ho! What a hilarious bon mot! How about this one: George W. Bush makes Hitler look like Mother Theresa. Zing!

Blah blah Edward doesn't show up, blah blah Bella 'had no practice dealing with overly friendly boys' (this from a girl with whom this entire school is instantly smitten), blah blah Bella gets home and goes immediately to the kitchen to do her female duty of preparing a meal for her man, that being her father** as she's yet to get hitched. (A Mormon aged seventeen and not engaged? For shame!)

There's also another bit of (presumably unintentional) foreshadowing here. Bella opines that '[i]t seemed excessive of [the Cullens] to have both looks and money.' Money? Where was there any indication the Cullens had--oh, right, the Volvo. Anyhow, remember this bit when I talk about the vampires' powers in a few weeks.

Charlie comes home and he and Bella chat, but not much. Each character is private, we've been told (though indirectly, for once), and they're each more comfortable being silently in the other's presence rather than chatting. This page-and-a-half works okay. It's natural and conveys the emotional distance between father and daughter without having either the characters or the narrator recite clunky exposition. But then the Cullens have to show up and torpedo any sense of realism or humanity.

'Do you know the Cullen family?' I asked hesitantly. [Again with the adverbs!]

'Dr. Cullen's family? Sure. Dr. Cullen's a great man.'

'They...the kids...are a little different. They don't seem to fit in very well at school.'

Charlie surprised me by looking angry.

'People in this town,' he muttered. 'Dr. Cullen is a brilliant surgeon who could probably work in any hospital in the world, make ten times the salary he gets here,' he continued, getting louder. 'We're lucky to have him--lucky that his wife wanted to live in a small town....'

So much wrong in only a few lines. Where to begin?

First, why is Charlie's voice getting louder as he talks? It could be a mark of Charlie's anger issues, just as Edward's future alternating attitudes towards Bella are indicative of his being an abuser, but again, it doesn't come across that way.

Second, what about Dr. Cullen makes him 'a great man'? He's a really good surgeon who gets paid less than he might. Swell. Somebody get Obama on the phone. We've got a Real American Hero here!

Third, in the very last exchange Bella and Charlie had, which happened all of five seconds before this one, Bella mentioned Mike and Charlie instantly declared that Mike was from a 'nice family'. Okay, so you judge Mike's family, but 'people in this town' are wrong for judging the Cullen family. (It's a minor point, but I love that Charlie immediately knows which 'Mike' Bella was talking about when 'Michael' tops the list of American male names, but he adds a 'Dr. Cullen's family?' to make sure she wasn't referring to some other Cullen family in this tiny town.)

Fourth, how does Charlie know that Cullen is a 'brilliant surgeon' who 'could probably work in any hospital in the world'? Surgery isn't exactly a skill that the untrained can easily evaluate. I had a fantastic surgeon in Malaysia who took care of an eye infection I had, but I'm no expert and simply judged him by the ease of that particular procedure. There's no way I would go from 'I thought he was a great surgeon because my operation went off without a hitch' to 'he could work anywhere in the world if he wanted, he's so good.' And in my case, the procedure was observed by my girlfriend, who has had surgical training, and I still wouldn't resort to this level of breathtaking hyperbole. What's Charlie basing his lofty opinion of Dr. Cullen on? I think Charlie has a direct line to the author of the novel.

Fifth, ten times? Now, my mother worked with medical doctors. My close friend's parents are both doctors. These people earn a lot of money. But honestly, ten times is just absurd. I find it difficult to believe that, barring some kind of circumstance that has nothing to do with skill (such as being the personal physician of someone of great wealth), in America, any surgeon in a particular speciality would ever make ten times what another surgeon in the same speciality makes. That means that if Dr. Cullen makes $60,000 (a pretty sad sum for any medical doctor, much less a surgeon), he could be making $600,000 somewhere else. That's what a neurosurgeon makes. Neurosurgeons do not earn $60,000 no matter where they are, unless they're not doing neurosurgery. And if they aren't, then they're doing the world a disservice, since there aren't many people who have the talent to do it, and even fewer who have gone through the extensive training to acquire the necessary skills. If you have a skill the world desperately needs that it took you almost two decades to acquire at great cost in resources that few people can acquire even with the necessary time and resources...you'd better use it. Not to do so would be a callous act of inhumanity--but wait, you say, Cullen's a vampire! He is inhuman.

Oh just you wait.

So, Dr. Cullen could make twice what he's making in Forks? Sure. Three times as much? Pushing it, but conceivable. Ten times? This is where Meyer's hyperbole for her nothing characters is particularly embarrassing. Bella can't just be a quirky smart girl who's cute but a little stand-offish; she has to be beautiful and smart and deep, the girl that every boy wants and every girl wants to be. Edward can't be a handsome but socially awkward fellow whose crippling self-doubt makes it difficult for him to establish an intimate relationship; he must be the sexiest boy at school who runs fastest and jumps highest and is strong and brave and reads minds and knows all kinds of stuff about stuff and doesn't want to do...you know...it. Even Dr. Cullen can't be just a doctor; he has to be a surgeon in a town too small to need a surgeon (and who appears not to be a surgeon in Forks, instead serving as your typical GP). In fact, he's the bestest surgeon evar, so that he could make ten times what he makes now if he went, y'know, anywhere.

Now if Charlie were just the best cop in the world, who could be making ten times what he makes in Forks if he went to New York City, I do believe all of our characters would be The Best.

So, um, where is the conflict is this story again?

=========================================

*It should be noted that he will at no point provide any explanation for his behaviour.

** Similes suck anyhow, unless you're Raymond Chandler or part of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 cast. Metaphors are where it's at. And if you're going to reference something, don't make it so obvious. Like the translation of Classical Chinese I just submitted in which I worked in an entirely appropriate 'We will crush the rebellion with one swift stroke!' Now that's how you drop references, Steffy!

*** Because the poor guy, well, you see, he's a man and men can't cook, a-hyuck!

Twilight: Enter the Cullen

Twilight, pp. 18-22

This week, we get our first exposure to Twilight's real protagonist, though at this point we will but stare pensively at him from across a school cafeteria. The rest of his 'family' is also introduced, in that they show up and are described by Jessica, who exists primarily to deliver exposition and to be less wonderful than Bella.

She performs Jessica function #1 today.

The first thing that occurred to me about the Cullens is that there are too many of them. (No, that's not a Mormon gag.) Really, do we need Jasper, Emmett, and Esme? I can't tell the difference between Alice and Esme, except Alice sees the future...kind of. Jasper is a newly 'vegetarian' vampire and so isn't very good at it. Except for the one scene in which Edward has to defend Bella from him--which doesn't occur until book #2--he doesn't really do anything. Emmett? Well, he doesn't even get the one scene. Rosalie is also of questionable necessity--oh wait, she doesn't like Bella. There's got to be somebody to grudgingly acknowledge that Edward was right about Bella all along. (This hasn't happened in either of the movies I've seen, so I'm assuming it's being saved for an upcoming film.) Alice is the one who likes Bella, Rosalie is the one who doesn't, and Dr. Cullen is the one who turned them all and taught them to be nice vampires. Really, I can't imagine why we need more in the vampire family than these three and Edward. None-the-less, we are burdened with Jasper, Esme, and Emmett (Emmett?). Forgive me if this blog doesn't deal much with any of the three in the coming months.

There were five of them. They weren't talking, and they weren't eating, though they each had a tray of untouched food in front of them.

Do they always do this? Let's leave aside the question of why five vampires--at least one of whom is over one hundred years old--would want to go to high school, or how they could stand to do so repeatedly. (It is later implied that the family replay a few years of their lives over and over again in different towns.) That's a question for another whole entry. For now, let's ask why they bother to get food and place it in front of themselves if they're not going to eat it. Isn't this more suspicious than not getting food at all? I don't know what sort of high school Mrs. Meyer went to, but my high school had plenty of people who didn't eat lunch, and nobody got suspicious that any of them was a vampire. So they're not eating food that they bothered to go and get...and they're not talking. Five people, sitting in silence over trays of uneaten food.

I'm sure no one but Bella notices this or finds it at all strange.

"They didn't look anything alike," we are told. Two paragraphs of notably vague physical description later, we are told "they were all exactly alike." I suppose Meyer is trying to do some kind of interesting dichotomy here ('their faces, so different, so similar', she writes later), but it really comes off as the author having forgotten what she wrote two paragraphs ago.

And those descriptions. For the men, we get body types and hair color. That's it. Nothing about their faces, how they dress, even how their hair is styled (unless you count "untidy" as a style). The women also get hair colors, but they are described in a very Jerry Jenkins-y way: Rather than telling us what they look like, Meyer tells us who they look like. Rosalie has "a beautiful figure, the kind you saw on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue". Like Jenkins, Meyer figures, "Why bother providing an actual image of my character, or even coming up with an honest-to-goodness metaphor? I'll just say she looks like this other hot person." At least Jenkins provided a specific person. Does every model on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue have the exact same build? I doubt it, but I can't say for sure because I've never looked at an issue of Sports Illustrated in my life.

This lends another clueless Jerry Jenkins vibe to the whole thing. Just as Jenkins offers "a young Robert Redford", as if people under 40 are likely to have an image of same leap to mind, Meyer mentions a magazine that hasn't been relevant in twenty years. (That it is a magazine primarily catering to men--the issue she cites in particular, one would think--I leave to commenters to unpack.) If you're going to let another person do your description for you, at least pick someone your reader is likely to know. Are most tweener girls familiar with the appearance of Sports Illustrated swimsuit models?

Alice is "pixielike". That's about it for her. I'm picturing a tiny woman with wings and a magic wand. That's what Meyer meant by 'pixielike', right? At least the ladies get hairstyles.

Bella reminds us that she doesn't remember Jessica's name when she asks her who the family are. Jessica gives her the names of the members and then disparages their lifestyle, in a way that starts well but that Meyer torpedoes with the dreaded adverb overuse that will pop up from time to time. (Well, it pops up all the time, but I promised to mention it only sometimes.)

"Yes!" Jessica agreed with another giggle. "They're all together though--Emmett and Rosalie, and Jasper and Alice, I mean. And they live together." Her voice held all the shock and condemnation of the small town, I thought critically.

The last sentence already adds unnecessarily to what the dialogue has already told us, and it's capped with the unnecessary adverb. Jessica's dialogue here has italics to clue us in to what she finds important in the Cullens' living arrangements. The final sentence implies Bella doesn't share Jessica's disapproval. But because Meyer doesn't trust the reader, she adds "critically" to make sure we "get" this.

Bella then defends the Cullens' lifestyle, despite knowing only what Jessica told her a few seconds ago (and conceding, though only in her head of course, that "even in Phoenix, it would cause gossip"), causing Jessica to "admit" the truth of Bella's statement "reluctantly". Before, the situation and earlier dialogue rendered the adverb redundant. Here, the word "admit" already implies that it was done so "reluctantly". And that's if you think Jessica's response ("I guess so") alone wasn't enough to imply this, which it was. As Stephen King wrote in On Writing, use "said" in dialogue unless another verb is needed. If it's already clear the character is admitting a point, there is no reason to use "X admitted" over "X said", and there's never any reason to use "X admitted reluctantly".

/adverb rant

Edward and Bella play "don't look at me looking at you" as the scene ends:

"Which one is the boy with the reddish brown hair?" I asked.
...
"That's Edward. He's gorgeous, of course, but don't waste your time. He doesn't date. Apparently none of the girls here are good-looking enough for him." She sniffed, a clear case of sour grapes.

I'm no expert on how the kidz talk deez dayz. I haven't had much of an ear for teen dialogue since the late 90s, but Meyer must have an ear on loan from the 1960s. "Good-looking"? Is that the word high school girls use to describe other pretty girls in a casual conversation? Dare I suggest "hot"?

In my first entry, we learned that Stephenie Meyer doesn't know what a preface is. Now we know she doesn't know the meaning of the expression "sour grapes", either.