THE BITERION COLLECTION: TWILIGHT: BASED ON THE NOVEL TWILIGHT BY STAPPHMEYER

“We shot a scene today where Edward comes in and saves Bella from getting crushed by a van and… it’s inexplicable.”-Kristen Stewart, speaking more truth than she knows

Okay, I know it’s weird to have reviewed Summer’s Moon before we review the canonical film in our collection; it’s like watching Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure before The Seventh Seal. But now that I have seen Twilight, I can tell you, it is definitely The Seventh Seal of movies about Vampires who live in Forks, WA. It is also the Schindler’s List of same. Faint praise, you say? Well, it’s true nonetheless.
This is technically the second time I’ve seen this movie; I watched Twilight long before I started reading and blogging about the book. Luckily for the sake of the blog and my reading experience, I was very, very drunk by the time the movie was over, and I had no recollection of the ending whatsoever. (What was kind of ironic is that I reached total-incoherence right around when the Cullens came to rescue Bella from James, which is shown in more detail in the film, so my experience was much more like Bella’s in the book: clouded and confused and under the influence—of Jim Beam and not vampire venom and blinding pain, but whatever.) That was like a year ago, though, and then I read the whole book and so I had a different perspective anyway. So this was almost like seeing it for the first time.

It’s impossible not to look at this film through the lens of the book (now, anyway); early on the movie even feels like it is in conversation with its source material. When Jessica introduces Bella to the Cullens, she remarks on the weirdness that is their living situation, a point never made explicit in the book. James is not the nondescript blur he was in the book, he looks like Sabretooth from the fist X-Men film.

And Laurent is black! And so is Tyler! Racial diversity has reached Forks! Okay, so the only black characters are antagonists, but you have to remember that this film was made in 2008, when prejudices still ran deep. It’s like how DW Griffith used black actors in Birth Of A Nation, but still used white actors in blackface if the part called for making physical contact with a white woman. Baby steps toward equality. Slouching towards a Bethlehem of equality.

The film is also revisionist in that the sexual energy some of the readers (like me) bring to the table is given back by the movie with equal force (whereas the book is unrelentingly sexually repressed): Bella makes a joke about boys padding their swimsuits (who writes Bella’s jokes? Jay Leno?), Jessica brings attention to her boobs, and Bella even makes out with Edward with no pants on! What? Bella takes her pants off? I felt scandalized.

Where the book is largely sans-plot, the movie introduces a framework wherein the bad vampires are killing people in Forks from the start of the film. I understand such a decision—we can’t all make movies with no plot whatsoever like Where The Wild Things Are (it should come as no surprise that I adore that movie)—but when you think about it too much (thinking about things too much being the ethos of the blog, essentially) it reflects poorly on the Cullens when you realize this was happening on their watch for months and they only got wise to it during the vampire baseball game.

Obviously we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I wasn’t wild about the opening sequence—over Kristen Stewart’s voice-over narration, we see a deer being hunted, presumably by one of the Cullens. My wife pointed out that it seemed like Stewart was the voice of the deer. It’s also just kind of silly. But after that the opening is pretty great. As much as I’m sick of shaky-handheld cameras in action films, I still like when it is used in scenes of exposition; Twilight is basically all shaky-handheld cameras in scenes of dialogue. I should probably be upset that mainstream films are appropriating the visual techniques of independent films, but for some reason I’m not. So that aspect of the production I like—what I don’t like is the super over-edited MTV-videos-circa-1995 style of some of the sequences (Vampire Baseball is especially ridiculous).
Events in the movie are condensed—we meet Jacob and Billy right away. Billy is much more ridiculous—he’s a comic relief “cool dad,” which is fine. In the book he’s a red-herring threat anyway. The Sadie Hawkins dance and the prom are combined, or rather the prom becomes the sole dancing-event, which is also fine. Harry Potter fans have kvetched for years about the condensing and the dropping of plot elements from the film adaptation (I’ve never had much of a problem, though you gotta figure it must have complicated the shit out of writing the screenplay for Deathly Hallows); this is not much of a problem for Twilight since it doesn’t really have a sub-plot to speak of (the sexual tension between Bella and Alice notwithstanding). I also sort of have the feeling that many of the Twilight fans are bigger fans of the movie than the book anyway? On the wonderful-terrible website “My Life Is Twilight” (which I stopped reading when this blog started—spoilers and all that. The sacrifices I make for my art, you know?) people were always quoting that whole “Say it!”/ “Vampire!” exchange, which comes from the film alone. We’re all lucky that no one quotes that fucking spider-monkey line, though. What is that?

I noted a long time ago that I didn’t expect those long exchanges of dialogue to make it into the film. They don’t. So what’s lost is really any sense that a relationship between Bella and Edward is based on anything other than mutual sexual attraction. Or mutual sexual repression.

We don’t get as much a sense of Bella as a character, either, which is once again due to the obvious problems of adapting a narration-heavy book to the screen. I think Kristen Stewart does a good job with an underwritten role. As far as I’m concerned, she is Bella. I get the feeling the real Twilight super-fans don’t like her, but I’m pretty sure they’d hate anyone who gets to straddle Robert Pattinson all the time, no? Kristen Stewart is kind of a twitchy mess in public, but she’s a game day player. Plus, actually, isn’t the fact that Kristen Stewart is such a PR trainwreck kind of endearing? In this era of relentlessly imaged child stars getting micromanaged by Disney, it’s nice that Summit Entertainment (which nonetheless seems like a pretty ruthless and protective and anal organization most of the time) lets Stewart be fucked up. When is she going to get the Jonas Brothers high?

It’s tough to comment on the rest of the casting (this is a pretty scattershot review, huh? I’m transitioning wherever I can) because the makeup is awful. Robert Pattinson seems less ridiculous as the movie goes on, in part because his pancake makeup gets less ridiculous as the movie goes on. Maybe they were running out of it by the end. Seriously, in his first scene he looks like he has acrylic paint on his face. And nothing on his neck. Alice looks similarly awful—it barely even looks like Ashley Greene, who doesn’t really need to be made up to look like Alice anyway. She looks more like what Alice should look like in Summer’s Moon. She looks more like Alice in SoBe commercials! Jasper looks like your Mom’s idea of what Kurt Cobain looks like. Again, if you see Jackson Rathbone sans Twilight makeup and hair he looks a lot more like how Jasper would theoretically look—it’s no exaggeration to say that the makeup people were the weakest link in this production. (And the editors. MY GOD, the editing in this movie makes me want to crawl into a hole and die. Vampire baseball is so atrociously glammed up it warrants mentioning twice.)

Rosalie and Esme are as blank in the movie as they are in the book. I read somewhere that S. Meyer’s first choice for Esme was Mary-Louise Parker which would have been fun, if totally inappropriate, casting. I don’t picture Esme as kind of having a perpetually distracted, self-destructive edge all the time, which is what MLP brings to the table by default. I kind of feel like Parker could have ducked in for a cameo as Renee, because the actress they have in there now does not look like she could have mothered Kristen Stewart. Stewart and Parker have the same kind of mumbling charm if not totally similar looks; I might also be thinking this because Parker plays Stewart-doppelganger (and Into The Wild co-star) Jena Malone’s mother in Saved!

"Maternal" is not the first word that springs to mind.

Peter Facinelli is charming and badly made-up as Carlisle, but he will always be Jimmy from Six Feet Under to me. (That’s another show I carry a torch for—I watched it before The Wire though, so I haven’t been able to shift it back into perspective.)

The guy who plays Charlie is great, and looks startlingly like Bill Hader.

The Fork Prom is way too nice, which feels like a betrayal. It’s supposed to be hellish, which vindicates the freaks like me and Bella. Worse, the side characters all get grouped off according to race: Eric and Angela are Asian, so they get together. Perfect Aryan Mike and All-American Jessica (Anna Kendrick, who is so overqualified for her part it’s kind of upsetting) get together. Tyler is black, so he doesn’t get anyone.

My other problem is the sort of weirdly demure scene when Bella fake-storms out on Charlie before she and Jasper and Alice flee. It would be far more heartbreaking if it were more histrionic and not like, mumblecore. “Just let me go, Charlie,” Kristen Stewart shrugs. In the book, that scene broke my black little heart. The movie version made my black little heart just go “meh.” It’s not like Kristen Stewart can’t scream—she does plenty of that at the end. So I don’t know what the deal is with that.

Speaking of the end, the whole scene in the ballet studio is impressively action-y—if you watch the special features they talk about all their practical effects at great length, and the whole time I was just thinking maybe you should have spent some of that money on fucking wigs and makeup! The scene is also nowhere near as bloody as it should be—and they could have easily gotten away with it. Harry Potter 6 was rated PG (!?). It’s a minor complaint, I know, but I wanted to see Stewart a little more bloodied up. I'm sure the super fans would have appreciated that too, but for reasons unrelated to authenticity.

In the end, it’s a very watchable movie. I didn’t get bored; The changes from the text were frequent enough to keep me interested but not so frequent that my allegiance to the book (such as it is) wasn’t offended. If I’m honest with myself, I’d say Robert Pattinson does a good job too, and is really mostly limited by his goddamned makeup. We don’t get enough Alice or Jacob to make a judgment yet either way. It’s impressively color-corrected too, all greens and blues; it’s again not the sort of thing you see in a normal romance film. (Baby steps.) When you think about the awful Chris Columbus adaptations of the first two Harry Potter films, the Twilight series is actually off to a better start. I’m interested to see if New Moon represents progress of regress. So let’s get Alfanso Cuaron on Breaking Dawn so he can kick that shit up a notch!

I enjoyed the experience of watching Twilight more than I enjoyed watching 500 Days of Summer. It isn’t overly ambitious, so it doesn’t have a lot of promise to live up to. But it isn’t lazy either. I would resent these people if I didn’t feel like they were trying; the Twilight phenomenon isn’t entirely created by marketing. It is still mostly created by marketing. But there’s a product at the end of the line that isn’t entirely embarrassing.

I watched the hour-long, seven part documentary about the making of the film, and the only think I learned is that Catherine Hardwicke seems like a fake person being played as a joke by Amy Sedaris. Seriously what is going on with that woman?