Twilight Immersion
I have drunken ALL the Twilight Kool-aid, every last processed red sugary drop of it, and licked the inside of the cup. It is some good cheesy fun and I do not feel ashamed of indulging my inner (eternal) 17-year-old. I confessed to Ashley a few weeks ago, when she was at my place helping me redecorate the living room, and she told me that Courtney (Kochuba) had turned HER on to the books. Yes! Two other intelligent women who love this shit--I'm not alone!
I've now read the first two books, and seen the first two movies. And yes, and also read what there is of Midnight Sun, which is Twilight from Edward's POV. YUM. In my opinion, the first movie (Twilight) is better than the book, and the second book (New Moon) is better than the movie. However all four are thoroughly enjoyable. I like the first movie better because 1) I love Catherine Hardwicke as a director and she found the edgy darkness and the oh-so-necessary HUMOR amid that gooey tale of Twue Wuv. Stephenie Meyer has obviously hit a nerve with her narrative but damn, she overwrites. Okay, SM, Edward looks like a Ralph Lauren model/god/angel, WE GET IT. But you know, these books are from the POV of a teenage girl--of course she's all dreeeeeeamy about his looks! Anyway, I love the humorous scenes in the first movie like the grin on Edward's face as they walk through the crowd at school for the first time as A Couple as everyone whispers around them--that grin is pure teenage boy, it says "hey you guys, I finally got a GIRLFRIEND." Also love when he introduces her to his family and they just do and say all the wrong things and he's completely mortified. ("Mom! Stop embarrassing me!")
And I liked the changes from the book, because the book has almost NO plot--it's 300+ pages of breathless exchanges between Edward and Bella, until as one site puts it the plot arrives late to the party, drunk, in a beat-up '53 Chevy pick-up truck. It drives away about fifty pages later and crashes into a tree, gets sent to the hospital, and is rarely heard from again throughout the course of the series. The movie remedies this somewhat, as they show the nomads attacking humans throughout the story. (And looking aw-ful-ly tasty, I gotta say. The nomads, not the humans.) And a lot of the characters are frankly more interesting in the movie--Bella, Charlie, Edward and James are all vastly improved by the acting. Charlie and James in particular--in the novel James is just this overly-polite sadist, a trope that has been beaten into the ground, but he's given all sorts of extra creepiness in the movie. And Charlie! LOVE him in the movie, the guy who plays him is just so damn awesome. Even Bella has more of a personality. Really, the one thing I didn't like was casting Nikki Reed as Rosalie--NR is a terrific actress and with her natural brunette she's very attractive, but she doesn't look remotely believable as a blonde, her coloring is just too dark.
And finally I must mention the awesomeness of the baseball/nomad confrontation scene. At first glance you might think that a scene involving vampire baseball stands an excellent chance of being completely lame. Fortunately Hardwicke avoided the pitfalls by 1) dressing them all in old-fashioned, striped baseball jerseys and hats, 2) scoring the scene to Supermassive Black Hole and 3) escalating the tension between the Cullens and the nomads with a seemingly endless sequence of tight-eye closeups, culminating in a crouched-stance face-off between the two sides when James tries to attack Bella. It is a total vampire baseball rumble and completely awesome. All it needs is a jazzy Leonard Bernstein score.
One more final note--Alice's neck-twist in mid-leap during the fight at the ballet studio? SO AWESOME. She really is a great character.
When I started looking for Twilight commentary online, a lot of what I found was either pretentious dismissal or overly serious discussion about the message teenage readers might take. Re: the former--I have no problem with criticism of the books (they are not very well-written, as I've said I think they're way overwritten. And the PLOT HOLES. So many plot holes, they haunt me...) but they are what they are, teenage fluff. Escapism. They're not the apocalypse. Just because an average book becomes a juggernaut best-seller doesn't somehow make it worse. (The same thing applies to Dan Brown books.) One post on TWoP irritated me mightily:
How lazy to lift the storyline of an entire quarter of a quadrilogy directly from Shakespeare? And no, Stephanie, trying to get all meta by having your main character, Mary Sue -- er, excuse me, Bella Swan -- make references to the story that you're plagiarizing does not make it clever or okay.
This is just someone hopping on the bandwagon, because there is no substance to this criticism. If they were half as well-read as they'd like to appear, they'd know Shakespeare did this ALL THE TIME. In fact Romeo and Juliet ITSELF is not original, Shakspeare based it on an earlier version. I mean, plagiarism? West Side Story parallels R&J's plot far more closely than New Moon. Stop trying to sound authoritative. Many, many stories have been based in full or part on classic stories. Furthermore, New Moon not only references R&J directly (they're reading it in class) and indirectly (miscommunication leads to suicide attempt in Italy) but Bella actually uses R&J to apply insight to her own story ("What if Romeo, instead of marrying Juliet, just disappeared?...What if Paris had been Juliet's friend? Her very best friend? The one person who really understood her...And what if she loved Paris? Not like Romeo...But enough that she wanted him to be happy too?") I think it's actually kind of sweet that she's drawing insight from a classic tale--see, the humanities ARE relevant!
Furthermore if I never again hear the term Mary Sue, it'll be too soon. Frankly that term has always sounded like geeks trying to sound edgy and in-the-know ("See! We have our very own snarky lingo! Now we can be like the cool kids who put down others with dismissive one-liners!"). It's just such a GEEK term, I'm embarrassed I even know what it means. It is ONLY because I used to write fan fiction *hangs head in shame.* In my defense I was a kid, I wrote this crap (and 99.9% of fan fiction is crap, it's all wish-fulfillment stuff that never challenges) when I was 12-14. YES, I WROTE STAR WARS AND THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO FAN FICTION. NO, NONE OF YOU WILL EVER GET TO READ IT. Here's a tip--there are heroes and heroines, and there are anti-heroes and -heroines. Just because someone is generally positive/likeable/identifiable does not make them a Mary Sue or a Gary Stu. By this reckoning, Juliet herself would be one--she really has no flaw other than being nearly-14 and therefore melodramatic.
Re: the second school of criticism. Okay, I can see why some eyebrows might be raised by Edward's behavior, namely that in the first book, he admits to sneaking into her room to watch her sleep. Obviously if a real boy did this, this would be disgusting and weird and unacceptable and arrestable. But it's important to remember this--dude's a vampire. This is a fantasy. If this were a real book about a normal human boy who did that, they wouldn't be nearly as popular because that would be too real. But he's a vampire. Who reads minds (so you KNOW he's already got boundary issues). Because by definition he's not real, there's that element of removal, of escapism--he has these amazing powers which he uses to protect her from all sorts of shit. And also, even though Edward can be controlling and gets off maybe a little too much on protecting her (my theory is that it allows him to sublimate his dangerous urges toward her by saving her--he can act out his disgust at his own urges by going medieval on James, the guys in Port Angeles, or anyone else). ANYWAY, even though he may act less than ideally (although if he DID act perfectly, geeks would be screaming "Gary Stu!"), he obviously, manifestly worships her, I mean he never shuts up about how perfect he thinks she is. This is not an abusive relationship.
I've now read the first two books, and seen the first two movies. And yes, and also read what there is of Midnight Sun, which is Twilight from Edward's POV. YUM. In my opinion, the first movie (Twilight) is better than the book, and the second book (New Moon) is better than the movie. However all four are thoroughly enjoyable. I like the first movie better because 1) I love Catherine Hardwicke as a director and she found the edgy darkness and the oh-so-necessary HUMOR amid that gooey tale of Twue Wuv. Stephenie Meyer has obviously hit a nerve with her narrative but damn, she overwrites. Okay, SM, Edward looks like a Ralph Lauren model/god/angel, WE GET IT. But you know, these books are from the POV of a teenage girl--of course she's all dreeeeeeamy about his looks! Anyway, I love the humorous scenes in the first movie like the grin on Edward's face as they walk through the crowd at school for the first time as A Couple as everyone whispers around them--that grin is pure teenage boy, it says "hey you guys, I finally got a GIRLFRIEND." Also love when he introduces her to his family and they just do and say all the wrong things and he's completely mortified. ("Mom! Stop embarrassing me!")
And I liked the changes from the book, because the book has almost NO plot--it's 300+ pages of breathless exchanges between Edward and Bella, until as one site puts it the plot arrives late to the party, drunk, in a beat-up '53 Chevy pick-up truck. It drives away about fifty pages later and crashes into a tree, gets sent to the hospital, and is rarely heard from again throughout the course of the series. The movie remedies this somewhat, as they show the nomads attacking humans throughout the story. (And looking aw-ful-ly tasty, I gotta say. The nomads, not the humans.) And a lot of the characters are frankly more interesting in the movie--Bella, Charlie, Edward and James are all vastly improved by the acting. Charlie and James in particular--in the novel James is just this overly-polite sadist, a trope that has been beaten into the ground, but he's given all sorts of extra creepiness in the movie. And Charlie! LOVE him in the movie, the guy who plays him is just so damn awesome. Even Bella has more of a personality. Really, the one thing I didn't like was casting Nikki Reed as Rosalie--NR is a terrific actress and with her natural brunette she's very attractive, but she doesn't look remotely believable as a blonde, her coloring is just too dark.
And finally I must mention the awesomeness of the baseball/nomad confrontation scene. At first glance you might think that a scene involving vampire baseball stands an excellent chance of being completely lame. Fortunately Hardwicke avoided the pitfalls by 1) dressing them all in old-fashioned, striped baseball jerseys and hats, 2) scoring the scene to Supermassive Black Hole and 3) escalating the tension between the Cullens and the nomads with a seemingly endless sequence of tight-eye closeups, culminating in a crouched-stance face-off between the two sides when James tries to attack Bella. It is a total vampire baseball rumble and completely awesome. All it needs is a jazzy Leonard Bernstein score.
One more final note--Alice's neck-twist in mid-leap during the fight at the ballet studio? SO AWESOME. She really is a great character.
When I started looking for Twilight commentary online, a lot of what I found was either pretentious dismissal or overly serious discussion about the message teenage readers might take. Re: the former--I have no problem with criticism of the books (they are not very well-written, as I've said I think they're way overwritten. And the PLOT HOLES. So many plot holes, they haunt me...) but they are what they are, teenage fluff. Escapism. They're not the apocalypse. Just because an average book becomes a juggernaut best-seller doesn't somehow make it worse. (The same thing applies to Dan Brown books.) One post on TWoP irritated me mightily:
How lazy to lift the storyline of an entire quarter of a quadrilogy directly from Shakespeare? And no, Stephanie, trying to get all meta by having your main character, Mary Sue -- er, excuse me, Bella Swan -- make references to the story that you're plagiarizing does not make it clever or okay.
This is just someone hopping on the bandwagon, because there is no substance to this criticism. If they were half as well-read as they'd like to appear, they'd know Shakespeare did this ALL THE TIME. In fact Romeo and Juliet ITSELF is not original, Shakspeare based it on an earlier version. I mean, plagiarism? West Side Story parallels R&J's plot far more closely than New Moon. Stop trying to sound authoritative. Many, many stories have been based in full or part on classic stories. Furthermore, New Moon not only references R&J directly (they're reading it in class) and indirectly (miscommunication leads to suicide attempt in Italy) but Bella actually uses R&J to apply insight to her own story ("What if Romeo, instead of marrying Juliet, just disappeared?...What if Paris had been Juliet's friend? Her very best friend? The one person who really understood her...And what if she loved Paris? Not like Romeo...But enough that she wanted him to be happy too?") I think it's actually kind of sweet that she's drawing insight from a classic tale--see, the humanities ARE relevant!
Furthermore if I never again hear the term Mary Sue, it'll be too soon. Frankly that term has always sounded like geeks trying to sound edgy and in-the-know ("See! We have our very own snarky lingo! Now we can be like the cool kids who put down others with dismissive one-liners!"). It's just such a GEEK term, I'm embarrassed I even know what it means. It is ONLY because I used to write fan fiction *hangs head in shame.* In my defense I was a kid, I wrote this crap (and 99.9% of fan fiction is crap, it's all wish-fulfillment stuff that never challenges) when I was 12-14. YES, I WROTE STAR WARS AND THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO FAN FICTION. NO, NONE OF YOU WILL EVER GET TO READ IT. Here's a tip--there are heroes and heroines, and there are anti-heroes and -heroines. Just because someone is generally positive/likeable/identifiable does not make them a Mary Sue or a Gary Stu. By this reckoning, Juliet herself would be one--she really has no flaw other than being nearly-14 and therefore melodramatic.
Re: the second school of criticism. Okay, I can see why some eyebrows might be raised by Edward's behavior, namely that in the first book, he admits to sneaking into her room to watch her sleep. Obviously if a real boy did this, this would be disgusting and weird and unacceptable and arrestable. But it's important to remember this--dude's a vampire. This is a fantasy. If this were a real book about a normal human boy who did that, they wouldn't be nearly as popular because that would be too real. But he's a vampire. Who reads minds (so you KNOW he's already got boundary issues). Because by definition he's not real, there's that element of removal, of escapism--he has these amazing powers which he uses to protect her from all sorts of shit. And also, even though Edward can be controlling and gets off maybe a little too much on protecting her (my theory is that it allows him to sublimate his dangerous urges toward her by saving her--he can act out his disgust at his own urges by going medieval on James, the guys in Port Angeles, or anyone else). ANYWAY, even though he may act less than ideally (although if he DID act perfectly, geeks would be screaming "Gary Stu!"), he obviously, manifestly worships her, I mean he never shuts up about how perfect he thinks she is. This is not an abusive relationship.