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Chapter 2: Evasion
Prom is coming up, but Bella's forced an “ironclad promise” out of Edward that she doesn't have to go again. Good for you, Bella. This is an unusual amount of agency coming from our heroine (“a free woman?”), but so far Eclipse hasn't exactly remained faithful to New Moon anyway. I guess we should roll with it.
At the lunch table Angela is sharing her anxiety over the mailing of graduation announcements. “She had her light brown hair pulled back into a sloppy ponytail instead of her usual smooth hairdo, and there was a slightly frantic look about her eyes.” So what you're saying is, she and Alice just banged under the bleachers and she's worried her boyfriend (Ben, apparently) will find out, right?
Speaking of Alice: somewhere along the way my crazy, drug-addled, hard-partying moral-relativist projection of her started to converge with her real character in the text. I guess I was on to something? She's the comic relief throughout the next few scenes, first “scrutinizing” Bella's outfit at the lunch table, “Probably planning another makeover.” Then, when Bella brings up her un-grounding, Angela proposes a celebration and this happens:
“What should we do?” Alice mused, her face lighting up at the possibilities. Alice's ideas were usually a little grandiose for me, and I could see it in her eyes now – the tendency to take things too far kicking into action. “It'll be tough to get an 8-ball and a male stripper on such short notice but I think I can make it happen with one phone call.”
Okay so I added the last line. But I'm not that far off base! Bella tells Alice to stay calm, to which she replies “Free is free, right?” (someone's got a new catchphrase). “I still have boundaries,” Bella says. “Like the continental U.S., for example.”
Angela and Ben laughed, but Alice grimaced in real disappointment.
What? Did I write this? This is more of S. Meyer just re-shaping her characters with reckless abandon – consider that the last time we heard about Alice being interested in parties was 450-something pages ago, and the last time we heard about makeovers was even further back than that – but I'm okay with this particular development.
And then Alice has an acid flashback, or possibly a vision. Who even knows any more? Anything is possible! What happens is Bella gets distracted thinking about her last image of Jacob, his face crumpled in pain, and suddenly snaps out of it when Angela is shouting Alice's name in a panic. Alice is sitting there with a “vacant look in her eyes.” There's a mostly irritating Peter Travers interview with Ashley Greene in which she demonstrates the Alice Cullen junkie-stare; she doesn't say whether or not it comes from personal experience.
Bella is startled by the sight of her; “I felt the blood slither from my face,” she says. That's a pretty good line. Edward kicks Alice under the table and they laugh it off.
“I'm just stoned,” Alice trilled.
Just kidding.
"I just came," Alice trilled.
Still kidding. For the rest of the day, Bella has the strange feeling that Edward is avoiding being alone with her; he doesn't seem to want to share whatever was in Alice's vision. Alice keeps giving him sideways glares; it's unclear whether she's urging him to tell Bella or just panicked. In a kind of nominally funny scene, Edward abruptly strikes up a conversation with Mike Newton in the school parking lot and offers to fix his car.
“Perhaps it's the cables?” Edward offered.
“Maybe. I really don't know anything about cars,” Mike admitted.
And apparently S. Meyer doesn't either. Perhaps it's the cables? But again, it falls upon Alice to really bring the jokes. In the car, she inexplicably launches into an extended monologue, “babbling at top speed” like Lucky in Waiting For Godot, speaking in whole paragraphs. Either S. Meyer is revising her characters again, or there really is supposed to be a subtextual suggestion that Alice is high. This is about halfway through, as Alice starts criticizing Edward's mechanic skills:
“Though I suppose, for Mike's car, you'll do. It's only within the finer tunings of a good Italian sports car that you're out of your depth. And speaking of Italy and sports cars that I stole there, you still owe me a yellow Porsche.”
Is Alice going to get all of the bon mots to herself? (What's the plural of bon mot? Bons mot?) Edward drops Alice off, and she takes all of the air out of the room with her. They drive back to Bella's house in silence, and then Edward relaxes on the bed (enjoy that image) while Bella boots up her computer. It's interesting that in the film adaptation of New Moon, Bella has a fancy MacBook. That's not very "old soul" of her, you know? (It's not that interesting actually, everyone has a Mac on every TV show and every movie. It's one of the more pervasive, effective and terrifying ad campaigns of our time.) Her anxious drumming on the desk finally tips Edward off to the fact that something is amiss, so he gets himself up (you're welcome) and they make out for a while. Seriously, a good long while. There's basically a full page description of the make-out session. Hands are run through hair, lips move together. Edward slides his hand down Bella's back. Tips of tongues trace lips. If you need a minute to recover, that's fine. We will wait.
Bella reads an e-mail from her mother and gets to missing her. If Bella's weird inverted relationship with her mother wasn't clear enough, you've got this:
You have to let them go their own way eventually, I reminded myself. You have to let them have their own life...
I see what you're doing there, S. Meyer. Bella thinks about her own mother's early marriage; Renee always told Bella she had no regrets but nonetheless insists that waiting to get married is the right idea. “Mature people went to college and started careers before they got deeply involved in a relationship,” Bella recalls. Well, all of that is true, sure. But Bella isn't planning on doing any of that! She's not planning a career, she's not even planning on becoming mature when you really get down to it! I'm not saying Edward's insistence on marriage makes sense, but Bella's opposition is even more ideologically incoherent.
Bella e-mails her mom back – we get a block-quote in fake DOS script to re-enforce the idea that Bella's computer is shitty – and gets a little joke in when Renee asks about Jacob: “he spends most of his time with a pack of his friends down at La Push these days.” Always the wit, that Bella.
“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” -Bella Wilde
When she looks up from the computer Edward has found her mangled car stereo from New Moon, like S. Meyer is trying to convince us she actually does remember writing the last book after all. Edward also brings up the plane tickets Carlisle and Esme bought her – remember those? They're about to expire. (This feels less like a planned plot development and more like S. Meyer, like Bella, had forgotten about them.) He proposes they fly out – together – to see Renee this weekend. Bella is immediately tempted; she misses her mother and sees a good PR opportunity in showing off her healthy(ish) relationship with Edward – the last two times her mother saw Bella were after James put her in the hospital and after Edward's fake-break-up put her into a psychological coma. But she realizes Charlie will lose his mind: Edward and Bella traveling together? Edward and Bella on a plane? Edward and Bella fucking in the plane's bathroom? You can see how a father's thoughts would spiral out of control.
Bella switches gears and finally brings up the vision Alice had earlier, and Edward tells her that Alice has been seeing Jasper in a strange place, which is freaking her out. She's afraid her man is going to screw around on her! That's an angle on Alice's powers I hadn't thought about before. But it has nothing to do with Bella, apparently, so she chastises herself for letting her imagination run wild (“Just like a woman, getting all hysterical and shit”-S. Meyer).
Bella makes Charlie dinner, and Charlie says it's been slow down at the station. He apparently spent a good portion of the day on the phone with Billy. Those two are kind of cute, no? Maybe this series will end with them moving in together. In a platonic way. Probably. He says Billy is throwing a party this weekend at La Push; recall that the prom is also this weekend and so is Edward's proposed (this guy is proposing all over the place!) trip to Florida. Busy weekend! Bella doesn't really respond to the invitation to La Push, but Edward comes in and brings up the plane tickets again, in front of Charlie, going over Bella's head. Both Swans are appalled.
Edward's gambit pays off, though, because Charlie's anger at the idea of Edward banging his daughter in an airlocked compartment (probably) ends up directing Bella's rage in her father's direction for the moment. She threatens to move out again, he threatens to ground her again. These two don't have many tactics, huh? There's a weird beat where Bella says Renee is “as much [her] parental authority” as Charlie, and her father gives her “a withering look.” She latches on to that, and threatens to tell her mom about his implication. I will say, this strikes me as a fairly realistic divorced father/daughter exchange, not that the market isn't plenty saturated with fairly realistic divorced father/daughter exchanges.
“Perhaps it's the cables?” Edward offered.
“Maybe. I really don't know anything about cars,” Mike admitted.
And apparently S. Meyer doesn't either. Perhaps it's the cables? But again, it falls upon Alice to really bring the jokes. In the car, she inexplicably launches into an extended monologue, “babbling at top speed” like Lucky in Waiting For Godot, speaking in whole paragraphs. Either S. Meyer is revising her characters again, or there really is supposed to be a subtextual suggestion that Alice is high. This is about halfway through, as Alice starts criticizing Edward's mechanic skills:
“Though I suppose, for Mike's car, you'll do. It's only within the finer tunings of a good Italian sports car that you're out of your depth. And speaking of Italy and sports cars that I stole there, you still owe me a yellow Porsche.”
Is Alice going to get all of the bon mots to herself? (What's the plural of bon mot? Bons mot?) Edward drops Alice off, and she takes all of the air out of the room with her. They drive back to Bella's house in silence, and then Edward relaxes on the bed (enjoy that image) while Bella boots up her computer. It's interesting that in the film adaptation of New Moon, Bella has a fancy MacBook. That's not very "old soul" of her, you know? (It's not that interesting actually, everyone has a Mac on every TV show and every movie. It's one of the more pervasive, effective and terrifying ad campaigns of our time.) Her anxious drumming on the desk finally tips Edward off to the fact that something is amiss, so he gets himself up (you're welcome) and they make out for a while. Seriously, a good long while. There's basically a full page description of the make-out session. Hands are run through hair, lips move together. Edward slides his hand down Bella's back. Tips of tongues trace lips. If you need a minute to recover, that's fine. We will wait.
Bella reads an e-mail from her mother and gets to missing her. If Bella's weird inverted relationship with her mother wasn't clear enough, you've got this:
You have to let them go their own way eventually, I reminded myself. You have to let them have their own life...
I see what you're doing there, S. Meyer. Bella thinks about her own mother's early marriage; Renee always told Bella she had no regrets but nonetheless insists that waiting to get married is the right idea. “Mature people went to college and started careers before they got deeply involved in a relationship,” Bella recalls. Well, all of that is true, sure. But Bella isn't planning on doing any of that! She's not planning a career, she's not even planning on becoming mature when you really get down to it! I'm not saying Edward's insistence on marriage makes sense, but Bella's opposition is even more ideologically incoherent.
Bella e-mails her mom back – we get a block-quote in fake DOS script to re-enforce the idea that Bella's computer is shitty – and gets a little joke in when Renee asks about Jacob: “he spends most of his time with a pack of his friends down at La Push these days.” Always the wit, that Bella.
“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” -Bella Wilde
When she looks up from the computer Edward has found her mangled car stereo from New Moon, like S. Meyer is trying to convince us she actually does remember writing the last book after all. Edward also brings up the plane tickets Carlisle and Esme bought her – remember those? They're about to expire. (This feels less like a planned plot development and more like S. Meyer, like Bella, had forgotten about them.) He proposes they fly out – together – to see Renee this weekend. Bella is immediately tempted; she misses her mother and sees a good PR opportunity in showing off her healthy(ish) relationship with Edward – the last two times her mother saw Bella were after James put her in the hospital and after Edward's fake-break-up put her into a psychological coma. But she realizes Charlie will lose his mind: Edward and Bella traveling together? Edward and Bella on a plane? Edward and Bella fucking in the plane's bathroom? You can see how a father's thoughts would spiral out of control.
Bella switches gears and finally brings up the vision Alice had earlier, and Edward tells her that Alice has been seeing Jasper in a strange place, which is freaking her out. She's afraid her man is going to screw around on her! That's an angle on Alice's powers I hadn't thought about before. But it has nothing to do with Bella, apparently, so she chastises herself for letting her imagination run wild (“Just like a woman, getting all hysterical and shit”-S. Meyer).
Bella makes Charlie dinner, and Charlie says it's been slow down at the station. He apparently spent a good portion of the day on the phone with Billy. Those two are kind of cute, no? Maybe this series will end with them moving in together. In a platonic way. Probably. He says Billy is throwing a party this weekend at La Push; recall that the prom is also this weekend and so is Edward's proposed (this guy is proposing all over the place!) trip to Florida. Busy weekend! Bella doesn't really respond to the invitation to La Push, but Edward comes in and brings up the plane tickets again, in front of Charlie, going over Bella's head. Both Swans are appalled.
Edward's gambit pays off, though, because Charlie's anger at the idea of Edward banging his daughter in an airlocked compartment (probably) ends up directing Bella's rage in her father's direction for the moment. She threatens to move out again, he threatens to ground her again. These two don't have many tactics, huh? There's a weird beat where Bella says Renee is “as much [her] parental authority” as Charlie, and her father gives her “a withering look.” She latches on to that, and threatens to tell her mom about his implication. I will say, this strikes me as a fairly realistic divorced father/daughter exchange, not that the market isn't plenty saturated with fairly realistic divorced father/daughter exchanges.
Speaking of divorced dads, I learned a lot from (the admittedly fictional) Leo McGarry (RIP John Spencer). One of his better lessons was that you should never grant the premise of a line of questioning if you don't like where it's going. Charlie slips up, because when Bella says she'll tell Renee about his withering look, he says “You better not.” He granted the premise that she'd even be seeing Renee, you know? Don't concede her point, Charlie!
Bella declares she is going out, which takes Charlie and Edward by surprise. Bella's acting out all over the place! Freedom! If only these books had started here, I'd be able to be happy without reservation. But so many of these changes are coming at the expense of character consistency, it's hard to be enthusiastic.
Bella declares she is going out, which takes Charlie and Edward by surprise. Bella's acting out all over the place! Freedom! If only these books had started here, I'd be able to be happy without reservation. But so many of these changes are coming at the expense of character consistency, it's hard to be enthusiastic.
It's either that, or S. Meyer never wrote characters well enough in the first place, so by definition they can't be consistent or inconsistent. But that's a little too depressing to really consider.
2 comments:
Bon mots, like you had it.
So in reading this again, I'm wondering what the deal is with Edward saying Alice has been seeing Jasper "in a strange place." Could she be seeing as far ahead as Jasper thinking about contacting Maria for the fight with the newborns? Or is Edward just lying? Or is Jasper cheating on Alice somewhere in the margins?
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