BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 8: Look Back in Anger

So Kira has brought a major controversy involving Ashley Greene and the Twilight films to my attention; read all about it here. Maybe by the time we actually get our thoughts it order this situation will be resolved, but obviously I am in Greene's corner basically no matter what. She could ask for 11 billion dollars to appear in Breaking Dawn 2 and I would be like "that is reasonable." It is a good thing I don't work for Summit Entertainment.

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 5: Cheater

When this chapter begins, Bella is already at work, which is strange. The first Twilight book had such aggressive unity of space and time that there was even a scene where Edward gives Bella directions and then they get in a car and then they drive to a place and then they get out of the car and walk into the place. It was like Gus Van Sant wrote it or something. Now S. Meyer is leaving out whole fiscal quarters, and it is really difficult to get one’s bearings.

Bella has been unable to return to her nihilist zombie state, so profound was the imaginary almost-rape in Port Angeles. She is once again suffering from what amounts to a hangover—everything seems “oddly close and loud today” as a couple of hikers jabber about seeing huge bears in the woods nearby. One of the hikers apparently has an “orange beard that didn’t match his dark brown hair.” I have seen a lot of people like that, and I am always annoyed by it. Why do they keep the beard when that happens? Their heads look like Neapolitan ice cream!

Bella also talks about the other hiker’s face, which has been wind-abused into “an impressive leathery crust.” It’s a detail that seems literally only included so that Bella can refer to him as “Leather-face” two paragraphs later. Good effort, S. Meyer. I didn’t laugh, but I kind of started to smile a little bit.

Bella leaves work early, but doesn’t want to go home to her empty house. She’s been having nightmares lately—always the same nightmare, in fact—and waking up screaming. In the dream there are no monsters or jump scares or anything: Bella wanders through the woods looking for something, can’t find it, can’t remember what she was looking for in the first place, and then realizes that there is nothing to be searching for in the first place. This sounds like the kind of post-grad anxiety dream I’m going to start having soon.

Bella’s just driving aimlessly around Forks, which is a very real small town thing to do. Driving laps around town was a favorite pastime of a lot of dudes in my hometown. Most of them were named Jared, as I recall. She’s fighting back daymare versions of her bad dreams, holding her arm around her chest trying to keep her body together. Eventually Bella realizes that she should probably not be driving in this state, so she pulls over to have a breakdown.

She starts thinking about Edward’s promise to seem like he’d never existed, and she realizes what a bunch of fucking bullshit that was. “He could steal my pictures and reclaim his gifts, but that didn’t put things back the way they’d been before I met him.” Yeah! Fuck you, Edward!

Bella says her insides have changed, but I don’t think she means literally. This is not some kind of virginity metaphor. Edward has left a physical impression on her body. Even her outward appearance has changed as a result of the break-up; her face is sallow and white, she’s got dark circles under her eyes—hey, she kind of looks like a vampire! “I might even pass for a vampire now,” Bella says. Yeah, we got there already S. Meyer.

“I think, as sort of a grand and aggressive gesture to make up for a few recent lapses in parenting and as a way to work out my anger over a recent frustrating situation involving a photo shoot for Cocoa-Cola and also because the general emotional environment in my home is cracking me up a little bit, I am going to take this gun and shoot my neighbor’s pigeons.”-Betty Draper

Bella decides that since Edward’s promise is impossible, that frees her from having to keep up her end of the bargain, i.e. keeping herself safe. So she decides to be a badass rock and roll troublemaker.

Well, she’s not going to go that far. I’m kind of irritated that Bella decides to be reckless in response to Edward’s failure to keep his promise. First of all, you didn’t want him to keep that promise in the first place, and second of all you should want to be reckless because it is COOL, Bella!

Who cared if I was reckless and stupid? There was no reason to avoid recklessness, no reason why I shouldn’t get to be stupid.

I think Justin Theroux is a cool guy—he was on Six Feet Under and Mullholland Dr—but I just saw Iron Man 2, which he wrote, and that dude cannot get a point across in a scene of dialogue. Bella’s line reminded me, because it expresses the same idea twice in a row. That’s like what every scene of exposition in Iron Man 2 is like, except it is ten times in a row, and I just wanted to die every time someone started talking. Which is too bad, because Robert Downey Jr. is great at talking. But I really just wanted everyone to shut the fuck up and fight.

“I need suits, Mickey Rourke. I brought you here to help me make suits, and now you are not making suits, these are something else which are not suits. This thing has a head, which means it is not a suit, and I asked you for suits. I thought we agreed that we would be making suits here, and that is not what you are doing.”-what the dialogue in Iron Man 2 felt like

Bella’s still sitting on the side of the road, and it occurs to her that she is blocking someone’s driveway. She looks around her before she pulls away.

Sometimes, kismet happens.

Kismet, Bella? This is really happening? But wait, look at the next sentence:

Coincidence? Or was it meant to be?

This is like a standardized test question or something. Remember how teachers always told you to infer the meaning of word you didn’t know from the context? This is that logic working in reverse. S. Meyer gives extra context so she can put a big word in. It only reads as clunky and redundant to us, not the intended audience for this book, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. It’s definitely not the same situation as the reckless and stupid example above. But why kismet? Why give kids a vocabulary word they will never need?

The writing always seems to get worse when Bella dives into her head like this, but I’m wondering if that’s just because it is relatively new, style-wise. Twilight had some of this inner-depth-plumbing, but not nearly as much. Instead it had heavily adverbed scenes of dialogue, and by now we’ve built up a tolerance for that. We haven’t got there with the internal monologue stuff, so it stands out.

So the kismet turns out to be a couple of old motorcycles by the side of the road. Charlie, like most fathers (or most fathers from the 50s) has a healthy fear of his daughter taking a ride on a motorcycle. Bella thinks back to the bloody accidents he’s described and she is like “DO WANT.”

So she goes to the house at the end of the driveway and some boy answers, a freshman she recognizes. He’s like “Whoa, Bella Swan?” It reminded me of how in middle school my friends and I would occasionally see in the high school parking lot this older girl we perceived as super-hot. I say perceived because I can’t really remember what she looked like—she wasn’t around long. But I do remember that she was really pale and had huge boobs and had kind of strange-looking eyes. (Hey, wait a minute…) Anyway, pale hot girl eventually started dating my neighbor, and one day she showed up at my house looking for his. It was really weird and off-putting to see her in that context. When I was younger my house and my school felt like totally separate spheres. Worlds collided.

The boy tells Bella she can just take the bikes—she only wants one but he tells her she might need both for parts—because apparently they don’t really work. He wants to know what she’s going to do about fixing them, which leads to a conversation about some local asshole who runs an overpriced autobody shop, which leads to Bella musing about how she’d never had to go there because Jacob did such a good job with her truck, which reminds her that Jacob can fix things!

Took you a long time to make that leap, Bella! S. Meyer does do a cool thing with the writing there, where Bella’s narration—which you think is just filling you in on backstory—turns out to literally be her stream-of-consciousness at that moment in the doorway. She reaches the conclusion about Jacob at the same time we do. It’s reminiscent of C. Palahniuk’s better days in that it is gimmicky, but in an unobtrusive way. In S. Meyer’s case it strikes me as more intuitive than anything. The boy helps Bella put the bikes on her truck and she heads for La Push.

He waved as I pulled away, still smiling. Friendly kid.

Bella is an old soul, isn’t she? An old Jewish man’s soul. So Bella goes and sees Jacob and for the next few pages S. Meyer shows us all the different ways she can indicate Jacob’s ethnicity: he has “deep russet” skin here, “red-brown” a few pages later, and even later it’s just “brown.” She’s running out of adjectives really fast! How long before S. Meyer slips up and just calls him “colored,” do you think?

As she is wont to do, Bella notes how sexually mature Jacob looks now, his “tendons and veins” showing beneath is “red-brown” skin. Oy, Bella needs to get laid SO BAD. I’m beginning to think that the physical pain she is experiencing is not heartbreak so much as pent-up sexual energy.

Jacob is happy to see her, and she is strangely happy to see him—she’s taken aback by the joy she experiences in his presence. “Something clicked silently into place, like two corresponding puzzle pieces.” Did Ben Gibbard write this chapter? Billy Black is there and he is all smiles for once. He does not give Bella any knowing, noble-savage glares at all. Jacob says he’s just been working on his car, and Bella’s like, “Oh, can I see it?” The set up is weirdly porn-y. Jacob says they’ll have to go out back and Bella thinks “even better.” Gross. Jacob is a little boy, Bella. Keep your overactive imagination off of his dick. I can tell this book is not going to be very kind to Jacob’s balls.

Jacob shows off his car, a Volkswagen Rabbit he’s rebuilt. Bella tells him about the bikes and her plan to fix them up; she offers him money to help and he seems offended. Luckily there isn’t a Deflores/Beatrice situation going on. He wants to help, but out of the goodness of his heart. She offers a trade, then: he gets one of the bikes in exchange for his expertise, so that he can give her lessons once they are in working order. It’s a lopsided enough deal to overcome Jacob’s sense of chivalry.

“Swee-eet.” He made the word into two syllables.

Not “sa-weet”? I guess they do things differently on the Rez. Bella asks if Jacob is legal yet, but I think she means driving age, not age-of-consent. They realize they’ve missed each other’s birthdays, and Jacob says they will have to celebrate retrospectively sometime. “Sounds like a date,” Bella says, and Jacob’s eyes light up. Bella immediately realizes she’s being a cock-tease and makes a mental note to not do that anymore, but somehow I think that her brain will write that memo but forget to CC her vagina.

Bella is surprised by the surge of enthusiasm she has around Jacob. I mean, he’s not constantly pissed off and tensing his fists and generally being an asshole all the time, which is the full scope of Bella’s experience with male/female interpersonal relationships thus far. So this is totally mind-blowing for her, it’s like playing Dirty Projectors for a Nickleback fan.

He asks her when she’s going to bring the bikes down and Bella tells him they are in her truck, biting her lip in embarrassment. SHE BIT HER LIP! YES! I think Bella’s going to be okay, everybody!