BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 22: From Here To Infirmary

When we last left the gang, Bella was vomiting a “fountain of blood.” Yowza! The chapter that follows is the fantastically grotesque birth scene, which is full of morbid and, for once, well-rendered imagery. It's vivid and energetic—the best thing S. Meyer has written by far—and I am absolutely certain this is the best version of it we will ever get. Sorry, but there is no way the film will come anywhere close to this fucking insanity; no one will vomit a fountain of blood, we won't have to look at Bella's twisted, bruised, naked body convulsing on a table. And that's too bad, really! This shit is bananas! Can Bill Condon hire like, Dario Argento or Roman Polanski as his second unit director? You have to admit, Polanski would be an appropriate uh, thematic choice. But anyway, enjoy this one. I did.

Chapter 18: There Are No Words For This

Bella—who is “streaming with red”—starts twitching around in Rosalie's arms. Her face is blank, and Jacob can hear her bones snapping, crackling, and popping and she thrashes and her baby bounces around inside her like a wrecking ball. Rosalie and Edward shoot up the stairs screaming for Alice to get Carlisle on the phone, and Jacob follows. There's a mini-operating room set up in Carlisle's office, and when Jacob gets there Bella's naked body is flopping around like “a fish on the sand” under sickeningly bright light. Fuck yes, right?

When Edward shouts that the baby is suffocating, Bella gets lucid enough to scream. “Get him OUT!” she shrieks, “Do it NOW!” Well, finally! The greatest detail is that Jacob sees the blood vessels in Bella's eyes burst as she screams. Holy shit, right? Her next scream is muffled by another explosion of blood from her mouth. Alice somewhat comically darts in to attach a Blue Tooth to Rosalie's ear and then bails; Alice won't even handle the PHONE CALL? (“I can't deal with this shit right now, you talk to him. I'll be in my room. Peace.”-Alice Cullen) It's particularly ridiculous because even though we are meant to assume it is Carlisle on the line, he never comes into play; in a moment the phone is smashed by accident before we ever hear what the good doctor is saying. Whatever! Just because this is the best thing S. Meyer has written still doesn't mean it is like, objectively good.


Jacob notes that Bella's skin is “more purple and black than white” as Rosalie raises a scalpel. Didn't we already cover that a scalpel isn't getting through Bella's stomach (the fetus is encased in a vampire-like rock hard shell)? But Rosalie stupidly slashes Bella's gut anyway, and then is amazingly too distracted and tempted by Bella's spurting blood to remember what's happening. Fucking vampires, huh? To be fair: imagine being really thirsty and coming across a water fountain. Of really good beer (or heroin or whatever stupid metaphor we were last given). Spurting out of a pregnant lady. Wait, don't.

As Rosalie moves to attack Bella, Jacob throws himself at her. Rosalie stabs him with the scalpel, he smashes his palm into her face and then kicks her in the stomach so hard he sends her flying out of the room, busting up the doorframe; Alice re-appears and catches Rosalie by the throat and drags her away.

Let's recap for a second: so far we've got blood coming out of Bella's mouth, bones being broken into splinters, blood spurting from an enormous and bruised pregnant stomach, scalpels being stabbed into werewolves, minor structural damage. I understand that a great many parents fear psychological damage to infants stemming from traumatic births (this is why Scientologists supposedly do the whole “silent birth” thing and normal people just try to have like, relatively positive energy in the room), and I can't help but wonder if little Renesmee's got a leg up on a future career as a sociopath already.

Anyway, Bella is choking to death on her own blood, and Edward is in the middle of ordering Jacob to perform CPR when they hear a loud crack that they realize is, get this: Bella's spine snapping. LOLOLOLOLOLOL. But seriously: AY CARAMBA!

Another shattering crack inside her body, the loudest yet, so loud that we both froze in shock waiting for her answering shriek. Nothing. Her legs, which had been curled up in agony, now went limp, sprawling out in an unnatural way.

"Her spine," he choked in horror.

Let me sound a sour note in the middle of this bloody party: this gore, awesome and terrifying and vivid though it is, comes out of nowhere. This is a 180 from the rest of these books, and even though it is well-written (or maybe because it is well-written) it feels imported from somewhere else. I'm enjoying it, but it is totally unearned.

But on the other hand, this sort of figures, and it does make a kind of twisted sense. The sexual tension that the scholar James Franco saw building and building in these books had to go somewhere, and obviously it's not going to lead to an explicit sex scene. Where does sexual energy go when it is repressed? Into violence!

For a long time I thought I'd be able to make some kind of grand conclusion about what Twilight's popularity says about America, but this series is so blindly reflective of America's twisted values—be as violent as you want, as long as there's no SEX—that I'm realized that all there is to say is Twilight IS America, though and through. Every little maddening moral contradiction is right here, in these words. We've been looking at Twilight as literature, which was fun but wrong. A while ago I said something to the effect of literature should try to correct society's issues, not accidentally reflect them; Twilight accidentally reflects us because it is a pop artifact and not literature, not art. It isn't necessarily worthy of all of this examination, except to conclude that at the end it wasn't worthy of our examination. Which is still a kind of significant conclusion--I had a political science professor who always said there should be a journal of failed studies, so that we know what definitively ISN'T true along with what IS.

ANYWAY, Jacob blows air into Bella's throat and listens to her heartbeat and also hears blood dripping all over the floor.

The next sound jolted through me, unexpected. terrifying. Like metal being shredded apart... I glanced over to see Edward's face pressed against the bulge.

Edward is biting into Bella's stomach to get the baby out. Edward is eating the baby out of Bella's stomach. (And that, right there, is the closest she'll ever get to getting oral sex. HEYYYO.) Edward gets the baby out of Bella really quickly, and so basically, there is a giant gaping hole in her on the side opposite Jacob. And he whispers: “Renesmee.” TOLD YA! It's a girl! Everybody light your pink cigars! Okay, well I guess we're still in a room full of blood with a dying mother so maybe hold off on those cigars.

A bloody room with a torn open mother and a healthy baby, huh? This is like a Republican wet dream.

Bella asks for the baby, but can barely get its name out after Edward brings her over. Is she having second thoughts about “Renesmee?” No. Guess what?

My eyes flickered across her skin. It was red with blood... fresh blood welling out of a tiny double-crescent mark just over her left breast.

AHAHAHAHA REALLY? That is not how you breastfeed, Renesmee! BAD GIRL!

As Edward pulls the baby away, Bella's heart stops. What a nice final moment for her, being bitten on the boob by your newborn child. (What a ridiculous detail, by the way! That is really in this book! Boob biting!) Jacob starts pumping her chest, telling Edward to get on with the vamping. Edward is, somewhat comically, looking for somewhere to stash the baby. Jacob tells him to “throw it out the window” (thank you, Jacob) when Rosalie comes back in, claiming she's got everything under control. The baby is still, of course, covered in Bella's blood. S. Meyer doesn't explicitly say that Rose takes the baby away and starts licking it, but that is SO what happens.

You'd think the ridiculousness would slow down here, but S. Meyer keeps it coming. Edward breaks out a big silver syringe full of his venom and jams it into Bella's heart, Pulp Fiction-style. First he has to knock Jacob's hands out of the way, breaking our narrator's fingers. This is a pretty inexpert operating room. Jacob goes back to pumping Bella's heart while Edward starts biting her all over, licking the bite marks afterward, which apparently heals them over. That's pretty handy, why hasn't that come up before?

(Edward has a syringe full of venom. So you're telling me in his spare time he's been jerking off into a test tube, right? I mean, that's got to be the easiest way to get venom out, no?)

There's a dark moment in which Jacob concludes that Bella is dead and gives up. Or it WOULD be really dark if Jacob didn't invoke, of all things, "Humpty Dumpty."

I kept pumping her heart, counting, while he worked maniacally over her, trying to put her back together. All the king's horses and all the king's men...
But there was nothing there, just me, just him.
Working over a corpse.
Because that's all that was left of the girl we both loved. This broken, bled-out, mangled corpse. We couldn't put Bella together again.

How much more effective would that shit be without the nursery rhyme? (Broken, bled-out, mangled corpse. Full stop. End of book. JK, we're far from the end here, but wouldn't that be something?) This is where Jacob's mind goes in times of immense tragedy? My only guess is that S. Meyer was trying to evoke TS Eliot or something, but that is supposing S. Meyer knows who TS Eliot is (other than knowing he's the guy who inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber's “Cats”).

Jacob walks out of the room, leaving Edward alone with Bella's dead body. Nursery rhymes aside this is a pretty effective choice, I'll give credit where it's due. We know Bella is going to be fine, but I like that S. Meyer is making us sit with the idea of our narrator for most of the past thousand pages or whatever as a corpse on a table with most of her blood on the floor around her. Bella's dead body is an exciting phrase to type, you know? Also it's my new band name.

Jacob tries to force the horrific imagery out of his head as he wades into his metaphorical ocean of pain. If Seth Clearwater is a good friend, he's breaking out the Morrisey records right now. He sees Rosalie feeding blood to the baby on the couch and thinks about how psyched she must be that she gets this kid to herself now. ("Yup."-Rosalie) Jacob feels a surge of hatred—we switch from ocean metaphors to burning, inferno metaphors—and suddenly resolves to kill the baby. Well, that's pretty late for an abortion, Jacob. Even I think so.

For the fifth or sixth time in this book, Jacob plots murdering the Cullens, wondering how many he could kill if he had to take on Rosalie, Alice and Jasper all at once. He decides it would be a better punishment to let Edward live, with “nothing,” than to offer him the peace of death. Of course, because this is the fifth or sixth time a wolf has, you know, cried wolf, it rings hollow. And then he sees the baby's cute face, and eyes that look like Bella's, and you know he's not going to murder a baby. He's no Jasper.

Anyway, that was a pretty killer scene, and now that we have enjoyed it we can all go home feeling good about getting through an S. Meyer chapter where nothing incredibly boring or morally objectionable happens! Right Jacob?

Everything inside me came undone as I stared at the tiny, porcelain face of the half-vampire, half-human baby. All the lines that held me to my life were sliced apart in swift cuts, like clipping the strings to a bunch of balloons.

Uh, Jacob? Jacob?

I was not left drifting. A new string held me where I was.

OH NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. Jacob... talk to me here. Jacob? JACOB? JACOB!?

It was the baby girl in the blond vampire's arms that held me here now.
Renesmee.

Holy fucking shit.