More on Twilight

[ivyfic]

Twilight first lost me when it explained why Bella had been yanked from her home in sunny Phoenix to the rainy Northwest. So many YA novels start with this sort of displacement. But the reason is usually something like her parents divorced and the mother is moving to a new place for a new life; a parent must move home to take care of elderly parents; a parent needs to move because of their job. It's always something uncontrollable, something bigger than them. This gives the teen plenty of reason for resentment—their parents have completely redefined their life without consulting them. But inherent in this is always a lesson—that some things are beyond your control, yes, but also that some things are more important than your social life in high school. For the teen this is always a moment of growth, their first steps into adulthood, when they realize how small their own problems actually are, and that their parents are flawed people who are doing their best but don't always succeed.

Now let's look at Twilight. Bella's in exile because…she volunteered to be. She completely resents being here and always has, but she's here out of some misplaced and (failed) attempt to make her mother choose Bella over her new boyfriend. That the mother didn't recognize her daughter's self-flagellating sacrifice for what it was makes her a bad parent. At this point there should be some room for growth. Instead, there's Bella suffering in silence and hoping that someone will notice (no one wants to suffer in silence without everyone knowing about it, of course) and praise her for it.

Meanwhile, she treats her dad like shit. Why? Best I can tell, because her mom did. Her mom left her dad because he was (I guess) too boring and she was too young to settle down. He's tragically still in love with her. Instead of gaining some insight into her father, strengthening her relationship with him, reinterpreting her parent's break-up, she simply views him as a pathetic loser who never deserved her mother and certainly doesn't deserve a daughter as awesome as she is. Plus, she shamelessly plays on his guilt and trepidation as a parent to shut him out and do as she pleases.

Then, despite much well-founded fears of being an outsider in a close-knit school, and much professed social awkwardness, she is immediately invited into the in-crowd where she takes up residence as queen bee and snubs and uses those who generously welcomed her. She is also the immediate crush object of a number of boys, which she describes as pathetic puppies, following her around. Though she's never been popular before, she certainly acts like she was born to it. She is supremely annoyed when boys ask her out because none of these children are good enough. Are we supposed to sympathize?

So let's recap:
Bella is so mature a teenager that she's a better parent to herself than her parents.
She suffers so beautifully in silence. No one understands her w0e.
Every boy she meets loves her and asks her out.
Every girl she meets is her friend and happy with her cast-offs.
Her smell is irresistible.
She is an immediate obsession of the most desired and untouchable kid in school.
She is so perfect vampires welcome her and are just happy that she's there for their vampire brother
Mary Sue meter off the charts.

Maybe if this story were told from Edward's point of view and Bella's smell were her only remarkable feature, maybe if we followed his struggle with his own nature and his longing instead of hearing Bella bitch about being asked to dances by cute boys, maybe then this would have been an entertainingly self-indulgent retread. But for god's sake, we only get the actual vampire emo angst in giant blocks of exposition.

What boggles my mind is that Meyer could tell a love story between a vampire and a human in a post-Buffy world—heck, in a post-Anne Rice world—and fail, so entirely, to find even a tenth of the drama that so many others have found in this well-trod genre.

In both Buffy and Interview for the Vampire, the vampire loves the human for her innocence. For Angel, he loves Buffy because she is an example of what he could be, what he has so far failed to be. For Louis, it is about loving the humanity that he has lost and knowing that, by loving a human, he destroys exactly that within her that he admires. That's the inherent tragedy of the vampire/human romance—that, by it's nature, the vampire destroys what they love.

What reason for this romance do we get in Twilight? Bella smells good. She smells good. That's it! That's the depth of character motivation! It has nothing to do with either Edward or Bella as characters; it's an innate quality. Bella is just irresistible to all men. And where's the tragedy in the first book? Despite some fleeting awareness by Bella that she has put her life and her family's lives in danger, and that she has cruelly hurt her father, once things work out there's no attempt on her part to reconcile with her father or to address the fact that she continues to behave in the exact manner that endangered them in the first place. What solution does she offer? She should be turned into a vampire. (Because Edward said that's the only way he'd have sex with her. *hem*) So what we are supposed to believe is the tragedy is that Edward will not indulge her short-sighted, impulsive, naïve, and unbelievably selfish desire to be made into a vampire. Does the word brat spring to anyone else's mind?

It was at this point that I realized who Bella is. In the Buffy episode "Lie to Me," an old friend of Buffy's arrives in town. She soon realizes he's using her to court the vampires, since he wants to become one. This episode clearly shows that what this boy is doing is selfish, naïve, and incredibly dangerous to himself and those around him. He's a villain, the most insidious kind of villain—the person so consumed with his own needs that he can no longer see anything he does as wrong. Well, Bella's that character.

Add to that the repeated shrieky insistence that this is true love and will last forever. Maybe I'd be more forgiving of Bella's belief that her love of Edward is worth any sacrifice if she wasn't being so blatantly immature about everything. But hey, the way Meyer has written the vampires, there doesn't seem to be a big drawback to being one of the undead, so maybe Edward should just vamp her already. (And then throw her out in twenty years when her teenage whining ceases to be amusing.)

This book is chock full of the peculiar myopia of teenagers—the one that leads to angsty poetry. Bella repeatedly chooses to isolate herself in the belief that someone should swoop in and offer her something better (which is exactly what happens). Eventually most teens gain enough perspective to realize that if they weren't so insistent that they deserve a better life they just might find the life they've got isn't so bad. That perspective is nowhere in these 500 pages.

That this book is so immersed in this immature teen fantasy is undoubtedly why it sells so well. That is also why it's utter crap.

Comments

[mclittlebitch.livejournal.com]

The author has one more book in the series coming out, a re-telling of Twilight from Edward's perspective. The first chapter's up someplace on the internets, and apparently it's all thoughts about killing/eating Bella. So you may sort of get your wish?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Well, unfortunately my problem with the book stems from the fact that the author has no perspective on the material and has created a wish-fulfilment Mary Sue. I don't think reading a whole other book about how wonderful Bella is would make me happy at all. No, I don't think I'll be reading any more Stephenie Meyer.

[mithras03.livejournal.com]

well, this is the housewife-author's fantasy, right? the life she wanted? mary-sue indeed...maybe she's behaved this way herself and doesn't see anything wrong with it....reviews by all on the last book have been dismal :-P

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Read the synopsis on wikipedia and you'll see why. People are saying it's crap...but they still like the first three books. My response is, really? You liked the first three? For god's sake, why?

I almost think book four would be more entertaining to read. At least shit happens in it.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Interesting that you brought up Ford from Buffy. He at least had some motivation to his selfishness that was understandable even if it was flawed. He had terminal cancer and was going to die anyway. The strength of Buffy was always that it told ordinary tales in an extraordinary manner--puberty and maturity told as the creation and progression of the Slayer, etc. In Ford's case, cancer is an ordinary thing. Tragic, yes, but something we can understand--the fear of death, the frustration and anger at missing out on life and dying so young.

Ford took it to an ugly place--he was, after all, a villain--but his underlying motivation was understandable. He was a sympathetic villain. Bella seems to be the opposite: an unsympathetic hero. Nothing in Bella's life is going explicitly wrong and she seems vindictive and spiteful and hateful for no reason, so it's hard to like her. But she's not killing people or telling her vampire lover to break his resolve and go eat some people, so she's technically a hero. Technically.

I haven't read the story, but nothing about what I've seen excerpted makes me hopeful. I read a review of the latest book in Entertainment Weekly, and it turned my stomach. Me! I can handle anything. But the descriptions of what goes on related to one plot point had me gagging. I suppose I must blame the teenagers as you do--they're equally at home with self-interested angst as they are violence.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I was wrong, she's not Ford. Ford at least had some insight into himself. (He also, IIRC, tries to sacrifice Buffy.) Bella isn't nearly that cool. She's one of those loser poseurs that Ford hangs out with who think that vampires are just misunderstood...right up until they get eaten.

Maybe this is asking too much, but I expect my YA literature to have characters actually grow up a little. I mean, isn't that the point of having a teen as a main character?

What irks me so much about this is not that Bella is a self-involved brat, it's that if you asked the author to describe Bella, I bet she'd say she was plucky, strong and independent. I don't hold this type of writing against teens. I do hold it against adults. Grow up already. Jesus christ.

I don't even think I'd've liked this as a teen. True, at that age, I little UST could hook me good (how else do you explain my compulsive watching of the Nanny), but the lack of perspective (not to mention plot) would probably still have bothered me. I railed against that stuff. I called it "TTA"--typical teenage angst. By comparison, I should probably reread my teenage supernatural romance of choice, Kissed by an Angel (http://www.amazon.com/Kissed-Angel-Collectors-Power-Soulmates/dp/0671023462/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218511957&sr=8-1). But even if the writing's crap, it at least has this on the Twilight series:
-a plot
-at the end, she does not end up with her tragic epic love, the angel (her dead ex-boyfriend). She realizes she can't live in that fantasy and moves on to a living, average boyfriend. She grows the heck up.

Also--I read that review. Yeargh. Uh...Miss Meyer? Your readers are tweens. They're just going through puberty. It was a great idea to gross the fuck out of them with implied abusive first time sex (I don't think "covered in bruises" counts as good practices in BDSM) and a graphic, horrific pregnancy. Go you.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

You know, I was saying the same damn thing--I wouldn't have liked this as a teenager and I wrote my own self-insertion Mary Sue fanfic at the time I was the "target" age for this crap. I read my share of Christopher Pike angst-fests, but those were better written than anything I've seen of this series. For starters, they frequently let their protagonists...lose. Fail! Not win at everything in life ever! Sometimes, they died. Not even all that heroically!

I need to go back and look at my old reading material. Somehow I think my books of choice--mostly Stephen King--have aged better than this series ever will.

But yeah, the pregnancy description almost made sick. Like actual wretching sick. Anything having to do with pregnancy wigs me more than most things. (This is why I left Aliens vs Predator: Requiem green at the gills.) I had to wonder, though, given the author's background, if her horror isn't revealing more than she knows about her personal experience. She's clearly conservative in her values vis a vis sexual relations before marriage; it almost seems as if the monstrous birth of her series is both scare tactic and her individual reaction to sex/pregnancy. Someone, somewhere, scarred this woman. Seriously.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Go back and reread Lois Duncan sometime. It might not scare you anymore, and you see the plot twists a mile away, but her characters are psychologically real. And, like good horror, they are exagerrations of the real world--just look at "Daughters of Eve." I read some of those when I was older and was always impressed by how nuanced her characterization and how well she handles them. Sometimes the boorish jock does the right thing; sometimes the nerdy sweet girl does the worst.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I didn't read too much of hers, actually, but the association fits. Basically, this woman got a book deal and made too much money over what people do better and for free on fandom boards at least three times a day. WHY?

[tirtzah.livejournal.com]

I was reading a bit about these books the other day and yeah, Bella seems to be the most disgustingly blatant Mary Sue ever. It seems it only gets worse as the books progress. The synopses read like bad, bad fanfic. *shudder*

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and this is the first book. The synopsis for Twilight actually sounds interesting. I can't imagine what the other books would be like when their synopses are crack.

[tirtzah.livejournal.com]

Oh I never said these were official synopses. More like those written by snarky fans, but enough to give me an very good idea of what they're like. @_@

[sasha-b.livejournal.com]

Ehehheeeee. This is a really interesting take on the series. I've only read the first one - and I'm in my late 30's, so I'm not exactly the target audience - but I thought it was mindless entertainment. My mother actually is reading them now too. *laughs*

I started reading Anne Rice when I was 15 and she will always be the be all end all for me in Vampire fiction - not all the books, but mostly the first three. I watched Buffy rabidly until season four - ugh, talk about ruin a show - although I did watch it until it was over even though it had lost it's charm for me. However - it had it's moments and I still think Joss Whedon is one of the more inventive and interesting writers around.

I haven't read anything about Breaking Dawn but I'm sure I'll read it at some point. I don't have the vehement loathing for it that you do, but they're definitely not my favoritest of books. I haven't been an emo teen for quite some time now. :p

Thanks for the opinion - interesting.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I think of anything as mindless entertainment. (Okay, maybe Hellboy II.) I watch a lot of crap, but anything that would require me to lobotomize myself to enjoy...I don't enjoy. (See various reaction posts to Torchwood.)

I've only read the first Anne Rice--I found it addictive but not fun to read. I liked her take on the ANGST that is vampires, but it felt like being released from a geas when I got to the end, so I decided not to pick up the next one.

If you want to see some good human/vampire romance, have you seen Near Dark? Even if you don't like the cheesy eighties soundtrack, you have to appreciate young, hot Adrian Pasdar. In tight jeans and a cowboy hat. *rowr*

[sasha-b.livejournal.com]

One of my favorite movies of all time. :)))))