So I went and saw The Twlight Saga: New Moon, and I’ve read all the books. Not just because I have kitschy taste (although I often do), but because when I’m speeding down the 405 and a cop car with lights flashing starts weaving back and forth in front of us to slow down the flow of traffic, I tend to think it’s foolhardy to just keep motoring along like nothing’s happened. I keep an eye out for the car wreck that I would otherwise have slammed into.
I can’t say New Moon was very good. Parts of it annoyed me. Here’s some of them.
1. Jacob’s teeth.
It’s an old, old convention: the vampires are the aristocrats, the werewolves are the working-class salt of the earth. Seen Underworld? It’s just that in most versions of the convention, both are white folks and so it’s a class thing more than a race thing. I’m shocked that everyone went ballistic over the racial stereotyping embodied by Jar Jar Bing in that George Lucas movie but no one remarks upon how the poor, slovenly Redskins play the canine protectors of the white girl and her kin. With their little disheveled shacks and fixer-upper cars and trash everywhere, they’re like the janitors or security guards of the Monster world.
It’s weird, how the movie essentializes these roles. Vampires are made, but werewolves are born. And while vampires are refined and deft at self-control, the werewolves can only barely discipline their natures—they’re more like animals, prone to erupting into fur and teeth whenever they lose their tempers. “Don’t make me angry! You don’t want to see me angry!” In both the book and the film, too, one of the conflicts between Bella and Jacob emerges over his inability to tell her he’s a werewolf because Alpha Dog (Sam) has forbidden it . . . and werewolves can’t defy Alpha, even when they want to. While you’ve got a slew of Cullen bloodsuckers who elect to go vegetarian and, miraculously, succeed, those poor Indian werewolves can’t elect to do anything. That’s just their nature.
In any case, poor Jacob—too uneducated and culturally innocent to know he doesn’t have a chance against privileged, refined white boy Edward. The rich kids always get the girl (or boy). Always. It’s a marriage plot, after all, this whole Twilight saga. And we all know from our Jane Austen novels that the pretty people will marry the rich people. No matter how smart or spunky or iconoclastic Bella may be, she’s going to go for the owner of the nice big house on the hill. With loads of money. And nice cars. And good taste in music. She may play around with the red boy in the white boy’s absence, but when old whitey returns then red boy is history.
Stephanie Meyer tries to mute this classicism/racism by making Jacob younger (thus the cougar jokes), giving him bleached teeth (because without cosmetic dentistry the class divide is too obvious), and playing up the mythic love element of Edward and Bella’s fated chemistry, but still . . . she chose to make the “wet dogs” (which is what Alice calls Jacob at one point) impoverished Injuns. It’s kind of creepy.
2. Cullen family politics.
Bella demands that the Cullens vote on whether or not she should be made into a vampire. When it’s time for Carlisle to weigh in, he announces patronizingly, “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to lose my son. Edward, I will not have you suicidal again over the possible death of Bella. I vote yes.” The wise Carlisle has spoken. Fine. The thing that makes me crazy about this dynamic is how inconsistently the movie portrays the maturity of its vampires. Is Edward 109 or not? And if he is – why is Carlisle talking to him and about him like he’s a teenager?
At casa Cullens, all these 100+-year-old vampire “children” revel in acting obnoxiously immature. The big one—Emmet—wears a sideways baseball cap, for goodness sake! He’s about 80 years old and wears a sideways baseball cap like to the manor born. I don’t buy for one minute that it’s a self-aware stab at fooling mortals into thinking he’s only 18. He wears it like he means it. And coven politics aside, I think at about 80 you should start acting and thinking like a bona fide grown-up no matter how much older than you your father is. Carlisle and Esme are not parents, even. They’re just older vampires, like 200 years older. At what point is age just a number? Only when the 109-year-old Edward wants to bed an 18-year-old girl, I guess.
3. Bella’s grief.
It probably says more about me than Bella, but my favorite part of the book was her grief. It fascinated me. I’ve been through the ringer, and while at one point (or mor than one), I may have worried that I wasn’t going to make it, deep down I knew I would. And I’m talking about major loss—like years and years of intimacy down the tubes, child-rearing together, or being so connected to somebody that I can’t breathe without thinking about him. And yet in each case, I dealt. Not Bella. Nope. She’s been with Edward (without sex, mind you!) for all of, what, 1.5 years, and upon his departure she collapses in the woods in order to die of exposure until one of those redskin canines finds her and carries her home to Daddy. Then she sits in front of the window for months—literally, months, the subtitles read from September to February–staring into space like she’s just not going to make it. What a cheap way to convey love and grief. Complete immobilization. Why not have her read some poetry? Take up painting? Drinking? Talk to a friend? Learn something, anything, from the experience? Something a little less passive? Nope. There she is, bottomed out with grief, waiting to die.
Until she discovers that by actually courting death she can “summon” Edward’s voice. Cut me a break. It’s the unhealthiest, most self-indulgent fantasy of grief I’ve ever seen: “I’m going to suffer so deeply and be so suicidal that my ex-lover will sense my proximity to death and therefore try to recall me back from the brink, because in truth he really does still love me, even though he threw me away.” As if. Somebody needs to make a satire wherein when Bella goes racing headlong toward a tree on her new motorbike, there’s a spectre of Edward beside her not pleading with her to stay safe, but laughing his ass off at how pathetic she is.
Oh, wait, I forgot: Edward abandoned Bella because he loves her so damn much. Right. Never mind.
4. Bella’s rebound.
I’m not a huge fan of Jacob—his teeth are too white and, until he crops his hair, his extensions are too annoying—but he deserves better than this rebound shit that Bella pulls on him. In effect, she uses Jacob to get over Edward, then dumps Jacob as soon as Edward reappears. And we’re supposed to think it’s cool because it’s in the name of Mythic Love. Which may be it is. And, okay, so maybe she and Edward belong together. But somebody, somewhere in the movie world should at least acknowledge that using your best friend in this manner is not cool. She should at least apologize. Instead, it’s all part of the vanity game: oh, look how cool and irresistible Bella is, what with TWO monsters in love with her. And Stephanie Meyer has the gall to represent Bella as completely unaware of this vanity game. “Who, little old me with the cutely arched eyebrows, adored by not one but TWO monsters? I just don’t know why or how that happened!” I’ll tell you why and how, Bella. You spent every afternoon of the week with the boy you know has had a crush on you since you were ten, all the while perfectly aware that he had a crush on you, but also all the while choosing to ignore this fact because you were too absorbed in your own pain to give a shit. The fact that you’re pretty and act super-nice, with that self-deprecating false modesty where you shrug your shoulders all the time, does not entitle you to cause unnecessary heartbreak.
5. Werewolf transformation.
Watch closely when Jacob becomes a werewolf. He’ll be running along in his cut-offs and then suddenly he’s a naked wolf. What happened to his clothes? Like I said, watch closely: they disintegrate into a cloud of little blue denim bits that hover around his face for a second like a swarm of indigo flies before evaporating into thin air. Annoying. And we never do get to see Jacob when he returns to human form without shorts on. It’s a rip-off. And that’s not just a pun.






This time of year makes me think of Wuthering Heights, probably because for huge parts of my life I read it every autumn; or taught it; or wrote about it. Nights getting cold, wind knocking around the trees and leaving a scoured-blue sky for morning, and all the usual intimations of immortality visited upon us by the season get me longing, longing to take the special kind of voyage inward that is the experience of Wuthering Heights. Lots of people I love don’t much care for the novel, but for me it’s one of the most powerful ever, ever. Anyone want to do a Wuthering Heights book club? I promise I can make you love this novel and show you how it will change your life.
Remember your horror as a kid at the idea of getting caught doing anything that might go down on your — gasp!– “permanent record”? Now with email, text messages, and FB, it’s all on your permanent record. All of it. Every word you share might be even more permanent than you, since it’s theoretically possible that all the online chats, drunken texts, status updates, blogs and emails you’ve authored will outlive you and achieve immortality in cyberspace.