Film
*In a format inspired by “David Lynch keeps his head,” by the late David Foster Wallace
Mooning anew
BY Chandler Levack November 18, 2009 21:11
Note: The format of the following essay was inspired by “David Lynch keeps his head,” by the late David Foster Wallace
1 What this article is about
The Twilight Saga: New Moon, written by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer. Starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, directed by Chris Weitz (of American Pie and Chuck and Buck). ©2009 Summit Entertainment. Distributed in Canada by E1 Films Inc. 130 minutes. Rated PG for scenes of grotesque images; occasional use of words such as darn, damn, hell; scenes that may cause a child brief anxiety or fear; embracing and kissing; restrained portrayals of non-graphic violence. The movie opens this Friday, November 20.
2 Subjects to which Twilight: New Moon pertains
Bloodlust. Sexual abstinence. The emotional and psychic peccadilloes of vampires. Cult phenomena. Teen fiction. Post-feminism. Textual and subtextual Mormon influence. Pop culture’s amorphous vacuum. First love. Mass marketing. “Twi-moms.”
3 What it sounds like in a room of screaming girls
A little like you’re going to be drowned in the noise and carried off into a vast hormonal sea. The screaming starts as you walk from Osgoode Station toward the MuchMusic building, where passing streetcar riders gawk and young boys taunt “Twilight sucks!” at the hordes of screaming girls. With a few exceptions, the Twi-hards are identical: early teenage girls who are immaculately made up and teetering on the edge of madness. They brandish “I Want U Emmett!” signs and record video on their parents’ BlackBerries — some of them with parents and emasculated younger brothers in tow. Extremely dutiful boyfriends stand pallid. But it’s mostly the girls here, repeating “Take it off!” at the two B-list Twilight cast members, Kellan Lutz (who plays vampire Emmett Cullen) and Bronson Pelletier (who plays werewolf Jared), who are trying to make small talk live at MuchOnDemand.
It should be noted that teenage girls — unlike, say, early-twenties female alt-weekly journalists with intimacy issues — are extremely comfortable with the phrase “I love you!” The fact that they are saying this to two terrified actors dressed in man scarves does not concern them. Beside me, a tween with braces blanches as her publicist mom talks about what she’d like to do to Taylor Lautner, the 17-year-old actor who plays Jacob, a burgeoning werewolf with a six-pack. A 13-year-old boy who insists that he’s bi tells me the sexiest thing about Robert Pattinson is either his hair or his lips and that vampires “are the new Madonna.”
4 Why Twilight makes the Jonas Brothers look like Donny Osmond
To use an old pop-crit cliché, if you’ve been living under a rock since 2005, that’s still no excuse not to know about the franchise birthed by Mormon author Stephenie Meyer. The original book and its three successive sequels* (see footnotes at article's end) have sold over 70 million copies and have been translated into 45 languages. That has spawned the successful film franchise, which so far has grossed over $382 million dollars. It’s so successful that the third instalment, Twilight: Eclipse, will be released this June. Barack Obama and Kelly Clarkson are fans. They aren’t the only grown-ups into it: there are over 200,000 posts on the message board of www.twilightmoms.com, a fan site for women over 25. Riot police had to be called in recently to protect New Moon’s stars from 2,000 crazed fans at a hotel in Brazil.**
5 Will the movie sequel be faithful to its source?
New Moon has not been screened for critics yet but, if the first Twilight movie and the expectations of the Twilight legions are any indication, it’s safe to expect that it will stick to the plot of Meyer’s second, 563-page tome. Unlike the first book, which concentrates mostly on the growing attraction between Bella Swan and vampire Edward Cullen that crests with a climatic scene of vampire baseball***, New Moon seems unadaptable. The plot is sprawling and insane, jumping from a paper-cut-gone-awry on Bella’s 18th birthday, to a devastating breakup worthy of any epic love story, to a trusty werewolf-transformation-as-male-puberty metaphor.
There’s also a brief sojourn to a haunted city in Italy with parallels to Monteverdi’s L'Orfeo, involving a telekinetic vampire (played in the movie by Dakota Fanning). As for the illicit love triangle between a vampire, a werewolf and a winsome young woman, advance buzz insists it will corner the pre-teen desk calendar and Hot Topic t-shirt market for years — and sequels — to come. 
6 A discussion of the emotional qualities that supposedly make the Twilight Saga so appealing to women
It may well be a psychic cocktail of the agonies and ecstasy of first love, wherein if a guy doesn’t return your phone call, you’re basically ready to throw yourself off a cliff. (SPOILER ALERT: this does happen in New Moon, thanks probably to Stephenie Meyer’s reputed love for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.) If you don’t believe me, read this (partially edited) post by Twilight Moms forum member Onyx Vampire under the subject heading “Can’t Stop Crying”:
“Everytime I read it regardless I cry and cry. I think for me why New Moon is soooo difficult is that my ex left me when I was 7 mths pregnant with our daughter, I completely understood what Bella was going through. The emptiness, the inability to breathe, the going through the motions of life without feeling anything but pain. That period of my life was definitely the darkest period of my life, of course so far.... The only difference was I didn’t have a Jacob, it was something I pretty much faced alone…. I have experienced that gaping hole... the one that won’t close no matter what you try. I’ve known the emptiness that comes from rejection. I’ve curled up and lost track of time, feeling as if I’d never be whole again, wondering what I could’ve done differently to keep him there.... While she was laying there on the forest floor, trying to come to the surface and respond to the world around her, trying to breathe through the pain, I was there, too....”
The essential emotional crux of Twilight that makes damaged single mothers transport themselves to a fantasy written at a fourth-grade reading level is this: imagine yourself at your most undesirable, as a teenager. Maybe it was the year you thought emulating Drew Barrymore’s baby-bang hairstyle was a good idea, or when terms like “bacne” still applied to you. Maybe it was when you were convinced that you were totally and irrevocably unlovable, and that things like love and sex were never going to apply to you because somehow you were cursed with a deeply rooted undesirability that seemed like the very essence of your life. What if there were a boy, 17 going on 108 years old, pale and stone cold, unable to do more than hold your hand, but a beautiful celestial being who wanted to watch you sleep at night and drive you to class and hang on your every word.
In the film, this boy has a James Dean pompadour, perfect lips and rocks the shit out of H&M separates, but in the books he is described as Michelangelo’s David. This boy loves you so much that he can barely touch you. And all this sexual frustration is starting to drive you crazy, to the point where you’re pretty sure spending a lifetime as a vampire subsisting on human blood is worth the spoils of even getting to first base because if somebody doesn’t touch your boobs soon you are really going to lose it.
Behind Meyer’s histrionic and irony-free literature and the first film’s charged aestheticism is a fantasy about a boy who will treasure you, told through obtuse metaphor and clunky dialogue, communicated onscreen through nervous stammering and eyelashes batting as if relaying Morse code. Edward Cullen is teen fiction’s most desirable bloodsucker, a Byronic babe who makes nightly vigils to his girlfriend’s house just to watch her sleep.
Yes, the icky post-feminist nature of Bella’s character, a girl with no hopes and dreams other than to be eternally adored by her vampire boyfriend, is gross. But while Edward’s omnipresence is at once creepy and intensely hot, in the sequel Meyer takes it to new psychological heights. After Edward calls the whole thing off****, Bella begins to experience auditory hallucinations of his voice when she’s in circumstances of pure terror — so she starts riding a motorcycle to literally court death. It’s maybe the saddest thing that I’ve read in a book geared towards adolescents since Judy Blume’s Deenie.
7 A convoluted explanation of Twilight: New Moon’s appeal, from actor Bronson Pelletier, who plays teen werewolf Jared in the film, as we sit flanked by two publicists in a hotel room at the Park-Hyatt
“It’s like, you know… our biggest audience would be like, teenagers. A lot of teenagers — they’re just misunderstood and they’re like, ‘You know what, nobody understands me,’ and they can really relate with this movie. Like, they’re dealing with the sorts of things we’re dealing with in this show. You know, like jealousy, rivalry… the whole love triangle, you know? And, uh, you know, heartbreaks and stuff like that. Plus, you know, they also get caught up in the whole fantasy realm, which is the vampires and the wolves. And everyone loves a good love triangle story too, right? So I think they can really relate with it. Not with, you know, the whole vampire thing but everything else… you know?”
8 What will happen next for the Twilight series?
Guaranteed: record-breaking sales; Herculean expectations for the forthcoming third instalment; cavalcades of 10-year-olds begging Robert Pattinson to bite their necks during press junkets. We also predict paparazzi-fuelled speculations into Pattinson and Kristen Stewart’s will-they-won’t-they romance that will probably lead both to an early grave. That, and standoffs between “Team Edward” and “Team Jacob” fans in middle-school cafeterias that are on par with the Franco-Prussian War. And an influx of think pieces examining everything from the history of vampire-human sexual relations to Twilight merchandise, such as Hot Topic Edward’s Body Shimmer, designed to mimic the diamond-like sparkle of vampire skin when they go out in the sunlight. (This is an actual thing.) Also: vampire grills; impossible expectations for real-life relationships that can’t possibly match the fantasy of an immortal boyfriend; bizarre masturbation fantasies; even more lame knockoffs along the lines of The CW’s Vampire Diaries, about a girl torn between two sexy vampire brothers; more Facebook quizzes regarding your “TWiLiGHT soulmate.”
9 What’s in it for you?
Fandom guilt and associated derision. An escape from reality. Release.
FOOTNOTES
* All with emo-tastic titles such as Breaking Dawn and Eclipse — they’re like Evanescence singles. Is it any wonder that the author attributes her inspiration to the music of Muse, Linkin Park and Arcade Fire?
** Twilight cast member Bronson Pelletier told me this anecdote during our interview.
*** Seriously.
**** Doing that super annoying thing that guys do when they break up with you, where they pretend that they’re the damaged ones and it is their deeply rooted fucked-up-ness that will make you “better off without them.”
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