Thursday, March 10, 2011

BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 23: Way Down In The Hole

Well, we've hit bottom. After a mostly tedious book 2, we got a gangbusters birthing scene that unfortunately gave way to the biggest outrage yet: Our narrator, Jacob Black, basically became Jacob Humbert. The promise made by the violent, crazy birth was dashed to bits in those final sentences. That scene was a fake out, like walking into a palace and falling through a trap door. Like discovering you have the ability to fly and then realizing it's just a lucid dream you're having in the moments after you got shot and before you just fucking DIE.

Book 3: Bella

Here we go again. We get another new “book” and a new epigraph and all that jazz. Sadly, we're not switching it up and hearing from Edward, or Alice, or even fucking Renesmee. I'd really take almost anybody over Bella. What's Billy Black up to? Mike Newton? I'd rather listen to Eric, who has been floating in some kind of existential nightmare cloud since New Moon, than go back to Bella. Hell, now is the time when we really SHOULD be hearing Jacob's thoughts more than anyone else's. As awful as most of Jacob's narration was, his thoughts are finally important now. So I'd even take him back.
I get S. Meyer's strategy. It would have been nice to hear from Bella at the start of book 2, but we cut away from her perspective right as she makes the transformative decision to carry her monster baby to term, come what may. Now we cut away from Jacob at a similar, if notably more sinister, moment. We're denied a window into their seemingly-incomprehensible thoughts just like the rest of the characters. But doing so doesn't highlight how ultimately alone we are in the universe and how unknowable our fellow human beings really are so much as it highlights how boring Jacob and Bella are most of the time. Plus it's an oddly realistic, witholding narrative choice for a fantasy book in which a magical vampire baby was just born.

(Speaking of magical vampire babies, Bella's fateful decision is in the process of being vindicated; will the same happen for Jacob, somehow? Shudder.)

There's a table of contents here, which Jacob's book weirdly lacked. Why are you so bad at writing books, Jacob? You should really re-write yourself and make better choices. Especially that one choice. Anyway, there are a few chapter titles that are pretty enticing, most notably chapter 26: “Shiny.” Oooh! I can't wait!

Epigraph

We're operating on the assumption that S. Meyer is just flipping open a copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and scanning pages until she hits on the phrase she wants/thinks sounds pretty, right? Because otherwise I don't know what to do with this:

Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after
all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone
you love is a hostage, sapping your courage
and corrupting your judgment.


-Orson Scott Card, Empire

Card, as it turns out is the Sci-Fi author behind Ender's Game. He is also a Mormon (and BYU grad) and an outspoken advocate for the LDS church. In 2006 he wrote an op-ed urging people to vote Republican, and indeed Empire (written in 2006) posits a 2008 in which Republicans control Congress (The late Ted Stevens is President Pro Tempore in Empire. Card has gone back and revised other books, such as Ender's Game, to make them better fit with political climates. So one added benefit, if people did as Card said in his op-ed, would have been that Empire would have correctly predicted a political outcome). Card is on the board of directors for the National Organization For Marriage, which was, at the time of Breaking Dawn's publication, organizing a campaign to pass Proposition 8 in California. “Regardless of law,” Card is quoted as saying, “there is only one definition of marriage.”

As a science fiction writer, Card is notably a critic of global warming science and even evolution.

I'm not suggesting anything in particular about the company S. Meyer chooses to keep.

Preface

Ugh, another useless preface. Jacob's was a throwaway joke, but Bella feels the need to give us another vague flash-forward. If Alice was narrating, this would (maybe) be interesting (I swear I'm only going to sulk about Alice getting sidelined for a few more chapters); there could be vague flash-forwards all the time. Unless it turns out Bella's power is just a better version of Alice's, I continue to see no need for this shit. So what happens is a “line of black” is advancing on Bella and whoever else, and she's guarding a “precious one.” So The Volturi are coming and Bella wants to protect Renesmee. Mega duh. And in fact the Volturi are mentioned explicitly a paragraph later, as if S. Meyer knows she can't trick us at this point anyway, when “like a burst of light from a flash” everything changes, and suddenly Bella is eager for their attack and ready to kick some ass.

What is Bella's vampire power going to be? Conceivably it's going to be a doozy. How could it NOT be? What remaining plot threads do we even HAVE? What Bella's fucking after car is going to be? I've LITERALLY been holding my breath since chapter one about that (not literally). It's hard to know where we are even headed with this book—is it just going to be about Renesmee's first few years, like Look Who's Talking To Vampires?—but I imagine Bella's early career as a vampire will be big factor.

I've just accidentally stumbled on a way this could be interesting: the first few weeks of life of a newborn juxtaposed with the first few weeks of life of a “newborn.” Wow, Edward's life is about to suck for a while.

(Another question that probably won't be answered for a while: what are the Volturi mad about now? Bella is a vampire, no? Do they object to Jacob and Renesmee's relationship? If so, I support them fully. Please come kill everyone, dear leaders.)

Anyway, regarding Bella's power—for some reason the preface invokes to me a kind of bullet-time-esque re-conceptualization of a battle scene. That was literally the only worthwhile part of the recent Sherlock Holmes movie (I mean, the gay subtext between RDJ and Jude Law was fun, though the motive was a little suspect. When there is gay subtext in a mainstream movie it's hard not to feel like the intention is gay=funny. The exception to this rule is Inception—I don't doubt C. Nolan's motives on the gay subtext in that one. A director who wears three-piece suits on set every day doesn't mock the gay community), and I'm kind of hoping Bella's thing is something similar. She is, after all, a serial over-thinker. (“In your human life you over-analyzed everything. Now you are a SUPER over-analyzer.”) Which will soon be obvious, if it wasn't already.

Chapter 19: Burning

Jacob's book had a curious lack of real self-exploration. He TOLD us he was suffering all the time, but that was all we ever really heard. He was not, unlike Bella, given to going over each and every aspect of his personal crises multiple times in the narration. Jacob is a bro through and through; he just didn't have the capacity to express himself in a floral manner like Bella. And the thickness of Jacob's skull was occasionally beneficial: witness the rollicking and crazy birthing scene, which has a new explosion of gore in nearly every sentence. Jacob doesn't stop to consider the implications of the spurting blood, he just enumerates the places blood is spurting from!

But Mrs. Cullen is a notebook-scribbling, introspective motherfucker. I know one when I see one, I am one. So unfortunately here, we get a retread of the previous scene. And instead of blood, it's the FEELINGS that are gushing.

There's also S. Meyer's favorite literary device: the disoriented narrator! I swear, what she should really do is write a collection of short stories about people waking up in hospital rooms and trying to piece together what happened, like a “close call” version of The Spoon River Anthology.

Bella is experiencing “bewildering” pain—she's basically flashing between numb blackness and hyper-painful redness. (Wouldn't it be crazy if in the Breaking Dawn film, the birth scene was just represented by black and red squares?) The idea is that the birth is so painful that Bella's drifting in and out of it—her body is trying to reject the pain. This is a cool idea that at least has some anecdotal basis: I knew a guy named Mike who once got hit in the face with a basketball in gym class then fell backwards and hit his head on the doors behind him. The next thing he remembers is sitting in English class a few hours later and suddenly screaming in pain. He has no idea what happened for the span of time between falling and “waking up” in class.

“It felt like I was being sawed in half, hit by a bus, punched by a prize fighter, trampled by bulls, and submerged in acid, all at the same time,” Bella says. Those of us who have suffered at her hands for the previous however-many pages should try to restrain our cathartic glee. Bella relieves every moment we already saw—dropping the cup, hearing about the detached placenta, blood vessels bursting (can you really SEE your own blood vessels bursting?)—and fears for the health of her “little Edward Jacob.” It was hinted, before, when Bella called the baby EJ, that Jacob would have been his middle name, but it has finally been made explicit. In some ways, that's worse than Renesmee, right? Way to give Jacob a permanent reminder of his second-class status, and to remind Edward for eternity that his wife is only really 60% or so on board with this whole thing! The only way a baby name could be more passive-aggressive is if it was like “Fuckyoudad Jones.”

6 comments:

Kim said...

Knowing how the book ends, I understand why she chose that epigraph. Again, though, it is solely on the basis of her seriously misinterpreting it. In fact, I'm pretty sure she thinks it means the opposite of what it really does.

I've had that pain black out happen to me when my appendix ruptured. It is truly a bizarre feeling.

Dear said...

Between Fuckyoudad and DeanDon (DonDean?), you are ON IT with the names lately. Maybe you should start a baby names blog and just come up with crazy fucking names all the time.

You're welcome for that amazing idea.

Xocolatl. said...

You know, it's quite sad that I take immense pleasure in reading the description of a fictional character's pain....I was waiting for this moment for so long, although it would have been entirely plausible if Smeyer somehow made it so that the morphine worked and so Bella wouldn't have to feel the pain, because she's such a *superspeshal snowflake*......ugh.

ZL said...

This is one of the few times S. Meyer is willing to let anyone even suffer a little bit. We should relish this moment.

Stephanie_DAnn said...

"It's like she gets off on being withholding." This quote from Arrested Development speaks volumes about this series.

Does Edward not get a say in the child's name at all? Naming the boy after his father and the mother's exboyfriend. Who does that? That middle name is a big middle finger pointed at both his name sakes. Kinda makes Renesmee sound not so bad.

Anonymous said...

This comment of course, comes much after this blog was originally posted, but NOW I finally understand why that scene in the movie gave people seizures. Bella's perspective was flashing red and black. So really, this is all S. Meyer's fault.