BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 7: Love Calls You By Your Name

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 4: Waking Up

It’s weird to see so much text on the page again! Apparently we’re out of the initial shock of Edward’s departure, which was so monumental as to alter the aesthetic core of this book for a few pages. The universe has re-aligned, for the physical book. Not so much for Bella.

At the start of this chapter an exasperated Charlie starts demanding that Bella go live with her mother in Florida. Bella is confused—like us, she’s tuning in halfway through this conversation. We’re still climbing out of the “form over content” forest, I guess. She wonders what she could have done wrong and alludes to four months of doing nothing but going to work and school, “after that first week, which neither of us mentioned.” So I guess there was a week of wild, grief-driven, furniture shredding psychosis that we missed, but not much else.

It turns out that all of that “not much else” is exactly what Charlie is objecting to. Bella hasn’t been taking it out and chopping it up, and Charlie wants her to raise a little hell. He says she’s been “lifeless.”

Now we start to get a sense of exactly why we were just hit with a series of blank pages: that’s how Bella’s existed for the last few months, outwardly at least. She’s been pretending to be okay, for Charlie’s sake, and now it occurs to her that it must not have been working. “Honey, you’re not the first person to go through this kind of thing, you know,” Charlie says. But she kind of is, right?

“Honey, you’re not the first person to fall in love with an undead vampire with a strict moral code who will barely allow himself to touch you because of the overwhelming desire to drink your blood, from whom you’ve begged for immortality and from whom you have been repeatedly rebuffed in requests for same, with whom you have nonetheless fallen irreparably in love and with whom you dream about spending literal eternity, and you’re not the first person to then have that vampire cruelly and theatrically dump you in the middle of the forest and then attempt to eliminate any evidence that he ever existed in the first place. Actually, never mind, you are the first person to do any of that.” -Charlie Swan

He starts bringing up his divorce, and you think he’s going to get sympathetic with her, but he basically says, “I didn’t take your mom walking out on me this hard, which was an actual divorce between people who had a child together, so I think there is literally something wrong with you that this is affecting you so much.” He wants her to see a shrink. Bella shoots that idea down, mentally noting that she couldn’t possibly tell her doctor the truth about the family of vampires who abandoned her. Patient-doctor confidentiality only goes so far.

Instead Bella proposes a trip out of town with a friend, and we get another little great Charlie moment that explains more about Bella’s current state in a few sentences than does the ten pages of emotion-exposition we will get at the end of this chapter:

“Look,” I said in a flat voice. “I’ll go out tonight, if you want. I’ll call Jess or Angela.”

“That’s not what I want,” he argued, frustrated. “I don’t think I can live through seeing you try harder. I’ve never seen anyone trying so hard. It hurts to watch.”

Bella really has been shut down for a few months—it doesn't appear to have been just for show, or if it was, Bella has included herself in the charade—we get repeated references to Bella feeling the first “spark of emotion” she’s felt in a while, once when Charlie explicitly mentions she needs to leave Forks to get better, and again when he makes reference to the fact that Edward hasn’t called or written in months. The explicit reference to Edward bothers Bella so much that she leaves for school to avoid further conversation, subsequently getting there so early she sits in her car and reads her calculus book for a while. Finally Bella is apparently studying something that is appropriate for her age level—some of the teachers at Forks High apparently have heads on their shoulders. Then this happens:

I forced myself to keep at it until the parking lot was full, and I ended up rushing to English. We were working on Animal Farm, an easy subject matter.

An easy subject matter? What the hell is that phrase? Also, Animal Farm? What the hell kind of 12th grade English class is this?

Eventually Bella meets up with Jessica and makes an awkward date. Bella's so nervous about having to talk to her that she lingers outside the classroom and ends up late to class. There was a lot of discussion going on in the comments about whether or not Bella's bizarre behavior was realistic in the last chapter. I can't really speak to that, but this compulsive avoidance of social interaction, this fear of asking people for anything, even something reasonable- this I totally have. I am Bella Swan, with respect to most social interaction.

Bella has to flatter Jessica a lot to get her to go to the movies; you get the sense that they haven't talked in a long time. There's more curious brand-name avoidance here: Bella alludes to seeing "that one with the female president," but Jessica tells her that one is out of theaters. "Well, there's that romantic comedy that's getting great reviews," Jessica says. That is definitely a thing that a normal person has said in a real conversation. I'm just kidding that's the most unrealistic line I think I have ever read! What's weird is Jessica mentions a (fictional) movie title one line later, a zombie flick called Dead End. So, why couldn't S. Meyer come up with something that sounded like a rom-com, too? It's important that Jessica mentions it because we need to understand that Bella is avoiding all depictions of romance in all forms of media; she was happy to be dealing with Animal Farm and Communism in English rather than Romeo and Juliet and true love. But to put it this way, with this awful line, just calls attention to the fact that S. Meyer is trying to drive this point home. We got it.

(S. Meyer spells "communism" with a lower-case c, by the way, which is wrong.)

Bella wants to see the zombie movie, so they agree to go to Port Angeles that night. Zombies, huh? I see where you are going with this one, S. Meyer.

I've been watching Mad Men a lot recently, and many of the episodes follow a certain formula. A character is having a particular emotional-repression problem, and that problem is reflected in something external, usually having to do with the world of advertising. So Don Draper's pitches always sound like they are half about whatever product he is selling and half about his life. There's an overwhelming sense of the weight that is causing these characters to act this way, and you never feel like true emotional health is even remotely possible. But then something big happens, and a character temporarily breaks out of his or her box. Betty Draper starts shooting a gun at her neighbor's pigeons. It is always exhilarating, but then everything returns to normal. This chapter of New Moon is structured in exactly the same way.

Bella goes home to get ready and avoids looking at something in a trash bag at the bottom of her closet: the stereo from Emmett et al., which Bella clawed out of her car with her bare hands. Hey, uh, shouldn't Edward have taken that? It's okay for his brothers and sisters to have seemed like they existed but not Edward himself? See how quickly the "it will be better if it's like I never existed" logic becomes impossible and breaks down? It just makes the whole CD and picture stealing gesture seem even more random and cruel. How is Edward so old and still so stupid? Is Edward a registered voter in Arizona?

(By the way, it occurred to me today that back in the breakup chapter, when Edward offers to mail all of the pictures to Renee on Bella's behalf, he probably took the envelope so that he could remove all of the pictures of himself from it first. Edward's dick moves know no bounds.)

Jessica picks Bella up; Bella makes a concentrated effort to form a smile on her face in the mirror before she goes outside. There's a lot of Dexter-style stuff in this chapter where Bella coaches herself on how to act like a normal person- when she needs to talk, the sort of questions she needs to ask- but she's not as good at it as Dexter. Also she doesn't kill Jessica at the end of the night.

In the car, whatever Jessica is listening to (obviously we don't get a band name) bothers Bella so she changes the station to rap. Jessica is appalled. She's basically like, "You listen to black music?" I like that Forks is so white the idea of a white person liking rap is unfathomable. They haven't even gotten to that mid-90s phase where white guys wore FUBU shirts all the time. Forks is so behind-the-times, that will happen in like 2015 or something. When they finally get high-speed internet and cell phone towers. And they finally find out that Barack Obama is the President. They make small talk; it turns out Eric, who vanished off the face of the earth at the end of Twilight, still exists. Good to know, I guess.

So the movie is playing early, so they "hit the twilight showing" and decide to eat later. Did you guys catch that? That was the name of the last book!

I listen to the /Filmcast every week, and the hosts of that show are extraordinarily concerned with the purity of the movie-going experience. They debate theater etiquette on a regular basis and are essentially terrified by the possibility that someone near them in a theater could be the kind of jerk who talks or takes phone calls during a film. They've told stories about being mortified by friends who talk over films or shout things in theaters; they've shared strategies on how to seem like a psychopath in the theater so that potential talkers will be too scared to set you off. Anyway, I just found myself thinking that one of those dudes would probably freak out at Bella or Jessica for the the way they behaves at the movies. They talk throughout the previews, and then when the film starts and there appears to be a depiction of a romantic couple on screen, Bella gets up and leaves, deciding to get popcorn. She comes back ten minutes later. "You missed everything," Jessica says. "Almost everyone is a zombie now." That's kind of funny, but shut up, Jessica!

Bella manages to enjoy the zombie action for a while, until the very end, when the symbolism of this whole chapter dawns on her.

The scene kept cutting between the horrified face of the heroine, and the dead, emotionless face of her pursuer, back and forth as it closed the distance.

And I realized which one resembled me the most.

I stood up.

So maybe this is a little more blunt than Mad Men. She walks out again, pretending afterward to have been too afraid. Bella notes the irony of the fact that all this time she's been trying to become a vampire, and she ended up a zombie. "It was depressing to realize I wasn't the heroine anymore, that my story was over," Bella says, which is itself also ironic, because we have another 450-something pages to go in this, which is only itself the second installment of her four-part story. Oh man, how long ago did I start this series? We're going to be doing this forever.

Leaving the theater, Bella realizes that Jessica is suddenly very tense and quiet, walking quickly and staring straight ahead. They are passing a sketchy-looking bar, on an unlit patch of road, and there are dudes hanging around outside. It's a place called One-Eyed Pete's, and Bella notes the sound of ice clinking coming from inside. I don't know if S. Meyer has actually walked past a real dive bar, but nobody's drinking anything with ice in there. I walk through Maverick Square every day, and what you hear is the sound of toothless yelling, the sound of stale beer being poured and vomited back out, and the sound of slow death. No ice. Ice clinking is a good sound.

I guess we should have seen the rape thing coming, huh? Why do people even go to Port Angeles if it is basically the rape capital of Washington? "Hey Jess, want to go see a movie in Port Rape?" "Sure that sounds like a good idea. I enjoy the cinema and also attempted rape." Jessica is a model of rape instincts in this situation, as it happens. Head down, keep moving, ignore the cat calls. Bella would do well to learn from her, because what happens next is, she basically tries to get raped on purpose. Betty, get your gun.

She is reminded of the last time she was surrounded by creepy men in Port Angeles, and starts walking toward them for some reason. Naturally Jessica starts to lose her shit. I don't really understand the geography of this scene- Bella walks toward the rapists, Jessica starts after her, but then stops, and Bella keeps going, but Jessica always seems to be within earshot and the rapists don't- how big is this street? It's hard to visualize. Bella is always walking toward them, or thinking about walking toward them, but she only ever seems to travel a few feet.

The guys are probably not rapists, and definitely not the same would-be rapists from before, but it still is a dangerous situation and Jessica is rightly panicked. She asks Bella is she is suicidal, and Bella answers that she is not, but then realizes it was a rhetorical question and the fact that she engaged with it as though it was a valid question in the first place is probably sending a bad signal about her state of mind. Bella steps forward again, and someone yells at her to cut the shit, but it's not Jessica. GUESS WHOSE DISEMBODIED VOICE IS BACK?

Well, I think it is Edward's voice, but Bella avoids saying his name, referring to him instead, always just using masculine pronouns in italics. It's making me think of that dream Bella had in Twilight where the pronoun/antecedent problems grew into a kind of awe-inspiring collection of nonsense.

The writing bottoms out here. I think we're past all of the meta stuff, so it doesn't make sense to suggest that all of the bad writing is supposed to reflect Bella's bad mood. Seriously, though this is some of the worst ever. Bella doesn't understand why she is hearing Edward's voice.

Option one: I was crazy. That was the layman's term for people who heard voices in their heads.

What the hell? I can't even start to break that down, it is so offensive to my sensibilities. That is the layman's term? Crazy? It keeps going.

Option two: my subconscious mind was giving me what it thought I wanted. This was wish fulfillment- a momentary relief from pain by embracing the incorrect idea that he cared whether I lived or died. Projecting what he would have said if A) he were here, and B) he would be in any way bothered by something bad happening to me.

Um, what is the actual difference between those two options? Bella also uses subconscious and unconscious interchangeably, irritatingly attaching the word "mind" after each most of the time. Bella's subconscious mind and unconscious mind are like new characters in this book, filling the void left by Edward and Alice. But Bella's unconscious mind is nowhere near as hot.

Bella has been avoiding thinking about Edward, and explains how she'd gone numb rather than experience pain. But this little moment has snapped her out of it, and she is trying to decide whether or not she wants to try and push it further.

There was a second of choice.

There was just a second of me vomiting because I hate that sentence so much. Bella decides to step forward again, and Edward yells at her some more and she loves it. She loves being reminded how paternalistic that dude was; it fills her with joy! But it turns out the guys aren't rapists, and Bella is disappointed because the voice goes away.

The threat that had pulled me across the street had evaporated. These were not the dangerous men I had remembered. They were probably nice guys. Safe. I lost interest.

That's our Bella, huh? If they aren't going to fuck her to death, deliberately or accidentally, Bella doesn't want any of it.

So she and Jessica go and eat (at McDonald's, a brand name that is mentioned several times; Bella even literally uses the phrase "golden arches," which is like WHAT) and Jessica rightly treats her like a crazy person. On the drive home, Jessica blares music and ignores her while Bella thinks everything over. This book has a lot of "thinking things over," so be prepared. Bella decides she was thrilled by the whole brush-with-rape thing because it made her realize she hasn't forgotten Edward; she's been worried that he was right about how he would slip from her mind.

Because there was one thing I had to believe in to be able to live- I had to know he existed. That was all. Everything else I could endure. So long as he existed.

That's also why Bella got all angry about leaving Forks at the beginning of this chapter: leaving Forks would make him seem even less real. I'm kind of pleased that S. Meyer was willing to wait so many pages to explain the significance of that earlier moment between Bella and Charlie, obvious though it might have been. It's also more Mad Men structuring- Bella comes home to Charlie and we are back where we started. Nicely done. It almost makes up for those last few pages. But it doesn't.

When Bella starts explaining, S. Meyer has a tendency to use a lot of italics, so it starts to look like maybe Bella's been reading a lot of Nietzsche. Also it feels like we're just getting started with the pronoun-with-no-clear-antecedent-indicating-Edward stuff. This happens as Charlie is standing, pissed off in the doorway, because he didn't know where Bella was:

"Hey, Dad," I said absentmindedly as I ducked around Charlie, heading for the stairs. I'd been thinking about him for too long, and I wanted to be upstairs before it caught up with me.

"Him" meaning Edward, all grammatical evidence to the contrary. Bella explains to Charlie that she went to the movies with Jessica, which is actually exactly what she told him earlier, and he calms down. She goes upstairs and we get a long description of how she is overcome with pain.

She describes it as a hole in her chest, with "unhealed gashes" that "continued to throb and bleed despite the passage of time." She gets so worked up that she has trouble breathing and even getting her blood to properly circulate. Bella's emotions have always held a lot of sway over her actual biological functions; that is a very weird talent to have. Some people are double-jointed, others do this. We are all unique snowflakes. Bella hugs her ribs to keep herself from falling apart. Aw, poor baby! Everyone needs to be nicer to Bella, okay?

Everyone needs to be nicer to Kristen Stewart, too. I just read about her interview in the new issue of Elle, which obviously I had to read about on the internet because I am not a subscriber. They basically asked her why she looks so sad and stressed out on the red carpet:

"People say that I'm miserable all the time. It's not that I'm miserable, it's just that somebody's yelling at me...I literally, sometimes, have to keep myself from crying...It's a physical reaction to the energy that's thrown at you."

And you know what? People in the comments at Huffington Post are being assholes about it! Shocking, I know! They're saying things like "don't act in movies, then." Right. Because people who act in movies have to sign off on totally insane TMZ freelancing motherfuckers chasing them down and screaming at them all day? Is that in the contract? It's bizarre to me that people don't immediately realize the problem is our sick celebrity culture; there are plenty of people out there who act in movies without being hunted down by paparazzi every waking hour, but occasionally a few unfortunate people seem to get picked out. And certain audiences out there want to see pictures of these people every time they leave the house (and sometimes just, you know, when they walk near a window) in magazines every week and on the internet every day until whatever happens to break the cycle. The celebrity in question goes insane. People get bored. Someone dies in a car crash. But you are right, commenters. Kristen Stewart should just get another job then. We should discourage all of the people who have normal reactions to this kind of thing from ever getting involved in this industry until the only actors we have left are terrifying, reality-TV show craving fame monster abominations. That will make it so much more fun to go to the movies.

One guy, who looks like a forty year old man, says she should rent our her forehead to advertisers. Thanks, asshole. Would you say that about one of your co-workers daughters?

I have this problem where when I say something in jest on the internet, people think I am being serious, and when I say something serious people think I am joking. I wear a wedding ring, because I am married, and people who have spotted it in videos have asked about it. I have answered them truthfully, saying that I am in fact married. Now, remember like a year ago when everyone was writing "25 Facts About Me" on Facebook? I wrote one, which was obviously full of lies. One of them was this:

14. I am unofficially considered the fifth Jonas Brother. By unofficially, I mean the only thing actually recognizing my status is a Court Order barring me from attending performances. But it does say "Fifth Jonas Brother," on the page.

A month or so ago I got an e-mail from someone asking if I was really married, because they had heard that I was but they also read on my Facebook page that it was a promise ring. What I'm saying is, I am often misunderstood.

So I just wanted to make it clear that when I talk about how awesome Kristen Stewart is I am not kidding at all. This girl is great, and she is doing interesting things with her career, and she deserves our support. And I think our support should mostly entail leaving her the hell alone.