September 1, 2008

• Twilight – A Review

  © Truly
    
      The first book in Stephenie Meyer’s four part Twilight Saga, Twilight, is detrimental to the young readers it was written for and not because it’s coursing with the raw lust and haunting darkness you might expect uptight parents to tisk about. In fact, some readers (okay, me) may be disapointed in how chaste and cheerful this vampire romance actually is. The real reason that Twilight is damaging is because 320 of its 498 pages are prime examples of truly bad writing. Worse still, Meyer has taken a perfectly good opportunity to create a strong female protagonist and squandered it on the same old damsel in distress scenario that gives most vampire stories–Buffy excluded here–their bad rap with us feminists.

      The book begins with Bella–a clumsy and brainy high school junior who’s just moved from Phoenix to Forks in upstate Washington. Bella is none to thrilled with the move, self-imposed as it was; she decided to live with her dad when it became apparent that her mother would rather travel with her new baseball player husband than tend to parenting duties in Phoenix.

      To her credit, Meyer does a fine job of creating Bella’s world in the first quarter of the novel. The reader lumbers along foggy mountain roads with Bella in her red, vintage Ford truck. They watch the lush and gloomy town unfold before them, between swipes of the windshield wipers. Readers follow Bella from class to class, they feel her social anxiety and are pleasantly surprised to find themselves cooking with Bella–an unlikely but not totally unbelievable hobby for a seventeen year old in the new millennium.

      Bella soon meets the Cullens, a family chock full of untouchably beautiful and mysterious teens, never seen in direct sunlight. Even though he is inexplicably rude and moodier than a tranny in undersized tights, Bella’s pick of the litter is Edward. Wildly attractive, one laughably bad simile describes Edward as “looking like a male model in an advertisement for raincoats” (pg 358). Bella’s infatuation with Edward reaches near manic proportion when when he saves her from a fatal car accident by catching a mini-van in his bare hands. After getting the inside scoop about the Cullens from a Native American friend–because who better qualified in the land of gross cliches to dispense information about the supernatural than the First Peoples–Bella begins to suspect Edward is more than just your average teenage heart throb.

   ”I listed again in my head the things I’d observed myself: the impossible speed and strength, the eye color shifting from black to gold and back again, the inhuman beauty, the pale, frigid skin. And more–small things that registered slowly–how they never seemed to eat, the disturbing grace with which they moved. And the way he sometimes spoke, with unfamiliar cadences and phrases better fit for the style of a turn-of-the-century novel than that of a twenty-first-century classroom.[...]Could the Cullens be vampires?” (pg 137-138).

      If Bella’s story unfolded as that of a smart, daring sleuth on a quest for answers, I’d be a satisfied customer. But Meyer ruins things by breaking every rule of the second act: she gives the protagonist what she wants. Edward soon confesses his undying love for Bella and, in cuddly conversation, details all the stipulations of his family’s vampire life. Is it any wonder that young writers struggle with the Comp 101 basic “show, don’t tell” when this is the crap they’re reading? Also, once you give your leading lady what she wants–what story is there left to tell?

      If Bella was forced to really work for her information, two key things would be at stake for her, propelling the story into the third act and beyond:

  1.) Her sanity.
  If a smart girl like her is even considering the possibility that her crush is a mythical beast, she has to struggle with that. It grows increasingly important to prove that the Cullens are vampires because it means that she is not insane.

  2.) Her crush.
  Does she get the boy? Doesn’t she? Does she even want him? What is she willing to risk to be with him?

      When Edward comes traipsing out of the vampire closet at the start of the second act, that’s the end of Bella’s journey. Nothing else feels risky. Sure, a pack of roving vamps crash Forks and one stalks her and threatens her family. But she’s got Edward’s constant reassurance that he will keep her and her family safe. And since Meyer spent so much time building up the Cullens’ infallibility, we believe him. And it’s boring.

      Meyer even goes so far as to have her character penned up in a hotel room for a good sixty pages, baby-sat by friendly vampires while her beloved is in the thick of the action, protecting her dad from the bad vamps. In a post-Buffy world, I don’t understand how teenage girls can find this type of leading lady truly engaging. Even Buffy–born into her role as action-adventure slayer–seems tame compared to her successor Veronica Mars, the teenage sleuth detective who chose her life as a heroic figure and loves every minute of it. With trail blazers like these, Meyer’s expectation that readers will engage with a protagonist who waits around all day with chaperones is absurd.
     
      The only thing that is a real point of tension after Edward fesses up to being a blood sucker is the question: what is Bella willing to risk to be with him? Although he loves her, Edward is constantly struggling with his desire to bite Bella. Every time the two even get close to anything resembling a make-out session, Edward pulls back and struggles with the vampire equivalent to blue balls. Chaste as it may be, Edward’s turmoil is more than a little reminiscent of the glorified rape scenarios of yesteryear’s Dracula.

      Dependent on the idea that beneath even the most refined gentleman lies a violent predator who is ready to “turn” on their dates at any given moment, Dracula is paradoxically passionate. His prey always dies shuddering in extacy. The subtext: women want to be hurt and men–with their untamable desires–can’t help but to inflict that hurt.

      Buffy the Vampire Slayer took the notion of Dracula and dismantled it bit by misogynistic bit. During the course of seven seasons, Buffy Summers did the nasty with her fair share of vamps–and she was kinky to boot. Ms. Summers got off on the idea that death was literally breathing down her neck, but there was no denying that she was just as aroused by the knowledge that she was an equal in her sexcapades. The vamp could kill her, sure. But not before she killed him.

       Twilight blissfully ignores the feminist course that Buffy paved the way for; Meyer even seems to have gone out of her way to create a wimpy protagonist. Not only is Bella unequipped to defend herself against Edward should he try to get fresh with her plasma, but she seems totally incapable of real-world survival. She is clumsy, suffers fainting spells, and gets failing grades for street smarts. In one scene she tries to research vampires by typing the word into Google. Honestly, Bella? Now I don’t even think you’re that smart anymore, which was the one thing you had going for you.

      After spending a weekend canoodling with the undead, Bella wants nothing more than for Edward to turn her into a vampire. Regardless of what Edward does with this knowledge, the reader’s last question is answered. What is Bella willing to give up to be with Edward? Sadly: her life.

      What makes the literary and feminist regression of Twilight all the more depressing is its success. The back of my paperback edition declares Twilight as a “New York Times Editor’s Choice” and “An Amazon ‘Best Book of the Decade.” Twilight the movie is scheduled for a November release.

      I picked up Twilight after seeing more than a few teenage girls devouring it on the bus, on the subway, in the park. It made me happy to see so many young girls churning their way through this book with such appetite. Now it just worries me.

  • 1:52 pm
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