From the moment I saw the title Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I knew this movie would end up on the blog. With a title like that, it had no chance to be any good, so the only question was, "Is it the good kind of bad?" Tragically, it suffers from the same fundamental problem that scuttled Drive Angry, only even more so. While there are flashes of the brilliant badness that might have been, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter doesn't know what it wants to be, and so the serious "historical" stuff keeps getting in the way of the goofy vampire-slaying. The best thing about this movie remains its title.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a cheesy Blade rip-off struggling to break out of a ham-handed anti-slavery allegory. I don't know if that describes the novel it was based on because I don't read trash, but it's the film we got. There's even a scene in which white vampires literally prey upon their black slaves. Oh, I get it: Racist exploitation is bad! What an original insight! It got to be adorable how the film believed it could surprise me, with plot twists, witty rejoinders, or sudden attacks that I saw coming before the movie even finished setting them up. The only thing 19th century about this movie is the way it telegraphs every "surprise".
Benjamin Walker stars as Abraham Lincoln, the 16th Emperor of the Known World, regarded by most as one of the greatest men to sit upon the throne, who also murders people by shooting them in the back. I don't know whether or not the filmmakers intentionally did this as some kind of inversion of the way the real Lincoln was assassinated, but either way, I'd like to extend a personal fuck you to all of them for having Lincoln do this. The character is obsessed with vengeance for his mother, who died not of milk sickness but of vampire bite. In fact, no one dies in this movie in any way other than a vampire bite, even during the ludicrous Civil War battle sequences. It really makes one wonder how nobody's figured out the whole vampire thing when hundreds of people killed by vampire bites turn up in mortuaries every day.
Actually Lincoln completely fails in his murder attempt when his gun misfires, and he runs away, with the unarmed would-be victim chasing him around and mocking him. This cowardly failed assassin is the Emperor who then crushed the Southern Rebellion with one swift stroke? Lincoln finally caps the guy in the face in a way that couldn't possibly have happened as shown on screen, but it doesn't matter because mother-killing guy is a vampire and so gunshots to the face only put him out of action long enough to set up a lame, predictable jump scare. Whew! The guy wasn't human, Lincoln's conscience is clear! The vampire kills Lincoln two or three times, but since this is the silly part of the movie, Lincoln just gets some blood on his face from a beating that would kill three normal men. Then he's saved by a guy who's English for absolutely no reason. It turns out Inexplicably English Guy is a vampire hunter, though we will never once see him hunt any vampires, and he goes around finding people who get really drunk before going out to murder someone and training them how to murder vampires instead of whoever they were going to murder (unless of course, like Lincoln, the person they were going to murder turns out to be a vampire). IEG takes Lincoln under his wing and teaches him the ways of the Force, hitting all the obligatory phases of Jedi training: "with the blast shield down, I can't even see", "hatred is the path to the Dark Side", "no attachments/love/family", and using a melee weapon instead of a gun. If only someone were there to tell Lincoln that hokey religions and ancients weapons were no match for a good blaster at his side...but this movie is far too humorless for that. At least when it doesn't give us a vampire throwing horses at Abraham Lincoln.
Said horse-throwing vampire is Barts, played by Marton Csokas to a nearly Baron Harkonnen-level of cartoony villainous overacting. Alas, if only the movie had more of that. Instead, we get Lincoln putting aside vampire hunting to wed Mary Todd and become Emperor of the Known World so he can fight the vampires by abolishing the slavery that's keeping them in the South where they belong.
See, because in addition to being soulless evil blood-drinking monsters who eat babies and hate Mom, baseball, and apple pie, the southern traitors were also vampires. As in, openly vampires, with head vampire Adam (Rufus Sewell) telling the rebel leader that he will provide the rebel scum with an army of vampires to defeat the Empire's stormtroopers. He does, and this army annihilates a contingent of stormtroopers using their vampire powers. As a former vampire hunter, Lincoln knows what to do: Melt down all the silver in the Empire, make it into musket balls and bayonets, and ship it to the battlefront, because silver is the only thing that can kill vampires. (Well, fire kills them too, but how could you possibly get that on a battlefield?). The Imperial war machine of the 19th-century is so efficient that it gathers thousands of silver objects, melts them all down, makes them into blades and balls, and sends people on foot to carry them to Gettysburg in one day.
Lincoln, meanwhile, is standing atop a moving train mowing down vampires by the dozen with his axe, along with his best pals Poor Man's Christian Slater and Token Black Guy. I guess Token Black Guy trained as a vampire hunter off-screen, because he's able to chop off vampire heads with Abe's axe as well as the Emperor himself. Fortunately, the vampires don't attack both of them at the same time, so they're free to hand off the axe to whichever of them needs it. To give credit where it's due, though, it's Poor Man's Christian Slater who gets kacked rather than Token Black Guy, so at least the Black Guy doesn't Die First.
And you know, I wouldn't complain about these silly parts if the movie had stayed true to them. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter only comes alive when Abraham Lincoln is hunting vampires. When he's romancing a hot Mary Todd, getting thrown in jail for beating up slavecatchers, meeting but never really talking to Stephen Douglas, talking to Poor Man's Christian Slater about how many men are dying in this or that battle--basically, whenever the movie tries to be serious, it's just dead in the water. None of that shit belongs in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. I want to see a tall, dark man in a righteous beard and a stovepipe hat bitchslapping vampires while getting a horse thrown at him by the Baron Harkonnen. The movie gives us some of that, but intersperses it with boring talky scenes that try to connect the vampire stuff to the life of the real Lincoln. As in most of his life, from early childhood to the eve of his assassination. And really, the clumsy, stupid, and useless vampirism-slavery metaphor--it's like making Hitler a werewolf: He isn't any scarier, and it trivializes the horror by divorcing it from anything human.
This is a movie allegedly about Abraham Lincoln fighting vampires, yet it's at least as much Lincoln biopic, with soaring music at Lincoln's speeches and Glory-wannabe Civil War battle sequences, also accompanied by soaring music.Try watching Van Helsing, only after every action scene, turn it off and watch ten minutes of John Adams. That's this movie.
No, I'm sorry, that was a terrible thing to say, nobody should have to watch Van Helsing. Csokas is the only one in the cast who understood what this movie should've been and what kind of performance works for it. Everyone else seems to think they're in a real movie. People, there's a lady vampire in the movie just so Mary Todd Lincoln has another chick to fight! Mary Todd Lincoln! This isn't Merchant fucking Ivory.
The filmmakers completely missed out on what could've been the most gloriously stupid movie of 2012, and that's even counting Twilight, Part 4: Part 2. I've got it! New Twilight movie, only this time with Csokas in the Edward role going one-on-one with Michael Sheen as Aro for the Overacting Heavyweight Championship of the World.
Fast-track this baby! I'll have a script for ya by next week!
Showing posts with label vampire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vampire. Show all posts
December 19, 2012
October 28, 2012
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.
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.
October 21, 2012
Twilight: Get Thee to the Google!
Twilight, pp. 132-135.
Bella, after a shower that "didn't last nearly as long as [she] hoped it would" (uh...doesn't a shower last as long as you want it to last?), uses her dial-up modem to discover Edward is a vampire with the power of Google (even though Jacob already told her this). Dial-up. In 2005. This just keeps getting better and better.
Now I know some of you occasionally leave your basement and hike the 8 miles into "town" so you can use Jed's 2800 baud modem to read this blog because you live too far from civilisation to have access to the cutting-edge technology that is "cable". So maybe Forks also lacks this city-folk knickknack, and dial-up is all Bella can get on Mustache Dad's old computer. Nice theory, my hog-calling friend, but like post-structuralist theory, it's fractally wrong.(Unlike post-structuralist theory, it makes sense on its own terms and isn't a collection of jargon designed specifically to obscure the fact that it's completely meaningless.) There are two main problems with it:
Bella refers to the modem as her modem. It seems we're to believe that in 2005 a teen-aged girl in Phoenix used a dial-up modem. The second problem is that even if we discount that, Bella doesn't even complain about the service. She doesn't compare it to Phoenix. Considering how much she supposedly hates Forks, that should be happening. What kind of emo chick passes up a chance to complain about how much her life sucks due to various minor inconveniences? Bella certainly wouldn't. She doesn't complain because Meyer had a dial-up modem in high school, so Bella does--are you seeing a pattern here? I really don't get why Meyer didn't just set the books circa 1990. Sometimes I think that all these technology oddities are subtle clues to the reader that this is in fact when they are set, but every time I try to give this novel credit for subtly, it blows up in my face. It's more likely that Meyer's handle on pop culture really is on the level of the Butabi brothers.
So we get a full two pages of hot, steaming search engine action, and it's even more exciting on the page than it is in the Twilight film. Bella finds the scholarly rigourous site Vampires A to Z(!), which claims there is a species of good vampire that Meyer made up to explain why the Cullens aren't evil despite being soulless monsters. Then we get this gem:
Overall, though, there was little that coincided with Jacob's stories or my own observations. I'd made a little catalogue in my mind as I'd read and carefully compared each myth. Speed, strength, beauty, pale skin, eyes that shift colour; and then Jacob's criteria: blood drinkers, enemies of the werewolf, cold-skinned, and immortal. There were very few myths that matched even one factor.
And then another problem, one that I'd remembered from the small number of scary movies that I'd seen and was backed up by today's reading--vampires couldn't come out in the daytime, the sun would burn them to a cinder. They slept in coffins all day and came out only at night.
It's clear Meyer expects us to regard this web site as generally correct (its text being "academic-looking", and it tells us about the good vampires), yet once again, she reveals that she hasn't done her homework. I assume she actually did a Google search, found a site about vampires with a stupid name, and spent a half hour paging through it, randomly throwing into her novel alleged vampire myths from the Philippines, Romania, and Poland, but I'm sorry, that just isn't going to cut it. I'm hardly a vampire expert, but I've seen my share of vampire films, read Dracula, and know a little bit about at least European folklore vampires. Even a relative neophyte like me can immediately see problems.
First, the stuff she gets right. It's true that beauty, speed, pale skin, and "eyes that shift colour" aren't going to show up in many vampire myths, especially the eye colour thing since Meyer just made that one up for...some reason. Vampires traditionally aren't fast (or beautiful, for that matter) because they're dead. It's only in the 21st century that our old undead stand-bys have to bounce off the walls like a bunch of skater punks who drank too much Surge. (I'm looking at you, I am Legend.) Forget the undead staggering toward us with the inevitability of the grave. Now they charge at us like tweeners at a Justin Bieber concert. That's why traditional vampires were mostly believed to kill children and other vulnerable people.
European vampires also weren't pale, because they were supposed to be full of blood. But Meyer says over and over again that few vampire myths involve blood drinking. I'm going to call bullshit here, simply because blood drinking is one of the core aspects of the creatures originally called vampires. If it doesn't drink blood, I don't see how you can call it a vampire. We call it a vampire bat because it's a bat that drinks blood. It isn't destroyed by sunlight and doesn't turn you into a bat when it bites you , but nobody has a problem with calling it a vampire bat because drinking blood is what vampires do. So as much as I love the hopping Chinese "vampires", they aren't, really. They're animated corpses that draw out of you something you need to keep on living (and I guess they're not into the whole religion thing), but that's where the similarities end.
So it's fine that "enemies of the werewolf" didn't come up since European tradition isn't based on two 12 year old boys arguing over who would win in a fight between Dracula and the Wolfman. "Immortal" is also not characteristic of traditional vampires (even though Jacob didn't say the Cullens were immortal). And though I'd think a walking corpse would be "cold-skinned", I guess I'll let that one slide, too. But blood-drinking ought to be there, and strength. Most monsters are stronger than people, since anything physically stronger than you is automatically threatening. And what shouldn't be there is what Meyer remembers from the "small number of scary movies" that are "backed up" by this highly accurate web site. Traditional vampires were not destroyed by sunlight. They just didn't come out during the day because it was easier to spot and escape from them. The notion that vampires were harmed by sunlight doesn't even go back to Dracula but to the film Nosferatu (1922). The creators of that film simply made it up to differentiate their film from Dracula so they wouldn't be sued by the notoriously litigious Bram Stoker estate. So this "academic-looking" site should not "back up" the myth that vampires are destroyed by sunlight, because there is no such myth and never was. I didn't even have to look that up! Simply being a fan of the horror genre is enough to know this.
But as I said on the day I started this blog, Meyer is not a fan of horror. Meyer doesn't know or understand vampires, and she doesn't care to. She has no love or respect for the genre she's working in. She just stole the term vampire to sell more books, and nobody's called her on it.
Well, I'm calling her on it. Stephenie Meyer, you're a hack writer who was lucky enough to somehow tap into the cultural zeitgeist despite your utter lack of talent, drive, and dedication to the craft of writing. You're the literary equivalent of Uwe Boll, except everyone knows Boll sucks and we love him for it. Your novel claims to be a vampire romances, but it has neither vampires nor romance. If I had to sum up the novel Twilight in one word, it would be contempt. Contempt for your readers, contempt for women and girls, contempt for American Indians, contempt for the horror genre and everyone involved with it.
Stephenie Meyer, your novel is bad and you should feel bad.
Bella, after a shower that "didn't last nearly as long as [she] hoped it would" (uh...doesn't a shower last as long as you want it to last?), uses her dial-up modem to discover Edward is a vampire with the power of Google (even though Jacob already told her this). Dial-up. In 2005. This just keeps getting better and better.
Now I know some of you occasionally leave your basement and hike the 8 miles into "town" so you can use Jed's 2800 baud modem to read this blog because you live too far from civilisation to have access to the cutting-edge technology that is "cable". So maybe Forks also lacks this city-folk knickknack, and dial-up is all Bella can get on Mustache Dad's old computer. Nice theory, my hog-calling friend, but like post-structuralist theory, it's fractally wrong.(Unlike post-structuralist theory, it makes sense on its own terms and isn't a collection of jargon designed specifically to obscure the fact that it's completely meaningless.) There are two main problems with it:
Bella refers to the modem as her modem. It seems we're to believe that in 2005 a teen-aged girl in Phoenix used a dial-up modem. The second problem is that even if we discount that, Bella doesn't even complain about the service. She doesn't compare it to Phoenix. Considering how much she supposedly hates Forks, that should be happening. What kind of emo chick passes up a chance to complain about how much her life sucks due to various minor inconveniences? Bella certainly wouldn't. She doesn't complain because Meyer had a dial-up modem in high school, so Bella does--are you seeing a pattern here? I really don't get why Meyer didn't just set the books circa 1990. Sometimes I think that all these technology oddities are subtle clues to the reader that this is in fact when they are set, but every time I try to give this novel credit for subtly, it blows up in my face. It's more likely that Meyer's handle on pop culture really is on the level of the Butabi brothers.
So we get a full two pages of hot, steaming search engine action, and it's even more exciting on the page than it is in the Twilight film. Bella finds the scholarly rigourous site Vampires A to Z(!), which claims there is a species of good vampire that Meyer made up to explain why the Cullens aren't evil despite being soulless monsters. Then we get this gem:
Overall, though, there was little that coincided with Jacob's stories or my own observations. I'd made a little catalogue in my mind as I'd read and carefully compared each myth. Speed, strength, beauty, pale skin, eyes that shift colour; and then Jacob's criteria: blood drinkers, enemies of the werewolf, cold-skinned, and immortal. There were very few myths that matched even one factor.
And then another problem, one that I'd remembered from the small number of scary movies that I'd seen and was backed up by today's reading--vampires couldn't come out in the daytime, the sun would burn them to a cinder. They slept in coffins all day and came out only at night.
It's clear Meyer expects us to regard this web site as generally correct (its text being "academic-looking", and it tells us about the good vampires), yet once again, she reveals that she hasn't done her homework. I assume she actually did a Google search, found a site about vampires with a stupid name, and spent a half hour paging through it, randomly throwing into her novel alleged vampire myths from the Philippines, Romania, and Poland, but I'm sorry, that just isn't going to cut it. I'm hardly a vampire expert, but I've seen my share of vampire films, read Dracula, and know a little bit about at least European folklore vampires. Even a relative neophyte like me can immediately see problems.
First, the stuff she gets right. It's true that beauty, speed, pale skin, and "eyes that shift colour" aren't going to show up in many vampire myths, especially the eye colour thing since Meyer just made that one up for...some reason. Vampires traditionally aren't fast (or beautiful, for that matter) because they're dead. It's only in the 21st century that our old undead stand-bys have to bounce off the walls like a bunch of skater punks who drank too much Surge. (I'm looking at you, I am Legend.) Forget the undead staggering toward us with the inevitability of the grave. Now they charge at us like tweeners at a Justin Bieber concert. That's why traditional vampires were mostly believed to kill children and other vulnerable people.
European vampires also weren't pale, because they were supposed to be full of blood. But Meyer says over and over again that few vampire myths involve blood drinking. I'm going to call bullshit here, simply because blood drinking is one of the core aspects of the creatures originally called vampires. If it doesn't drink blood, I don't see how you can call it a vampire. We call it a vampire bat because it's a bat that drinks blood. It isn't destroyed by sunlight and doesn't turn you into a bat when it bites you , but nobody has a problem with calling it a vampire bat because drinking blood is what vampires do. So as much as I love the hopping Chinese "vampires", they aren't, really. They're animated corpses that draw out of you something you need to keep on living (and I guess they're not into the whole religion thing), but that's where the similarities end.
So it's fine that "enemies of the werewolf" didn't come up since European tradition isn't based on two 12 year old boys arguing over who would win in a fight between Dracula and the Wolfman. "Immortal" is also not characteristic of traditional vampires (even though Jacob didn't say the Cullens were immortal). And though I'd think a walking corpse would be "cold-skinned", I guess I'll let that one slide, too. But blood-drinking ought to be there, and strength. Most monsters are stronger than people, since anything physically stronger than you is automatically threatening. And what shouldn't be there is what Meyer remembers from the "small number of scary movies" that are "backed up" by this highly accurate web site. Traditional vampires were not destroyed by sunlight. They just didn't come out during the day because it was easier to spot and escape from them. The notion that vampires were harmed by sunlight doesn't even go back to Dracula but to the film Nosferatu (1922). The creators of that film simply made it up to differentiate their film from Dracula so they wouldn't be sued by the notoriously litigious Bram Stoker estate. So this "academic-looking" site should not "back up" the myth that vampires are destroyed by sunlight, because there is no such myth and never was. I didn't even have to look that up! Simply being a fan of the horror genre is enough to know this.
But as I said on the day I started this blog, Meyer is not a fan of horror. Meyer doesn't know or understand vampires, and she doesn't care to. She has no love or respect for the genre she's working in. She just stole the term vampire to sell more books, and nobody's called her on it.
Well, I'm calling her on it. Stephenie Meyer, you're a hack writer who was lucky enough to somehow tap into the cultural zeitgeist despite your utter lack of talent, drive, and dedication to the craft of writing. You're the literary equivalent of Uwe Boll, except everyone knows Boll sucks and we love him for it. Your novel claims to be a vampire romances, but it has neither vampires nor romance. If I had to sum up the novel Twilight in one word, it would be contempt. Contempt for your readers, contempt for women and girls, contempt for American Indians, contempt for the horror genre and everyone involved with it.
Stephenie Meyer, your novel is bad and you should feel bad.
August 19, 2012
Twilight: Blood Appeal
Twilight, pp. 85-90.
The rest of the morning passed in a blur. It was difficult to believe that I hadn't just imagined what Edward had said, and the way his eyes had looked. Maybe it was just a very convincing dream that I'd confused with reality. That seemed more probable than that I really appealed to him on any level.
We open this week with another piece of unintentional irony. Once again, Stephenie [sic] Meyer manages to get both aspects of a particular situation wrong at the same time. She has even odds to get at least one right, but Twilight is such a masterpiece of suck that it's consistently wrong at a number of levels simultaneously.
It is true, of course, that Bella shouldn't appeal to Edward "on any level". First among these, of course, is that vampires eat people. Edward's attraction to Bella is like a person falling in love with a deer. Would you feel anything approaching romantic love for something that you hunt, kill, and eat? Now, to make the vampire mythos as sexually neutered as possible in this story, we'll eventually find out that the Cullen clan don't eat people anymore. (Come on, not even a Dexter or Morpheus the Living Vampire we-only-prey-on-bad-people thing? No. The vampires must be as nonthreatening as possible for maximum faux-bad boyness.) But as we'll discover, this doesn't in any way decrease their desire to eat humans. It's just that these are Zen vampires that hold their desires in check. So the point still stands. Edward has eaten lots of people, and he'd still eat people now if he didn't practice safe feeding. The notion that he'd have true romantic feelings toward a person is unthinkable. (Again, the Edward-as-villain plotline is just straining to come out here.)
That the prey animal Edward has a totally unbelievable fixation on is Bella makes it even more ludicrous. In all his decades of unlife, he's never come across anyone as enchanting as a 17-year-old girl he's shared probably four minutes of conversation with? I guess her high school-level command of the process of cell mitosis is pretty impressive stuff where Edward comes from! We'll be told later that Edward is drawn to Bella primarily because he can't read her mind. (Because Edward does that, you know.) Now I know I'm hardly the first to make this observation, but really, it's too easy:
Maybe he can't read her mind because there isn't anything to read.
But Meyer can't just get this wrong. No, a rich, powerful, dark, and mysterious man falling in love with the heroine for no discernable reason is part and parcel of hack romance novels. (Novels of this type written by good authors provide female protagonists who are believably irresistable to such men.) Any old crap writer can be not bothered to craft a plausible scenario in which two characters in a romantic story could actually fall in love with each other. It takes someone as monumentally untalented as Meyer to both do that and have an unbelievable scene in which the heroine recognises this fact, but for no reason at all! As noted, if you know Edward is a 100-year-old vampire, you can't believe his attraction to Bella. But Bella doesn't know this. All she knows is that Edward is a year ahead of her in school, is hot, and is kind of a creepy jerk. Why wouldn't she appeal to him? So far, every boy at the entire school has been asking her out! The most popular girl in school has made her her best galpal. And if that isn't enough, she's new to this tiny, isolated town that probably hasn't had any new blood since the Carter administration.
To cut Meyer as much slack as possible, this could possibly work if Bella were sheltered, naive, and socially inept, the way good Mormon parents like to think their good Mormon girls are. (They aren't.) In short, maybe if Bella had actually lived in Forks her whole life and been raised by Charlie, maybe I could buy that she reached age seventeen without seeing herself as attractive. But Bella grew up in Phoenix, raised by her pseudo-hippie New Age mother whose first question when she hears Bella likes a boy is, "Are you being safe?" I can't believe I'm saying this, but "he really likes me?" is immature for high school. Think about what that means.
Even if Bella consciously rejects relationships, dating, and the high school social scene, it's not credible that she has no understanding of how it works, and since her arrival in Forks, she has shown she does know how the game is played. Once again Meyer wants to have her cake and eat it, too. She wants Bella to be popular and liked and desired even as she's standoff-ish, tragically hip, and withdrawn. She's written Bella as both naive and jaded, narcissitic and empathetic, passive-aggressive and...well, she got that one consistent. Bella has belief and understanding that she could never have formed without going through experiences that can't possibly have left her as innocent as she has to be to keep this "I don't know know why boys like me" foolishness going.
At this point Meyer informs us that Bella's mooning over whether or not Edward really said he wasn't going to talk to her because they shouldn't be friends hasn't been taking place in solitude. No, she's been doing this while--and I hope you're sitting down as you read this--ignoring the person she's with. That isn't my judgement; Bella tells us so. It's poor Jessica she's ignoring, again. Jessica, who apparently has no friends other than Bella, despite Bella's never once so far listening to anything Jessica had to say that wasn't about Edward. This time "Jessica babbled on and on about her dance plans...completely unaware of my inattention." That's our Bella!
Jessica finally stops "babbling" when she mentions Edward (because all talk that isn't about Edward is babble by definition), who's sitting alone instead of with the rest of the Cullen clan. He motions for Bella to come over, and Jessica reacts to this with "insulting astonishment", even though Bella is "star[ing] in disbelief". Right, so Jessica's disbelief that Edward would want to see Bella is insulting, while Bella's disbelief of the exact same thing at the exact same time is not. That's our Bella: She's right and everyone else is wrong, even when they have identical thoughts. I mean, I can't think of a more naked sign of authorial favour. When you're wrong, I'm right, and when you're right, I'm right. Isn't this the same person who earlier on this very page declared it more likely that she hallucinated an entire conversation than that Edward would find her appealing "in any way"? Yet Jessica's "astonishment" at this very thing is "insulting"?
Edward wants to see her because he "decided as long as I was going to hell, I might as well do it thoroughly". When Bella rightly points out that he's not making sense, he says, "I know[!]" and leaves it at that. Then why did he say it in the first place? Because he's the kind of person we here in normal-people land call something that rhymes with "brass pole". He eventually says he's "giving up" on trying to stay away from her. The two then descend into a bottomlessly silly exchange in which he says it's a problem that he says too much around her, so he says it so that she doesn't understand what it means. So why is it a problem? And how can he accidentally say "too much" if it's nonsensical? Then we go over the "I'm warning you, I'm dangerous" rigamorole all over again, because we readers are too dumb to get it the first 37 times.
Or maybe Meyer thinks that if she keeps saying it, we'll believe Edward really is dangerous.
===========================================================
*Okay, I know I've said that attending high school for eternity would be a horrible fate. I mean, listening to teen-agers prattle on about nothing day after day as year after year slips past....So, Edward doesn't do that. I get it. But what exactly does he do? He doesn't talk to anyone, doesn't appear to study (he just reads the teachers' minds to find out what the answers they want)...what does he do in school for seven hours a day?
The rest of the morning passed in a blur. It was difficult to believe that I hadn't just imagined what Edward had said, and the way his eyes had looked. Maybe it was just a very convincing dream that I'd confused with reality. That seemed more probable than that I really appealed to him on any level.
We open this week with another piece of unintentional irony. Once again, Stephenie [sic] Meyer manages to get both aspects of a particular situation wrong at the same time. She has even odds to get at least one right, but Twilight is such a masterpiece of suck that it's consistently wrong at a number of levels simultaneously.
It is true, of course, that Bella shouldn't appeal to Edward "on any level". First among these, of course, is that vampires eat people. Edward's attraction to Bella is like a person falling in love with a deer. Would you feel anything approaching romantic love for something that you hunt, kill, and eat? Now, to make the vampire mythos as sexually neutered as possible in this story, we'll eventually find out that the Cullen clan don't eat people anymore. (Come on, not even a Dexter or Morpheus the Living Vampire we-only-prey-on-bad-people thing? No. The vampires must be as nonthreatening as possible for maximum faux-bad boyness.) But as we'll discover, this doesn't in any way decrease their desire to eat humans. It's just that these are Zen vampires that hold their desires in check. So the point still stands. Edward has eaten lots of people, and he'd still eat people now if he didn't practice safe feeding. The notion that he'd have true romantic feelings toward a person is unthinkable. (Again, the Edward-as-villain plotline is just straining to come out here.)
That the prey animal Edward has a totally unbelievable fixation on is Bella makes it even more ludicrous. In all his decades of unlife, he's never come across anyone as enchanting as a 17-year-old girl he's shared probably four minutes of conversation with? I guess her high school-level command of the process of cell mitosis is pretty impressive stuff where Edward comes from! We'll be told later that Edward is drawn to Bella primarily because he can't read her mind. (Because Edward does that, you know.) Now I know I'm hardly the first to make this observation, but really, it's too easy:
Maybe he can't read her mind because there isn't anything to read.
But Meyer can't just get this wrong. No, a rich, powerful, dark, and mysterious man falling in love with the heroine for no discernable reason is part and parcel of hack romance novels. (Novels of this type written by good authors provide female protagonists who are believably irresistable to such men.) Any old crap writer can be not bothered to craft a plausible scenario in which two characters in a romantic story could actually fall in love with each other. It takes someone as monumentally untalented as Meyer to both do that and have an unbelievable scene in which the heroine recognises this fact, but for no reason at all! As noted, if you know Edward is a 100-year-old vampire, you can't believe his attraction to Bella. But Bella doesn't know this. All she knows is that Edward is a year ahead of her in school, is hot, and is kind of a creepy jerk. Why wouldn't she appeal to him? So far, every boy at the entire school has been asking her out! The most popular girl in school has made her her best galpal. And if that isn't enough, she's new to this tiny, isolated town that probably hasn't had any new blood since the Carter administration.
To cut Meyer as much slack as possible, this could possibly work if Bella were sheltered, naive, and socially inept, the way good Mormon parents like to think their good Mormon girls are. (They aren't.) In short, maybe if Bella had actually lived in Forks her whole life and been raised by Charlie, maybe I could buy that she reached age seventeen without seeing herself as attractive. But Bella grew up in Phoenix, raised by her pseudo-hippie New Age mother whose first question when she hears Bella likes a boy is, "Are you being safe?" I can't believe I'm saying this, but "he really likes me?" is immature for high school. Think about what that means.
Even if Bella consciously rejects relationships, dating, and the high school social scene, it's not credible that she has no understanding of how it works, and since her arrival in Forks, she has shown she does know how the game is played. Once again Meyer wants to have her cake and eat it, too. She wants Bella to be popular and liked and desired even as she's standoff-ish, tragically hip, and withdrawn. She's written Bella as both naive and jaded, narcissitic and empathetic, passive-aggressive and...well, she got that one consistent. Bella has belief and understanding that she could never have formed without going through experiences that can't possibly have left her as innocent as she has to be to keep this "I don't know know why boys like me" foolishness going.
At this point Meyer informs us that Bella's mooning over whether or not Edward really said he wasn't going to talk to her because they shouldn't be friends hasn't been taking place in solitude. No, she's been doing this while--and I hope you're sitting down as you read this--ignoring the person she's with. That isn't my judgement; Bella tells us so. It's poor Jessica she's ignoring, again. Jessica, who apparently has no friends other than Bella, despite Bella's never once so far listening to anything Jessica had to say that wasn't about Edward. This time "Jessica babbled on and on about her dance plans...completely unaware of my inattention." That's our Bella!
Jessica finally stops "babbling" when she mentions Edward (because all talk that isn't about Edward is babble by definition), who's sitting alone instead of with the rest of the Cullen clan. He motions for Bella to come over, and Jessica reacts to this with "insulting astonishment", even though Bella is "star[ing] in disbelief". Right, so Jessica's disbelief that Edward would want to see Bella is insulting, while Bella's disbelief of the exact same thing at the exact same time is not. That's our Bella: She's right and everyone else is wrong, even when they have identical thoughts. I mean, I can't think of a more naked sign of authorial favour. When you're wrong, I'm right, and when you're right, I'm right. Isn't this the same person who earlier on this very page declared it more likely that she hallucinated an entire conversation than that Edward would find her appealing "in any way"? Yet Jessica's "astonishment" at this very thing is "insulting"?
Edward wants to see her because he "decided as long as I was going to hell, I might as well do it thoroughly". When Bella rightly points out that he's not making sense, he says, "I know[!]" and leaves it at that. Then why did he say it in the first place? Because he's the kind of person we here in normal-people land call something that rhymes with "brass pole". He eventually says he's "giving up" on trying to stay away from her. The two then descend into a bottomlessly silly exchange in which he says it's a problem that he says too much around her, so he says it so that she doesn't understand what it means. So why is it a problem? And how can he accidentally say "too much" if it's nonsensical? Then we go over the "I'm warning you, I'm dangerous" rigamorole all over again, because we readers are too dumb to get it the first 37 times.
Or maybe Meyer thinks that if she keeps saying it, we'll believe Edward really is dangerous.
===========================================================
*Okay, I know I've said that attending high school for eternity would be a horrible fate. I mean, listening to teen-agers prattle on about nothing day after day as year after year slips past....So, Edward doesn't do that. I get it. But what exactly does he do? He doesn't talk to anyone, doesn't appear to study (he just reads the teachers' minds to find out what the answers they want)...what does he do in school for seven hours a day?
July 17, 2010
Twilight: Mirror Universe
Twilight, pp. 25-28.
This week on Twilight (alternate title: Everybody Loves Bella), we're introduced to Mike, who loves Bella. This poor kid makes you feel bad for him from his very first appearance, because, clearly unprepared for Bella's manipulations, he has no idea what's in store for him. He's friendly and polite--already a bad sign--though a little lacking in tact.
I looked up to see a cute, baby-faced boy, his blond hair carefully gelled into orderly spikes, smiling at me in a friendly way. He obviously didn't think I smelled bad....He was the nicest person I'd met today.
But as we were entering the gym, he asked, 'So, did you stab Edward Cullen with a pencil or what? I've never seen him act like that....He looked like he was in pain or something.'
'I don't know,' I responded. 'I never spoke to him.'
'He's a weird guy.' Mike lingered by me instead of heading to the dressing room. 'If I were lucky enough to sit by you, I would have talked to you.'
I smiled at him before walking through the girls' locker room door. He was friendly and clearly admiring.
That's our Bella--keep it vague, keep 'em guessing, never let them pin you down to anything. The number one rule of emotional manipulation is never let anyone know your true motives.
So, despite Mike's entirely inappropriate reference to Edward's absurd behaviour and his rather too eager 'I woulda talked to you', he's 'the nicest person I'd met today', and Bella likes him because 'he obviously didn't think I smelled bad', as Edward seems to. So from Mike she seeks validation of her attractiveness, a boost to her self-esteem that her abusive boyfriend has shaken, but Bella will set him up with Jessica because, as Jessica's good friend, Bella will allow her to take a partner she herself has rejected. Mike is attracted to Bella because, well, everyone is, but he's lacking something, that sort of open contempt for her and indifference to human emotion that Bella finds so captivating.
This is where the author's lack of touch with anything resembling a normal teenage experience comes out. I've no idea if Mrs. Meyer had such an experience, but if she did, her writing shows no evidence of this. My high school experience was typical (summers in Rangoon, luge lessons), though I share neither the joy of having escaped it nor the nostalgia for it that seem to comprise the two most common American attitudes towards high school.
But I do remember that high school was all about cliques. You were in one whether you wanted to be or not. No-one reading this is going to be surprised which clique I ended up in: the gamers. I was one of the first at my high school to have Internet access (and before that, local bulletin boards). In computer programming class, I was the unofficial teaching assistant. I played Dungeons and Dragons on the tabletop, wrote fantasy fanfiction, and sparred occasionally with swords.
One of the hallmarks of high school cliquishness is that cliques rarely crossed lines. The smokers had their area of the school, and everybody else made fun of them...from a distance. I had a middle school friend who ended up in their clique, which essentially marked the end of the friendship. None of his friends would've welcomed me, nor mine him. (I'm sure they made fun of us, too.) The jocks had their clique, and gangsters theirs, and the 420-friendly smokers theirs.
So the most popular girl in school was really the one who appealed to the most cliques. I remember not being at all enamoured with my high school's Most Popular Girl. I was much more interested in the salutatorian and, before that, the eventual valedictorian of the rival high school in our district. That is, girls who were closer to my clique. (My high school was sadly lacking in gamer girls.)
Twilight's high school is, thus, a completely foreign place to me, where the rules are all different. I'm half-recalling a line from an episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, something like 'A perverted world, where the spazzes make fun of the cool guys.' That's what Forks High is, high school turned upside down, where the geeks are popular and the cool kids can't get dates. Bella is not the kind of girl who should be the darling of the school, because she's in the angsty-emo-goth clique. There she would be highly sought after (with her manipulations being just another part of the package), but outside of it, she'd be...well, she'd be regarded precisely in the way Mike views Edward. 'She's a weird girl' he would say to Jessica not long before he asks her out, because Mike and Jessica are in the same clique, and so he would actually find her attractive. He shouldn't need Bella to point this out, and he shouldn't be interested in anything Bella has to say on this or any other matter.
This is where Meyer wants to have her cake and eat it, too. She wants her fauxtagonist to be quirky and deep but also widely popular, forgetting or ignoring that depth and quirkiness aren't popular. The good-looking pretty types (Mike) aren't interested in moody, antisocial types like Bella. They're more interested in people like themselves. People closer to, or in, their own clique.
Of course, high school romances are often about love that jumps cliques. In fact, the story might have been interesting if Bella actually did end up with Mike, with Edward being the one everybody (including Edward himself) assumes she'd go for. Bella and Mike could run into constant trouble because their expectations and the worlds they inhabit are so vastly different. Edward and Jessica would be the obstacles here, representing the safer, conformist alternatives to the difficulties of making their relationship work. But Bella just has that something that Mike can't ignore (just pretend that, in this alternate universe, Bella actually has something), and even though he finds it easier--more practical--to be with Jessica (just as Bella finds her relationship with Edward easier), love keeps drawing them back together, and the story ends with the beginnings of their finding a way to engage in each other's worlds and with a new appreciation for each other's distinctive outlook.
But enough about a potential good story. Instead, we've got to get the emo princess hooked up with the emo prince, with no real obstacles, and we've got to stretch it over four books.
Good lord.
Even according the rules of Meyer's parallel universe, Mike's reaction to Edward's shenanigans is all wrong. This is part of Meyer's persecution complex (hmm...Mormonism popping up?). Everybody must love Bella, because she's fabulous, but they must also look at her in awe and regard her with suspicion, because she's so, like, deep and different and stuff. So when a man she has never seen before in her life flips out when she shows up, not only does she immediately have to blame herself, but so do other people who already regarded the Cullens as freaks. This just doesn't make sense on a human level. If I'm a high schooler who sees the school's nutjob have an episode when the New Girl sits next to him, how could my first reaction be I wonder what she did to him? It's nonsensical. I'd think something more like God, that Cullen's got serious issues.
This is how that exchange would've gone in the real world:
He was the nicest person I'd met. Just as we got to the gym, he said without looking at me, 'I, uh, saw what happened with Edward Cullen.'
'Oh.' My cheeks turned a little red. Just a little. 'You did?'
'Yeah.' He looked at me now. 'Look, he's really strange. I don't know what his problem is, but he acts like that sometimes. Don't let him get to you. Who knows what was going on in his head?'
Or something like that. Mike should be blaming Edward, since Edward is so clearly in the wrong here. Now, it might work if Edward was the small-town boy who had lived in Forks his whole life and Bella was the big-city newcomer that all the students resented for her contempt for their small-town customs. But in Twilight, it's already been established that Everybody Loves Bella and the Cullens are regarded as weirdos. So why is the nicest person Bella has met today immediately siding with Edward, accusing Bella of having done something to cause Edward to react as he did?
Bella comes upon Edward in the school's main office, trying, and failing, to get out of the class he shares with Bella. (How, oh my brothers, could this 'vampire' stand to attend high school every day for decades?)
Edward Cullen's back stiffened, and he turned slowly to glare at me--his face was absurdly handsome--with piercing, hate-filled eyes.
Makes a girl's heart melt, don't it?
This week on Twilight (alternate title: Everybody Loves Bella), we're introduced to Mike, who loves Bella. This poor kid makes you feel bad for him from his very first appearance, because, clearly unprepared for Bella's manipulations, he has no idea what's in store for him. He's friendly and polite--already a bad sign--though a little lacking in tact.
I looked up to see a cute, baby-faced boy, his blond hair carefully gelled into orderly spikes, smiling at me in a friendly way. He obviously didn't think I smelled bad....He was the nicest person I'd met today.
But as we were entering the gym, he asked, 'So, did you stab Edward Cullen with a pencil or what? I've never seen him act like that....He looked like he was in pain or something.'
'I don't know,' I responded. 'I never spoke to him.'
'He's a weird guy.' Mike lingered by me instead of heading to the dressing room. 'If I were lucky enough to sit by you, I would have talked to you.'
I smiled at him before walking through the girls' locker room door. He was friendly and clearly admiring.
That's our Bella--keep it vague, keep 'em guessing, never let them pin you down to anything. The number one rule of emotional manipulation is never let anyone know your true motives.
So, despite Mike's entirely inappropriate reference to Edward's absurd behaviour and his rather too eager 'I woulda talked to you', he's 'the nicest person I'd met today', and Bella likes him because 'he obviously didn't think I smelled bad', as Edward seems to. So from Mike she seeks validation of her attractiveness, a boost to her self-esteem that her abusive boyfriend has shaken, but Bella will set him up with Jessica because, as Jessica's good friend, Bella will allow her to take a partner she herself has rejected. Mike is attracted to Bella because, well, everyone is, but he's lacking something, that sort of open contempt for her and indifference to human emotion that Bella finds so captivating.
This is where the author's lack of touch with anything resembling a normal teenage experience comes out. I've no idea if Mrs. Meyer had such an experience, but if she did, her writing shows no evidence of this. My high school experience was typical (summers in Rangoon, luge lessons), though I share neither the joy of having escaped it nor the nostalgia for it that seem to comprise the two most common American attitudes towards high school.
But I do remember that high school was all about cliques. You were in one whether you wanted to be or not. No-one reading this is going to be surprised which clique I ended up in: the gamers. I was one of the first at my high school to have Internet access (and before that, local bulletin boards). In computer programming class, I was the unofficial teaching assistant. I played Dungeons and Dragons on the tabletop, wrote fantasy fanfiction, and sparred occasionally with swords.
One of the hallmarks of high school cliquishness is that cliques rarely crossed lines. The smokers had their area of the school, and everybody else made fun of them...from a distance. I had a middle school friend who ended up in their clique, which essentially marked the end of the friendship. None of his friends would've welcomed me, nor mine him. (I'm sure they made fun of us, too.) The jocks had their clique, and gangsters theirs, and the 420-friendly smokers theirs.
So the most popular girl in school was really the one who appealed to the most cliques. I remember not being at all enamoured with my high school's Most Popular Girl. I was much more interested in the salutatorian and, before that, the eventual valedictorian of the rival high school in our district. That is, girls who were closer to my clique. (My high school was sadly lacking in gamer girls.)
Twilight's high school is, thus, a completely foreign place to me, where the rules are all different. I'm half-recalling a line from an episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, something like 'A perverted world, where the spazzes make fun of the cool guys.' That's what Forks High is, high school turned upside down, where the geeks are popular and the cool kids can't get dates. Bella is not the kind of girl who should be the darling of the school, because she's in the angsty-emo-goth clique. There she would be highly sought after (with her manipulations being just another part of the package), but outside of it, she'd be...well, she'd be regarded precisely in the way Mike views Edward. 'She's a weird girl' he would say to Jessica not long before he asks her out, because Mike and Jessica are in the same clique, and so he would actually find her attractive. He shouldn't need Bella to point this out, and he shouldn't be interested in anything Bella has to say on this or any other matter.
This is where Meyer wants to have her cake and eat it, too. She wants her fauxtagonist to be quirky and deep but also widely popular, forgetting or ignoring that depth and quirkiness aren't popular. The good-looking pretty types (Mike) aren't interested in moody, antisocial types like Bella. They're more interested in people like themselves. People closer to, or in, their own clique.
Of course, high school romances are often about love that jumps cliques. In fact, the story might have been interesting if Bella actually did end up with Mike, with Edward being the one everybody (including Edward himself) assumes she'd go for. Bella and Mike could run into constant trouble because their expectations and the worlds they inhabit are so vastly different. Edward and Jessica would be the obstacles here, representing the safer, conformist alternatives to the difficulties of making their relationship work. But Bella just has that something that Mike can't ignore (just pretend that, in this alternate universe, Bella actually has something), and even though he finds it easier--more practical--to be with Jessica (just as Bella finds her relationship with Edward easier), love keeps drawing them back together, and the story ends with the beginnings of their finding a way to engage in each other's worlds and with a new appreciation for each other's distinctive outlook.
But enough about a potential good story. Instead, we've got to get the emo princess hooked up with the emo prince, with no real obstacles, and we've got to stretch it over four books.
Good lord.
Even according the rules of Meyer's parallel universe, Mike's reaction to Edward's shenanigans is all wrong. This is part of Meyer's persecution complex (hmm...Mormonism popping up?). Everybody must love Bella, because she's fabulous, but they must also look at her in awe and regard her with suspicion, because she's so, like, deep and different and stuff. So when a man she has never seen before in her life flips out when she shows up, not only does she immediately have to blame herself, but so do other people who already regarded the Cullens as freaks. This just doesn't make sense on a human level. If I'm a high schooler who sees the school's nutjob have an episode when the New Girl sits next to him, how could my first reaction be I wonder what she did to him? It's nonsensical. I'd think something more like God, that Cullen's got serious issues.
This is how that exchange would've gone in the real world:
He was the nicest person I'd met. Just as we got to the gym, he said without looking at me, 'I, uh, saw what happened with Edward Cullen.'
'Oh.' My cheeks turned a little red. Just a little. 'You did?'
'Yeah.' He looked at me now. 'Look, he's really strange. I don't know what his problem is, but he acts like that sometimes. Don't let him get to you. Who knows what was going on in his head?'
Or something like that. Mike should be blaming Edward, since Edward is so clearly in the wrong here. Now, it might work if Edward was the small-town boy who had lived in Forks his whole life and Bella was the big-city newcomer that all the students resented for her contempt for their small-town customs. But in Twilight, it's already been established that Everybody Loves Bella and the Cullens are regarded as weirdos. So why is the nicest person Bella has met today immediately siding with Edward, accusing Bella of having done something to cause Edward to react as he did?
Bella comes upon Edward in the school's main office, trying, and failing, to get out of the class he shares with Bella. (How, oh my brothers, could this 'vampire' stand to attend high school every day for decades?)
Edward Cullen's back stiffened, and he turned slowly to glare at me--his face was absurdly handsome--with piercing, hate-filled eyes.
Makes a girl's heart melt, don't it?
July 9, 2010
Twilight: Meet...Cute?
Twilight, pp. 23-24
Tracy and Hepburn. Romeo and Juliet. Han and Leia. Edward and Bella.
Now, I'm not your man when it comes to romantic comedies (or dramas). But the great thing about being an aficionado of bad films is that I enjoy badness in any genre. (Except bad comedies. Those are pure pain. I watched The Hangover on a plane last week and I was praying we would crash into the ocean.) And in order to appreciate bad films, you have to know what they're doing wrong, which means you have to know how it should be done. So I know that the Meet Cute is a key part of the romance. If it's wrong, only a master could salvage the rest of the romance. Maybe.
Here we have a prime example of Doing It Wrong, and I'm afraid we're in less than masterful hands when it comes to saving it.
Bella comes into her biology class, and things go well with the teacher. Alas, there is but one seat remaining in the room, and it's the one next to...Edward! (I feel like I should pause and add an ! every time I write his name. Read the book and you'll see why. On second thought, don't.)
In a good romance--that is, one that doesn't centre on creepy, controlling misogyny--the Meet Cute is not the place for creepy, controlling misogyny. I can think of no better way to torpedo a romance than to make the romantic leads thoroughly unlikable when they meet. It's one thing to write your leads as flawed, realistic human beings. An uncommon choice, but a workable one. It's quite another to do this:
Just as I passed, [Edward] suddenly went rigid in his seat. He stared at me again, meeting my eyes with the strangest expression on his face--it was hostile, furious....I didn't look up as I set my book on the table and took my seat, but I saw his posture change from the corner of my eye. He was leaning away from me, sitting on the extreme edge of his chair, and averting his eyes like he smelled something bad. Inconspicuously, I sniffed my hair.
Okay, I quoted that last line for laughs. I don't know why, but 'I sniffed my hair' always makes me guffaw. If I feared I were giving off a bad smell, I wouldn't check it right in front of someone. I'd excuse myself and check it out, if it were so bad. I can't even imagine why her hair would stink, or why his looking away from her would make her think she stinks. (Surely there are any number of reasons someone would look in a different direction. Whichever way he looks, he's going to smell her just the same.) It's even funnier in the movie, in which you plainly see just how 'inconspicuously' one can do this.
And do I even need to mention the unnecessary adverb at this point?*
Seriously, though, this is their Meet Cute? Her sniffing her hair and him sitting on the edge of his seat like a fifth-grader who doesn't want to get cooties? Okay, I could maybe forgive them as high schoolers, but Edward is over one hundred years old. This is another point I fear I might belabour, but really, there is nothing at all that makes him strike the reader as someone with that kind of life (un-life?) experience. He is a centagenarian, of a sort, but he seems firmly trapped in the mental space of junior high. This might work as a weakness of the vampire, a variation of one of Stoker's themes: The vampire is powerful, but he doesn't grow, and eventually the changing world will render him obsolete. But when we get toNew Moon (oh my brothers, the sacrifices I've made for you), we get Bella mourning her aging because it will be hard for Edward to love an old lady, not because Bella will mature while Edward stays forever mentally fourteen...err, seventeen. I mean seventeen.
Anyhow, perhaps some ladies can help me out in the comments, but I'm having trouble understanding why Bella is instantly smitten with a man whose first look at her is filled with anger. Do you find a man's fuming at your existence attractive? Me, I'd sort of talk to the principal about it.
But wait! I said there was a controlling element in this Meet Cute, right? That's because earlier, when they were still in the cafeteria, Edward seemed to smile at our Bella.
I bit my lip to hide my smile. Then I glanced at him again. His face was turned away, but I thought his cheek appeared lifted, as if he were smiling, too.
So after their little peek-a-boo game, Edward seems to smile at her, but here, he's hateful towards her for no reason at all. (Supposedly yet another Twilight novel explains that this is because of his desire to rip out her throat and drink her red, red kroovy while letting out a Schwarzeneggerian howl of triumph, but Bella doesn't know this.)
He was glaring down at me again, his black eyes full of revulsion.
One minute he's smiling at her, another he's 'full of revulsion'.
Get used to it. That's Edward's game.**
====================================
*The answer, of course, is yes. I have to mention at least one, since I've refrained from going on about all the others. '...I was watching him surreptitiously.' Okay, okay, I'll stop.
**Not to be confused with Ender's Game, a good little novel. And Orson Scott Card is Mormon, too, though his praise of Meyer and hatred of Pulp Fiction are a bit suspect.
Tracy and Hepburn. Romeo and Juliet. Han and Leia. Edward and Bella.
Now, I'm not your man when it comes to romantic comedies (or dramas). But the great thing about being an aficionado of bad films is that I enjoy badness in any genre. (Except bad comedies. Those are pure pain. I watched The Hangover on a plane last week and I was praying we would crash into the ocean.) And in order to appreciate bad films, you have to know what they're doing wrong, which means you have to know how it should be done. So I know that the Meet Cute is a key part of the romance. If it's wrong, only a master could salvage the rest of the romance. Maybe.
Here we have a prime example of Doing It Wrong, and I'm afraid we're in less than masterful hands when it comes to saving it.
Bella comes into her biology class, and things go well with the teacher. Alas, there is but one seat remaining in the room, and it's the one next to...Edward! (I feel like I should pause and add an ! every time I write his name. Read the book and you'll see why. On second thought, don't.)
In a good romance--that is, one that doesn't centre on creepy, controlling misogyny--the Meet Cute is not the place for creepy, controlling misogyny. I can think of no better way to torpedo a romance than to make the romantic leads thoroughly unlikable when they meet. It's one thing to write your leads as flawed, realistic human beings. An uncommon choice, but a workable one. It's quite another to do this:
Just as I passed, [Edward] suddenly went rigid in his seat. He stared at me again, meeting my eyes with the strangest expression on his face--it was hostile, furious....I didn't look up as I set my book on the table and took my seat, but I saw his posture change from the corner of my eye. He was leaning away from me, sitting on the extreme edge of his chair, and averting his eyes like he smelled something bad. Inconspicuously, I sniffed my hair.
Okay, I quoted that last line for laughs. I don't know why, but 'I sniffed my hair' always makes me guffaw. If I feared I were giving off a bad smell, I wouldn't check it right in front of someone. I'd excuse myself and check it out, if it were so bad. I can't even imagine why her hair would stink, or why his looking away from her would make her think she stinks. (Surely there are any number of reasons someone would look in a different direction. Whichever way he looks, he's going to smell her just the same.) It's even funnier in the movie, in which you plainly see just how 'inconspicuously' one can do this.
And do I even need to mention the unnecessary adverb at this point?*
Seriously, though, this is their Meet Cute? Her sniffing her hair and him sitting on the edge of his seat like a fifth-grader who doesn't want to get cooties? Okay, I could maybe forgive them as high schoolers, but Edward is over one hundred years old. This is another point I fear I might belabour, but really, there is nothing at all that makes him strike the reader as someone with that kind of life (un-life?) experience. He is a centagenarian, of a sort, but he seems firmly trapped in the mental space of junior high. This might work as a weakness of the vampire, a variation of one of Stoker's themes: The vampire is powerful, but he doesn't grow, and eventually the changing world will render him obsolete. But when we get to
Anyhow, perhaps some ladies can help me out in the comments, but I'm having trouble understanding why Bella is instantly smitten with a man whose first look at her is filled with anger. Do you find a man's fuming at your existence attractive? Me, I'd sort of talk to the principal about it.
But wait! I said there was a controlling element in this Meet Cute, right? That's because earlier, when they were still in the cafeteria, Edward seemed to smile at our Bella.
I bit my lip to hide my smile. Then I glanced at him again. His face was turned away, but I thought his cheek appeared lifted, as if he were smiling, too.
So after their little peek-a-boo game, Edward seems to smile at her, but here, he's hateful towards her for no reason at all. (Supposedly yet another Twilight novel explains that this is because of his desire to rip out her throat and drink her red, red kroovy while letting out a Schwarzeneggerian howl of triumph, but Bella doesn't know this.)
He was glaring down at me again, his black eyes full of revulsion.
One minute he's smiling at her, another he's 'full of revulsion'.
Get used to it. That's Edward's game.**
====================================
*The answer, of course, is yes. I have to mention at least one, since I've refrained from going on about all the others. '...I was watching him surreptitiously.' Okay, okay, I'll stop.
**Not to be confused with Ender's Game, a good little novel. And Orson Scott Card is Mormon, too, though his praise of Meyer and hatred of Pulp Fiction are a bit suspect.
June 30, 2010
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)