BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 39: Superbad

A man wants to build a shed and he needs 99 bricks. He goes to Home Depot and they tell him they only sell bricks in quantities of 100. “Why should I pay for 100 bricks when I only need 99?” the man asks. “Sorry buddy, you gotta buy them like this,” he is told. So the man buys 100 bricks, builds his shed, and in the end he's standing in his backyard, holding this extra brick. With nothing else to do with it, he throws it into the air.

So in the midst of all the new characters in the last chapter, I skipped a few things:

• Edward refuses to help Bella do fight training because it's too hard for him to think about ways to kill her. And yet Jasper and Alice seem to have really enjoyed it (“More sexual chemistry”-The Atlantic)!
• Zafrina has the power to “make most people see whatever she wants them to see.” For instance, she makes Edward think he is alone in the middle of the rain forest. Dream big, Amazon lady. Renesmee is intrigued by Zafrina's power, but Bella is worried about exposing her child to this new form of media. Luckily she can see RNSM's vivid memories of the visions “and thus judge for myself whether they were appropriate or not.” Bella is one of those miserable parents who allows like, 30 minutes of TV a day, isn't she? Listen Bella, I spent my childhood in a basement watching MTV for six hours a day and I turned out just fine. Sure, some might say writing a blog about Twilight which is swiftly approaching 500,000 words is evidence of some mild form of psychopathy, but, uh, well, anyway...
• There's a scene in which Kate trains Bella to use her powers. Bella manages to project a weak shield over Edward (after a lot of getting frustrated and biting her lip), but when Kate threatens to shock Renesmee Bella suddenly summons the motherly energy to shield not just Renesmee but several other surrounding vampires. Everybody is thrilled with her power—oh yay! We might not have to do anything! Seriously: the excitement promised by the conclusion of this book is reverse-indexed to Bella's progress. I'm rooting against her, but then again, I always am.

Chapter 33: Forgery

Bella's on the phone with Charlie, who obviously can't come over because the Vampire Model UN is still in session. Instead Bella promises to bring RNSM over, and sees an opportunity to pursue the whole lingering J Jenks mystery. Charlie says Sue is coming to make him lunch, briefly considers inviting Billy over, then decides against it. Bella decides to pretend he didn't say all that and let whatever's happening between Charlie and Billy and Sue stay between the three of them. It's a nice beat, since ordinarily S. Meyer is so terrible at world-building; there is never much of a sense that anything is happening that doesn't involve Bella directly. In part that's because she's a hugely self-absorbed narrator, but moments like that make it seem more deliberate than accidental (I still think it's mostly accidental). But anyway Charlie and Billy and Sue had a weird threesome and that's why things are awkward, right?

Bella grabs Jacob and they head to the garage with RNSM—Jacob wants to take Bella's Ferrari. What? Ferrari?

Edward had gotten around to revealing my after car; as he'd suspected, I had not been capable of showing the appropriate enthusiasm. Sure, it was pretty and fast, but I liked to run.

We spent 630 pages building up the suspense for that? This is how the big automotive storyline ends, not with a bang but with a whatever? What is the point of ANYTHING in this book? They take Edward's Volvo anyway, since the Ferrari is so ostentatious. On the road, Bella asks Jacob “How are you?” Putting aside that Jacob is an evil pederast and no one should care how he is, the fact that she asks him that question is sort of amazing. S. Meyer has such a show-don't-tell problem that Bella and Jacob's relationship has always just been TOLD to us. We never get to see them just shooting the breeze, we only hear about it. Until now. And really, we never see anyone just having a conversation—for all the dialog in these books, most of it is straight plot exposition. For a blissful moment, that doesn't happen. We only get a paragraph of Jacob complaining about the Romanian vampires before Bella drifts back into past-perfect narration, but just seeing the words “How are you?” really perked me up.

That aforementioned past-perfect shit returns us to the dumbest stuff S. Meyer can muster: RNSM really likes the Romanians, and speaks out loud to them since they won't let her make physical contact. One day she asks them why their skin is so weird—papery and fragile the way Bella once described the Volturi. Vladimir answers that it was the result of sitting still for a very long time, contemplating their “divinity.” Luckily no one asks him to elaborate on that. The Romanians were in power before the Volturi were, and all of that sitting still nearly “petrified” them. Oh boy. The science of vampiredom just gets more and more retarded, and couple that with the Ayn Randian (or maybe more like Newt Gingrichian or even Ron Swansonian) goofy metaphor about the incompetence of government, and you've got a double-wide UGH.

Bella briefly indicates to Jacob that this isn't a run-of-the-mill trip to Charlie's. “You know how you're pretty good at controlling your thoughts around Edward?” she asks him. Wait, why would Jacob need to be good at controlling his thoughts around Edward, unless he was thinking about RNSM and—you know what? I don't even want to. He says he is, and then Bella just gives him a meaningful look; Jacob ruminates on that as they pull up to the Swan house. After the hellos and howareyous Bella says she's got some errands to run. “Behind on your Christmas shopping, Bells?” Charlie says. He mentions to RNSM that he's got her covered “if your mom drops the ball.” Bella realizes she hasn't thought about Christmas at all.

I like this glimpse we suddenly get of Bella as Nancy Botwin. She's so desperate ensuring her child's survival that she does a shitty job raising that child. After all, despite her anger at Jacob for imprinting, she's more or less accepted it as an inevitability and is increasingly giving him more RNSM-related responsibility, the responsibility she knows she can't handle herself. Nessie is a future Shane Botwin of America.

Bella drives to the Seattle address Alice gave her, and describes in pure, hateful Bella fashion her dilapidated surroundings. “To say that it wasn't a nice neighborhood would be an understatement,” she says. Well, grammatically that is like the definition of an understatement, Bells.

During my human years, I would have locked the doors and driven away as fast as I dared. As it was, I was a little fascinated.

I don't think “fascinated” is something you can be “a little.”

I tried to imagine Alice in this place for any reason, and failed.

Holy shit, is Alice setting Bella up with her dealer?

What follows is a nice little noir-ish scene, in which Bella gets out of her car and opens “her big gray umbrella” and, in her “long cashmere sweaterdress” (WHAT), and has a long conversation with a dude named Max on the front porch of J Jenks's place. He frequently undresses her with his eyes, and Bella rather unabashedly uses her sex appeal to get information out of him; she doesn't know what she's after, after all, so she tries to act like she does while plying Max for hints.

Eventually Max calls J Jenks, who Bella can hear shouting over the phone about being interrupted. The worst part is when J Jenks asks “Is she a badge!?” Very natural dialog, that. Max mentions the name Cullen, and suddenly instead J Jenks is mad about not being interrupted sooner. Off the phone, Max gives Bella a new address and asks what she's involved in. Drug cartel, mafia, and diamond smuggling are his top three guesses. Diamond smuggling before prostitute?

Confident New Bella enjoys toying with Max, and there's another nice moment where, upon entering the law offices of a one Jason Scott, she is given the brush off by a secretary because she doesn't have an appointment. Immediately “Mr. Scott” calls over the intercom that he is expecting a Ms. Cullen shortly.

I smiled and pointed to myself.

K Stew can totally play this as smoky and cocky as I imagine it to be, and I bet if handled right it will be the cinematic high point of Breaking Dawn pt. 2. The text since Bella's “rebirth” has been, heretofore, pretty uneventful—I pity Melissa Rosenberg. But this chapter is pretty good.

Unfortunately, it doesn't build up to anything, story-wise.

A few minutes of conversation with J Jenks makes clear to Bella that he is in the fake ID business, and she realizes Alice intended this as a way out for RNSM if everyone else died (Why? I don't know, just go with it). Bella therefore thinks Alice sees them having a shot at taking out Demetri, the in-house Volturi tracker, which would allow RNSM to run in the first place (incidentally, it also lets Alice and Jasper off the hook—Alice has clearly set herself up better than anyone else. You go, girl). Bella also assumes that Alice doesn't see Edward getting out alive, since in that case he'd be able to make the IDs himself. And that means Alice saw Bella dead, too. According to Bella, I mean; this IS like, 30 second-hand assumptions in a row, but S. Meyer doesn't give us any reason to think our narrator might be incorrect. Have you noticed that no one ever guesses wrong in this book?

Bella wonders who RNSM's guardian should be, then. What, they never picked a godfather and godmother (or was it Alice and Jasper)?

Who would I put this on? Charlie? But he was so defenselessly human. And how would I get Renesmee to him? He was not going to be anywhere close to that fight. So that left one person. There really had never been anyone else.

Keep telling yourself you have no choice, Nancy.

Bella gives him the names Jacob and Vanessa Wolfe. (Hey! Bella and I made the same joke!) “Nessie seemed like an okay nickname for Vanessa,” Bella says. Indeed. It actually makes a better name than her other one! Is that a good enough reason to hope that Bella dies? So RNSM can be freed from the shackles of her moniker? Bella hands over a picture she has in her wallet, then hastily gives Jenks the money he asks for. She tells us that not only do the Cullens have bank accounts all over the world like a South American drug dealer, they've got cash stashed all over their house like a North American one.

And that's it. That's what all this J Jenks business was about. The need for a birth certificate and fake IDs strikes me as, you know, far too realistic and practical for a fantasy novel; Jacob and RNSM are going to be on the lam for a long time before they settle down and buy property, you know? Like everything else we've been reading, it feels unplanned and aimless. That this is what J Jenks added up to is a profoundly deflating feeling.

I recently re-watched Little Miss Sunshine (okay, it was being projected silently on the wall of a bar I was at) and I once again appreciated the way the script is so densely interlocked; events and ideas set up early on pay off down the line in rewarding and funny ways. There's nothing at the beginning of Breaking Dawn that pays off at the end. Instead we get “point A leads to point B 40 pages later” fifty times in a loosely connected sequence. Literally the only running plot point was the fucking car, and unless RNSM and Jacob sell the Ferrari for weed money in the epilogue, it didn't add up to anything either.

A woman and a man get married, and on their wedding night the man gives the woman an ugly wooden duck. “Why are you giving me this duck?” she asks. “I hate this thing.” Her husband tells her it's really important she hang onto the duck, and in ten years he will explain the significance of it to her. The duck sits on the bureau in their bedroom for nine years and 364 days while the husband and wife fight and have a generally unhappy life. She often asks him about it and he refuses to answer, in fact it leads to more fighting. On the day before their tenth anniversary, the husband has a heart attack and dies. Distraught, the woman flies back to her parents' house, and takes the duck with her. Now, this is back in the days when people could still smoke on airplanes, and as the woman sits down in her seat with the wooden duck on her lap, the man next to her lights a cigarette. “Sorry, could you please put that out? I'm allergic to the smoke.” “Why would I do that?” the man says. “It's a free country.” The woman says nothing as the plane takes off, and he finishes the cigarette. But as they reach cruising altitude, he lights another. “Please stop,” she says. “It's bothering me.” “You know what's bothering me?” he says. “That ugly wooden duck. Throw that thing out the window, and I'll put my cigarette out.” “This was a gift from my late husband,” she says. “These cigarettes were a gift from my late wife,” he says. He keeps smoking, and soon the woman can't breathe at all. “OKAY FINE,” she says in desperation. She opens the window and throws the wooden duck out of the plane; the man puts out his cigarette. Filled with immediate regret, the woman runs to the cockpit of the plane. “You've got to turn the plane around,” she says to the pilot. “I just threw this wooden duck out the window, and it was a gift from my late husband, and I've never understood why he made me keep it but I really need it back if I have any hope of ever finding out.” The captain decides that's a pretty good reason, so he turns the plane around and lowers the altitude quite a bit. When they reach the right spot, the captain opens the cockpit window and reaches out. What does he catch? The brick!