Category Archives: twilight

musing, twilight, vampires, very hot men

Vampiracally Speaking

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I have never been one for vampires.

There was that one class in college my senior year, when I needed a diversion from thesis writing and Honors seminars. It was memorable mostly for the professor, a youngish, spry fellow who you just knew would someday end up in bed with a student. One example of his questionable judgment: On the day that specs — i.e., high schoolers — were sitting in on the class, he showed us a long clip from an NC-17, campy Andy Warhol romp.

Anyway, I have no real complaints about that class. I ended up with an A and got to read Dracula for the first time, which I recommend as a perfect Victorian artifact.

Years before, as a young teenager, I read Memnoch the Devil, about which I only recall that two lovers bond when — spoiler alert! — the undead man laps up the woman’s menstrual blood. That would never fly in an age of AIDS education.

One Twilight movie was quite enough for me, thank you. The closest I’ve come to the books has been listening to Alex rip hilariously through them.

And so on. Vampires? Eh. They’re strong, I guess, generally European and high-class; they dress well. I remain unmoved.

Why then have I gotten so drawn into Buffy the Vampire Slayer over the last month? And how embarrassing is this to even admit? It’s a TV show (check) that aired on the WB (check) aimed at teenage girls (double check) featuring witches, vampires, and a sci-fi / fantasy plot (KILL ME NOW).

Even worse: I developed serious flutterings for one of the characters. You know which one. The one with the cheekbones and the (okay, fake, but still unfathomably sexy) British accent. Watching Spike — his name is Spike, for christ’s sake! what is he, a pit bull? — I felt like a 15 year old again unable to look away from Titanic.

I cried during Titanic. Then I went to the theater to cry through it again. Only on the third viewing, this time on HBO, did I notice how awful the script was. Sure, it was sad that the Irish moppets died, and the sweet old couple, and those noble musicians, but mostly I watched Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and I cried because I thought I would never have a love that pure.

Spike is a much darker protagonist than Jack, of course, more in the line of merry, amoral Rhett Butler for whom I also nursed a teenage devotion. When push came to shove, though, Rhett Butler was willing to walk away from a passion that was killing him. Spike and Jack, bless their tragic hearts, see it through like characters in Italian opera, expiring to save the woman they love.

I’ve been in a happy relationship for almost ten years now, and apparently, for some reason, that moony 15 year old lives on. I am no better than the girls participating in the endless “Spike or Angel?” debates. To which, btw, I say, Are you kidding? One of them stomps around looking sullen all the time. The other?

The other is a funny, lanky, sex-obsessed, cheerfully profane Brit. You hear me, out there in tween land? NO CONTEST.

And now I’m telling you about it, because I have not even a smidgen of pride left.

movies, twilight

Twi-hard

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With varying degrees of success, I’ve been making myself go out lately. At best, I see a sweet, moving play, like the one my friend Lucas is in, I cry a little, and I am actually inspired to start writing (!) when I get home. Or I go with a crowd I don’t know to a mind-blowing show by and starring Anna Deavere Smith, which turns out to be about DEATH and CANCER and PEOPLE DYING FROM CANCER, and sob. And then, exiting the theater while still shaken and teary, deal with the following:

GIRL 1: I didn’t cry once! Did you?
GIRL 2: No! I almost did, during the orphanage one.
GIRL 3: Yeah, that was really sad. … But I didn’t cry either.
GIRL 2: Huh. [turning to me] Well, it was nice to meet you! Bye!

It’s not their faults, of course. They didn’t know what was going on with me. But I still felt like an idiot.

Friday night, I went to a birthday party with a bunch of people I know and love, and it was still hard. Trying to be boisterous and upbeat, I ended up overcompensating and saying at least one truly ridiculous, hurtful thing. Luckily everyone else was drinking and I counted, by the end of night, enough ridiculous things to knock my most offensive comment out of the evening’s Top Three.

At the party, one of my friends mentioned my blog, my dear, old neglected blog, where, she said, I “write about my feelings.” The pained look on my face must have given me away, and she hurried to assure me that she didn’t mean it in a bad way. But Jebus Crispy! My feelings? Is that what I have come to? Is that what I’ve been wasting my time with for eight years?

It took me a moment to regain my equilibrium. Once I did, I realized I was battling my own — wait for it — internalized misogyny. That’s right! Why do we look down on feelings, and, especially, harping on, writing about, discussing them? Because they are as feminine as cats and babies. As girly as pretty, pretty princesses and snowflakes and romance and pom poms, and just as pointless, because feelings don’t make money or amass power, and that’s what the patriarchy values.

I rebel against my own internalized misogyny! Or, I am trying to!

Sing it with me: Who cares if a well-done theater production made me cry, or if I keep a personal blog? There is nothing wrong with feelings. There is nothing wrong with memoir, with rom coms, with Titanic or Twi—

I’m sorry, did you cough? What did I say? Oh yes. Twilight. I suppose you heard that it obliterated records this past weekend, propelled to success by a starkly young, female audience. To be clear, I’m no fan of the series. I haven’t read the books, and you may recall that I could not have rolled my eyes harder at the first film. (As a viewer I felt like echoing Jeneane Garofolo in Reality Bites after she has suffered through the thousandth Winona Ryder-Ethan Hawke bantering session: “Just do it and get it over with already!”)

But who cares? Anything that makes Hollywood pay attention to women and value female viewership is a net positive. New Moon is probably as melodramatic and sappy as its predecessor was, but most movies these days are loud and dumb. There’s no reason to be especially disdainful of a phenomenon just because it’s oriented towards girls instead of boys. Let us have a share of the stupidity!

Personally, I’d take Jack Dawson over Edward Cullen any day. Good, old-fashioned costume melodrama is more my style than sparkling vampires, and at least Jack and Rose got to get it on before he died helping to save her. But, as the true snobs say, chacun a son gout.

ETA: Pajiba agrees with me.

movies, twilight

"Hold on tight, Spidermonkey!": a meditation on ‘Twilight’

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Gone are the days of Anne Rice. She has found her lord and savior, and she has turned her back on the vampires she once tended to so lovingly.

Now, I never begrudge anyone a good rebirth (or two, in the case of Robert Zimmerman). But Anne Rice left behind her a void that lesser folks have struggled — and failed — to fill. True Blood is said to be campy and silly; everyone shudders at the idea of a new Buffy movie; and then, of course, there’s Twilight, the international sensation.

The four books of the saga have twee names and covers that could have been designed by the staff at Hot Topic. That’s more or less all I know about them, having never opened one; and if the writing is as over-ripe as the movie, that’s all I ever need to know.

Lord, this movie. Have uncorseted bosoms ever heaved so dramatically? Have two sets of eyes ever stared so beseechingly into each other? Have vampires ever seemed so ridiculous? And I do mean ridiculous. The “good” vampires — a set of clean-cut, wealthy, thoroughly creepy Aryans in pancake makeup — have to stay hidden from view on sunny days. Why? Because they turn into David Bowie. Whereas poor Kirsten Dunst and her nurse were reduced to ash in seconds in Interview with the Vampire, and their equivalent bursts into flames in Let the Right One In, in Twilight the undead merely sparkle.

Other rules broken by these “good” vampires: they have reflections; they seem unfazed by garlic; and they can enter new spaces without being invited. What is the point, I ask you, of well-understood genre conventions if they are overthrown without so much as an explanation?

There are of course “bad” vampires, a crew of multi-culti, gender-nonspecific hippies who escaped from the recent Shakespeare in the Park production of Hair. These vampires seem quite sexual, whereas the others aren’t; they also attack humans, while the superior creatures restrict themselves to animals (and then have the gall to call themselves vegetarian). It’s the culture wars of the 60s all over again.

Here is the crux of the books’ and the movie’s appeal, as I understand it: though Bella and Edward are so into each other and so horny that their sexual tension made me need to pause and get some air, they cannot consummate their passion. It’s all titillation and no release, presumably because if Edward were to physically love Bella, he would have to kill her. (Why? Who knows? He may be a vampire but he’s also a teenage boy and they are NOT TO BE TRUSTED.) Still, as a viewer I felt like echoing Jeneane Garofolo in Reality Bites after she has suffered through the thousandth Winona Ryder-Ethan Hawke bantering session: “Just do it and get it over with already!”

The alternatives offered by the movie — lying down in a meadow, holding hands, tearing another vampire to pieces and burning his body in a ballet studio — are unintentionally hilarious, as is most of the dialogue (“About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him, and I didn’t know how dominant that part might be, that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.”).

For all that, it was the Indians-as-werewolves that were the tipping point.