THE BITERION COLLECTION: Dread

I feel a little unoriginal bitching about torture-porn films, but you know what? I hate torture-porn films. I don't understand the attraction at all. I say this as someone who has no particular problem with onscreen violence. The difference, which is probably obvious, is that violent movies in general use violence as a component of action. And what I really like (and what most people like, I would think) is the action! Blood and gore is the seasoning, and this is a metaphor that would probably feel too condescending if I took it any further.

Torture films divorce the violence from the action. Instead of two people evenly (or somewhat unevenly) matched, fighting it out (shooting it out, stabbing it out), we have two people who are completely unevenly matched; we have a victim and a perpetrator. We aren't watching action, we are watching suffering. And why would you want to watch suffering? I don't buy the catharsis argument, which is what a lot of people say. You know how some vitamins give you %500 of your daily value of Vitaman C? Torture films give you %500 of your daily value of violent catharsis. %100 is plenty. If you need this much catharsis, you also need medication. Incidentally this blog post gives you %500 of your daily dose of metaphors.

In high school I watched at least two Saw movies, Hostel, and a variety of cheap-o, Lionsgate straight-to-DVD releases. (A friend and I sort of had a fascination with the "Thriller" rack at our hometown video store, which was almost entirely composed of obscure releases from Lionsgate Films made with a budget of what seemed to be about fifty dollars each. Did Lionsgate OWN our video store?) I didn't particularly enjoy any of them, and I have actively avoided torture movies ever since. Hence the fact that I haven't seen Saw 4-18 or however many more there are. I find no enjoyment in seeing people die in bizarre and inventive ways, especially in the sort of joyless, faux-gritty, bleak dirges most of these films seem to be. Torture films are distinct from most other horror subsets, but their tropes are slowly bleeding into other horror films; witness the "gritty" remakes of 80s horror films being churned out by Platinum Dunes as we speak. It's what makes stuff like Ti West's throwback House Of The Devil, which borrows so heavily from Rosemary's Baby it probably owes Roman Polanski money, seem new and refreshing. The torture genre is already exhausted, and it's still new! It's like Ring-Tone Rap!

Torture films are also reflective, in a bad way, of the current American moral arraignment, which permits violence of basically any kind and fears sex of any kind. (Which is also a trend we see continued in Twilight, to a lesser extent.) In a way, Saw is this generation's Deep Throat, isn't it? Why are ANY of these movies only rated R? How are they at all less obscene than pornography? I hate sounding like a fucking schoolmarm over here, but honestly! Why do people like this?

This is all a longwinded way of saying that Dread, starring Jackson Rathbone of Twilight, fucking sucks. It was a totally miserable, grotesque, exploitive piece of shit. I enjoyed it less than (500) Days Of Summer, which makes it the worst film I've reviewed so far for this site.

Dread is one of the "8 Films To Die For," which is a part of Horrorfest 4. It's hard to believe there were four Horrorfests, but there you are. The previews before the film were an unrelenting barrage of horrific violence, and it turned out that a lot of it was from the last 30 minutes of this film. Doesn't seem like the best strategy, marketing wise, but I guess at this point they already have our money.

Jackson Rathbone plays Stephen Grace, a film student who takes a philosophy class and meets the mysterious Quaid, who is basically a psychopath from the outset. There is actually no mystery at all about the fact that eventually Quaid will try to kill Stephen and others - early on we find out that both of his parents were murdered by an axe-wielding lunatic, and we spend the entire film waiting for him to snap. Though it kind of seems like he has snapped already.

Quaid is played yellingly by Shaun Evans, who does a terrible job disguising his British accent. It is Sam Worthington-level bad. The film also features Hanne Steen as Cheryl, a film editor who is also Rathbone's love interest (not that the romantic subplot is at all important), and Laura Donnelly as Abby, a girl with a birthmark covering half of her body, who works with Rathbone at what appears to be a prison library.

The sets in this movie are the most ridiculous part: Quaid lives the mother of all haunted houses, a collapsed, condemned shack in the middle of the woods with an endless supply of new rooms. It's amazing how many different basements this dude seems to have. Rathbone and Donnelly work at the aforementioned bookstore or possibly-library from hell, which cinematically consists of an employee break room and a single book shelf. I understand budget constraints; these filmmakers obviously spent most of their money on fake dirt and dried blood to cover everyone with at the end of the film, (everyone is so dirty for the last act! Take a shower, someone!) but can't we get another angle of this bookstore or library? A few scenes take place at a hospital, which literally has a bunch of flickering fluorescent lights in the hallways. Really? We're going to do the flickering light thing? Okay.

So Quaid proposes that Stephen do a "fear study" for his senior project, and he brings on Cheryl because apparently he is a senior film student who doesn't know how to edit fucking video? We first see her cutting real celluloid film, so we know she's an old soul, but those skills don't necessarily translate to using Final Cut Pro. But whatever, she's on board. There's a long montage of people talking to their camera, saying a bunch of stupid and gross bullshit, like a 14-year-old's tribute to the "audition" scene in Audition.

Quaid also likes to paint portraits of topless women, and so there are plenty of boobs in this movie: gritty, bleak boobs, and eventually slashed up boobs, so if you have a lot of unresolved sexual aggression like this movie does I'm sure you'll dig that. There's also a fairly reductive subplot about Abby's body issues that culminates in a particularly brutal manner.

Jackson Rathbone is fine. He doesn't have a lot to do. Mostly he yells at Quaid for being a creepy asshole and then continues to hang out with him. Quaid seems to be taking their fear study too seriously (basically from the outset - it's not like there's a real turning point in this movie. At some point it seems like Director Anthony DiBlasi just got bored and decided now would be a good time to start killing off some characters. More like Anthony DiBLAHsi, am I right?) and pretty soon he's pushing his collaborators to face their fears (Jackson Rathbone's fear is dying, so how exactly do you face that fear?) in semi-ridiculous, low-rent Jigsaw ways.

If the 50's were the "alien invasion and body-takeover" era, the 70s were the "post-hippie Satanism" era, the 80's were the "Reagan-era morality-based slasher film" era and the 90's were the "serial killer," era, the aughts are what some have termed the "media horror" era. A trend kicked off my The Blair Witch Project, continued by The Ring, Paranormal Activity, [Rec], The Descent, and even Michael Haneke's Caché (Hidden). Every one of these movies have a meta-angle to them, and the argument could be made that Dread is a commentary on horror movies. There is a lot of ridiculous dialogue about "touching the beast," and using this fear study to glimpse real fear as a way of being truly alive. Like seeing a horror movie allows us to face fears and be thrilled and blah blah blah. It's a fairly obvious thesis (and this is coming from someone who opened this blog post by opining about what makes Torture Film violence different from ordinary film violence! This post and a DVD of Dread can be found in this month's edition of Duh Aficionado Magazine).

(And you can trace the alien invasion stuff to fear of Communism, and the Satanism stuff to backlash from all the Free Love, but what exactly does this "media horror" trend reflect? Reality TV? Our collective obsession with navel-gazing in general?)

Interestingly this movie isn't really all that different from Summer's Moon, but the latter film fails to realize it's torture-porn aspirations which ironically helps it in my estimation. It also isn't nearly so determined to rub our faces in gore and disgusting imagery, and it also stars Ashley Greene. Hence its ranking over (500) Days Of Summer and Dread's ranking below it.

Even if Dread had something clever to say about horror films, which it doesn't, it would still be a universally unpleasant viewing experience. Jackson Rathbone is about to star in what will surely be a (non-Twilight) blockbuster, The Last Airbender, which looks fucking great even though it's being directed by M. Night Shyamalan, so I hope for his sake it will pull him up out of these kinds of awful films forever (the last few seconds of that trailer: holy shit). The word is he is a nice guy (isn't it weird that we are impressed when it turns out actors are nice? Don't we normally expect people to be nice under ordinary circumstances?) so I hope he succeeds. If only so I won't have to watch another movie like this ever again.

BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 17: Who's Afraid Of Virgin (Yeah) Wolves?

Maybe you, like me, have been troubled by the relentless parallels between Jacob's behavior and domestic abuse. Sometimes, for the past few weeks, I've wondered why exactly it was bothering me so much. Novels are allowed to have dark themes, after all. I realized that I felt uneasy because these moments somehow felt simultaneously deliberate and accidental, the way they kept piling up but were never addressed. There was a tension there I couldn't put my finger on; it was almost as if S. Meyer was drawing parallels to abusive relationships without actually condemning them, as if she didn't think they were a bad thing. But I put that thought out of my head, because it seemed crazy. And then, holy shit. This fucking chapter. WHAT THE FUCK?

Get ready for this, you guys. I recommend strapping your copy of New Moon to your hands with a bungee cord or something, because at some point you, like me, will probably be seized with the urge to throw your book across the room. Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 14: Family

Jacob and Bella meet the wolf pack on the back road where they used to ride bikes. Bella is underwhelmed when they all emerge from the woods. "These were just four really big half-naked boys," she says dismissively.

"Just think of the possibilities, Bella!"-Alice Cullen

Bella has difficulty telling them apart; they all look the same to her. It's okay Bella, my grandfather says the same thing about black people. One time we were watching a movie and he asked me why Barack Obama was in it. We were watching Slumdog Millionaire, and he was looking at Dev Patel.

Only Sam stands out; he's the biggest and he still has that inner-peace about him that Bella hates so much. But when the pack sees her, they all flip the fuck out, even Sam "Namaste" Uley. This wolf pack is apparently a boys' club.

Paul is not someone we've heard much about, but I hate this prick already. He's clearly one of those friends who can't deal with one of his bros spending time with a girl. Men can be so needy! Jacob steps protectively in front of Bella when the boys start howling in protest, and that simple little gesture sends Paul over the edge.

He threw his head back, a real growl tearing from between his teeth.

A "real growl?" Why am I thinking of Max from Where The Wild Things Are all of a sudden? Paul immediately transforms into a wolf and lunges at Jacob and Bella. There was no build-up to that scene at all; it just... happened. We're going to skip the foreplay, S. Meyer? You just want us to lie there?

There's a Transformers quality to the wolfication: "Dark silver blew out from the boy, coalescing into a shape more than five-times his size." Five times his size? Where do you keep all of that wolf, Paul? I know, I know, it's injun magic, I shouldn't question it. Jacob runs toward Paul, jumps into the air, and transforms before he touches the ground. Showoff.

The two wolves violently rip at each other and eventually tumble into the woods, at which point Sam chases after them and the two remaining boys burst out laughing. Bella is shocked and terrified and appalled at their callousness, which should probably be the first sign she's got nothing to worry about. Didn't this same misunderstanding just happen? Didn't I just complain about it? Does Bella ever get tired of being wrong? We get the sense that fighting amongst werewolves is N.B.D., as the kids say (if you do the old-school periods in your abbreviations like the N.Y.T. it classes it up a bit) and the two boys (who are Jared and Embry, if it matters, which it doesn't) nonchalantly start picking up shredded bits of clothing and sneakers. They collect Sam's (still intact) shoes and mention throwing out the rest. At least they are environmentally conscious werewolves. Do you think they recycled Laurent?

"Kids, a dirty Mother Earth free of vampires is worse than a clean Mother Earth infested with them. So do your part, and pack out what you pack in. Knowing is half the battle."-Sam Uley

Embry even runs into the woods to get Sam's pants. Pro-tip: Expert werewolves remember to take off their pants before they morph. I'm glad S. Meyer thought this through enough to avoid Hulk-style wardrobe questions.

"Yes, the wolves are all naked boys on the inside. That is very important for this story." -S. Meyer

And to answer your question: Yes, Sam Uley does wear cut-off jeans. How did you guess? Because Edward has the market cornered on mock-turtlenecks and pleated pants? I bet Sam's are the kind where the pockets hang out the bottom. Get that look!

Sam Uley (Artist Rendition)

Before he left, Sam had ordered Embry and Jared to take Bella "to Emily's," so they commandeer Bella's truck (she's kind of shocked and dizzy after watching Jacob explode into a giant wolf, which is understandable, but seriously, is Bella ever not collapsing and vomiting these days?) and proceed to banter like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or something.

"Well, the wolf's out of the bag now." Embry sighed. "Way to go, Jake."

Do the wolves always use wolf-themed variations on popular expressions? He stuck out like a sore wolf. A wolf in the hand is worth two in the wolf. If you don't have anything wolf to say, don't say anything at all. Wolf means never having to say you're sorry.

There's some talk in the truck about the treaty between the Cullens and the Quileutes - Embry was afraid Laurent was a relative, which apparently would have aversely affected vampire-wolf diplomatic relations, which are apparently a thing. Did these guys not get the memo that the Cullens are no longer in the picture? Or the Cullens will be back soon anyway and this is just a plot seed for Eclipse that needed to be planted somewhere.

Emily turns out to be Sam's fiancée, and on the way over, Embry tells Bella not to stare at her.

I frowned at him. "Why would I stare?"

Embry looked uncomfortable. "Like you saw just now, hanging out with werewolves has its risks."

Uh-oh. Are you ready for what happens next? There is no way that you are. They reach "a tiny house that had once been gray" (what color is it now?) and the boys walk right in. Bella follows, and there's "a young woman with satiny copper skin" (S. Meyer loves to exoticize the minorities, huh?) standing at the stove, facing away. "For one second I thought the reason Embry had told me not to stare was because the girl was so beautiful," Bella says. So we know Bella is an ass man. But then we all stop smiling because Emily turns around.

The right side of her face was scarred from hairline to chin by three thick, red lines, livid in color though they were long healed. One line pulled down the corner of her dark, almond-shaped right eye, another twisted the right side of her mouth into a permanent grimace.

Hey, did you guys not get all the domestic violence parallels yet? Do you maybe need them SHOVED DOWN YOUR FUCKING THROAT? SAM LOST CONTROL AND RIPPED EMILY'S FACE OFF! DO YOU GET THE METAPHOR YET? DO YOU!? ARE YOU UNCOMFORTABLE ENOUGH YET OR HAS SOME OF YOUR SKIN NOT COMPLETELY CRAWLED OFF OF YOUR BODY? DO YOU STILL HAVE SOME BLOOD LEFT TO BE CURDLED?

As if the mother of all thematic sledgehammers wasn't bad enough, S. Meyer is determined to make this whole situation even worse. Emily feeds them muffins, and there's a weird beat where she asks Bella if she's the "vampire girl" and it seems kind of hostile and Bella replies "Yes. Are you the wolf girl?" and everyone laughs. Okay. Then Sam comes home.

"Emily," he said, and so much love saturated his voice that I felt embarrassed, intrusive, as I watched him cross the room in one stride and take her face in his wide hands.

Am I the only one who flinched instinctively on Emily's behalf?

He leaned down and kissed the dark scars on her right cheek before he kissed her lips.

ISN'T IT WONDERFUL THAT THIS ABUSIVE FIANCÉ LOVES HIS VICTIM SO MUCH? IT'S SO GREAT THAT HE STILL LOVES HER AFTER HE DISFIGURED HER! WHAT A GUY! THEY ARE SUCH A MODEL COUPLE! PERFECT AND WONDERFUL LOVE!

This was worse than any romantic movie; this was so real that it sang out loud with joy and life and true love.

Are you sure that's what you meant to say, Bella? Are you sure you didn't mean "this was worse than anything; this was so bleak and misguided and exploitive and cheap that it sang out with ugh and gross and FUCK YOU S. MEYER" or something?

"Hey, none of that," Jared complained. "I'm eating."

"Then shut up and eat," Sam suggested, kissing Emily's ruined mouth again.

"Ugh," Embry groaned.

AMEN, EMBRY! What kind of person conceives of this? All along, S. Meyer has been drawing these comparisons for seemingly no particular reason, except perhaps to mirror the threat formerly posed by the Cullens, which itself mirrored abusive relationships to a lesser extent. I guess it is okay to be thematically condescending in YA fiction, to do something like create a character whose seeming sole purpose is to embody a theme you've already established. But what is the point of this particular theme? To show Bella beset on all sides with danger? Bella's already in so much danger all the time, we've reached a level of danger saturation. And nothing is ever really made of the fact that the things Bella loves pose as great a threat to her as everything else, except that Edward occasionally points it out when he's in a particularly self-loathing mood. The whole thread seems unnecessary, like S. Meyer is keeping it around and not doing anything with it. And to then make Sam and Emily this Great Romance, to have Bella be overwhelmed by their love - what the hell kind of message is that sending? It's misguided to an insane degree, but it doesn't even seem to be aware of its own perversion, does it? Twilight compulsively avoids sex and bad words. If it felt like this series was knowingly inverting our ideas about abusive relationships, that would be one thing. It would be morally reprehensible in a way we could respect. I'm not against being transgressive, but to be unaware of one's own moral reprehensibility is to be a sociopath. This chapter is sociopathic.

Jacob tells the pack that Victoria is after Bella, and they all argue as to what extent they will use Bella as bait. They plan on splitting up on their patrols or something (it's hard to read closely when you're too busy punching this book repeatedly). They want to keep Bella on the reservation as often as possible, and Bella insists on finding excuses to get Charlie down there too.

Sam tells Bella if she sticks around he can't "make any guarantees" about her safety. OBVIOUSLY! The guys are psyched that they'll get a chance to kill Victoria, and Bella and Emily get to be nail-biting, worried female stereotypes for a good long while. Bella watches Emily watching the boys eat breakfast and notes that she clearly sees them as her family.

All in all, it wasn't what I'd been expecting from a pack of werewolves.

You said it, Bella. Jacob spends the rest of the day on patrols, and Bella hangs out with Billy. Charlie comes over for dinner, and that night he asks Bella what the deal is now. She shrugs off all the problems with Jacob as a misunderstanding, and tells him about how great Sam and Emily are.

His face changed. "I hadn't heard that he and Emily had made it official. That's nice. Poor girl."

Bella asks Charlie if he knows what happened, and he tells her Emily was mauled by a bear. Oh good, I'm glad there's an official story. I wonder whose idea it was? Bella takes a minute before she goes to bed to reckon with her amoral self. Earlier Jacob had called her a hypocrite for being worried that he was killing people, since she used to date a vampire and all.

I curled into a tight ball. No, Edward wasn't a killer. Even in his darker past, he'd never been a murderer of innocents at least.

AT LEAST? Does Bella not realize that killing non-innocents is still bad? Does S. Meyer?

I shook my head sadly. Love is irrational, I reminded myself.

I know how you feel, Bella. I'm shaking my head so hard and so sadly it feels like it's going to fall off of my body!

BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 16: Reckoner

We all know that Bella Swan doesn't necessarily have the soundest moral foundation. I'm not saying Charlie and Renee are bad parents, but Bella seemed relatively unfazed by the notion that most of the Cullens used to be murderers. Edward was a Dexter-like vigilante, but the moral implications of such a life were barely acknowledged by Edward himself and not at all by Bella. Plus, neither parent seems to have ever given Bella the sex talk, but that is not the problem at hand. Right now I'm worried about Bella because she's trying to reckon with the possibility that Jacob is a killer, and it seems more than likely that any decision she makes will be reprehensible. At the end of the last chapter Bella was sitting on the floor trying to decide what to do; now we get her verdict. Brace yourself.

(I know what you're thinking: how can I love Alice so much when she likely also killed people? Alice has given back to the community, with her body. Edward is a virgin. So what good is he?)

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 13: Killer

The good news is our girl Bella finally seems to have a grip on the concept of moral complexity. She can't bring herself to leave the literal wolves to the metaphorical ones, so to speak, but she can't condone their behavior either. So she resolves to warn Jacob about the bounty on his head and then immediately cease their friendship. Not exactly righteous, but for Bella this is progress. She's pissed and conflicted, but her rapier wit is intact. "It was bad enough that my best friend was a werewolf. Did he have to be a monster, too?"

"I refuse to join any wolfpack that would have me as a member."- Bella Marx

She arrives at La Push; it's very early in the morning. Still, she pounds on Jacob's front door until Billy calls her in. I would love to play poker with Billy Black, because the man has such a tell! This happens as Bella walks in:

When he saw who it was, his eyes widened briefly, and then his face turned stoic.

(Too many commas, S. Meyer!) Literally on the same page, Bella asks Billy if he knows that Charlie is out in the woods with half the swinging dicks in Forks hunting wolves.

Billy's expression flickered, and then went blank.

Always with the barely detectable facial tics, this guy! He's the opposite of Jacob's constantly shifting Scanner Darkly face (the face fell far from the tree I guess). But why bother with the stoicism if you can't keep it up? That's what she said!

Billy tells Bella to let Jacob sleep, but she bursts into his room without knocking. NOT A GOOD IDEA, Bella. Jacob is a horny 16-year old. What if he is up already, in more ways than one? But it's okay, he's asleep and (probably) not erect. Bella describes his room as literally so small that it only holds his bed.

"Well, that's all I would need, baby."-Quil Ateara

He's also still wearing the "same black cut-off sweats he'd worn last night." Cut-off sweats? I pity the wardrobe designer for these movies. Bella can't bear to wake her sleepy friend, so she decides to wait for him at the beach, leaving the message with Billy. "I could see many questions for me in his dark eyes,"she says. Yeah, I bet you could.

Bella does a little internal monologue where she concludes that she loves Jacob too much to condemn him. "Jacob was my friend whether he killed people or not. And I didn't know what I was going to do about that." I'm still happy that Bella at least thought it over. And none of these moral considerations matter anyway because it becomes immediately clear that Jacob and his friends aren't killing anyone. That was a close one, we almost had a morally fraught situation there! Good thing we didn't; that might have been too interesting for some readers.

(Maybe I'm having my moral cake and eating it too, complaining on the one hand that Bella has no moral compass and then complaining on the other hand that she doesn't get a chance to use it anyway, but whatever. It's a moral failure and a moral default at the same time.)

Jacob shows up and there is a long, misunderstanding-filled conversation where he thinks she's disgusted by the fact that he's a werewolf and she thinks he's an unrepentant killer but neither turns out to be true. I get that "misunderstanding" is the major theme of this book, but just once I'd like to read a straightforward conversation, you know? I hate that every plot point hinges on the fact that all of our major characters are dumbasses.

This book has had a lot of weird stuff about eyes sparkling with unspeakable secrets and noses full of contempt, but I really dig when Bella's voice is here described as being "pale with revulsion." That's great and very evocative. It reminds me of Anne Carson, in a good way. Nicely done, S. Meyer.

Jacob is frustrated about the wolves' inability save people from whatever really is killing them, and when he seems to callously remark that the members of the hunting party will start dying soon, Bella starts speaking in the pale voice. Jacob gets angry, and Edward's Ghost reappears when he starts "pressing his trembling fists against his temples and squeezing his eyes shut." It gets tense for a second, but Bella tries to diffuse him and very sweetly asks if he could stop killing people. He's like, "Say what, bitch?" Then everyone is happy again. They hug, and Jacob strokes her hair. Yep, he's the same guy he always was.

So who is killing people? Jacob talks about how the wolves are always too late to stop some vampire, and Bella concludes that Laurent must still be around. But Jacob informs her that Laurent is dead. She's shocked and thrilled and doesn't understand how the wolves could have done it. "It's what we're made for, Bells," Jacob says. I'm still uncomfortable with this Intelligent Design-y sentiment (Jacob later says "we exist because they do"), but I do love the idea that the God of S. Meyer's universe is a total nerd, creating monsters to fight each other like World of Warcraft or some shit. I suppose it is possible to see the real world that way, like God created Americans to kill Muslims, and surely some people do see it that way. Shudder.

Bella and Jacob proceed to tie up a lot of loose plot threads: she asks about the previous night when he'd said it wasn't safe for them to be around each other. Jacob explains that it wasn't safe for her; if he gets too angry he turns into a wolf. So Jacob worries that around Bella he will lose control and kill her. Sounds like Bella's kind of man.

And so obviously these werewolves don't shift when there's a full moon out. Fanboys, get your pitchforks! "Hollywood's version doesn't get much right," Jacob says. So essentially it's the same deal as the vampires, but this time S. Meyer found a very quick way to explain New Moon's place in the werewolf cannon. Hard to argue with that. Fanboys, put your pitchforks away!

Truth be told, the lion's (or wolf's) share of this conversation is spent explaining the stakes of this new werewolf world. Jacob seems to be able to move without making a lot of sound, even in human form. Bella comments on the noisy rocks she has to walk across on the beach, but when Jacob starts pacing back and forth on them he doesn't make a sound. There's also the fact that Sam is the Alpha of the pack, and he can therefore give his pack orders they are incapable of disobeying, which explains all of the choking on words in the last few chapters.

Jacob also talks about the horror of becoming a werewolf for the first time, though he doesn't go much further than saying "It was horrible." He does manage to get Bella to pity Sam Uley for a second, talking about the fact that he had to go through it alone. The Uley Youth Outreach program suddenly seems a lot less creepy, huh? Bella still wants to think Sam Uley is a creep, though. Not to tease the next chapter too much, but she'll have a good reason soon!

Bella eventually realizes that since Laurent has been dead for a while, and people are still somehow getting killed, obviously someone else is around. Apparently Laurent's death was so shocking, Bella totally forgot the entire basis for this conversation. You got to get all of those werewolf details out somewhere, I guess. Jacob starts talking about the other vampire he'd been travelling with, who has been hovering around the perimeter of Forks for weeks. He starts musing out loud what she could be after and Bella starts dry-heaving with anxiety.

"Victoria," I gasped as soon as I could catch my breath around the nauseous spasms.

Around The Nauseous Spasms is my new band name. Bella explains that Victoria is after her, getting revenge for Edward's murder of James. Are we all supposed to ignore the fact that Edward didn't even kill James? Are we going to retcon this fucking series already? Edward seemed all let down in the hospital because Jasper and Emmett were the ones who had done the deed, right? I guess we're not going to let the truth get in the way of a good story. Already, Victoria's plan for revenge makes no sense. Bella also mentions that Edward doesn't love her anymore anyway, so it's not like killing her would even be a proportional response. I wish someone would point all of this out to Victoria (and S. Meyer)!

Jacob was distracted by that, his face torn between several different expressions. "Is that what happened? Why the Cullens left?"

In case you were wondering what "torn between several expressions" looks like.

Jacob brings Bella back to her truck and leaves her for a minute, saying he's going to call a meeting. She has a panic attack while he runs into the woods. Mostly she's now afraid of Jacob getting hurt in his apparently ongoing attempts to kill Victoria. How long has he been a wolf? It's only been a few days, but Jacob talks about hunting Victoria like it's his day job or something.

No matter what Jacob said, the thought of him coming anywhere close to Victoria was horrifying.

That's what she said? Jacob comes back, and he explains that he went into the woods to wolfitize briefly. It turns out all the members of the pack can hear each other's thoughts when they are in wolf form.

"Is that what you meant last night, when you said you would tell them you'd seen me, even though you didn't want to?"

"You're quick at dispensing with plot threads," Jacob said.

So a bunch of teenage boys can all read each other's thoughts? That's got to be quite the pornographic echo chamber in there. I'm sure they've all gotten to know Bella without getting to know her, if you know what I mean. I'm saying, they've probably seen her in every conceivable sex position by now, if that wasn't clear. And she's about to meet them!

Jacob makes another overture to Bella before the meeting, mentioning Edward's name on the way over and then apologizing for it.

"How do you know me so well, Jacob? Sometimes it's like you can read my mind."

"Naw. I just pay attention."

He asks her if maybe she's better off without him. She cuts off the conversation, saying "If things were different, it would be nice to finally talk to someone about it." I think this is Bella's way of saying, "If you weren't thinking about banging me right now maybe I could confide in you." Once again, obviously Bella needs Alice. I mean, Alice wants to bang Bella too, but she keeps it to herself. Oh, hey, by the way WHERE THE FUCK IS ALICE?

Thoughts?

BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 15: Wolf Like Me

I've been reading New Moon, by S. Meyer. Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 12: Intruder

Bella wakes up in the middle of the night when something starts scratching against her window; she gets out of bed and sees a “huge dark shape” wobbling in a looming sort of way, which she assumes is Victoria, and immediately starts preparing to die. Wobbling, though? That should be your first sign you're not dealing with a vampire. They're not all as graceful and dancer-like as Alice, but I don't see them wobbling. I shouldn't be mentioning Alice, it makes the edges around the hole in my chest ache. Learning about Ashley Greene's appointment to high office doesn't make me feel any better. Alice is never coming back. Anyway, Bella hears Jacob's voice at the window and realizes it's a false alarm.

Now this is another one of those S. Meyer scenes which is sort of hard to visualize—it sounds totally ridiculous:

Jacob was clinging precariously to the top of the spruce that grew in the middle of Charlie's little front yard. His weight had bowed the tree toward the house and he now swung – his legs dangling twenty feet above the ground – not a yard away from me.

What? It is suggested briefly that Bella thinks she's dreaming, but it is not driven home sufficiently enough to accommodate the cartoonishness of this scene. He ends up swinging like Tarzan into her room, landing noiselessly enough to not wake Charlie. When he grins at his success, Bella gets pissed off. “I'd cried myself to sleep over this boy,” she says. When, exactly, Bella? You did just cry yourself to sleep, but it was over Edward! Is she having trouble keeping them straight?

His harsh rejection has punched a painful new hole in what was left of my chest. He'd left a new nightmare behind him, like an infection in a sore—the insult after the injury.

He'd put salt in a wound that had already been salted! WE GET IT BELLA. Again, I find myself mentally adding swears to the dialogue. David Mamet should write the script for Breaking Dawn.

“Get the fuck out!” I hissed.

Bella tries to shove Jacob back out of the window (Team Bella!) at which point she realizes that A) his skin is still super-hot, and B) he is shirtless. Last week a few of you balked at the idea of playing Marry/Fuck/Kill with Jacob Black because he is just a (fictional) boy. I don't disagree with you, but remember that S. Meyer is writing this stuff—describing the half-naked body of a 16 year old. It's weird to think about, huh? I only object to it as much as I object to the sexualization of Dakota Fanning in The Runaways, which is to say enough to feel uncomfortable, but not enough to impact my opinion of the work as a whole.

Strangely, Bella is overcome with fatigue. Like, literally, she almost passes out on her feet. Why so sleepy, Bella? She says something about sleepless nights, but she was just sleeping a minute ago! You can't complain about crying yourself to sleep and also complain about not sleeping in the same breath! I guess I don't know how sleep deprivation works-- does sleeping a little bit make it way worse? Like extremely, comically worse?

Bella collapses onto her bed and presumably spends the rest of the conversation lying down, which leads to more visualization problems. At one point Jacob takes Bella's face in his hands (while it is still attached to her body, it needs to be said). So is he bent over her bed, at like a 90 degree angle? Is he straddling her?

Jacob says he came to apologize but Bella is too fucked-up on exhaustion to understand exactly why. (It kinds of reads like Bella is actually just high, and S. Meyer is euphemizing it away like the sex talk from Twilight.) She's lucid for a lot of the conversation, though; the exhaustion appears and disappears in the service of a few plot points. (It's not like the semi-conscious near-death scene at the end of Twilight, though it probably should be. Here, Bella can read all of Jacob's specific emotions and intentions but can't verbally respond coherently or comprehend direct questions.)

Jacob feels like a jerk but he still can't tell Bella the truth – he actually seems physically incapable of speaking when he tries. But then he mentions that she already knows anyway; he says he told her the truth way back in the first book (well, he doesn't say that exactly), which is true. Back when Jacob was a round-faced little boy, he told her the legend that his people descended from wolves. He just didn't know it was anything other than a legend at the time. But Bella is too tired/drunk/high to remember any of that. C'mon now, Bella. I've had a couple of drinks tonight and I remember it just fine.

Jacob's face shifts from “hopelessness to blazing intensity in a second.” He really is a lot like Edward now, huh? He keeps trying to hint at the truth, but it seems to take physical effort.

Whatever he was trying to do, it was so hard he was panting.

That's what she said! Bella, I mean. I've given up on complaining about my standard grammatical hobby-horses, but something unforgivable happens on page 285. Jacob is still trying to remind Bella about what happened that day at La Push, and she apparently visually reacts at the memory of learning Edward was a vampire:

He spoke slowly, making each word distinct. “Do you remember what I said?”

Even in the dark, he must be able to see the change in my face.

I understand a little bit of past-perfect confusion, but BASIC fucking past and present tense inconsistencies? WHAT THE FUCK? Am I the only one OUTRAGED by this?

Then Jacob looks at Bella with “eyes that knew too much.” We've all been complaining about the overly emotive eyes in this book, and this is the “insult after the injury” to use Bella's clunky rendering of an already boring cliché.

Jacob is also frequently described as being “sarcastic,” though it is hard to understand exactly how he is imbuing some of these lines with sarcasm.

“Maybe it will come back to you. I guess I under why you only remember the one story,” he added in a sarcastic, bitter tone. “Do you mind if I ask you a question about that?” he asked, still sarcastic.

That is kind of hard to say in a sarcastic tone! What would the conveyed meaning even be? Does he not really want to know the answer?

"Could you BE any worse at understanding how sarcasm works?"

Jacob has to leave before Bella can figure anything out – he hasn't told the guys about going off the reservation (literally and figuratively) yet.

“You don't have to tell them a fucking thing,” I hissed.

“All the same, I will.”

He tells Bella not to hate the bros – Sam is “incredibly cool.” She asks why she can't see him, then, and he replies “it's not safe.” She interprets this to mean she's the radioactive one, that he somehow knows about Victoria, which is such a stupid and illogical conclusion to draw that I am forced to believe Bella really is high. On what, though? Maybe there's a carbon monoxide leak.

Jacob tells her to come see him when she figures it out. Unless she doesn't want to. There's a lot of stuff about how Jacob's face is different. Sometimes it's Bella's Jacob Face, which is nice and gentle and happy and carefree, and sometimes it's Sam's Jacob Face which is all lines and veins and tendons and harsh eyes:

His face turned hard and bitter, one hundred percent the face that belonged to Sam. “Oh, I can think of a reason,” he said in a harsh tone.

But then other times it's like Sam's Jacob Face is commenting on Bella's Jacob Face:

A wide grin spread slowly across Jacob's face...it wasn't the grin that I knew and loved – it was a new grin, one that was a bitter mockery of his old sincerity, on the new face that belonged to Sam.

That is some face you got there, Jacob. Before he leaves he tries to hug Bella, but it ends up being this weird Frankenstein monster moment where he almost crushes her to death.

I took his hand, and suddenly he yanked me – too roughly – right off the bed so that I thudded against his chest.

Sometimes I make notes in the margins at night and in the morning I can't remember what they mean. There's a particularly mystifying note next to this passage: it just reads “Shake Weight.” Okay, Zac. Whatever.

Bella passes out and Jacob leaves and she has a new version of the Oswald Alving sun-finding dream she had many (new) moons ago after the aforementioned La Push trip. At the time the dream confirmed her fears about Edward being a vampire, but Jacob also turned into a wolf. This time it confirms those (almost totally absent) suspicions. Jacob turns into a wolf again, but this time it's the big, knowing-eyed russet wolf. This dream is so versatile! It's like Jacob's face!

She wakes up screaming, but Charlie is so used to it by now that he doesn't come in to check. Probably not a good thing, given the Victoria situation. Someday she'll scream and really need it, and help won't come. Like that old story about the boy who cried something. What was it? "The Boy Who Cried Tiger"? I can't remember.

Then, weirdly, S. Meyer literally copies over a page of text from Twilight. Seriously. Bella flashes back to her conversation with Jacob, but instead of paraphrasing it or something, S. Meyer just pastes in a whole fucking page word-for-word and italicizes it. What's even more bizarre is that one word changes:

“Do you know any of our old stories, about where we came from – the Quileutes, I mean?” he asked.

That's the New Moon version of the line. (Technically since the originally line is italicized my block-quote shouldn't be, but for the ease of the reader and but for the grace of god, you know?) In Twilight, the end of it reads “he began.” But everything else is exactly the same. It's almost like S. Meyer thought about revising but just went “Nah, fuck it” after a second or two and hit cntrl+i instead. She could have just transposed the conversation into past perfect (her problems with that tense notwithstanding): “He'd began,” “I'd admitted,” etc. Of course now I'm wondering if it's “he'd began” or “he'd begun” and I really don't know. Maybe that's what scared S. Meyer off too.

Bella finishes her cheap flashback (If you've ever seen any of the Saw movies – I think I saw the first three – every movie ends with a flashback of the movie you just watched, which strikes me as vaguely insulting, even for the audience of a Saw film. Actually, a lot of movies do that, and it's always cheap, just like this is cheap. One of the many great things about Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind is that quick flashbacks in that film contain images you don't see in any other context – in other words it's really like a flashback a real human would have. It bothers me when, in other movies, someone's life will flash before her eyes and the only parts of her life you see are clips from the previous 90 minutes. There was more life than that, right? By the way, I wholly agree with the Onion AV Club that ESOTSM is the best film of the previous decade. If you disagree we should fight about it.) and for some reason says “werewolf” out loud, alone in her room.

There's a great section where Bella wonders if all myths and monsters and legends are real. “Am I going to have to fuck a mummy next?” she says. But not really.

Was there anything sane or normal at all, or was everything just magic and ghost stories?

We are going to stop at werewolves and vampires, right guys? They seem to go well together: cold, intellectual, (self-loathing, violent) vampires and hot, passionate, (self-loathing, violent) werewolves. There isn't anymore room in that dichotomy. Dull, room-temperature (self-loathing, violent) centaurs?

Then Bella gets mad at herself for being such a fucked-up crazy monster-fucker. “Jacob, the only human I'd ever been able to relate to...and he wasn't even human.” This is a pretty fun way of playing with the “girl who always picks the wrong guy” trope, but it can't really be explored because Bella only has herself to talk to. What she needs is a confidant she can tell about this shit, someone who can wittily remark “Boy, you sure know how to pick em, Bella.” Which reminds me: Yo String, where is Alice? String! STRING! WHERE THE FUCK IS ALICE?! STRING!

"Just don't get me started on Gatsby. Seriously, don't."

There was no cult. There had never been a cult, never been a gang. No it was much worse than that. It was a pack.

Why is that worse? Bella decides to go straight to La Push, even though it's early in the morning. Charlie is on his way to work, obviously a little confused, when she comes barreling down the stairs. Still, he seems okay with letting her go, he just tells her not to stop anywhere.

“There's been another attack,” he says. “The wolves again. There's a missing hiker and more blood.”

My stomach dropped like I'd hit a corkscrew on a roller coaster. “A wolf attacked him?”

Bella immediately find herself morally vexed on all sides. There's a hunting party getting together to kill the wolves, and Bella's first instinct is to protect Jacob. But when she realizes Charlie is going out on the hunt too (with his pistol, apparently, unless he straps on a rifle when he goes to work) she also wants to protect him. After a few minutes Bella finally realizes Jacob might actually be a murderer and would therefore not deserve her protection. The moral arc of Bella is long, but it bends toward justice.

BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 14: You've Made Your Bed Now Fuck In It

Dana Stevens recently referred to the experience of watching Sex And The City 2 as "wallowing in a luxurious abyss." I don't know that any of New Moon is particularly luxurious (without the Cullens around we've been free of ostentatious displays of wealth, which is probably something I should appreciate but it will likely be one of those situations Joni Mitchell was taling about) but we have definitely been wallowing in an abyss for a while. For some reason I feel like we're climbing out, though. The Jacob/Sam/Cult situation is reaching a climax (at least I hope it is) and this new Victoria thread hints at something other than a lot of cock-teasing and adrenaline-chasing. We have been getting our cocks teased for too long. I'm not going to make reference to climaxes again, thank you very much. Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 11: Cult

Part of the reason I feel better about this chapter is because it has a nice elliptical structure. This is basically what happens:

1. Bella fears Victoria
2. Bella tries to tell Charlie about Sam Uley
3. Jacob confronts Bella
4. Bella tries to tell Charlie about Sam Uley again
5. Bella fears Victoria again

So points for that. But like Bella's recurring nightmare, we're not out of the woods yet. The chapter opens with an awkward rhyme:

Each time that I opened my eyes to the morning light and realized I'd lived through another night was a surprise to me.

The bizarre phrase "to the morning light" and the general meter of the line make the rhyme sound intentional, which is scary. Accidental rhyme happens all the time. But doing it on purpose is kind of a mystifying choice.

Bella is very preoccupied with the Victoria thing hanging over her head; admirably she seems more concerned with Charlie's safety than her own. She can't run away because she can't be sure Victoria won't follow her scent back to Charlie's house anyway, and she can't go to Renee because that would put her at risk too. She should just start hanging out with her enemies, right? Put in some double shifts at Newton's. Call up that bitch Lauren!

The worry was eating a hole in my stomach. Soon I would have matching punctures.

She's referring to the metaphorical chest hole, but I think this new thing might actually be an ulcer, Bella. Get that checked out.

She's also been missing Jacob more than ever: "It was bad enough before I was scared silly," she says. That's barely an admission of the fact that she overreacted to the whole Edward/breakup situation, an admission that things are finally serious and worthy of anguish now, but let's pretend it is so that we can all start to like Bella again, okay? Also, "scared silly?" Why does Bella talk like a youth pastor? You're not selling Bella as Ms. Secular USA, S. Meyer. That is not how we talk!

It was bad enough before I was fucking scared shitless, but now that I had this cunt Victoria to deal with I needed Jacob more than ever.

Her theory that Jacob has been distant because he's been doing an intervention with Embry falls apart when he continues to not call. She doesn't want to believe that he's given up on her. Well, I do! You are such an asshole, Bella! You've fucked with Jacob's head and dick for months (and as rape-y and terrible I find Jacob, that doesn't excuse your behavior), you've essentially admitted as much (in your occasional moments of lucidity, when you're not burying the truth in layers of denial), and now you have to deal with the consequences!

Except not really, because obviously Jacob is not ignoring Bella because he's realized that she isn't worth the trouble; it's probably quite the opposite. But if there was any justice in this book, that would be why! I know, I just said we should forgive Bella. But it is so hard sometimes! That's what she said!

(Bella is assured by the fact that since she has a huge target on her back Jacob is safer staying away, but she only feels like this for about 30 seconds before elaborately justifying that possibility away in order to visit him.)

One day Bella's subconscious comes back (remember that asshole?) and delivers "a verdict it must have been working on for some time without my knowledge." That's some brain you got there, Bella.

"Not just a hat rack, my friend."

(Thanks for the tip, Kim. That's what she said.)

Bella's brain has concluded that Jacob must have fallen in with Sam Uley and his gang of merry men. Well, yeah. I never know if we're supposed to be solving these mysteries along with Bella or if we're supposed to be way ahead of her. It's probably the latter, since I doubt we should be thinking of our narrator as a moron. But why is our narrator such a moron? To be fair, Bella confesses that her conclusion is "embarrassingly obvious." She also says "Holy crow, I knew exactly what was going on with Jacob." Holy crow, Batman?

I get that S. Meyer is a Mormon, and when she hits her hand with a hammer she probably yells "sugarplums and daisies!" But she must know that the rest of us don't. (She must know now, having hung out with Kristen Stewart for more than a few seconds.) In the interest of writing a believable character then, can we get some fucking curse words in here or just cut it with the Leave It To Beaver euphemisms altogether? Similarly:

He hadn't given up on me at all, I realized with a rush of feeling.

Why doesn't S. Meyer have the guts to just come out and admit that Bella had an orgasm? Or is that not what that is?

Bella decides to go to La Push, potentially to kidnap Jacob. "I'd once seen a PBS show on deprogramming the brainwashed," she says. I know there's a lot of bullshit on public TV, Bella, but are you sure that wasn't an article on Prison Planet or something?

She calls Charlie at the police station first, and when she tells him her suspicions about what's going on at La Push he seems to take her seriously. But when she implicates Sam Uley, Charlie rises to his defense, the same way he used to defend the Cullens. Charlie doesn't get enough credit for being particularly intuitive. Even with incomplete information he comes to the right conclusion. As we say in the social sciences, he is a skilled user of heuristics. (The other day it occurred to me that I now have a Bachelor of the ARTS degree in Political SCIENCE, a sort of unconscious admission of Poli-Sci's place as a particularly dubious science.)

Charlie is busy anyway, he says "two tourists have gone missing off a trail outside crescent lake." That's funny, we have a Crescent Lake in my hometown too, but we capitalize proper nouns there. Every town is different, I guess. But there's blood on the tracks this time, so the hunt for the wolves has intensified.

He hangs up and this happens:

I stared at the phone for a long minute. What the hell, I decided.

She says hell? Hooray! I should start counting the scarce and precious swears. Maybe YA fiction is like a PG movie - are you allowed a set number of swears? Or do you think S. Meyer has personally set a number she finds acceptable? She seems like the type. It's not like YA Fiction has an analogue to the MPAA to regulate such a thing, so the latter is more likely.

She calls Billy, who actually answers, but gets the expected reply that Jacob isn't in. So she drives to La Push, determined to wait him out. Once on the Rez, she runs into Quil walking down the side of the road. She picks him up, and I half expected Quil to offer oral sex in exchange for the ride, or at least make jokes about getting a "ride" from Bella, but he's too depressed. He'd gone looking for Jacob, but lost the Uley Gang's trail in the woods. That's right: Jacob is one of them now. According to Quil he adapted rather quickly, not disappearing for days like the others. So perhaps he is very good at being a wolf? Quil and Bella speculate that it might be drugs, but neither of them can really believe it. Like Jacob once was, Quil is afraid he'll be next.

I can't wait for all of this to stop being mysterious; I feel like we've been solving this case for years. This investigation is like a season of The Wire, only not as good and with no Omar. If this story had an Omar it was Laurent, and we've (probably) seen the last of him. I think in this analogy, Edward is Bunk, Emmett is McNulty, Alice is Kima, and Bella is Stringer Bell (heh, but really). Sam Uley is Chris Partlow and Jacob is Michael. Carlisle is too morally upright to exist.

Bella drops off Quil and parks outside Chez Black; she didn't bring anything to do, which kind of confounds me. I generally carry a bag full of books and magazines and paper and pens at all times, so great is my fear of having to sit somewhere for very long with only my thoughts to occupy me. It's actually stupid because I come up with my best ideas when I am doing nothing, but maybe on some level I am afraid that won't be true anymore if I force it. It ends up not being an issue for Bella, because Jacob shows up after a few minutes.

He cut his hair. I'd actually forgotten his hair was ever long, given how inundated we've been with Eclipse stills, so it wasn't as significant to me as it perhaps should have been? What does a haircut signify? He also appears to have aged a few years, he's all veins and tendons, but the important thing is he looks much more like an asshole. His facial features have somehow rearranged to make him look harsher, like Heidi Montag, post-op. "There was a darkness to Jacob now," Bella says.

One less shitty wig for Summit Entertainment to fuck up, am I right?

Mistah Kurtz is flanked by his gang banger buddies, and everyone is staring at Bella like "fuck you, cunt." Everyone but Sam Uley, who apparently looks like he doesn't want to kill Bella at all. So naturally he's the one she concentrates her anger on. (Bella hates people who don't want to hate-fuck her.) She thinks about how much she'd like to kick the shit out of him and for once she wants to be a vampire solely for the purpose of getting some vengeance. Now might be a good time to draw a parallel between Bella and Victoria, but since S. Meyer doesn't I won't either! Bella requests a private audience with Jacob, and everyone looks to Sam for permission. Boss Wolf gives the okay, and the boys head into the house while Bella and Jacob walk around the corner.

Jacob tells Bella he was wrong about the Sam situation, but he can't tell her what is really going on. He says they can't be friends anymore, and it plays like a mirror image of the breakup scene with Edward earlier in the book. In terms of the Monomyth, maybe this isn't Edward's Refusal Of The Call so much as it is everyone's Refusal Of Bella. I would feel bad for her again, but this time she deserves it.

"It wasn't like I thought it was. This isn't Sam's fault. He's helping me as much as he can." His voice turned brittle and he looked over my head, past me, rage burning out from his eyes.

"He's helping you," I repeated dubiously. "Naturally."

But Jacob didn't seem to be listening.

Uh, it doesn't seem like YOU are listening, Bella! Jacob might have a mild form of epilepsy - he keeps shaking and can't seem to control himself. That's domestic abuse parallel #2,415 if you weren't uncomfortable enough already. Eventually Jacob tells Bella that if she wants to blame someone, she should blame the "filthy, reeking, bloodsuckers" she loves so much. So clearly Jacob has come a long way from being blissfully skeptical of his father's beliefs. But Bella pretends not to know what he is talking about, and Jacob tries to clarify while still avoiding the word "Cullen" out of deference to Bella. Which is kind of weird. He's being a jerk to Bella, seemingly on purpose a la Edward, but not on this one subject? Emma "people can imagine breasts but not asses" logic going on here.

Bella wonders if the Uley Gang has formed around mutual hatred for vampires, and interestingly Jacob's rhetoric does reflect that of groups formed in opposition to some other group or race: Know-Nothings, White Supremacists. Bella asks what he's blaming the Cullens for, and he replies "for existing."

Edward's imaginary disembodied voice shows up, urging Bella to calm Jacob down. She doesn't understand why the hallucination is happening now; "There was no adrenaline, no danger." But on some level obviously she knows she is in danger, since she Ghost Edward is a product of her "unconscious mind." So she knows he is dangerous but doesn't want to believe it (#2,416). Bella mentions Quil and Jacob gets angrier.

"He won't be next," Jacob muttered to himself. "He can't be. It's over now."

He ends up punching a tree, and it breaks and falls over. I know I said there is no phallic imagery in this book, but this is an interesting moment, don't you think?

Jacob tells Bella to go home, and she asks if they are breaking up. Jacob laughs, so maybe he understands the situation better than I gave him credit for. "Loneliness" chokes in Bella's throat.

"I'm sorry, Bella," Jacob said each word distinctly in a cold voice that didn't seem to belong to him.

What the hell could that sound like? "I'm. Sorry. Bella." She briefly entertains the idea of leaving him alone to deal with his shit before resorting to using sex as a weapon instead, saying maybe she could change how she feels about Jacob after all. Luckily Jacob still kicks her sorry ass off his property, though he seems very angry with himself. "I'm not what I was before," he says. "I'm not good."

"What?" I stared at him, confused and appalled. "What are you saying? You're much better than I am, Jake. [No one is contesting that!-Ed.] You are good! Who told you that you aren't? Sam? It's a viscous lie, Jacob!"

Oy at that last sentence. Who the hell employs a phrase like that in the heat of the moment? Talk about the gentle cadences of an earlier century, huh? Jacob leaves, and he has enough of a lead on Bella that when she gets back to the house only Billy is still there. He seems to feel really bad but he still more or less kicks her out.

Bella gets rained on a lot on her way home, and if constant references to being wet weren't TWSS-worthy enough, there's this:

I'd thought Jake had been healing the hole in me - or at least plugging it up...He'd just been carving out his own hole.

Charlie's waiting for Bella on the porch, and "a kind of horrified recognition" registers on his face as he understands what happened. She tells him Sam Uley said she and Jacob can't be friends anymore, which is really not true at all, but it prompts Charlie to call Billy. Bella overhears a tense conversation in which Billy seems to be blaming Bella and her cock-teasing for the breakup. Charlie doesn't want Bella getting all depressed again, and he comes close to threatening to kick Jacob's ass. Team Charlie!

Bella goes to bed perplexed and depressed. She breaks her own rules and thinks of Edward until she cries herself to sleep. Then she has a dream in which the new, asshole Jacob shows up in the forest and then gradually morphs into Edward. Sure, now that Jacob has become a moody prick intent on hurting Bella "for her own good" he kind of reminds me of Edward, too.