BLOGGING ECLIPSE, pt. 27: A Very Long Enragement

When we last left our heroes, Bella was getting ready to fuck Edward's fucking brains out. For real this time! Of course, that isn't going to happen; this chapter is fraught with sexual tension, but it's a prolonged fake-out. Not that I particularly object to being faked-out in this case. The best comparison I can think of is the trailer for CATFISH, which distorts nearly everything about the film in the space of two minutes. It is a movie I wholeheartedly recommend, despite the fact that the trailer writes a million different checks the actual film can't cash. You should really know nothing about CATFISH at all when you see it (and you should see it!) other than the fact that it is a documentary, but trailers are a marketing necessity. Therefore the filmmakers (or someone else at the studio) rather cunningly created a trailer for a film that does not actually exist. I'm not spoiling anything when I tell you that the movie is not at all what you would expect based on the trailer alone. In the end I was happy to be deceived so as not to see where it was headed. And this chapter of Eclipse is a very similar experience. Except for the part where I was happy about where it was headed. Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 20: Compromise

As Bella steels her resolve to fuck Edward, they arrive at his house for the night. He literally takes her in his arms and carries her across the threshold of chez Cullen; if you weren't getting the matrimonial vibes already, S. Meyer pours some of them on a piece of cloth, sneaks up behind you, and holds them to your face. Bella feels the excitement in Edward's lips: “It wasn't like before when I could feel the fear and panic leaking through his control.” I don't know what “fear and panic” leaking through “control” feels like, but that's how it normally feels!? Oy vey, Bella. Edward starts talking about the “hand-me-down” he wanted to give her, asking if she'd like to go to his room to get it.

His bedroom? “Sure,” I agreed, feeling quite devious as I wound my fingers through his.

FEELING QUITE DEVIOUS. That got written, you guys. It is obviously the name of my new band's first EP. Edward heads into his closet, and Bella wanders over to his bed, “plopping down on the edge and then sliding to the center.” So “plopping” is obviously not a word that fits very well with the rest of this erotically charged milieu, huh? Check this out:

I curled up in a ball, my arms wrapped around my knees.

SEXY! That is really the pose you want a girl to adopt before you have sex! I'm not exaggerating the harsh juxtaposition here; Bella goes from coquettishly musing about going to Edward's bedroom to the fetal position in the space of SIX SENTENCES. I've got whiplash over here. Edward comes out of the closet (naturally) and brings his gift over, quickly attaching it to Bella's charm bracelet. When you add the second charm to a bracelet, you've really turned a corner; you're basically a charm collector now. This is the moment I realized Bella wasn't going to get laid tonight, or maybe ever. Start investing in stamps and hummels, girl.

The charm itself is a “brilliant heart-shaped crystal” that sparkles in the lamplight. Of course it is. “I thought it was a good representation,” Edward says. “It's hard and cold.” You know what else is hard and cold, Edward? Oh, nevermind. That's kind of a tacky sounding charm! Not that a miniature wood-carving of a wolf is much better. They cuddle on the bed, and we get, hands-down, the dumbest statue metaphor yet: “It probably felt similar to snuggling with Michelangelo's David, except that this perfect marble creature wrapped his arms around me to pull me closer,” Bella says. REALLY? REALLY. My favorite part is “probably.” Like even Bella can't fully commit to that fucker.

She starts talking about Edward's talk of compromise a few days ago: “I was thinking I would like to apply the same principle to a different situation.” For a second I thought Bella was going to bargain for oral and my head almost exploded, but she actually seems to be going down this road with no real plan of attack. She first tries to get out of marriage; Edward cuts her off immediately, countering that by agreeing to vamp her, he's already conceded his half of that equation. Bella's clearly flustered by this move, as she resorts to a mixed construction metaphor like she's been reading a shitty self-help book: “We're not discussing my... renovations right now. I want to hammer out some other details.”

Bella makes a classic rookie negotiation mistake of asking Edward to clarify his prerequisites. You're running this meeting, Bella! Don't give him the floor like that! He throws in a bunch of new shit: when they get married, all of his money is hers, so she should pay for some college, and he'd also like a few more years of her as a human so she can attend said college. Bella ends up trying to argue her way out of this new hole instead of into Edward's pants. Jesus, you are so bad at this Bella! Somewhere, Alice is hiking and monitoring every turn in this conversation, going “fuck!” every time Bella screws up.

Lucky for Bella, Edward is such a moron he doesn't see her coming, if you'll pardon the expression. She talks about her worries of being a newborn, worried she won't feel the same way she feels now: “I won't want you the same way I do.” He's still totally oblivious even when she says, “There's something I want to do before I'm not human anymore,” so she gets him to promise to give her whatever she wants.

“YES!” -Alice, hiking

Bella moves in for the kill, sort of. “I didn't have the faintest idea how to be seductive,” she says. “I would just have to settle for flushed and self-conscious.” I was going to criticize this, but then I thought back to being a teenage virgin. Flushed and self-conscious would have worked just fine on me. And Edward's gone a lot longer without than I did. But of course, that's part of the problem; Edward's at that stage of ever-perpetuated virginity where it's easier just to go on living than try to make a change. They start kissing, she unbuttons his shirt. He freaks out. “Be reasonable, Bella,” he says. I kind of think she is being reasonable! She's turning Edward's rhetoric about having the full human experience around on him – of course by “full human experience,” Edward probably meant accepting Christ into your heart or something.

Bella doesn't give up, though – she starts taking her shirt off. Atta girl! Edward pins her arms to her sides. Here's where any kind of notion of Edward being an attractive figure erodes for me. He doesn't want her to take her clothes off? Way to give the girl a complex, Edward. Also: physically restraining a woman is a troublesome enough image, but physically stopping her from undressing makes it a nearly perfect visual metaphor for this whole series. Edward has become S. Meyer herself, doing everything she can to keep our clothes on.

Is Edward wrong yet? Presumably, eventually, Edward will stop being right, in our author's eyes, for preventing sexual intercourse, right? Bella is not going to change her mind and decide to live a Morrisey-like life of abstention, we're just waiting for Edward's opposition to crumble. The cracks are finally showing here; this chapter is S. Meyer's first real hint that eventually, these two are going to fuck. But this chapter is simultaneously (and more correctly) a re-affirmation of Edward's fucked-up values, because the only thing that is really going to break his resolve is a wedding.

But not before this moment gets more troubling:

“So you can ask for any stupid, ridiculous thing you want, like getting married, but I'm not allowed to even discuss what I –”
While I was ranting, he pulled my hands together to restrain them in just one of his, and put his other hand over my mouth.
“No.” His face was hard.

WHAT? Troubling visual metaphors aside, one could probably write an entire paper about the battered-woman psychology that leads Bella to use the word “ranting” to describe her own plea. It's amazing how fast S. Meyer can take a scene from “teasing and sexy” to “terrible and ugly.” Bella is struck by a harsh, physically potent wave of rejection, and wants to run from the room. Not a bad idea, this chapter has gone on long enough! Edward realizes he's being an asshole, but has a kind of curious strategy for getting back into Bella's good graces: essentially, he tells her that lots of people think she's hot. She's worried about what YOU think, dumbass!

“Do I have to send a petition around to get you to believe? Shall I tell you whose names would be at the top of the list? You know a few of them, but some might surprise you.”
Suddenly Edward's phone rang. He answered it. “Alice? What? No, don't worry, I'm not going to tell her about your feelings –” he noticed me staring at him open-mouthed “er – your feelings about fall fashion.”
I could hear her screaming curse words as he snapped the phone shut sheepishly.

Bella tries to further articulate her fear that as a vampire, she won't feel precisely the same way for Edward as she does now. She's floundering a bit, and kind of sounds like a stoner or a nervous grad student – she uses the word “intellectually” twice in two paragraphs! But it seems to nearly work on Edward - he hesitates. It's really just another fake out, of course; it's a cock-block aftershock. He rallies, and tells Bella he could kill her (as in, it bears repeating, FUCK HER TO DEATH) and she expresses disbelief. So he reaches up and snaps one of the metal roses off of the bed. Then he crushes it. HE CRUSHES A FLOWER. Metaphorical enough for you? Or am I thinking too much like Georgia O'Keefe?

Bella acknowledges that Edward could, you know, FUCK HER TO DEATH, but she counters that he probably won't FUCK HER TO DEATH, that rather, he has the self control to resist FUCKING HER TO DEATH. “It might not work like that, Bella,” he says. Here we come to the crux of the problem (emphasis on the “come,” thank you). Edward has never had sex with anyone before, so he doesn't know what happens when he ejaculates. Forgive me for being so blunt, but S. Meyer dances around this issues so much I'm going to cut through all of the artifice. The problem is vampire ejaculation. How does it work? Does it work? We don't have a reliable authority on hand. (Speaking of reliable authorities, why hasn't Edward practiced on Alice? I'm sure she'd be down. I'm saying, if Bella's safety is so important to Edward, and Bella's desires are also important to Edward, the least he could have done is practice-fuck someone else by now. It's just common courtesy!)

I gotta give Bella credit, here – she does not relent. She wants it bad. “You don't have to give me any guarantees. If it doesn't work out right, well, then that's that,” she says. In other words: “I don't care if you fuck me to death as long as you fuck me.” That's kind of hot. Are we sure Edward's not gay? I know I've taken some flack for suggesting this kind of thing before, but seriously. She promises marriage, a few human years at college. She gives away the store. It starts to work:

He didn't stop kissing me. I was the one who had to break away, gasping for air. Even then his lips did not leave my skin, they just moved to my throat.

She gets his shirt unbuttoned, but he cuts her off again when she turns to her own. (What does Edward have against seeing Bella's bra?) His reasons for stopping now are calculating and kind of bitchy: he says that if they have sex tonight, if he gives Bella what she wants, she'll “go running off to Carlisle in the morning” to be made into a vampire. Um, fuck you, Edward. Trust your woman a little! He says that they have to get married first, because he is “much less reluctant” to give Bella what she wants (as in vampiredom). All evidence to the contrary! This is a whole chapter about Edward being reluctant to give Bella what she wants! This realpolitik stuff is bullshit anyway – Edward (or S. Meyer) is trying to find a way around saying he (or she) doesn't believe in pre-marital sex.

Bella doesn't even say yes before Edward starts saying they're “engaged.” Yes, this is happening. Do you see what S. Meyer did here? She's used this scene to obscure the religious/moral motives of getting married before having sex. Before Edward was just a religious bigot, now he's a cunning negotiator. The necessity of marriage before sex has been couched in a convoluted rhetorical conceit. We've seen puritanical and cavalier forces at odds with each other throughout this series – until now I thought we were seeing S. Meyer's misgivings writ large. But the forces of sex and evil (Team Alice, basically) were never in this fight; they were included to keep Twilight from looking like an obvious religious tract. The idea that this would ever get sexy has been an illusion all along. Twilight isn't a wolf in sheep's clothing, it's a sheep in wolf's clothing.

Somewhere, in the woods, Alice vomits in disgust.