BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 2: Do The Panic

Now we begin New Moon in earnest. To those of you who have helped promote this blog in the past, this is probably where you should send people. Long, semi-insane interpretations of S. Meyer's interpretations of Shakespeare tend to be off-putting, so let's pretend that last post never happened. If you are new here, welcome! This is the blog where we over-analyze and discuss the works of S. Meyer at length-- I'm sure you've been looking for something like this for a long time. If any of you, like Kira, are reading along with me, please let me know whenever we came to similar conclusions. It's nice to know I am not always crazy.

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

One of the weird things about writing a sequel is that authors feel compelled to find some clever way of working information we’ve already learned into the first few pages of new text. In chapter 1, old details trickle in here and there—we have to learn that Edward is a vampire again, for instance—and it has a weird “curtain pulling back” effect.

Authors obviously don’t intend people to pick up in the middle of a series, so there is no real reason not to start at the beginning anyway. The summary bits in the first chapter ostensibly serve an audience that doesn’t really exist. Instead it functions like a wink to readers: hey, remember this? It seems unnatural and contrived for Bella to talk this way.

Chapter 1: Party

We start with an anxiety dream. Bella’s teeth don’t fall out, but that’s the essence of it. Has anyone ever really had the archetypal “teeth falling out” dream? I’ve been having one lately where I have one elongated, dented front tooth. I’m guessing it’s a “no dental insurance since 2007” anxiety dream, but maybe it just means I was a pirate in a past life. Or a beaver.

In the dream, Bella’s standing in a field looking at her (reanimated) dead grandmother. Edward starts wandering from the woods into the field, but Bella hears his voice first.

The voice I’d walk through fire for—or, less dramatically, slosh every day through the cold and endless rain for.

Weather in Forks is bad: check! Bella panics because her grandmother will see him sparkle when he steps into the sunlight—“Gran didn’t know I was in love (check) with a vampire (check)—nobody knew that (check)”—and when she looks over at her grandma the old woman looks equally panicked as Bella does. Hint hint.

Edward strides out anyway and Bella silently laments that his mind reading power doesn’t work on her (check). He puts his arm around Bella, who turns and looks shyly at her Grandmother. Gran has her arm sticking out at a funny angle, and we realize she’s not looking at her grandmother but herself, in a mirror. Edward whispers “happy birthday” to old-woman Bella and young-woman Bella wakes up.

It is Bella’s 18th birthday; she’s legal everybody! She’s in a bad mood (check) but what’s so bad about 18? Porn, cigarettes, voting—it’s a great year. Well, if Bella ever fucks Edward she’ll be guilty of statutory rape in some states, so there’s that. Edward will be 17 forever! He’s basically a Miley Cyrus song waiting to happen.

She goes to school, and Edward is waiting “like a marble (check) tribute to some forgotten god of pagan beauty.” Bella gets that “and he likes me, cunts!” standard ego boost that momentarily relieves her stress. Alice is there too, so we get a whole paragraph of backstory about how she and Edward are not really related but she is just as super-sexy as him because she is also a vampire.

I’m getting sick of the word “tawny” by the way—here used to describe Alice’s eyes while she waits excitedly with a present in hand. It makes me think of an eagle or something, which makes me think of Eagle Eye, which makes me think of Shia Labeouf. I don’t want Shia contaminating my Alice. Bella gets pissed off again at the present because apparently she requested none. Nevertheless Alice skips (check) toward her enthusiastically with her “pixie face (check) glowing under her spiky black hair (okay, you get it).”

Alice asks about how she liked her camera and scrapbook—because she already knew what her parents were going to give her, get it? She sees the future, folks! Tip your waitresses.

We hear about how Bella’s heart beats funny around Edward—by now you’d think she’d be suffering, health-wise, from all that. Then there’s this:

“So, as discussed, I am not allowed to wish you a happy birthday, is that correct?”
“Yes. That is correct.” I could never quite mimic the flow of his perfect, formal articulation. It was something that could only be picked up in an earlier century.

I’m not checking that one off the list because it’s bullshit! Recall that Edward was born in the 20th century, not the 16th. It’s not like he said, “Ere speak we further, thou hast forbid me from perforce expressing birthday wishes withal, be this correct?” And it’s not like Bella’s normal reply would be like, “Mos def, yo.” So let’s stop it with the earlier century, okay?

Edward remarks that most people enjoy getting presents, and Alice laughs—“the sound was all silver, a wind chime.” Don’t patronize Edward, Alice. “What’s the worst that could happen?” she says, but she should have foreseen that would be a stupid thing to ask. “Getting older,” Bella replies. Edward’s face tightens into “a hard line.” That’s our Edward! Always tightening into hard lines!

As a political science major with real misgivings about my apparent chosen trade, I’ve taken a lot of Lit courses. For some reason the theme this year in both my Shakespeare and “Literature and the Art of Film” classes seems to be “looking for phallic symbols in everything.” Did you know that basically every thing in Shakespeare, Middleton, Poe, James, Hitchcock and basically all German Expressionism is supposed to represent a penis? Macbeth’s dagger? Penis. Charlie’s cigar in Shadow of a Doubt? Penis. There’s also a lot of rape and incest imagery. I’m just saying this because Edward’s hard mouth is not supposed to represent a penis. There are no phallic symbols in New Moon. I just want to free you from thinking about that angle (that’s what she said). Rape and incest imagery I’m not sure about.

Alice and Bella have a minor fight when Alice insists on throwing a party tonight—she got Bella out of work and everything. Bella has a job? In this economy? Bella protests that she has to watch “the nineteen-sixties version” of Romeo and Juliet. (Why the vague year? No IMDb, S. Meyer?) This motif is back already? They are apparently doing R&J in Bella’s senior English class. What is going on with this curriculum? I’m writing a letter to Arnie Duncan about Forks High.

Bella maintains she has to watch the movie, and Alice snaps. (She likes to party.) “This can be easy, or this can be hard, Bella, but one way or the other—” DAMN. Is it getting hot in here or is it just Alice('s temper)?

Edward strikes a compromise—cooler heads prevail (get it?)—and they go to class. Alice “danced” off to hers, in case you were wondering.

Bella spends a while fixating on the sexual maturation of the boys in her school. Mike Newton is thinning out apparently, and Bella is again thankful Edward can’t read her thoughts. She’s still sulking about presents too, but she sort of has a good reason. She’s bothered by the fact that the Cullens are really rich, which is something we haven’t officially learned before. The cars and designer clothes have hinted as much, but Edward stole a car once, so you never know about these things. Cullen morality is a tricky thing. It obviously doesn’t extend so far as thinking as stealing is wrong, or, as it turns out, thinking that exploiting Alice’s power to play the stock market is wrong. As a poor child of a school teacher (like me) she’s uncomfortable around ostentatious wealth (like me). Good for her (us).

Edward has apparently been angling to pay her college tuition, something every father should do. Oh wait, I forgot, he’s not her dad! Still, I’d take the money, Bella.

“Sheeeeeit, I’ll take any motherfucker’s money if he giving it away!”
-Sen. Bella Davis

Edward’s compromise is that he’ll take Bella home to watch the movie and then forcibly return her to Chez Cullen for the bash. So they go home and settle in. In case you forgot the Prime Directive of Twilight, that sex equals death, Bella and Edward have a makeout session in which she gets a little too horny and Edward has to shut it down. Poor Bella. She’s the stereotypical guy in this relationship, always trying to grab at body parts and getting cock-blocked. It’s hard to blame Edward—most people over the age of a hundred have little in the way of a sex drive.

Bella describes the experience of cuddling with Edward: he’s ice cold and rock hard. He’s behind her, so it’s essentially like sitting against an ice pack.

“Did someone say six-pack?”-Charlie Swan
“Did someone say wolf pack?”-Jacob Black

Bella gets upset when Edward starts criticizing Romeo. “Romeo was one of my favorite fictional characters. Until I met Edward, I’d sort of had a thing for him.” Attracted to a fictional character? That’s ridic—oh, I see what you did there, S. Meyer.

Edward does a standard Lit. 101 takedown on Romeo: fickle (Rosaline), quick to violence, kills self and asks questions later, etc. But Edward sticks on the suicide thing and says he envies the ease with which the star-crossed lovers offed themselves. We are getting goth up in this bitch.

Bella naturally freaks out, and Edward explains that back when Bella had her brush with death he’d started thinking about how he’d kill himself if things went south down South. It’s pretty hard to kill a vampire, after all, so you have to plan. Edward’s plan is not that complicated, though. He says he’d have gone to Italy and provoked the Volturi. The Volturwhatnow? That’s something we haven’t heard about yet! I bet it’s important!

The Volturi, it turns out, are the Royal Family/Vatican of the vampire world. They are super old, have super powers, and enforce the rules. The first rule of Vampire Club is the same as the first rule of Fight Club: don’t talk about it. But there aren’t any other rules. So Edward would have had to fly out to Vampire Vatican City and done something vampire-y in front of a normal human (there are normal humans in Vampire Vatican City, apparently). And then, you know, he’d have been ripped to pieces or something; Edward is super casual about all of it. (Happy birthday, Bella!)

Obviously this leads to an argument. Bella is horrified by the idea of Edward killing himself, even if she was dead. He asks her what she would do “if the situation were reversed.” Is he implying that she would definitely kill herself too? I’m not saying he’s wrong, but he’s a little cocky, no? She basically asks him the same exact question: if something happened to him, would he want her to off herself? (S. Meyer puts the emphasis on “off myself” When it seems like the emphasis should be on “would you want me to” or “would you want me to” because both questions have to do with Bella’s suicide. Edward is asking if she would want to die if he died, and Bella is asking if he would want her to die if he died, but it ends up reading like they haven’t heard each other. It’s confusingly worded, though it oddly mirrors they way their self-absorption is clouding their comprehension. It’s probably unintentional.) He realizes that he wouldn’t want her to die either. So in other words they’re both too obsessed with the idea of their own suffering to see it from the other’s point of view. Very healthy stuff going on.

Charlie comes home; we get the sense that Edward spends a lot of time with both of them now because Charlie is unsurprised when Edward passes on dinner. (What must he think, though? Either Edward has an eating disorder or he’s a snob who won’t eat the poor folk drivel they eat at the Swan residence.) Edward asks to take Bella over to his place for the evening, and Bella briefly hopes that Charlie will object, but there’s a ball game on so he basically kicks them out of the house. Another classic Charlie move. Charlie also asks after Alice.

“Hey, say hi to Alice for me. She hasn’t been over in a while.” Charlie’s mouth pulled down at one corner.
“It’s been three days, Dad,” I reminded him. Charlie was crazy about Alice. He’d become attached last spring when she’d helped me through my awkward convalescence; Charlie would be forever grateful to her for saving him from the horror of an almost-adult daughter who needed help showering.

Whoa. The Joey Tribbiani part of my brain just exploded. Alice and Bella have been SHOWERING TOGETHER?

"How you do[BOOM]"

On the one hand, this is a huge leap forward for Team Alice. On the other hand, now I find myself thinking that Charlie and Alice should get together! Charlie is too cool a guy to be alone, and we’ll see in a few pages that Alice really deserves better than Jasper. Alice deserves a real, mature man. And Charlie deserves some young pussy.

In the car on the way over, Edward tells Bella to not be a bitch tonight. “The last real birthday any of us had was Emmett in 1935. Cut us a little slack... They’re all very excited.” I thought Emmett got vamped immediately after being discovered as a victim of a bear attack. So they never knew him as a human! Did it happen on his birthday? The other thing is that everyone is going to be there—including Emmett and therefore Rosalie. Bella explains that most of Forks was under the impression that the elder three Cullens were away at college in Dartmouth (all of them? The town gossips in Forks must be having a field day wondering how many buildings Carlisle had to donate to pull that off, because you KNOW those kids didn’t have the grades) but in reality they had gone to Africa. That doesn’t seem like the most hospitable climate for vampires! This chapter has so many inconsistent new details!

Edward apparently wanted to buy Bella an Audi for her birthday, but she refused. He asks if there is anything he can get her.

The words came out in a whisper. “You know what I want.”

I like Bella’s strategy—she’s just going to bring this up in every conversation until he relents! Edward says “shut the fuck up” (paraphrasing) and Bella replies “Maybe Alice will give me what I want.” Yes, Bella! This is what I have been saying! Alice can give you (or maybe your dad, I haven’t decided) everything you want! Love, sex, companionship, trust, immortality—you are literally getting NONE of this from Edward! Who is he to you?



Chez Cullen is decked out like we’re in a Nancy Meyers movie or an episode of My Super Sweet Sixteen. I have to say this kind of girly decorating binge is really out of step with my idea of Alice’s character. I was thinking it would be like the parties you see in Blow, and maybe even Paul Reubens would be there, but no dice. Instead of bowls of cocaine we get bowls of pink roses lining the stairs outside. Japanese lanterns hang from the porch. Inside, every surface is covered with pink candles and “dozens of crystal bowls filled with hundreds of roses.” Where the hell did Alice order all of these flowers? The Cullens are so bad at staying inconspicuous! Oh, I’m sure the Forks flower shop gets orders for a few grand worth of roses like, all the time. I’m sure no one even noticed.

There was a table with a white cloth draped over it next to Edward’s grand piano, holding a pink birthday cake, more roses, a stack of glass plates, and a small pile of silver-wrapped presents.

HANG ON. A stack of glass plates? No one at this party eats food other than Bella! Inconsistency seems to be the theme of this chapter. At least we get a brief introductory moment when all of the Cullens behave as expected: Carlisle greets Bella charmingly, Esme hugs her maternally, Emmett grins at her brotherly (TWSS alert: Bella wonders “had Emmett always been so…big?”), and Jasper keeps his distance aloofly. Rosalie doesn’t even smile. Bitch.

Alice drags Bella to the present table. There’s a funny bit where Emmett suspiciously ducks out of the room and Bella opens her first present—a box so light it feels empty—which turns out to be an empty box. “Um…thanks,” Bella says, and even Rosalie momentarily cracks a smile, her icy heart thawing for a brief second. Bitch. Turns out it’s a new stereo for her truck, and Emmett is installing it so she can’t return it. “Alice was always one step ahead of me.”

The other day in my Shakespeare class we took a break from discussing penises to talk about the porter scene in Macbeth, a comedic interlude between Duncan’s murder and the discovery thereof. In some ways it serves as a palate cleanser so you don’t have two horrific scenes back-to-back, but why make it funny? It’s a peaks and valleys thing. Putting a moment of comedy before something dark and serious makes it all the more devastating if you can pull it off. But it’s tricky! If you get the balance wrong, subsequent violence and death also seems funny. I recently saw a production of The Changeling—a play that veers harshly from comedy to tragedy and back again—and the directors seemed to anticipate this problem and decided to play the whole tragedy as a comedy. Even murders garnered laughs from the audience.

It’s tough to say what’s happening here. All of the jokes are a prelude to something, but to some people it might all seem funny. The Cullen family pushes in to watch Bella open presents—even Jasper gets closer—and she suddenly gets a paper cut. Shit gets real. A paper cut, remember. Jasper loses it, and Edward, in a boneheaded move meant to protect Bella, sends her flying across the table (!) into the cake and glass plates so she gets cut up a lot worse. Smooth! Emmett and Edward wrestle Jasper back, but pretty soon everyone notices that Bella is bleeding all over the place and soon she’s staring up at “six suddenly ravenous vampires.”

One the one hand it’s a well earned cliffhanger—the aforementioned jokes build a false sense of security and then S. Meyer hits us with this crisis. On the other hand, it’s not really a false sense of security. It’s a contrived sense of danger. Are we really supposed to believe Jasper is this unstable? A paper cut? He was in the room with an even more profusely bleeding Bella long enough to dismember James in the last book, and they all go to public school, were kids bleed all the time! How could this have never happened around Jasper before? It seems unbelievable, in terms of the stakes (get it?) as we already understood them, for this to actually be dangerous.

It’s well written, but totally inconsistent character-wise, which undercuts the writing. It’s actually the opposite of S. Meyer’s usual situation. I think I like the devil I know better.