More on Twilight
Aug. 11th, 2008 04:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficTwilight 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.
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.