The entire Twilight Roundtable is here.
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Originally, I had intended on writing something about the fourth and final book in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn, but I just couldn’t do it and wrote an email to Noah explaining why. He asked if I’d put the email up as a post, so here it is, slightly modified (but only slightly).
Oh Noah,
I’ve gotta bail on the Twilight roundtable. I have been dealing with a few extra things of late, but really it’s just because I don’t give enough of a shit to write anything on what was the most terrible book that I’ve ever finished (there’s been worse — e.g., Malazon book 1 — but I wisely quit them). At least I know what women, many of whom are my friends, are reading in their fixation on YA novels. Then again, maybe I wish I didn’t know. Reading the book only confirmed what I thought about the movies, but with a whole lot more repetitious moaning and anxiety thrown in. The filmmakers had the good sense, or were forced by the demands of their medium, to either throw a lot of that out or turn it into a ludicrous over-sexualized spectacle of yearning. The movies were fun, the books aren’t. But even regarding politics, there wasn’t much of a surprise for me: the Cullens are representative of realpolitik America, who use the threat of overwhelming power to keep the evil others, the Volturi, at bay. As Edward says, they’re cowards below the surface. And I really don’t disagree with the pop feminists out there about this book. The men and women take traditional roles: Alice likes clothing, Esme is a homemaker, Edward is the artist, Carlisle the intellectual, etc.. And then there’s Bella who finally achieves self satisfaction by being admired by Edward. She’ll never have to work for eternity. Her child is so perfect, as described on every page. What are her interests in music, books, or anything else? Meyer doesn’t know or care. What we do know is that Bella’s interested in babies and husbands. Of course, Meyer rigs all this with rules for her fantasy that make all this knuckledragging wish fulfillment seem okay. And it is in the diegesis, just like Dirty Harry‘s fascism, but not so much if one wants a life like this. A truly obnoxious read in just about every way: stylistically, ideologically … even plot-wise (the structure seemed to be made ad hoc without an editor).
Anyway, I just don’t want to spend any more time thinking about such idiocy. Sorry, man.
“the Cullens are representative of realpolitik America, who use the threat of overwhelming power to keep the evil others, the Volturi, at bay.”
This seems a little confused to me. I’d agree that Meyer associates vampires with decadent pale Europeans…but that seems like all vampires. The Cullens are wealthy, cultured, inbred, and marginal to the typical American high school — part of their glamor is their (somewhat garbled, but still) Europeanness. It seems weird to see them as avatars of American realpolitik in that context. The vampire fight is if anything an internal European feud (with the Native Americans taking the side of good…which, again, doesn’t seem like it maps well onto current geopolitics.)
I also think you’re downplaying the way that the ending is…not a fight. America’s overwhelming force is really deployed a lot — that’s kind of the point. Here, instead, there’s a huge build up to conflict, and then no conflict. How many fantasy series do that? How many pop culture anything do that? The book is really non violent compared to just about any other vampire story I’ve read…it seems like you’d need to take that into account and think about it if you’re going to ding it for it’s approach to violence….
This will be about as rambling as my post above:
Well, if you want to go that route: the Cullens are the white European descendants (and speaking of whiteness, there are some really embarrassing exoticized descriptions of blacks in the book) who are in this country rejecting the old world ways (that would be the Volturi) and not very accepting of the natives. Of course, what eventually ameliorates the Settler-Savage relationship is that a few Savages (shapechangers qua werewolves) turn on their own people and traditions to support these amazing Settlers. This isn’t all that different from the film Cowboys vs. Aliens, another piece of shit in recent popular fiction. But that’s something of an accident coming from what the central ideological agenda is here: the good werewolves, just like the good vampires are the ones with the American values (defined conservatively), which were in part imported from Europe. Ultimately, the Cullens, just like we modern Americans, don’t hate the Savages once they’ve been proven to go along with the program. Of course, this being a white conservative Mormon wank fantasy, Bella would never fuck one of those smelly creatures, either. But maybe that’s not because Jacob’s an Indian, but merely because she, like any wannabe trophy wife, prefers money over the future trailer park life of giving into the hot dirty allure of the boy from the wrong side of the tracks.
And the resolution between the Cullens and Vultori doesn’t come down to some sort of pacifism, which would require bravery, but to the latter being such cowards at the sight of overwhelming special powers of the Cullen team. Edward calls them cowards repeatedly, much like we used to view the commies during the Cold War. If I threaten to beat your ass, and you back down, this doesn’t mean our differences were resolved peacefully, unless you define ‘peace’ in a Kissinger-like fashion.
And, though I didn’t mention it in the email, I hated the way any bit of perversity that Meyer dreams up is guiltily explained away somehow through the book: the bestiality, for one, that’s never allowed to take route. Jacob’s pedophilia is explicitly denounced by Ed saying something like, “I’m so proud of him for not seeing Nessie as a little sex toy, but as just a child (who will, in a good oldfashioned Mormon fashion, quickly grow into her womanhood, but let’s put that aside, wink, wink).” Then there’s the potentially disturbing descriptions of fucking the marble corpse of Edward, but that’s done away with by making Bella into a superhero vampire (which is really just a human without flaws) who can then sense how alive he truly is. I know, it’s just a dumb teen book, so she couldn’t go all Necromantic, or even Big Love, on us, but that doesn’t keep it from being lame. And, relatedly, as I alluded to above, nothing is done with the notion of absolute power — Meyer just lamely assumes that the “good” vampires won’t behave like the fascists of Salo, treating us like meat, but will instead behave like the Cullens. There’s no real reconfiguration of morality in the book, everything comes down on the side of a middle-aged bourgeois woman with conservative values.
In sum, the book is a perfect example of why Darko Suvin dismissed fantasy relative to SF in that it offers no cognitive estrangement, only reinforcing the values that the less progressive members of our culture already possess.
Speaking of bourgeois, why do you have no problem with this middle aged woman fantasizing about being a teenager, but attacked Clowes for it? I guess one can prefer Bella to Enid (depressing, but possible), but it’s interesting that you’ve never addressed the same problem in Twilight (unless I missed it). Is it simply because she’s a woman and he’s a man?
And like a couple of the Cullens,* Kissinger expressed an American viewpoint while being a foreigner. Unlike Carlisle, though, he kind of sounds like a vampire.
*Really, we’re just talking about Carlisle, at best, but I guess one might consider Edward or Jasper vaguely European. Certainly not the girls, who are the typical American mall shopping types, and not the jock Emmett. Esme is such a non-entity that all I could figure out about her is that she likes interior design (she’s thoroughly bourgeois, in other words).
Seeing Bella’s choice of Edward/rejection of Jacob as racist is kind of fun…but isn’t it rather undercut by the fact that Meyer seems happy with her daughter eventually marrying Jacob? (I do think there is stuff with class in the novel — both with the allure of upperclass romance and the allure of lower class earthiness. Tried and true romance tropes.)
I don’t have a problem with adults writing about teenagers in general. The issue with Clowes was that there were insistent themes of older man/younger woman incest, which mapped very queasily onto the not-too-buried (and I think sexualized) fantasy of Clowes as Enid which drives the book in a lot of ways. All in the context of people praising the book for its insight into female psychology. I don’t really see how what Meyer does is really analogous…I mean, there really isn’t anything in the book that suggests she has an erotic interest in intergenerational lesbian pairings, is there? I guess you could get upset at her sexualization of Edward if you wanted…I mean, I think she does want to be Edward in some ways. I guess I have trouble getting exercised about it when Edward is so clearly a fantasy (though as I said in my piece, I do find the romance kind of boring because of that.)
Your take on violence here still seems pretty confused to me…as does your take on perversity. Perversion always involves disavowal and repression; if it doesn’t, it’s not perversion, but normalized, I think. To me, the way the book jumbles together body horror and sexual fetish with romance and family values and coming of age narratives is really pretty thoroughly bizarre…way more so than if we just got some standard shock the bourgeoisie underground sex and violence, or even standard horror film gross out paint by numbers. I mean, I love horror films, and enjoy the gross out too…but I feel like you’re asking for genuine offensiveness and maybe failing to notice that you’ve been genuinely offended? That is, the reason you have such a visceral reaction is because the books have actually found a way to be more repulsive than the things you are holding up as more authentically repulsive.
As for the violence; again, I don’t see much Kissinger in Carlisle. Kissinger was all about realpolitick; he didn’t care about killing people. Carlisle devotes his life to saving lives and is adamantly opposed to killing even the irredeemably evil, if he can at all help it.
“If I threaten to beat your ass, and you back down, this doesn’t mean our differences were resolved peacefully, unless you define ‘peace’ in a Kissinger-like fashion.”
That’s not how Kissinger defined peace, though. He defined peace as dropping bombs on you. Not threatening to drop bombs on you, but actually dropping bombs on you.
The Cullens could have exterminated the Volturi. They could murder humans. They work to avoid doing both of those things…and their successes are seen as more admirable than violence.
It’s kind of interesting…your prejudice in favor of violence as normative and even as ontologically determinative means that you end up saying that anything short of pure nonviolence doesn’t count; if there’s any use of force, then it’s the same as genocide, just about. Niebuhr actually did something similar now that I think about it; for him, the fact that pacifism wasn’t pure in all cases essentially meant that any use of force in the name of virtue could be justified. It’s sort of funny, because pacifism is generally accused of being unrealistically obsessed with purity — but I think you’ve helped solidify my sense that it’s Niehburian realism which is really freaked out by the messiness of the world.
I mean, do you see no difference between the way Twilight approaches violence and the way almost any other series with this kind of set up would approach violence? Meyer’s characters, and Meyer herself, are really committed to not having a war. That doesn’t mean they renounce all possible force, but it does mean they work pretty hard to avoid the genre default denoument, where everybody who is in the way of the forces of good gets exterminated. And yet, somehow, in your reading, that makes the series more oppressive and more committed to violence than alternatives which actually enthusiastically embrace visions of genocide? I just don’t get it.
Oh…and I do definitely like Twilight more than Ghost World. It’s a lot weirder and less predictable, is the main reason. Clowes just sort of acquiesces in all his genre conventions; Meyer’s much more creative with hers.
Which doesn’t mean that Twilight is great or anything. I just really don’t like Ghost World at all.
The Cullen team was ready to “drop the bomb” if need be, but the other side backed down. And Kissinger also promoted nonviolence when it was perceived to be practical (China). The defining characteristic of realpolitik is that you operate in a pragmatic and expedient manner for a particular goal. For example, letting the Volturi and other vampires continue to kill and pillage as they see fit, so long as Carlisle can keep his coven alive and safe, even though he’s supposedly against killing humans for food.
Regarding violence, the only difference between Meyer’s fantasy and other equally retrograde tokens of the genre is that she’s more dishonest about it. Violence still wins the day, but with enough plausible deniability that interpretations such as yours can pretend its about pacifism. Structural violence is what ends the book.
And the book doesn’t really offend me, so much as bore me. Boring is offensive in a way to me, but not in the sense you mean. My principles aren’t questioned in the least by reading some cheaply put together moral allegory.
Finally, I don’t imagine Clowes thinking Enid’s end is the greatest thing that could happen to a human being, whereas Meyer pretty clearly believes this about Bella’s. The latter is pure wish fulfillment, the former is not. What you’re reading as weirdness in Twilight is just sheer inability on the part of the author, like porn created by an autistic or something. Her imagination is too impoverished to create anything truly disturbing.
Oh: Bella’s acceptance of Jacob as a son-in-law is about as liberally accepting as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
I think the only reason why people hate Twilight is because they read HU (and like-minded sites) too regularly. It’s actually amazingly easy to avoid all things Twilight if you don’t read HU and, maybe, don’t live in America.
Not one person has encouraged me to read the books or watch the movies otherwise. Anecdotally speaking, my wife hates the movies and it’s the only film series she has refused to watch with me (it could be the vampire thing). My theory is that North American women are starved of mainstream romances while Asian women generally are not. I hear regular recommendations for Asian romance dramas for example.
Also, I love the idea that Noah prefers Twilight (in all its iterations) to Ghost World.
I don’t know that I can say that the third movie was better than Ghost World. They’re both awful.
Oh…and I bet the not living in America is more the key than not reading HU. Believe me, stateside the percentage of people getting their Twilight news from HU is just vanishingly small.
Well, yes, the third movie was pretty terrible. But better than In the Shadow of No Towers…?
And also, not HU in particular but like HU. But HU sort of has the distinction of being a male-oriented site with a deep interest in Twilight. I understand that you’re trying to make it “bi-gendered” though.
There are not sites “like HU”! We are unique! A one and only!
Yeah, the third movie was better than shadow of no towers. Better than Schindler’s List too. But not good.
I know plenty of women who read the books as they were coming out. It was a gal pal who convinced me to see the films, which I enjoyed (but particularly the even numbered ones). I’d rather watch the films than read Art Spiegelman’s comics. And I’d wager that the Breaking Dawn book — as big a turd as it is — is probably a lot better than SoNT, since there’s no way I would even try to read that thing.
I don’t care what anyone says, I really like Spiegelman’s “Breakdowns” book. Why not critique him when he was in his prime? “SoNT” is a cheap target.
Suat mentioned it because I wrote about the most negative thing I’ve ever written about Shadow of No Towers..the piece is here.
Noah B:”I like Twilight more than Ghost World. It’s a lot weirder and less predictable, is the main reason. Clowes just sort of acquiesces in all his genre conventions; Meyer’s much more creative with hers.”
What genre does Ghost World belong to? Coming of age? The sensitive bohemian growing up in a repressive environment? There is the “just get out of town, for no particular destination” ending. But Enid and Rebecca don’t demonstrate any superiority to the local eccentrics they torment, or even a comprehension of them. It’s not unsympathetic, but it is a portrait of teenage solipsism.
I don’t see how Twilight does anything more creative than graft the sexy vampire genre onto a chaste teen romance, to the jingle of cash registers everywhere. I guess you could interpret the “and the werewolf will marry her daughter” business as a brilliant deconstruction of the whole business, but it’s also the kind of resolution a small child would create for a Barbie love triangle. Meyer has the fantasy writer’s problem of building a lot of mythology for the sake of supporting that kind of plot twist. “Every thousand years, a werewolf loves a small child, and it is the Flapdoodlefoodle; it cannot be denied.”
“The issue with Clowes was that there were insistent themes of older man/younger woman incest, which mapped very queasily onto the not-too-buried (and I think sexualized) fantasy of Clowes as Enid which drives the book in a lot of ways. I don’t really see how what Meyer does is really analogous…I mean, there really isn’t anything in the book that suggests she has an erotic interest in intergenerational lesbian pairings.”
The part where Enid sees Clowes pretty strongly undermines that reading of Ghost World. I’m amazed that anyone would deny that gratification drives Twilight at every level.
“Oh…and I do definitely like Twilight more than Ghost World. ”
Which sums up HU’s (faux) contrarianism nicely: (too) harsh on anything that has arty pretensions, far too generous to schlock.
Hey Martin. I mean…I prefer Jimmy Corrigan to Twilight. I prefer Peanuts to Twilight. I prefer Henry James to Twilight, and I think he had some pretensions. Other things with pretensions I prefer to Twilight:
James Joyce
Tarkovsky
Shakespeare
Lilli Carre
Derik Badman (just wrote about both of those last two yesterday)
Lichtenstein
El Greco
I mean…there’s no shortage. I think Twilight is mediocre (my essay about it for the roundtable wasn’t positive); I just really think Ghost World is crap. I guess I could lie about that in order to make folks happy…but it seems silly to do that for my own blog.
I’m prepared to accept that Noah really doesn’t like Ghost World. I’m not convinced he’s familiar with the comic book of that name.
I read it! Even wrote a review…somewhere around here…ah right: here.
Haven’t seen the movie though.