Blogging Breaking Dawn, pt. 31: Still Life With Cullens

Everybody still alive out there? We're going to get through this, I promise.

Chapter 25 (cont'd): Favor

So Jacob has told Charlie that Bella is a vampire, sort of. He knows she's SOMETHING, and that's all he wants to know. Bella is still worried even though “Jacob's intervention had brought out a better reaction from Charlie than I'd ever hoped.” So yeah, this is the problem we've been having: Edward and Bella living too happily ever after. But this time I'll let this narrative erosion—er—slide, because Charlie is the best and I'm glad he's coming back.

And, it turns out, Charlie knows about Renesmee. Jacob told him the baby is like their ward, that Bella and Edward are adopting her, “like Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson.” I'm assuming he's referring to when Wayne adopted Grayson and not when they adopted a Chinese baby together in the infamous Frank Miller graphic novel Gay Batman. Apparently Charlie even smiled at the notion that he was now a grandfather. AWWWW this guy, huh? Jacob told Charlie that RNSM was “more special than all of us put together,” to try and head off concerns about her rapid growth.

“All of us put together? Oh please. Though that is a weirdly sexy image.”-Alice Cullen

The problem that I am having is that this next section has a lot of fun stuff in it, but that fun stuff is sandwiched between ugliness. Like sex with a really hot girl during an orgy of mostly unattractive people. I mean I know that there are ugly people at every orgy but sometimes you just wish they'd hang out by the coffee for a while longer you know what I mean? No?

The first thing I'm referring to is Jacob trying to apologize to Bella by again pitching his idea that this is how everything was supposed to work out. “I'll always love you. But I love you the right way now,” he says. As a mother-in-law? “There's finally a balance. We both have people we can't live without.”

When we were talking Sucker Punch, I was aware that the moral part of my brain was conflicting with the libertine part of it. I guess the latter won out, but this is the flip side of the coin. I can see that S. Meyer is sort of presenting this to us as a daring, freaky relationship—challenging us to be OK with Jacob and RNSM being together, trying to show us that our horror was an overreaction. But the lack of two consenting adults is what she is missing. It's a different result from the same mistake Right Wingers make when they say if we allow gay marriage, we'll have to allow men to marry animals. Sorry Rick Santorum, but your dog can't consent to having sex with you. Once again, I invoke the mysterious fanfiction writer Janine who, in The Edge, put Bella in a polyamorus relationship with Jasper and Alice. That was the kind of freaky but acceptable relationship S. Meyer could have employed (if she wasn't so scared of homosexuality).

Anyway, suffice it to say that I hate everything S. Meyer is doing with this Jacob/RNSM thing, and it is awful and evil and getting worse every time it comes up. (I recently learned what the term "ship" meant, when someone told me they "ship" me and my wife. Are there people out there who ship Jacob and Renesmee? And am I the only one who didn't know what that term meant?)

The second thing is that after a series of funny set pieces, Bella sits back and realizes she is special. It's a wonderful moment for her self-esteem, and she rattles off the ways in which she always thought of herself as mediocre. It's a moment that probably resonates with many of the young girls reading, but unfortunately what makes Bella special now is fucking vampire magic, so the inadvertent message to the audience is: you're not special, and there is no way to ever fix it. Or maybe it will be fixed, if the right guy comes along. The symbolic meaning of Twilight is always convoluted like this—this series was an allegory for abstinence, with vampires abstaining from biting, until it was just LITERALLY about abstinence, with vampires abstaining from sex—but either way the message is pretty ugly.

Alice, who bolted from the room when she first heard Charlie was coming (“I need to wear something WAY sexier than this!”), returns and saves us from Jacob and S. Meyer, “her hands full and her expression promising violence.” Team Alice! She orders the wolfpack into the corner and tells them to “commit to being there for a while” so she can “see.” You get the feeling—though it is never really made explicit—that Alice is learning to work around the wolves and half-breed babies in her life. When Bella won't let Jacob hold RNSM (good girl!) Alice tells her to just keep the baby still so she can “see around her.”

She also gives Bella colored contacts to hide her bright red eyes—she says she “was prepared for several possible futures” before they left on the honeymoon.

“If you'd died, I had two weeks' worth of high-caliber prostitutes ready to go for Edward. Didn't get my deposit back, either.”-Alice Cullen

Bella can see the “microscopic scratches and warped sections” of the contact lenses. Gosh, vampire-vision must be pretty tough to take sometimes. Years of blogging has rendered me so nearsighted I can't even read most wall clocks anymore, and it's great, like permanent beer goggles. Anyway, Edward tells Bella she looks gorgeous and Alice mentions that Bella's real brown eyes were much prettier. This is here mostly to set up something that happens in a few minutes, but I like that Alice used to think about how pretty Bella's eyes were.

Alice leaves to stock the bathroom with spare contacts—the venom in Bella's eyes will slowly burn them away—and instructs Esme to teach Bella to move like a human again. What follows is an interesting and funny scene in which all of the Cullens explain the tips and tricks they use to blend in. Esme tells her not to move too quickly. Emmett tells her to sit if the other person does; “Humans don't like to just stand there,” he says. Jasper tells her to let her eyes wander every thirty seconds, Rose tells her to cross and uncross her legs (nice every five minutes). When Bella then practices moving slowly, Alice rolls her eyes at the attempt. I'm picturing Bella doing a super-exaggerated slow-motion walk, like a cartoon character sneaking up on someone.

Edward instructs RNSM not to mind-meld with Charlie, and also not to bite him. Bella is like, “she understands that?” and Edward is like “uh, maybe.” Edward then tries to kick Jacob out, but he claims Charlie needs him there for moral support. “As far as Charlie knows, you're the most repulsive monster of us all,” Edward says.

“Repulsive?” Jacob protested.

YEAH, REPULSIVE! You don't know that? That aside, the page and a half that follows is the funniest moment I have found in this series so far. (Breaking Dawn is really a best-of-times, worst-of-times situation) Bella hears Charlie's car in the driveway and concentrates on calming down. Jasper, monitoring her mood, says, “Well done, Bella.” But Edward gives her an encouragement kiss, which immediately makes Bella super horny.

Jasper felt my mood change. “Er, Edward, you might not want to distract her like that right now. She needs to be able to focus.”

And then there is this:

“Later,” I said, and anticipation curled my stomach into a ball.
“Focus, Bella,” Jasper urged.
“Right.” I pushed the trembly feelings away. Charlie, that was the main thing right now. Keep Charlie safe today. We would have all night...
“Bella.”
“Sorry, Jasper.”
Emmett laughed.

Wonderful. It's subtle, it brings back that interplay between the narration and the dialogue from book one, and it's funny and charming. I know the bar is really low, but I was totally floored. Well done, S. Meyer.

And then Charlie shows up. Carlisle answers the door, and Bella watches the doctor instantly change his expression from stressed to welcoming, “like switching the channel on the TV.” S. Meyer is at her best when she's giving us these weird little details. She's not very good at plotting, or dialogue; she doesn't seem to have a firm grasp on morality and basic human decency; she doesn't do a good job of really establishing the over-arching rules of this fantasy world she's constructed. But she's got jokes, and she can do this. Though I am still waiting to hear about whether or not vampires wear underwear. Is that in her FAQ?

Bella awkwardly re-introduces herself to her shocked, stressed father. For the first time we get the sense that her voice is much different than before—Charlie can barely recognize it. What with all the “bell-tone” and “chime” metaphors S. Meyer has used, are they going to just auto-tune Kristen Stewart's voice or something? As Charlie stares, Bella bites her lip. It's been a while since we've had a good lip bite! Remember when I planned on keeping track of them? Bella tries not to breathe around her father, but she needs to inhale in order to speak. So for most of the conversation she keeps us posted on her oxygen levels, which would be an interesting way to build tension if we didn't already know this was going to work out just fine. Bella assures Charlie that she is, herself, just fine, and Edward “smoothly” lies that his long-lost brother died in a car crash which is why he recently inherited his niece. Renesmee. His niece whose name is a portmanteau of his mother's name and his wife's mother's name. Yes, very smooth. Bella points out that Carlisle is a grandfather too, and that should make him feel better about the whole thing, and Charlie laughs because it does. But then RNSM looks at him, and he sees her eyes—“his eyes”—and the truth dawns on him. Bella sees him trying to calculate exactly how long ago she was pregnant, and Edward comes out with a version of the truth. Charlie seems like he's finally about to freak out.

And then Emmett, who has been weirdly central lately, suddenly shouts from across the room. He's watching a football game. “Florida winning?” Charlie asks. Everyone except Emmett freezes in anticipation, and once Emmett tells him the score, Charlie sits down next to him and says, “Well, I guess we should see if they can hold on to the lead.” It's a funny moment that is also very psychologically complex—it's very Matthew Weiner-esque. Can I end on a Mad Men reference two times in a row?