BLOGGING ECLIPSE pt. 16: I Will Bury You In Time

Previous entries can be found in the directory (updated 9/6).

Chapter 12: Time

Bella, Edward and Alice walk to the parking lot after school, and Alice tries to very gently inform Bella that the Cullens are throwing her a graduation party. “You're such a bitch I figured I'd tread lightly,” Alice laughs, her voice all silver and wind-chimey and shit. Alice wrings a lot of jokes out of her fortune-telling abilities; the Cullens are probably sick of her Tight Five but Bella's a fresh audience.

“By the way, I love my gift. You shouldn't have.”
“Alice, I didn't!”
“Oh, I know that. But you will.”

Ha ha ha. Tip your waitresses! (“So how you doin'? Where are ya from?”-Alice Cullen) Bella complains about getting such advance notice – now she'll have to dread the party for a few weeks. At which point Alice slaps her upside the head and says “You so crazy, Bella!” Graduation is in “exactly one week.”

Exactly one week!? Graduation isn't on the weekend? Also, how would Bella not know this? Doesn't she have any final assignments? A term paper? No, of course not. Forks High is the worst fucking school in America. They need this guy to save a few of the trouble kids with promise:

Mike Newton is basically Forks High's Namond Brice. But who will save him?

So okay, it's good that we're not going to drag this graduation thing out for too long. I admire the current trend of TV shows resisting the urge to make themselves into self-perpetuating mechanisms where the end of every episode is a reset button and nothing ever changes from season to season. I just finished Dexter season 4 (no spoilers) and it ends with a serious game-changing twist. Weeds has made a habit of doing that every year – ending each season with “where the hell could they go from here?” and then actually making good on that promise, radically altering the tone and content of the show from year to year. That impulse has even trickled down to network shows. I haven't caught up with The Office, but how awful would it be if Jim and Pam still hadn't gotten together? If The Office had come out in 1996 that would probably have been the case. It never happened for Tim Taylor and Wilson on Home Improvement after all of those years of “Will they or won't they?”

Bella's head spins – she's put off worrying about how to separate herself from her parents and her human life for so long that she doesn't have time to worry about it anymore, she just has to DO IT. She zones out with worry in the car while Alice jabbers away, but once they drop her (Alice) at home, Edward asks what's going on. It's generally implied that as Bella's “best friend” Alice is just as good at reading her as Edward, which makes her behavior in the car seem strange and insensitive. I'm interpreting it to mean that Alice is taking a day to not give a fuck about Bella's problems. (“Honestly, this whole family can be such a buzzkill, dude. Sometimes Jazz and I need to just lock the door, put on some some Grateful Dead bootlegs, smoke a few bowls and just shut out all those vibes.”-Alice Cullen) Bella tells Edward how she feels, and he immediately offers to delay the transformation. Bella (obviously) doesn't think that's a good idea. She enumerates the threats on her life: “Victoria, Jane, Caius, whoever was in my room, Venom, Sandman, Harry...”

Edward tells her that's all the more reason not to do it. How counter-intuitive! Does Edward write for Slate now? He says he wants her to have a choice. “We've all struggled, trying to reconcile ourselves with something we we had no control over,” he says. Isn't it easier to regret something you do have control over? If becoming immortal is such an agonizing decision (it isn't, but you know) wouldn't it be better if you felt like you had no choice? What is there to regret then? What is Edward struggling over? “I kind of wish I'd died of the flu at age seventeen.” He would wish that, wouldn't he? Bella will always have to take a backseat to Jesus. (“No regrets. God is dead.”-Alice's lower-back tattoo translated from Japanese)

Bella moves on – she can't remember what she'd been planning to buy Alice as a graduation gift. (So that wasn't just a joke?) S. Meyer continues to deftly avoid mentioning band names. Just kidding, she's deft like a virgin at an orgy.

“It looked like you were getting us both concert tickets -”
“That's right!” I was so relieved, I almost smiled. “The concert in Tacoma. I saw an ad in the paper last week, and I thought it would be something you'd like, since you said it was a good CD.”

I can only imagine what awful noise Edward and Bella are going to drag Alice to.

“Linkin Park and Nickelback with special guest Fred Durst? Oh, you shouldn't have. I mean, really. YOU LITERALLY SHOULDN'T HAVE.”-Alice Cullen

I can't wait for the concert scene. “The band played the title track from their album that we liked and I concentrated on the pulsing lightshow while they transitioned to another song that the audience reacted to because it was the single which played all the time on our favorite radio station.” It's going to be epic.

One of the most irritating things about New Moon was the way so many plot developments were driven by misunderstanding. One has to wonder why, or if, Bella and Edward are right together since they never seem to be on the same page. More misunderstandings come to the surface and are cleared up here, but there's always more! The rift between these two is like something out of a Roland Emmerich movie. There's what's (maybe) supposed to be a big reveal when Bella asks Edward why he's so reluctant to vamp her. She thinks he's afraid he won't like her after-the-fang (ex post fango?) but he confesses that rather he wants her to be a vampire SO BAD, it feels too “selfish.” Are you kidding me? Religion is the worst thing ever. “This feels good, so it must be bad.” Bella is nonetheless touched.

If he really wanted me, I could get through the rest...somehow. Selfish suddenly seemed like a beautiful word.

Bella's self-worth is too indexed to Edward's desires. And don't tell me Bella's going to get all Ayn Rand-y on us now. Maybe that would be good for her, actually.

Edward asks Bella why she doesn't want to marry him. This again? Haven't we been over why no one's motivation makes any sense whatsoever? Edward and Bella need to read this blog. They are both going to be immortal vampires living largely off the grid – you can't tell me that any of the Cullens are carrying around legit forms of ID. A marriage certificate is just begging for a joint investigation from the IRS and INS. And we all know what happens when multiple federal agencies get together. David Koresh knows what I'm talking about.

But that doesn't make Bella's reasoning any less petty and retarded:

“I'm not that girl, Edward. The one who gets married right out of high school like some small-town hick who got knocked up by her boyfriend. Do you know what people would think?”

Bella, you are LITERALLY getting super powers. If Mike Newton's mom looks at you sideways, you can come back to her store when she's closing up alone and mail one of her body parts to each continent!

Edward counters that he always was “that boy” and he tells a Froggie Went A-Courtin'-style tale of how he would have “endeavored to secure [her] hand” if he'd met her back in his day, and it gets Bella so hot she actually has a little historical fantasy.

I saw myself in a long skirt and a high-necked lace blouse with my hair piled up on my head. I saw Edward looking dashing in a light suit with a bouquet or wildflowers in his hand, sitting beside me on a porch swing.

Shudder. Why is Edward holding flowers in this fantasy? Are they getting married while sitting on the porch swing? Bella snaps out of it and uses a line of reasoning I've tried before – if the Cullens are supposed to keep up with the times, shouldn't Edward drop it with the old-timey values? (Also, he ceased being human in 1918. Gatsby was written 7 years later. S. Meyer's grasp of the moral values of early 20th century America could use some tuning up. Does she think we all used oil lamps until WWII?) Edward is relieved that Bella isn't “more eager for immortality than just [him]” - I'm beginning to think insecurity is the only thing these two have in common. But he points out that Bella's current modern values are fleeting. “So why should the transitory customs of one local culture affect the decision so much?” EXACTLY, YOU MR. DARCY WANNABE MOTHERFUCKER. Marriage itself is a transitory custom! Fucking romantic love is a transitory custom!

A day or two later Bella picks up a newspaper. GASP. But don't worry, she doesn't suddenly give a fuck about Haiti, she's just looking for the ad for that Hoobastank/3 Doors Down concert. But her eye is caught by the headline (“Seattle Terrorized By Slayings”) of the most badly written fake newspaper article in the history of literature. Has S. Meyer ever read a newspaper? I mean, let's start with basic inverted-pyramid journalism 101.

I apologize in advance for anyone who is bored to death by the next section.

You will be missed, and I will pay for memorial services.

Your first sentence should get as much of the who/what/when as possible. At the very least that stuff should be in your first paragraph. SO:

It's been less than a decade since the city of Seattle was the hunting ground for the most prolific serial killer in U.S. History. Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, was convicted of the murders of 48 women.

OK. Is this a story about Gary Ridgway? It isn't? Well then what the fuck are we doing? We're going to start with the history lesson to prove you did some research? We need THIS GUY:

That's multiple Wire references in a single post. I think it's my brain's defense mechanism – start thinking about things that are particularly well written when I'm confronted with something particularly shitty. This “article” doesn't even get to the objective facts of the current case until the third paragraph. We learn that there have been at least 39 homicides so far. There's also an allusion to gang activity. But then we quickly devolve again into what reads like the Wikipedia page for “serial killers.”

From Jack the Ripper to Ted Bundy, the targets of serial killers are usually connected by similarities in age, gender, race, or a combination of the three.

I kept expecting to read “Webster's dictionary defines 'homicide' as...” The killings in Seattle, it is noted, seem to be completely random. And then S. Meyer seems to forget she was even trying to write a fake article, unless the by-line credits this article to “Bella's Swan's subconscious.” The resemblance is uncanny, otherwise.

The selection appears to be random. The motive seems to be killing for no other reason than to kill.
So why even consider the idea of a serial killer?

That last sentence is its own paragraph! What? Henry Mencken just rolled in his grave so hard he's technically buried in China now. Finally we get to some more information about the case – a real editor would slash the first eight paragraphs of this article, not that S. Meyer has a lot of experience with real editors – and our author tries to sneak a few too many details in. I know that a fake article is a great way to get some exposition out of the way fast, but we musn't be greedy. How would a reporter (and clearly a shitty one) know, for instance, that the crime scenes are “perfectly clean of evidence”? Why would the police release that kind of information? Later, a description of the ways victims have disappeared gets far too ridiculous:

30-year-old amateur boxer Robert Walsh entered a movie theater with a date; a few minutes into the movie the woman realized that he was not in his seat. His body was found only three hours later when firefighters were called to the scene of a burning trash Dumpster, twenty miles away.

So David Blaine is doing this, then? Is that the twist? Here's the kicker:

Only one conclusion is indisputable: something hideous is stalking Seattle.

That's right: the Pulitzer prize committee! “It took me three tries to read the last sentence,” Bella says. “Because it was the dumbest writing ever.”