BLOGGING ECLIPSE, pt. 28: Idiot Wind

The Biterion Collection Movie Club is shaping up nicely! I'm still integrating some comments into the conversation, but check it out here. Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 21: Trails

Bella wakes, unfucked, and notes the lousy weather outside (symbolism). One would think this was the day of the battle, but it's still another day away. (We were moving at a pretty good clip for a while there, but we've screeched to a halt. And there's still a hundred pages of this book! Either S. Meyer is really going to make a meal out of this battle or we're in for a motherfucker of a denouement.) Edward leaves so Bella can get dressed, and she tries to sort out how she got engaged last night. In any other book, waking up with a ring on your finger would at least mean you'd had some fun the night before, but not here. Even when she takes the ring off, Bella's hand feels heavy. Maybe not so much with the commitment and the monogamy for this one, eh?

Bella and Edward agree not to tell anyone, and the Cullens return from their trip. They all seem very “business like” except for Alice, who is in a uniquely pissy mood. She tells Edward that he should probably pack for cold weather – she can't be sure, since Jacob is involved in the hiking trip – and practically spits at Bella to “wear a jacket, cunt.” (Eventually we'll need to address the fact that Alice should be able to see what the weather is gong to be like in other places around Forks, but we'll worry about that later, when this plot ceases to make sense entirely.) Edward and Bella go to the garage where the Cullens keep a bunch of unused camping gear, and Alice follows them in. Bella calls Jacob to tell him they'll be leaving soon, Billy answers. We haven't heard much from Billy lately – S. Meyer hasn't needed a vaguely hostile noble savage or some handicapped comic relief, so he hasn't been around. But he's really nice on the phone, telling Bella he wished he could go fight with the wolves. “Being an old man is a hardship, Bella,” he says. Awwwww. Billy is nice, Alice is mean, left is black, white is down! I have a bad feeling about this battle.

When Bella hangs up she can see that Edward and Alice are having a kind of telepathic argument. Alice asks to speak to Bella alone, and Edward protests. “This is a female thing,” Alice says. Well, now you have my attention! Edward leaves, Alice goes and sits on the hood of her Porsche. Bella leans up against her, and Alice curls into Bella's side (!!!). What is about to happen, you guys?

“What's wrong, Alice?”
“Don't you love me?” she asked.

Don't get your hopes up! In the margins I wrote “ahhhhhh!” but it turns out that Alice is just pissed off she's not invited to the wedding. Sigh. Bella and Edward resolved to go to Vegas to make it official, so naturally Alice found out about the whole engagement thing. Bella tells Alice she can come too, but that doesn't satisfy her.

She stared at me with pleading eyes, her long black eyebrows slanting up in the middle and pulling together, her lips trembling at the corners. It was a heart-breaking expression.
“Please, please, please,” she whispered. “Please, Bella, please – if you really love me... Please let me do your wedding.”

Alice's manipulation of Bella plays as a parallel version of the last scene with Edward. Both of them are taking advantage of our narrator, but Alice's methods and motives are far less reprehensible. Edward's trying to obey his convoluted moral code on the sly, couching his religious convictions in realpolitik negotiation. Alice just wants to throw a party, and she's transparent with her manipulation. Even Bella recognizes that she's being played by Alice – she later calls her “totally unscrupulous,” a label I imagine Alice would like – but she doesn't see that with Edward. She defends the idea of going to Vegas by saying that Edward is “trying to make me happy.” He's actually just trying to appease you, ever so slightly, now that he has what he wants, (which by the way, is your intact virginity before holy matrimony, Bella!). Alice is deliberately making you miserable, but at least she's going about it honorably. It's what makes this scene cute and fun to read, unlike that last fucking chapter. Obviously Bella ends up agreeing to let Alice be her wedding planner (“Suck my dick, J. Lo!”-Alice Cullen).

Alice then asks to see the ring, but Bella's not wearing it. Alice is taken aback, like maybe she missed a breakup somewhere back there: “You mean we could have been having sex on the hood of my car all this time?” Edward has returned by then, and tells Alice that Bella “has issues” with jewelry. “What's one more diamond?” Alice says.

“Well, I guess the ring has lots of diamonds, but my point is that he's already got one on –”
“Enough, Alice!” Edward cut her off suddenly.

So the crystal on Bella's wrist is apparently a gigantic diamond, like something out of a heist movie. Okay, sure. Fine, whatever. I mean, why is this even coming up now? But whatever. Alice realizes she should shut the fuck up about it before Bella catches on (because that was apparently not enough to allow Bella to catch on) and warns them again about the terrible weather coming. It sure seems like we're hearing a lot about this bad weather. Do you think it's going to be important? Probably not, right?

Edward and Bella head to the woods, and then Bella starts leaving the false trail. Edward walks parallel to her, “twenty yards away.” This scent science is getting even dumber – Bella is leaving her scent by touching rocks and trees, and that's going to be strong enough that it's okay for Edward to be 20 yards away the whole time? As long as he doesn't run his fingers along anything? Even Bella seems to think this doesn't make any sense – she starts running her fingers through her hair and leaving the loose strands around. "A" for effort, Bella. As they reach the clearing, Bella trips and cuts her hand. Edward comes over to help her and there's a big deal made of the fact that he's okay around her blood. Bella thinks back to the party, when he'd had to hold his breath around her. That was the last time Bella's bled around him? Bella, whose clumsiness is the most well-defined part of her character? Anyway, Edward says her life is too important to him now or something equally stupid. Bella rubs her bloody hand on the rocks, noting that it will probably drive the newborns crazy and Jasper will be pleased. Either that or Jasper will go nuts like he did LAST TIME he was around your blood, you idiot! They reach the clearing; “Let's go camping!” Edward says. Yay, camping!

See, what's a little bad weather among friends?

Jacob shows up – steps out from behind some trees, actually. Way to not seem like a rapist, Jacob! It's his turn to take Bella through the woods to a predetermined place where Edward will be waiting. Pay attention now, because this is complicated. And stupid.

This whole excursion with Jacob is happening, we are meant to understand, in order to disguise Bella's scent. Okay. And apparently it's going to take a few hours. Okay! The false trail has been laid, so now Bella has to be spirited HOURS AWAY from the trail and the battlefield, to what turns out to be THE TOP OF A MOUNTAIN. OKAY. Why not just take her back to her bedroom in Forks? How much further away is it? What is going on with this plan? It would be ridiculous under normal circumstances, but everyone also keeps talking about how a terrible storm is coming, too. As he sets off with Bella in his arms, Jacob notes the absence of wildlife. “It takes a lot to silence the forest this way,” he says. So maybe we should reconsider camping on a mountaintop, guys!

Jacob jumps from rock to rock while holding Bella – she likens him to a mountain goat. Nice. Jacob notices the charm next to his wolf-carving, and says it figures that Edward would give her “a rock.” Bella again wonders if this charm could possibly be a diamond, but her train of thought gets derailed before she can conclude one way or another. I love that we've got a mystery subplot going on. IS IT A DIAMOND OR ISN'T IT? WHEN WILL WE KNOW?

I'd kind of forgotten that Jacob was an evil rape-kisser, but he brings it up again. Why is he always reminding us how evil he is? Maybe he's been ordered to talk about it every few chapters like how sex offenders have to go door to door. Bella's getting better and more accurate with her put downs – she says she didn't think of it as a kiss, that it was “more of an assault.” Jacob goes on anyway to tell Bella she should be playing the field more. “You know, like the sort of fields parceled out to indigenous peoples by the US Government to apologize for past instances of systematic extermination,” he says (OK, he doesn't). Something kind of weird happens when Jacob brings up the fact that she seems to like him better as a wolf.

“I think it's easier for you to be around me when I'm not human, because you don't have to pretend that you're not attracted to me.”

My mouth fell open with a little popping sound.

Bella neither confirms nor denies Jacob's theory, neither to him nor to us. Why? Is Bella supposed to be attracted to Jacob? When was that supposed to have become true? I feel like S. Meyer intended for Bella to sort of be romantically interested in Jacob all along but just forgot to write about it. The films, incidentally, have the same problem, only worse. Then Jacob says this:

“It's possible to love more than one person at a time, Bella. I've seen it in action.”

On the internet, right Jacob? Or have you been spying on Alice and Jasper and their friends again? JEEZ, how the hell did S. Meyer intend that to sound? Before Bella has a chance to ask Jacob which end of her he had dibs on, they start talking werewolf mechanics again. I thought we were done learning wolf facts, but I guess not. Bella brings up that Jacob is second-in-command, and they have a long, boring discussion of lineage. Bella realizes that Jacob should technically be the leader of the wolfpack and assumes Sam wouldn't step aside. Turns out instead that Jacob didn't want the title! Technically that would have made him Chief of the Quileutes, and it was too much power for him or something. But there has to be at least one highlander, so Sam stayed in charge. Jacob says he's comfortable being a wolf now, but at first it felt like “being drafted into a war you didn't know existed.” It's hard not to feel bad for Jacob a little. I mean, the metaphor only barely works, because usually draftees are acutely aware of the war they are getting drafted into, but I'm saying if you ignore that part. Oh, who am I kidding? No sympathy for the devil.

Jacob and Bella reach the camp site – Edward has a tent set up against a cliff face. The sky is angry and black. Edward says the tent is secure – he “all but welded it to the rock.” Don't you think the first step should be reconsidering the choice of camp site? Or reconsidering the IDEA OF the camp site? This is the dumbest chapter in the book, and that is saying something.