Tag Archives: Stephenie Meyer

Twilight: The Graphic Novel

Posted on by

 
This first appeared at The Comics Journal.

Twilight: The Graphic Novel; Stephenie Meyer and Young Kim; Yen Press;  $19.99; B&W, Softcover; ISBN: 978-0759529434

Twilight isn’t great any more than the original Superman comics are great. Both are essentially empty-headed wish-fulfillment, though differently inflected — in Superman, boys get to imagine that they are strong enough to save everyone; in Twilight, girls get to imagine that their love is so powerful that it magically makes those they care about safe. The day dream is too blatant to be anything but gauche — but the blatancy is also the power. Like Superman, Twilight has figured out how to give its audience exactly what it wants — and the result is mass enthusiasm, fame, fortune and infinite spin-offs.

I’m on my third iteration of the first Twilight novel myself — I read the book, watched the movie, and have now read the graphic novel (or the first volume of it, anyway.) Each has its own charm. The novel has the courage of its convictions, and the not -inconsiderable grace of its own obliviousness. Stephenie Meyer’s vision is melodramatic and often clueless (Volvos and baseball are the height of hip?), but she believes in it as fervently as Siegel and Schuster thought manly men wore their underwear on the outside, and there’s something about such utter faith that makes you sit up and take notice, even if just to exclaim in disgust. Twilight the movie didn’t have that potent naivete, but it made up for it —like the Superman movie before it — with a touch of camp, a sense of humor largely missing from the source material, and, most importantly, drop-dead gorgeous actors.

Twilight the graphic novel is more like the book than the movie. Indeed, reading it, it’s hard to escape the impression that Twilight should have started out as a manga-fied graphic novel in the first place. It’s true that, without Bella’s narration, and with manga’s faster pacing, both character and plot are much more attenuated than in the novel. Traits that are important in the book — like Bella’s clumsiness, or Jessica’s cattiness — are present only as asides in the GN. Similarly, the plot whips by faster than a sparkly vampire running through the forest — one moment Bella shows up in town, the next she sees Edward, and the next, hey, presto, she’d rather die than be separated from him. Overall, the pacing feels so rushed that I wonder whether you’d actually be able to follow the thing if you hadn’t read the book first — though, of course, everyone who buys the graphic novel has already read the book first, so it’s not really that much of a problem.

In any case, following Twilight isn’t necessarily the point— which is why the graphic-novel treatment feels so natural. In this version of Twilight, people and events largely disappear, and what you’re left with is lovely faces exchanging soulful looks in lingering freeze frames of fractured time. I’m not a huge fan of Young Kim’s art, which exists in an uncomfortable halfway zone between mainstream and manga, and which manages to be both slickly anodyne and clumsy — especially in the clunkily transparent speech bubbles. But…you know, slickly pretty is probably what most readers want from this experience, and Kim’s general instincts to show as many eyes in closeup as feasible seems similarly sound. The graphic novel, in other words, is just the juicy bits— a kind of distilled overheated fanfic version of the original. Since Twilight was essentially an overheated fanfic version of itself to begin with, though, that works out fine.

 

Edward, Daddy

Posted on by

In his book Forbidden Partners: The Incest Taboo In Modern Culture, James B. Twitchell argues that the gothic romance, and particularly the vampire story, is built upon the fascination/titillation/horror of the incest taboo. Twitchell points out that the vampire is typically an older, powerful man who attacks a younger, often virginal woman, forcing upon her an intimate encounter which involves a sex-like, perverted mingling of blood. Twitchell also reminds us that:

The most startling aspect of the folkloric vampire is that he must first attack members of his own family. This prerequisite has been lost in our modern versions, but it is clear in almost every early story in almost every culture. We may have neglected this because we find it too dull and predictable, but it may also be…because this familial tie makes all too clear the vampire’s specific sexual design.

The most popular current version of the vampire story is, of course, Twilight. Twilight differs from Dracula in many ways — but it definitively retains the gothic fascination with inbred family structures. Bella, notably, calls her father “Charlie” — his first name — and when she moves back in with him, she cooks for and takes care of him more like a wife than like a daughter. Bella’s surrogate vampire family is even more flagrantly incestuous; Carlyle’s “children”, turned vampire by him, all live together as brothers and sisters — and, at the same time, as paired husbands and wives. Even Carlyle himself, and his wife appear no older than their “kids” — who they create not by having sex with each other, but by having sex with the children themselves. Father/mother/brother/sister — the familial roles are all, for the vampires, arbitrary, interchangeable, and interpenetrated with sex.

If vampires are both daddies and lovers, Edward is certainly no exception. In fact, much of Meyer’s incomprehensible plotting is suddenly clarified once you start to view Edward as a father surrogate. Edward is, of course, much, much older than Bella (while still being, also, magically, 19.) And his relationship with Bella is defined by his overwhelming desire to protect her…not merely from others, but from himself. His stalkery behavior is often specifically explained as a paternal desire to keep her from harm — he disables her car, for example, to keep her from being hurt by Jacob. Meyer also is oddly fascinated with scenes in Bella’s bedroom — scenes in which Edward does not have sex with Bella, but rather spends hours watching her sleep…like a doting father. Edward’s continual refusal to have sex with Bella, and/or to turn her into a vampire, are also consistent with his fatherhood; he loves her, but incest sex would be so right wrong.

Obviously, incest is definitionally squicky, and it’s no surprise that Twilight’s flirtation, and more than flirtation, with the taboo have repulsed many, feminist and otherwise. At the same time, Twitchell notes that the gothic — incest and all — has long appealed strongly to young women. Why should this be? Twitchell doesn’t have any very good explanation — he mutters something vaguely about false consciousness, stammers about symbolic representations of hymens breaking, waves his hands, and scurries on by.

Gale Swiontkowski in Imagining Incest: Sexton, Plath, Rich, and Olds on Life With Daddy provides a somewhat more convincing explanation of the appeal of incest narratives for young women (if not of vampires per se.) Looking at American women poets, Swiontkowski argues that for daughters incest with the father can be a kind of symbolic grasping of patriarchal power — a repudiation of passivity in favor of the phallus. Obviously, this is a fraught and potentially damaging transaction, especially in the not-nearly-infrequent-enough-cases where there is actual incest and abuse. Still, Swiontkowski argues:

An advocacy of incest by men, as in pornography, is a regressive move toward social and psychological hoarding that enslaves women to men’s desires, especially if it is taken as a literal enactment of the right of males in patriarchy. The advocacy of symbolic incest by women is an enlightening and advancing move because it breaches the social restrictions on women that determine their subservience in a patriarchy.

This does seem to be in large part what Meyer is trying to do in Twilight. Meyer’s world is one in which the incest taboo is destabilized; fathers are brothers are husbands; siblings are lovers…and, as a result, ultimately, daughters are fathers. Edward is Bella’s lover and her father — and he is also Bella’s self. Edward’s paternal desire to keep Bella safe is ultimately accomplished by making Bella into Edward — by turning her into a vampire who is (the text is careful to note) stronger than Edward himself. Marrying her father makes Bella her own father, and she has the phallus/fangs to prove it.

Bella’s fatherhood is achieved by giving birth; it is tied into, and comes out of, her motherhood. Twilight, in other words, wants to allow Bella to retain her gender even as she grasps the phallus; being a vampire does not unsex or transex her, but actually reinscribes her femaleness. Bella can be structurally father without being male, just as the vampires can all be structurally siblings while sleeping with each other. Instead of incest leading to horror as in the traditional gothic, for Meyer it opens up onto a utopia of sexy, happy families and sparkly vampires.
_________________

While writing this, it suddenly occurred to me that there’s a vampire in the Hunger Games too. President Snow, with his breath that smells like blood, surely functions as a Dracula surrogate — the older, powerful, seductive patriarch. One of the creepier moments in the book is when he leaves a rose for Katniss in her house; a symbolic and squicky father/daughter rape.

Katniss, of course, has lost her own father — which perhaps explains the intense personal relationship she develops with Snow. Certainly, Katniss’ hatred of Snow in the book seems weirdly unmotivated. Snow does many horrible things, of course…but those horrible things seem almost too much, the personalization of the evil of the regime almost too intense, as if Suzanne Collins is desperate to find an excuse to place Snow at the center of Katniss’ mental and emotional world.

Given Snow’s role as demon/father, and given the series’ fascination with intensely gruesome and macabre violence, I think it’s possible to see The Hunger Games as itself an example of the gothic. In many ways, too, it’s a much more traditional gothic than Twilight. Incest leads to horror — and to punishment, not just for the father, but for the daughter as well. Katniss’ punishment is precisely that she doesn’t get the phallus; repudiating the incest storyline means that she must also repudiate personal power and agency. She can’t actually admit to her love of dressing up (good girls don’t do that); she can’t admit to an investment or interest in politics (good girls don’t do that); she can’t even really enjoy the denoument of her romance storyline (the boy is nice enough…but he isn’t daddy.) As with Mina Harker, the dull live with the socially acceptable doofus can’t quite compete with the rush of the blood, the horror, and the power — the violent daddy things you’re not allowed to say you want.

White: Not the New Black

Posted on by

Whether in the American Revolution, Schindler’s List, or Star Wars, Americans have always had a deep and abiding love for tales of oppressed white people. In her new YA novel, Revealing Eden, Victoria Foyt takes that insight and runs with it as fast and as far as impressively insipid prose can take her. In the far future, solar radiation has become exponentially more dangerous, and those without the melanin to withstand it are second-class citizens. Our heroine, Eden, is white and, therefore, doomed to eugenic culling unless she can convince a black man to mate with her and give her dark-skinned babies. Soon she is embroiled with the fascinating Bramford, a black scientist who has had his DNA spliced with panther, eagle, and anaconda genes, turning him into an earthy, atavistic archetype. Luckily, in Foyt’s world, black people are in charge, so Bramford’s evolutionary descent has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with sexualized animalistic fantasies about black men. Shame on you for even thinking so.

Revealing Eden is unusually crass in its take on race, but its general methodology has a longstanding pedigree in sci-fi and fantasy. You need only think of that ham-fisted Star Trek episode in which the aliens with faces that are white on the right side are oppressed by aliens with faces that are white on the left side, or the ham-fisted Next Generation episode in which the crew finds a planet where women rule over men.

Or, for a more recent example, try the film In Time, a parable in which fungible time has replaced money as the currency of choice. Thus, the rich live forever on horded time and the poor have to beg, borrow, steal and run for every second. The movie is clearly intended to be a comment on our crappy economy and growing inequality — but it’s a comment shorn of any mention of the ways in which that inequality continues to be bound up with race. There is, as far as I can remember, only one black character in the film; a long-suffering wife whose (white) husband is an alcoholic. The unfair distribution of time serves as a metaphor for real-world injustice — but does the metaphor highlight those real-world injustices, or does it deny them? Is it possible that the sci-fi setting is just a way to do a story about economic oppression without the inconvenience of having to feature black leads?

Similar questions arise in the three most successful YA series of recent memory: Harry Potter, the Hunger Games and Twilight. All make extensive use of metaphor to discuss racial prejudice — or to avoid discussing racial prejudice, as the case may be. In Harry Potter, (bad) wizards are prejudiced against muggles; in the Hunger Games, the people of the Capitol are prejudiced against the people of the Districts; in Twilight, vampires and werewolves are prejudiced against each other.

All these series come down squarely against discrimination, which is nice as far as it goes. That isn’t very far, however. For example, wizards in Harry Potter really are superior to muggles; no one really denies that. The only point at issue is whether muggles should be killed outright (as Voldemart believes) or whether they should be kept in perpetual ignorance for their own benefit (as the “good guys” believe.) Rudyard Kipling might approve, I suppose, but, to put it kindly, it’s hard to see this as a particularly insightful take on contemporary race relations. And I will avoid discussing the lovable house elf servants, who adore their own enslavement — a fantasy underclass entirely composed of Gunga Dins.

Hunger Games and Twilight are arguably less clumsy, but not by much. Suzanne Collins avoids discussing race by the simple expedient of not discussing it. Her main character, Katniss is possibly biracial, but it’s so downplayed in the book that Hollywood had no problem casting a white actress in the part for the film. In Twilight, there are many Native American characters, and the books deal forthrightly with prejudice directed against those characters. But all that prejudice is because the Native Americans are werewolves; there’s barely a hint that Native Americans who are not werewolves might occasionally be discriminated against. And, of course, Meyer, like Foyt, cheerfully deploys the stereotype of the animalistic, emotional, virile lesser races. Just because discrimination is bad doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun with it, right?

In all of these cases, the problem is that oppression is seen as a (simplistic) structure, rather than as a history. For Foyt, Rowling, et. al, you condemn racism by saying, “Hey! Racism is bad!” For none of them is there a sense of historical inequalities as a living and inescapable presence. Victoria Foyt’s main character, Eden, reads Emily Dickinson, but not Langston Hughes; nobody in Harry Potter compares Voldemort to Hitler; nobody in the Hunger Games has heard of Che. Oppression in all of these series has a now, but no yesterday. Sci-fi and fantasy, apparently, means a world without a past.

It doesn’t have to be that way. As just one counterexample, consider Octavia Butler’s Dawn, the first book of her Xenogenesis trilogy. The novel is set after a nuclear apocalypse. Most of the world has been destroyed, and earth’s few survivors have been rescued by a tentacled alien race known as the Oankali. The rescue is not entirely philanthropic, though. The Oankali are genetic manipulators; they want human beings for their genetic material. Or, to put it another way, they want to mate with our women — and also our men.

The main character in Dawn is an African-American woman named Lilith. You might think that in a future where most of humanity is dead and aliens have inherited the earth, race wouldn’t matter. But, as Butler shows, that would be naïve. Race matters a lot. It inflects other humans’ reactions to Lilith when they are asked to follow her leadership. It inflects the aliens themselves, who assume that Lilith will want to mate with one man because he is black. And it inflects Lilith’s reactions as well, both in her loyalty to her species against an imperial invader, and in her eventual acceptance of difference and, ultimately, of interspecies integration.

Butler doesn’t forswear analogy. The Oankali are in some ways very much like human imperialists — the European invaders conquering the New World. Similarly, mating with the Oankali is comparable to interracial relationships. But the metaphors don’t erase the past; instead they complicate it The imperialists are also saviors. Interracial marriage is both a betrayal of the race and the promise of a new and beautiful future. A future in which, not incidentally, the children of a black woman save humanity.

Dawn demonstrates that metaphor is not, or at least should not be, amnesia. Foyt wants to say that white is black without making any effort to think about either white or black. As a result, her world — and to a lesser extent, the worlds of Rowling, and Collins and Meyer — have an air of rather nervous blandness. Butler, alone in this company seems to realize that even in a different world, we can’t escape what has already happened in this one.

Tween Horror

Posted on by

I had an article on the Atlantic a couple of days ago in which I talked about the Hunger Games and Twilight, comparing Bella and Katniss. I argue that Bella is in many ways stereotypically feminine (passive, focused on romance and motherhood) while Katniss is in many ways stereotypically masculine (competent, deadly, not focused on romance).

People have not been pleased with me. Specifically, Alyssa Rosenberg and Amber Taylor take me to task. Alyssa started out by calling me condescending and went on to say:

First, there’s something really profoundly weird and limited about this definition of femininity — and condescending in the piece’s sense that a totalizing devotion to motherhood, to relationships, to sex, to girliness is the only, or most worthy, definition of femininity. The second-wave feminists who produced Our Bodies, Ourselves may not have done the research into a groundbreaking medical text that changed the relationship between women and the medical establishment while wearing pretty dresses*, but that doesn’t mean that their work wasn’t deeply attuned to the feminine. Creating space for women’s voices in hip-hop, and suggesting that women have something specific to offer the form, may not be explicitly attuned to the state of romantic and sexual relationships, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an exploration and assertion of the feminine. Choosing to have a baby even if it means you have to be on bed rest or endanger your life might mean you’re devoted to motherhood, but it doesn’t actually make you more of a woman than casting off your cloak to duel the holy hell out of Bellatrix Lestrange or climbing into an exo-suit and doing battle for a little girl’s life — and by extension, the continued existence of the human race.

As is usually the case, Caroline Small is more eloquent than I am, so I’ll let her respond. This is a comment she left on the Atlantic site before Alyssa’s post went up, but I think it resonates.

The comments to this article are really pretty interesting. But pretty disheartening, really, too. A lot of popular feminism, which seems to be where some of the commenters are coming from, isn’t very attentive to the history of cultural gendering, where certain traits were indeed gendered “female” and certain “male”, and where the male traits were generally considered better and more worthwhile. Those preferences haven’t really gone away — the sets of traits and behaviors are still valued differently. They’re just more available to individual people of both genders now.

I’ve been seeing these “I’m glad I grew up with Buffy and not Bella” things too, so it’s not just Katniss. I sympathize; Bella doesn’t particularly appeal to me either. But it doesn’t take much insight to recognize that she aligns more closely with “traditional femininity” than Buffy and Katniss do.

Fortunately, there are lots of women today whose self-perception aligns with the masculine values, to the point that those women would never describe those traits as “masculine”. I think these comments reflect that. But being able to see them as non-gendered, or differently gendered, is something we have the luxury of doing because we were fortunate enough to have come up after feminism fought those hard battles, in an era where other people and society overall enforce those gendered norms on our individual bodies much, much less.

A lot of people seem to think that the point of feminism is making “masculine” behavior acceptable for women — or making no behavior unacceptable for women, that is, separating the behavior from the bodies of the people who perform the behavior and not judging women who prefer those historically masculine traits. And I agree that is one goal of feminism.

But feminism used to also be about recognizing the value and beauty of the way women historically did things, of women’s ways of knowing, of women’s unique experiences — of “femininity” as a counterweight to the excesses of “masculine” strength and authority and aggression. It used to be about valuing “femininity” as a place from which we could criticize and challenge the bad things in our world. A lot of the distaste for Bella is genuine distaste for the historically “feminine” categories and behaviors and values and aesthetics, but it’s generally expressed without even the slightest recognition of how problematic and limiting — and historically patriarchal — that attitude is.

So I’m hesitant that it’s a good thing to derogate traditional femininity, either in favor of traditional masculinity or even in favor of an individual woman’s right to behave however she pleases. A feminism that rejects the very notion that culture is gendered (in ways that have nothing to do with biology) is a feminism that’s amputated its best critique of power. It’s essentially co-opted by historically masculine cultural biases and preferences — including the ones for violence and strength. That’s tragic, if that’s where we are.

Part of the appeal of characters like Katniss is that they challenge conventional gender without completely eradicating it. Part of the appeal of characters like Bella is that they subvert conventional gender without really challenging it at all. I don’t much like either of them at a personal “do I want to hang out with these people” level — I’m with the person who prefers Hermione, although HP is almost as badly written as Twilight. But it strikes me that not being able — or willing — to think the difference is a problem.

Girl power is great — except when it moves beyond allowing people with female bodies to behave any way they like and becomes a new set of restrictive, normative, angry, prejudiced norms that bully people with female bodies into behaving a certain way. The widespread and almost-always knee-jerk “feminist” contempt for Bella, both in itself and in comparison with “tough” female characters like Katniss and Buffy, is a tremendous intellectual and social failure in that respect.

So I think it’s worth asking the defenders of Katniss — is there actually a feminist critique of the power structure that gets Katniss into the book’s defining life or death challenge, the kind of systematic feminist critique you get from, say, Joanna Russ or Erica Jong? I can be talked out of this position, but it doesn’t seem to me that there is. The same question could be asked of Buffy, and of any other girl power heroine. Twilight may actually have the edge on that one — there is a definite critique of the Volturi from Bella’s perspective that aligns nicely, yes, with Christian ideals, but also with traditionally feminine ones. (Although Bella is certainly no Alyx.)

Ignoring the seductiveness of those “masculine” characteristics, pretending their relationship to authority and strength and power and violence is transformed just because a woman engages in them — — that’s not feminist at all. And neither is perpetuating biases and prejudices against the historically gendered-feminine traits. A feminism that can’t make room for Bella is a feminism that’s going to have a lot of trouble getting purchase with women who like Bella, and that seems like a tremendous mistake to me.

To me it seems like Caroline has Alyssa pretty much dead to rights. Alyssa is basically insisting that the feminine be defined as, “anything that women do.” And that has been one goal of feminism. But another goal has been to champion those things traditionally associated with women. And you can’t champion those things if you feel it’s condescending to even suggest that they exist.

The difficulty with championing them if you refuse to admit they exist is perhaps best epitomized by another commenter on the Atlantic. This is Genevieve du Lac. Her comment has garnered 16 likes, so I don’t think she’s just speaking for herself here.

I’m really disgusted with these definitions of femininity and feminism. Why can’t a woman be competent and feminine at the same time? Femininity is not weak. And Bella is just retarded. The two neurons she’s got floating around in her cerebellum are drunk off too much estrogen… like most 16 year olds. So she’s got some feminine qualities – like following her feelings, etc. That does not make her the epitome of femininity.

I’d like to think a woman can be feminine and still be competent. I can wear my makeup and heels and take care of my hair just as well as I sky dive, shoot an arrow, shoot a pistol, finish my MBA, and have a career. Sheesh.

Like Alyssa, Genevieve wants the feminine to mean everything women do. But to get there, she has to call Bella “retarded” and sneer at her “estrogen.” Which, to me, seems like a problem.

Alyssa doesn’t lambast Bella in such offensive terms, of course, which I appreciate. But she is coming from at least a vaguely similar line of country.

And while those values are worth examining further, Twilight‘s also eminently critiqueable on narrative grounds, something Noah gives very little credence. Complexity is the stuff of genuinely compelling decision-making, as well as compelling storytelling. What’s troubling about Twilight is less the idea that Bella picks Edward and more the inevitability of their eventual union. Once Edward walks into Bella’s science class, she never really considers anything else, never gets presented with any other truly compelling options, she treats the humans in her life who are graduating and going off to their own adventures with dismissiveness and disinterest. Tough choices are fascinating. Defending the world’s kindest fate is rather dull.

And just as I’m bored by Bella’s certainty and dismissive attitudes towards people who set other priorities and take other paths, I don’t appreciate the idea that I don’t live up to Noah Berlatsky’s very particular standards of femininity, I’m doing it wrong. There may be effective arguments for a Christian focus on love rather than strength. But a strident and myopic lecture to women with a variety of priorities isn’t likely to be one of them.

Alyssa is arguing for narrative complexity — complexity involving action, politics, and suspense. She goes on to argue that the Hunger Games is interesting in part because it’s about how politics destroys families; how the public trumps the private and why that’s evil.

But…that’s not unique to the Hunger Games. It’s just how adventure stories work. You’re fighting for home and family; that’s the motivation, but it’s not the story. That’s why Amber Taylor is misleading when she says that Katniss’ actions are all about her family. Diagetically they are…but that isn’t what the books focus on. We hardly know Katniss’ sister, or her relationship to her; Pru really just exists as a kind of pure idol of goodness and innocence, a reason to keep fighting, like any number of pure-women-left-at-home in any number of adventure books. What Alyssa wants, and what adventure narratives want, isn’t the exploration of love and relationships…so they push those over to the side. And instead, you get violence and things blowing up.

I don’t have any problem with things blowing up in my entertainment. I don’t know that I seek that kind of thing out quite as much as my wife does, but I’m perfectly happy to go along for the ride. Enjoyable as those things-blowing-up are, though, I like other kinds of stories too. Such as, occasionally, romance. Which is what Twilight is.

As in most romances, narrative complexity, in terms of events and suspense, is not the point. You know Bella is going to get her guy, just like you know that Jane Austen’s heroines are going to end up happily married. That’s how romance works. People — often people known as “women” — read those books not because they’re idiots who don’t like complexity, but because they are interested in a different kind of complexity. Specifically, they’re interested in the ins and outs of love; not just whether people love each other, but how they do so; not who will live and who will die, but what will they say and how will they say it and how will their relationship develop?

For instance, there’s that scene in the Twilight series where Edward’s family is voting on whether to turn Bella into a vampire. Edward’s father votes yes, and his reason is that Edward has vowed to kill himself when Bella dies. For Edward’s father, his love for his son therefore means that Bella has to also live forever.

As a father, as a husband, as someone who has been thinking a lot recently about in-laws and what they mean for marriage and for love — I found, and find that scene really moving. And that’s where the suspense and surprise in Twilight comes from; from the explanation and exploration of love and intimacy, not just between Bella and Edward, but between Bella and Jacob, and Jacob and Edward, and Edward’s family — the entire cast of characters, in other words. It’s different than watching the nifty new way Katniss kills somebody, I’ll grant you. But it’s not worse. For me, anyway, I find it more compelling. Or, as Laura Blackwood says in a lovely recent essay, “The Twilight series challenges what I would call the “Buffy Summers Maxim”: that teen heroines be physically empowered, oftentimes at the expense of emotional clarity.”

None of which means that Katniss, or Alyssa, is “doing it wrong.” Even if the Hunger Games is (like Twilight) dreadfully written, I still like Katniss. I like watching her figure out how to kill people; I like her tomboyish competence; I like her butchness, I like her delight in dressing up, even if the series won’t really allow her to own it. I like the way she finds true love and family at the end. She’s not my favorite heroine in the world, and her whining (like Bella’s) gets pretty tedious, but overall, I enjoyed spending time with her. That’s why I went out of my way to say at the end of my essay at the Atlantic that Katniss and Bella aren’t opposed. As another writer notes here, it’s not an either/or choice. Lots of girls admire both characters. I think it’s possible to imagine that Twilight’s heroine and the Hunger Games’ heroine would find something in each other to love and admire as well.

Amber Taylor disagrees with me there, though:

The idea that there would be a fight is absurd, but the reason for peace is not that Bella and Katniss “might understand each other’s desires and each other’s strength” and walk away in mutual respect. Katniss wouldn’t fight Bella because Bella is not an autocratic totalitarian dictator. Bella threatens exactly nothing that Katniss values, and thus Katniss, a user of violence who is not inherently violent, would probably shrug. Katniss’s political consciousness and promotion of self-rule does not threaten Bella’s tiny microverse of loved ones and would likewise be a non-issue to Bella.

For Taylor, Katniss wouldn’t respect Bella. She’d just ignore her, because Bella is no threat. But I have to ask…if Bella “threatens exactly nothing” that Katniss or Taylor or Alyssa values, why then are so many writers so eager to attack her? If she’s not a danger, why call her a “retard” or deride her as dull or passive or sneer at her “tiny microverse of loved ones” — that thing that some of us of insufficient political consciousness refer to as our “family”? What, in other words, is so scary about Bella and the girls who love her? And could it, maybe, have something to do with our culture’s ambivalence about femininity?

I’ll let Sarah Blackwood have the last word.

Bella holds up a cracked mirror and shows us some things we don’t want to see. But she also reminds us that the imagination resists checklists of appropriate behavior. Teen girls resist checklists. The really interesting conversations start to happen when we stop circling the wagons against “bad examples” and “passivity” and start exploring not only what we want our heroines to be like, but why.

Twilight: the Battle for Legitimate Art

Posted on by

A lot of critical analyses of Twilight, the award-winning series by Stephenie Meyer, focus on legitimacy.  Is Twilight literature?  Is it good literature?  Is it worthy of critique?  These questions reveal the fundamental fallacy rooted deep within our culture: the idea that art should be questioned at all.  Art is art.  It needs no explanation, no analysis, no excuse.  Art is the expression of our inmost psyche, our deeply-rooted desires, our secret yearnings which would otherwise be impossible to express.  Twilight is all of this and more.

Instead of interrogating this text from this perspective, I would like to pay homage to this great work by exploring the characters and plot with the same simple lucidity and attention to detail Meyer paid them.  I want to get inside this work, to live in it, and experience it again.  I want to feel what people feel when they immerse themselves in art such as this; I want to touch nerves in the same plain yet oh-so-effective way.  I want people to be moved, and I want them to be entertained.  Let us cease to critically analyze; let us not merely destroy.  Let us create.

Let us use our hearts, not our minds.

Let’s do art.

 

TWILIGHT

Art is Beauty