Sunday, July 11, 2010

BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 25: My Suffering Is Worse Than Your Suffering

I recently learned that the term “bottle episode” refers to an episode of a TV show created, in part, because of budgetary constraints. Generally speaking, bottle episodes only make use of the principal actors on a show and very few locations so you can make up for going over budget on a particularly fancy episode earlier in the season or save up for a future expense. Most of the time we don't notice this kind of thing because it happens organically; it's not unusual for the friends in Friends to spend 22 minutes in Monica's apartment, nor is it strange for the Bartlet administration to spend an hour in the West Wing on The West Wing. Plus Seinfield was an unending stream of bottle episodes, saturating the market and rendering them less obvious elsewhere. Now, obviously, novels don't have any budgetary constraints. But the chapter in New Moon that follows the long Italian excursion is literally an entire chapter in which Bella and Edward sit in her room and talk.

It's hard to know where these tropes come from – have budgetary constraints on television shaped the way we tell stories? Or do bottle episodes tap into an urge that was already there? The famous “LOUD quiet LOUD” description of The Pixies' song structure comes to mind. Maybe as storytellers we have a natural inclination to pull back after a big flourish.

Anyway, speaking of bottles, you might need a drink to get through this chapter! Because these two should really shut up! Am I the only one who would rather hear about what Jasper and Alice are up to right now? (Oh, here it is!) Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 23: The Truth

Bella wakes up feeling stiff like she's been out for a while. She starts describing nightmares and colorful dreams we eventually realize are the events of the last few chapters. Oh boy. Bella thinks It Was All A Dream, and continues to think that for the next ten pages except when she doesn't; it turns on and off whenever S. Meyer wants to insert a tired punchline. It's totally inconsistent: she'll start talking to Edward and engage with him normally for a few lines and then suddenly veer off and say something like “well, since this is a dream I guess that's just what I'd imagine you'd say.” And Edward has to keep saying, “Bitch, you're not dreaming.” To top it off, this chapter is full of groan-inducing, Palin-esque lines like “This dream did not want to be shoved away into the vault of dreams I refused to revisit.” Ugh.

It's irritatingly similar to one of the last chapters of Twilight, in which Edward keeps being referred to as “the angel.” Bella even actually spends some of this chapter thinking she is dead again. She's The Boy Who Cried Dead over here: one of these days you're really going to be dead and no one will believe you, Bella! To keep it interesting, she also spends some of this chapter thinking she's crazy. So we shift from dreaming to crazy to dead and back again seemingly at random and at will.

Somewhat disturbingly, when Bella concludes after a few pages that she must have drowned after jumping off the cliff and dreamed everything thereafter, Edward tries to reassure her by saying, “I can't imagine what you could have done to wind up in hell.” Who said anything about hell? I re-read the section a few times, and Bella makes no allusion to any particular after-life outcome. Why would you just assume Bella would go to hell, Edward? Either his holier-than-thou-ness has reached new heights, or a key line got deleted somewhere. I prefer to think Edward is just an asshole, but you can give him the benefit of the doubt if you like. I've got plenty more evidence coming up.

They debrief each other; Edward does most of the talking, because Bella is being a crazy/dreaming/dead idiot. But we gather that Charlie has banned him from the house.

His eyes were sad. “Did you expect anything else?'
My eyes were mad.

Nice rhyming, Stephenie! Bella asks about an alibi, but Edward says he doesn't have one yet; he's hoping Alice will think of something “as soon as she and Jasper are finished fucking the bejesus out of each other.” I might have actually just written that quote into the margins, but you know that is what's going on.

Bella asks what Edward has been up to for the last few months, and he says something cryptic about trying his hand at tracking, the skill at which James apparently excelled. We will eventually learn that he was trying (and failing) to track Victoria, but not before this happens:

“I didn't realize the mess I was leaving behind. I thought it was safe for you here. So safe. I had no idea that Victoria” - his lips curled back when he said the name - “would come back.”

Fair enough. But as previously stated, eventually Edward will admit that he started tracking Victoria and ended up in South America by mistake when she went to Forks. Nice tracking there, Edward. This comes up much later in the conversation when Bella wants to know what “distractions” Edward pursued. Translation: did you fuck anyone else?

“No,” He sighed. “That was never a distraction. It was an obligation.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that, even though I never expected any danger from Victoria, I wasn't going to let her get away with...”


And then he just trails off. Let her get away with what, Edward? Either it never entered your mind that she was dangerous or it did. It can't be both. “I never thought in a million years that Victoria would hurt you, which is why I felt okay leaving you, but after leaving you I tried to pursue her anyway, for no reason at all.” Unless Edward wanted to fuck Victoria, which would be kind of an interesting revelation. Of course that won't happen; this is just lazy, nonsensical writing. S. Meyer is trying to have her Victoria threat cake and eat it too.

There's a weird minute where Edward talks about how bad he felt about the whole abandonment situation and Bella tells him he needs to stop feeling so responsible for her life. The underlying assumption being that the only thing that drove him to suicide was guilt.

“Isabella Marie Swan,” he whispered, the strangest expression crossing his face. He almost looked mad. “Do you believe that I asked the Volturi to kill me because I felt guilty?”
I could feel the blank incomprehension on my face. “Didn't you?”
“Feel guilty? Intensely so. More than you can comprehend.”


Okay. S. Meyer is trying to put some cracks in the foundation of misunderstanding on which this conversation is built, but going about it in a kind of incomprehensible way. We've been building to this for so long, I thought you'd handle it a little more deftly! Which is what she said! Edward tells Bella he lied to her that day in the forest; in order to protect her he told her he didn't want to be with her. But it turns out Edward was hurt by the exchange too.

“I'm a good liar, but still, for you to believe me so quickly.” He winced. “That was... excruciating.”

Oh, poor Edward! He wanted her to beg him not to leave! The depth of self-absorption in this chapter is awe-inspiring. And when you think we've hit bottom, the floor drops out like a carnival ride.

“But how could you believe me? After all the thousand times I've told you I love you, how could you let one word break your faith in me?”

So this is Bella's fault now, huh? I see what you did there, Edward. But our girl Bella flips it back on him. “It never made sense for you to love me,” she says. And it goes back and forth from there. My suffering is worse than your suffering. Edward goes into an extended metaphor (a relatively coherent one, for once) about how before Bella his life was like “a moonless night.” It was “dark, but there were stars – points of light and reason.” And then Bella “shot across the sky like a meteor,” and when she was gone he was “blinded by the light.”

I wanted to believe him. But this was my life without him that he was describing, not the other way around.

My suffering is worse than your suffering. No one has learned anything. Edward tells Bella he is going to kill Victoria, and Bella balks. She says she has bigger problems than Victoria anyway, and this controversial remark leads to some of the most confusingly-worded dialogue yet.

“Really?” he asked. “Then what would be your greatest problem? That would make Victoria's returning for you seem like such an inconsequential matter by comparison?”

Gentle cadences of an earlier century, I know, but it's more like gentle cadences that are spoken by him in a manner that would indicate an earlier century that he was from am I right? Turns out Bella's talking about the Volturi (she says they are the second-greatest threat in her life but doesn't specify the top slot), but Edward dismisses that. He says their sense of time is adjusted for eternal life, and therefore when they say they'll be visiting soon they probably mean “within a decade or so.” Edward says they won't give Bella another thought until she's thirty, which obviously upsets her. This is a girl who looked for wrinkles when she turned eighteen.

The unending fight about turning Bella into a vampire starts up in earnest again. Edward is particularly brusque. Bella asks if he is just going to let her get old and weak and gross.

“That is exactly what I'm going to do. What choice have I? I cannot be without you, but I will not destroy your soul.”

Edward is the worst kind of theologian: he's arrogant about his totally unfounded, and in fact invented, ideas. This soul thing is just his personal theory! He's not basing it on anything! I used to work as a videographer at a church and I once listened to sermon that was based on the presupposition “What if Adam had a pet lamb in the Garden of Eden?” The pastor cited a line in Genesis in which God gives Adam and Eve clothing as he kicks their asses out, and worked his way backwards from there. The big, Shyamalanian twist was: God made Adam's sweater from the pet lamb! Not in the Bible, mind you. The pet lamb itself only existed in this dude's imagination. So rather than base a sermon on a section of the Bible, he used a line in the Bible to invent a new character (He literally named the sheep "Wooly" and referred to it as such throughout) and based a sermon on it. I wish I was joking. Edward is that guy, basically.

So Bella is appalled and asks the obvious question: will you still want to fuck me when I look like your grandmother? Well that's not exactly how she phrases it. And Edward says “Yes, I will want to fuck you when you look like my grandmother.” Well, that's not exactly how he phrases it. When Bella points out that she will die, Edward says he will kill himself when that happens. So romantic.

Bella points out that eventually the Volturi will come a-knocking, and Edward gets all excited talking about the plans he has to deal with them. Exactly what Bella wants to hear, in other words. What a tone-deaf asshole! Does Edward have Aspergers or something? Does he ever want to get laid? Bella decides to leave. Good! Edward asks where she's going and she says “to your house.” To confess her love for Alice? Is that what she's going to do?

“If you're going to bring the Volturi down on us over something as stupid as leaving me human, then your family ought to have a say.”
“A say in what?” he asked, each word distinct.
“My mortality. I'm putting it to a vote.”


Yes! Suck it, Edward! Let's get some democracy up in this bitch! Authority must derive from the consent of the governed, fuckface!

Previously: Catching Up: Airport Sex Edition

1 comment:

Angie said...

haha that conversation between Edward and Bella about the whole "would you want to fuck me when I look like your grandmother?" reminded me of this hilarious video XD

Idk if youve seen it but I laughed pretty hard at it so yea :p

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqvg0C90FhM