BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 14: Killing Yourself To Live

In the comments last time, Kim articulated the theory that S. Meyer is just making this "as crazy as possible." Like now that we've gone off the deep end with the pregnancy, we might as well dig a hole in the bottom of the pool and see if we can get to China, you know? I think this is probably correct. There's an episode in the fifth season of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia in which Frank Reynolds (Danny Devito) declares his intentions to have sex with the recently widowed sister of his dead wife. "I don't know how many years on this earth I got left," he says. "I'm gonna get real weird with it." Sub in "years" for "pages" and I think we've got S. Meyer's governing philosophy right now.

Chapter 10: Why Didn't I Just Walk Away? Oh Right, Because I'm An Idiot.

Okay Jacob, we get it with the long chapter titles. Enough.

So, much like Bella, Jacob has a lot of Show Don't Tell problems with his narrating: "I felt like... I was in some Goth version of a bad sitcom," he says. He decides to talk to Bella but not to actually offer himself up as a sperm donor just yet, which strikes me as the correct strategic decision. As he and Edward walk back to the house, he wonders if the Cullens were able to hear them making their, uh, gentleman's agreement. “No one looked disgusted or outraged,” Jacob says upon his entrance, concluding that they must have been out of (vampire) earshot. Clearly you don't know Alice well enough, Jacob.

“I find nothing wrong with this plan. Would it be okay if I watched?”-Alice Cullen

Edward asks his family to give Jacob and Bella some alone time, and Rosalie protests. “Over my pile of ashes,” she says. Ha ha ha. Quite the wit you (suddenly) are, Rose. But seriously, GTFO. Bella reassures her. “Jake's not going to hurt us,” she says. Us? When no one's around does Bella rub her stomach and hiss “My preciousssssss”? Edward mentions that he and Carlisle will be within sight of Rosalie the whole time, and Bella gets upset at Edward's intimation that he is the one to be feared. Bella's pity for Edward pisses Jacob off. Man, there's a whole lot of anguish going around right now, huh?

The girl was a classic martyr. She'd totally been born in the wrong century. She should have lived back when she could have gotten herself fed to some lions for a good cause.

I don't feel like Jacob would have that reference to Christian persecution at-the-ready. I'm not saying Jacob Black is stupid, but he lost his summer internship at the M&M factory because he threw out all the Ws. Anyway, everybody leaves and Jacob and Bella get down to it. Talking, I mean. Jacob gives Bella the standard “you're a dipshit” for a few minutes. Good.

“I told you--,” I started to say.
“Did you know that 'I told you so' has a brother, Jacob?” she asked, cutting me off. “His name is 'Shut the hell up.'”
“Good one.”
She grinned at me. Her skin stretched tight over the bones. “I can't take credit-- I got it off a rerun of The Simpsons.”

BULLSHIT. There's no way a joke that tepid came from The Simpsons. Unless it was one of the recent seasons. I find it hard to believe S. Meyer has ever watched an episode of The Simpsons in her life, anyway. Of course, lack of experience never stops her from trotting out heroin metaphors: Jacob complains about spending more time with Bella, saying that “like a junkie with a limited supply, the day of reckoning was coming for me. The more hits I took now, the harder it would be when my supply ran out.” What's happening in this simile, exactly? Jacob the hypothetical heroin addict is reaching a day of reckoning, eh? Is he going to jail, like a 25th Hour situation? Because I'm pretty sure heroin finds its way in there. Or is Bella maybe the heroin itself, reaching its expiration date? Does heroin have an expiration date? Or is Bella the stash house?

Anyway, Bella tries to reassure Jacob. “How could I have lived through all that I've lived through and not believe in magic by this point?” she asks. When Jacob presses her on this point, as in, "what the fuck are you talking about," she actually brings up A Midsummer Night's Dream by name. She thinks Jacob will imprint someday, and “then all of this will make sense.” What's ironic is that at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, everything doesn't make sense. Some people fall in love, some people fall out of love, and two of the main characters spend the end of the play debating about whether or not magic or coincidence caused the preceding events to occur (without coming to an acceptable conclusion). It ends vaguely, and Puck gives a final soliloquy that deliberately undermines the play you have just seen, as well as the notion of staged drama in general. This kind of depth is completely absent from Twilight, which is one of the many reasons S. Meyer really shouldn't be inviting the comparison. BUT ANYWAY, Jacob gets angry at Bella for saying that. “Tell me what the point was then, Bella!” he says. “What was the point of me loving you?” Hmmm, good questions!

“So what was the point of your twisted love story, in the end? If there is any sense, please clue me, Bella, because I don't see it.”

OH GOD AMEN JACOB. “I don't know yet, Jake,” Bella says. Is that her or S. Meyer speaking?

“I don't know yet, Jake. I'm kind of flailing around here. I'm trying lots of fucked-up shit, but any kind of momentum the other three books built up died a couple hundred pages ago. We're on a sailboat in dead water, just going down endless digressive paths like Marlow on the deck of the Nellie, searching for meaning in darkness and fucking madness.”

Okay, that's not what she says. “I just... feel... that this is all going somewhere good, hard to see as it is now. I guess you could call it faith.” Oh, of course. Jacob is bugged by Bella's apparent disregard for her own life, but as she goes on it becomes clear she is planning on getting vamped at the last possible second. Which is probably exactly what's going to happen, but it doesn't fit with the Midsummer motif very well. Bella points out to Jacob that Edward, Emmett, Rose and Esme were all close to death at the time of their transformation. That, of course, was not the case for Alice and Jasper, which is another possible explanation for why they are so much foxier and generally cooler than the rest of the family.

Jacob maintains that Bella's course of action is reckless, and points out that Edward will get himself killed if anything goes wrong with her. There was a time when pointing that out would sway Bella in an instant. And sure, we made fun of Bella for her insane, sometimes morally reprehensible dedication to Edward back then, but, uh, what happened to her insane, morally reprehensible dedication to Edward? It's gone! Or it has almost entirely transfered over to her unborn child, which Bella weirdly insists is a boy, seemingly because she hopes to make another Edward. She mentions the baby's sex in passing and Jacob asks about it. "The ultrasound wouldn't work," Bella says. "The membrane around the baby is too hard--like their skin." This birth is going to ROUGH. "But I always see a little boy in my head," Bella continues, not at all creepily.

Jacob continues to question the plot contrivances that have brought us here, playing the now-nearly-constant role of S. Meyer's anthropomorphic guilty conscience:

"I though the whole point was that you wanted your vampire more than anything. And now you're just giving him up? That doesn't make any sense."

How am I supposed to blog about this if Jacob is doing it for me? Of course, Bella doesn't have a compelling answer. She didn't want a baby, but now that she is having one, she wants one. And she specifically wants this monster baby, which should probably signal to Jacob to not press the surrogate thing. But they're interrupted by Bella grabbing her stomach in pain. When she lifts her sweatshirt, Jacob sees that her stomach is covered in huge bruises from the baby's kicks. Everything else aside, that's pretty cool. Sorry guys, but I used to listen to a lot of Alkaline Trio and this is hitting all of my gothic pressure points.

Jacob ignores the warning signs, though, and asks Bella what she would do if this wasn't a "one (cum)shot deal." Bella misinterprets, and here's a very curious section that follows.

"Oh. Ugh. Please, Jacob. You think I should kill my baby and replace it with some generic substitute? Artificial insemination?" She was mad now.

I thought Bella was a modern woman. She's anti-artificial insemination now? I'll give Bella this much: she is being more ideologically coherent than most pro-lifers. I've long complained, when debating issues like stem cell research, that those who oppose abortion should also oppose in vitro fertilization. That's the argument put forth by Sam Harris in his great, short book, Letter To A Christian Nation. He points out that the process of in vitro actually creates and destroys several embryos; if you believe that life begins at conception, several "babies" die in order for one to be born. Of course, Harris's point is that pro-lifers DON'T oppose artificial insemination. He is trying to rhetorically box them in. And yet, this is the second time in two days I have encountered a conservative who is actively against artificial insemination (Bella and some random asshole on Facebook). (The counterargument to those rare folks is, first, a number of Bible passages that support the life of the mother over a child and/or imply that life does not begin at conception, and second, the fact that about 50% of all pregnancies terminate spontaneously. Which, to paraphrase Harris, makes God the most prolific abortionist in town.)

And yet conservatives who oppose artificial insemination don't do so out of ideological coherence. Make no mistake, it comes from an anti-feminist place. Artificial insemination leads to single mothers of the worst kind: the empowered ones. Nothing erodes the sanctity of the family more than an empowered woman, you know?

Once again we must invoke the bizarre fact that S. Meyer claims to have studied feminism. Her writing flies in the face of this, but there you are. Of course, she studied feminism at Brigham Young University, which is like studying evolutionary biology at Trinity Bible College. Or studying child-labor law in a Chinese sneaker factory. If they even offer classes.