Friday, January 22, 2010

BLOGGING TWILIGHT, pt. 9: STFU Bella

I’ve been reading Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer, for reasons I’ve only partially managed to articulate. It’s really beside the point now. Buy the ticket, take the ride, right? Previous entries can be found in the archives.

Chapter 9: Theory

In the car, Bella doesn’t let Edward start asking questions yet. She wants to know how he knew she’d headed south after bypassing the dowdy bookstore—reading Jessica’s mind wouldn’t have gotten him that far. “I followed your scent,” he confesses (pg. 180). Gross.

She continues to pester him about the mind-reading—this is when she calls it make-believe so it’s unclear why she’s even asking—she wonders why he can’t read her mind. He speculates that maybe Bella is on the AM frequency and he’s only getting FM. That’s a nice analogy, but the child of the 90s inside me feels like he should have told Bella she was on the FM frequency—having an AM mind sounds like a veiled insult.

I had political science professors who loved to cite a poll from before the election that stated that voters associated Obama with brands like Coke and Nike and Sony and other “cool” stuff, whereas voters associated McCain with products like Pepto Bismol and Bengay. I’m sure that poll really happened. Still, to this day, it is the dumbest thing to which a professor has attempted to assign meaning.

How on earth could data about brand associations be collected in a way that wasn’t statistically insignificant or misleading? If you asked a thousand people what brand they most associated with Obama, don’t you think you’d get at least 500 or 600 individual answers? Thousands upon thousands of people write-in a fictional character for President every four years, but Homer Simpson and Mickey Mouse don’t show up on any of the final tallies because a hundred people pick Homer, a hundred more pick Mickey, 200 more pick “Lizard People” and a thousand other people write down their own name. So maybe 11 percent of people polled associated Obama with Coke, 11 percent associated him with Nike, and another 11 percent associated him with Sony, but the remaining 67 percent was one or two points each for fifty-odd other brands. Does the poll tell us anything? No, but it will still get published and written about in 40 newspapers. The only other way this happened is a guy went around with a list that read “Coke, Nike, Sony, Pepto Bismol, Bengay” and asked people to indicate which presidential candidate each product made them think of.

The point being—well, I guess the above point is that polls are dumb—but the original point was going to be that I actually would associate Obama with FM and McCain with AM, but Sarah Palin would be FM too (the sort of FM station that makes you groan when you pass it on SCAN, because they’re playing Nickelback or Big & Rich or what have you). Clinton was FM, even George W. Bush was FM. George H.W. Bush was AM. Carter was AM. Nixon was AM. Reagan was TV.

Bella eventually confronts Edward with Jacob’s story, and he basically cops to it without saying the word “vampire.” Again, it’s sort of unclear how much Bella understands. She says it doesn’t matter to her what he is, even if he isn’t human (he pretty much already cleared that one up for you, Bella). Bella’s laissez-faire philosophy pisses Edward off briefly, but he somehow seems to have curbed his mood swings for the most part. His lips “press together in a cautious line” but he doesn’t tear the steering column out or go on a shooting spree. He’s growing up! Well, not really:

“How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” he answered promptly.
“And how long have you been seventeen?”
His lips twitched as he stared at the road. “A while,” he admitted at last.

Great line, but that’s not how age works, Edward! Finally Stephanie Meyer gets her paragraph breaks right, by the way, did you notice?

Edward likes to drive really fast, apparently almost 100 mph, but I don’t believe for a second that you could get a Volvo anywhere near that speed. Bella points out that Edward would survive a car crash, but she probably wouldn’t. The Don Draper inside me realizes this would be a perfect time for Edward to mention casually that Volvos are very safe and durable—I bet that C30 has a roll-cage like something Jeff Gordon would drive in the Daytona 500. Hell, the car I once crashed into a boat was a Volvo. I'm still here.

"Edward told me that in Greek, 'nostalgia' literally means 'the pain from an old wound.' It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. I mean a Volvo. It's a Volvo. Did I say time machine? What the fuck?"-Don Draper

Again, without ever actually using the word vampire, Edward dismisses a bunch of myths about vampires. They don’t get burned by the sun, they don’t sleep in coffins—in fact they don’t even sleep. Edward admits this last bit as though it is something very tragic about himself—it’s a somber moment in an otherwise lively conversation (about how Edward is a vampire with a thirst for human flesh but still). To me, that’s the biggest selling point to being a vampire. Never having to sleep? Wow! Think about how much shit you could get done!

Twilight has incurred the wrath of a certain type of fanboy for taking these liberties with the vampire myth. I’m thinking of that horrible video from around the time the New Moon film came out, when some asshole (think Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons with a fascist streak) rounded up a bunch of Twilight fans, promised them a screening of the film (this was opening night, mind you) and instead decided to lecture them about what vampires were really supposed to be like. I won’t even link to the video—these kind of mean-spirited stunts have proliferated on the internet as people lust after “going viral”—and I hate that look of self-satisfaction unfunny people get when they think they are being funny.

The worst part is the people who complain about this stuff are wrong. Twilight would in some way be desecrating the myth of the vampire, I suppose, if the normal notion of a vampire was totally ignored—in other words if the conversation in the car never took place—but Twilight is a post-vampire-novel novel. Stephanie Meyer’s creation is a world in which the myths about vampires exist, vampire movies exist, vampire novels exist. And the vampires who exist in the real world are different—the myths didn’t quite have it right.

So vampires of yore exist in this wholly separate sphere, a totally alternate reality in which vampires are real and have no knowledge of a realm in which they are not real. Twilight exists in the same sphere any other YA novel exists in—the real world—where the characters are conscious of the other, fictional vampire sphere. So vampires, in Twilight, are both real (in the Cullen-variety) and not real (in the Dracula variety). I’m sorry if this sounds incredibly obvious to you, but some people apparently need to be taught this.

This scene in chapter nine also contains this phrase: “his tone was as hard as his face” (pg. 183). I feel like there’s a dirty joke to be made there, but I can’t get the bat off my shoulder. One thing about these scenes between Edward and Bella that especially bothers me is that Stephanie Meyer feels the need to qualify every single line with a particular, specific emotion. This is what my arguably-dogmatic writing teacher was afraid of having to deal with when she outlawed variations on “said.” On page 186, Edward asks a question “sarcastically,” then has a “bleak” voice two lines later, asks something “flatly” two lines after that, and then has a voice described as “deeply skeptical” two lines after that. Almost every line has an accompanying detail and reading it is exhausting. On the next pages he whispers, then warns, then explains slowly, then murmurs, and then his voice is “very low.”

So Bella inquires as to the purpose of Edward’s trip with Emmett the previous weekend. It turns out they were hunting, but Bella is a little upset to learn that they returned on Sunday. That, of course, doesn’t explain his absence from school at the start of the week, which Bella points out bitterly. Edward explains he can’t be seen in public when the weather is nice, even though he doesn’t burst into flames or anything. Hey, wait, wasn’t it supposed to be Edward’s turn to ask questions in this chapter? Shut up, Bella.

Shit gets heavy in the car when Edward realizes it’s dangerous for him to be around Bella alone. “This is wrong,” he says (actually, he “groaned quietly” per S. Meyer) and Bella bites her lip again (pg. 190). Is that four or five lip bites so far? I lost count.

Edward drops Bella off, promising to actually come to school the next day. Bella avoids telling the whole truth to her father, who is a little bewildered that she is home before eight.

How’s My Driving? – Edward’s Bumper Sticker
If You Can Read This, You’re Also A Vampire So Let’s Have A Race – Edward’s other Bumper Sticker
I’d Rather Be Driving A Stake Through Your Heart – My wife’s suggestion

Bella goes up to her room after taking a deliberately long shower again (this might be some kind of OCD symptom actually) and a key passage follows. I know it is key, because it’s also on the back of the book:

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him – and I didn’t know how potent that part might be – that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him (pg. 195).

Oddly, the blurb on the back misquotes this passage slightly, substituting “dominant” for “potent.” I don’t know what’s up with that. “Dominant” is kind of better, being more evocative of a struggle between Edward’s good and evil sides, the heartthrob and the monster, the Jekyll and the Vampire, but whatever.

1 comment:

rosanne said...

i totally agree with you about the vampire myths. i am pretty much a traditionalist, but i had no problem accepting the vampire lore presented here. to my mind it was like they were a different species of vampire. my only problem with this version was that there were no real tradeoffs. you didnt really have to give up anything physically for immortality the way traditional vampires do. maybe that's way too judeo-christian of me, but, there you have it.