TWILIGHT IN FORKS: There But For The Grace Of God Go Ay Caramba!

WHAT ON EARTH. I can't believe it has taken me this long to watch this "documentary," but I'm kind of glad I waited. Because if I'd seen it earlier I might have STOPPED THIS BLOG IMMEDIATELY AND RUN AWAY FROM EVERYTHING TWILIGHT-RELATED FOREVER. Because HOLY SHIT: this thing is INSANE.

Twilight In Forks is a Summit Entertainment-produced "documentary" about… well, I actually am not even sure. Basically it is long clips of interviews with fans and some residents of the actual town of Forks, WA spliced awkwardly with jazzily edited footage of trees. There is no narrator nor any central figure. There are occasional title cards with words like "people" and "fans" which are apparently supposed to give us some measure of organizational comfort, but really it's anarchy in there. We veer back and forth between interviews with the "fans," which includes a disconcerting number of adults, and at the end of the movie we get a long history lesson about the Quileutes from two Native Americans who might be Quileutes but don't seem to remember the history of their own people.

We hear about how economically depressed Forks was before the release of the Twilight books (Drinking Game Suggestion: Drink every time someone refers to "this economy") and get a vague sense that things are on the rebound (because two Twilight gift shops opened up?). We get the aforementioned Drunk History lesson about the Quileutes. And we meet a rogues' gallery of total psychopaths. Also: since this is a Summit Entertainment production, you'd think they'd be able to use some footage from the Twilight film instead of faking it, America's Most Wanted-style.

Anyway, there is almost no way to convey to you the sheer, unadulterated nuttiness of this film, except for maybe just typing LALALALAYAYAYAYAJAJAJAJA for fifty paragraphs or so. But I'd rather just show you the kind of thing people say in this fucker. You've got to understand that despite the jazzy interludes, this documentary is very badly edited; there are some cuts that actually caused me physical pain. But for the most part it's the lack of editing that's the problem. These people stand in front of the camera and talk for minutes on end, with no respite from the shit pouring out of their mouths. Nowhere to hide. It's almost like Errol Morris directed this, but obviously he didn't. So: what follows under each screen cap is an unedited transcript of some of the actual words I heard people say when I watched this film. Remember, I am writing this, therefore I did not kill myself when I heard these words. You can (probably) withstand it too. [Note: my punctuation represents a "best guess." Sometimes the syntax is so convoluted these people could mean almost anything.]

"I have a friend, actually it's a friend of my folks, and his dad always kept a journal, and so I would say he would have been about the same age as my grandfather, and this, um, gentleman was looking through his dad's journal, and in the journal it said out at the Quileute, they were gonna court two young ladies, and their last names were "Cullen." So they had a ranch out at the Quileute prairie, which is really quite amazing. They quit farming out there, because they said the ground wasn't good, and they were having trouble making money and everything, but there really is a Cullen connection to Forks, which is a little bit eerie. The house that they've picked for the Cullen house in Forks was indeed owned by a doctor, he worked at Forks hospital, he had four children, and one of them was adopted."

"I'd always been a hobbyist musician and songwriter you just kinda for fun, and you know, my wife suggested to me one day, you know, why don't you write a song about Twilight, and I thought well, that's kind of a good idea. I could make it cool-sounding without being overtly Twilight."

"Bella's house, I know it really does have yellow cupboards in it, and the upstairs bedroom is blue. I know it's been broken into by fans to see what color the cupboards were and that's how we know."

[I have no idea what people mean by "Bella's house" - there is a bed and breakfast in Forks that has been officially designated as "the Cullen house," and there is a person interviewed in the movie who supposedly bears a resemblance to Bella, but it's unclear if they mean that girl's house or some other machination of the Forks chamber of commerce, which is behind the bed and breakfast and lots of other dumb shit.]

"The Twilight fan base is still going to be very powerful 40, 50, 60 years from now."

"It gives you hope, like it's what could be; love, life, something to look forward to, at least for my daughters."

"For my wife and I, you know, she's noticed, she said to me after I read the books, I've noticed a change in the way you talk to me and treat me. And my daughter's been the biggest change. As girls grow up, they spread away from their fathers, there's not much in common. Well, with us, they've brought us together, it's actually driven us closer. And it's, we have something in common, we talk about it, we go shopping for things. And I buy her all [mumbles] Twilight stuff. And she's the reason my hair is blonde. I'm naturally dark brown, and in February I went to get a haircut from my sister, and I told Nina, my daughter, that she could do anything she wanted to my hair, and she said dad I want to see you blonde like Carlisle. So, okay. And it's been this way since February and I'm going to keep it until I get tired of it, you know, other people have said when are you gonna get rid of this? I like it so I'm gonna keep it. In fact I've won a costume contest at the DVD release party in South Center Mall. As Carlisle. So."

I hope you read that last one good and hard, because WHAT? I mean, HUH-AH-WHAT-NOW? It's the little details that really make it work. Daughters "spread" away from their fathers? Twilight has "driven" them closer? The same guy earlier sums up the way Twilight has changed his life as: "I hang out with a bunch of teen girls now." For a split second, you almost see the recognition dawn on him, but he pushes it away.

ANYWAY, all of the above quotes are only from the first third of the movie. You really need to see this thing to even believe the rest of it. We didn't even get to "Jacob Black's Real Grandfather" or that first lady's conspiracy theory that Stephenie Meyer is LYING about having never visited Forks before she wrote Twilight (half of the people in this movie seem genuinely convinced that Twilight is REAL, and the other half are very obviously playing along, which makes it seem occasionally disturbing and exploitive), or the guy who moved his whole family to the economically depressed town of Forks, WA just because he liked the books so much. We didn't get to this guy and his impassioned defense of Stephenie Meyer's writing skills:

WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING WITH THAT WHITE BOARD?!

On the 500 Days Of Summer Scale, this movie ranks as "better than 500 Days of Summer." My only real complaint was that I feel like I didn't get enough insanity; this movie is only an hour and fifteen minutes, and I feel like it should be closer to fifteen hours. I want to put that Carlisle impersonator in a room and make him talk until he UNDERSTANDS. Which is why the good news is, there's a sequel coming out along with Eclipse this weekend. Perfect.

Previous entries can be found in the directory.