Tag Archives: Twilight

Twilight: The Graphic Novel

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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

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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.
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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.

The Boy Who Never Should Have Been

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Cressida Cowell’s How to Break a Dragon’s Heart, like all the How To Train Your Dragon series, is told through a frame story. The hero, Hiccup Horatio Haddock III, is an old Viking warrior narrating the story of his adventures as an (insufficiently fierce, overly cerebral) Viking child.

The frame story doesn’t impinge too much on the narrative. It’s even unclear who the old Hiccup is supposed to be talking to…and the bulk of the book is in the third person, not the first, so it’s not like you’re insistently reminded that old Hiccup is doing the talking. Still, in this volume at least, the frame is thematically accented in the book’s creepiest scene. Hiccup has been imprisoned in a hollow tree by his arch-enemy, Alvin the Treacherous. Inside the tree with him, it turns out, is an old witch, who has been in the darkness so long she no longer needs light to see. Hiccup refuses to tell her who he is, and the witch proposes a game. She will tell him a story, and at the end of it, the two of them will try to guess each other’s names. Whoever guesses gets to kill the other. The witch, invisible in the dark, starts to speak with her disembodied voice…and to Hiccup’s horror she tells him the story of his own ancestors. Cowell actually draws in the tree bark as a kind of circular frame of rough blurry bark ringing the dialogue. Thus, in the visible ring the narrative goes round, Hiccup telling the story of the witch telling the story of Hiccup — who guesses the witch’s name just as she guesses his, and so, in a way, manages to tell her story too.

The insistence on the storyness of the story is a staple of much children’s literature, from Alice in Wonderland to the Never-Ending Story. It’s so associated with children’s lit, in fact, that you can sometimes forget that it’s also a solidly modernist obsession, used obsessively by Joseph Conrad, Faulkner, Borges, and others.

Modernists and children’s author use the frame story for similar reasons; it’s self-conscious. It acknowledges that the narrative is a game, which is nice for kids (who like games) and for sophisticated aesthetes (who like games as well.) And, in fact, that sense of playful whimsy, of a story that knows its own storiness, is one of the things I like most about Cowell’s series. Alvin the Treacherous’ constant horrible deaths and miraculous survivals, always returning with one less body part (this time he’s got a wooden nose); or the way the doomed heroic fiancés keep shouting “YOU BETCHA!” or “TOO RIGHT!” no matter how horrible the situation; or even Cowell’s delightfully scratchy, blobby artwork — it all emphasizes the createdness of the characters, they’re existence as cartoon tropes on the page. They aren’t real; they’re in a frame, and the pleasure is less in finding out what happened than in seeing the pieces fit into place, like Hiccup’s miraculous key which gets him out of the tree and frees the fiancés and releases the dragon with the broken heart.

It’s interesting to compare Cowell’s embrace of storytelling with those other more popular fantasy series. Harry Potter and Twilight aren’t any more real than How To Train Your Dragon, obviously…but they’ve both got a more fraught relation with the real. Neither Harry nor Twilight has a frame story…and in fact both are in many ways predicated on denying a frame and pretending that the fantastic is real. In Harry Potter, the world of magic exists unknown side-by-side with the real world, on magical railway platforms halfway between more mundane train stops, or in Quidditch games concealed in farmer’s fields. In Twilight, too, the vampires and werewolves are all around us, but we don’t know — only the reader does. Both series are about secrets and knowing truths. Harry is the Boy Who Survived, defined by his encounter, and escape, from the ultimate reality of death.

Hiccup, on the other hand, is, according to the witch, the “Boy-Who-Never-Should-Have-Been.” Hiccup’s father, it turns out, married the wrong person; prophecies went awry, stories went wrong, and the result was an accident of fate, a hiccup in the narrative. Hiccup isn’t but is, like a character in a book. “The story had done its work. Carried away by its power, Hiccup had betrayed himself and his identity,” Cowell writes. The narrative knows who you are, perhaps, because who you are is nothing but a narrative.

In the first words of the book, which are the first words of the frame, Hiccup says, “History is a ghost story.” In Harry Potter or Twilight, of course, the opposite is true – the ghost story, the magic, and the vampires are history. That’s why those series are replete with angst and darkness; they’re about convincing you they’re real, and the real is trauma. How To Train Your Dragon is much lighter fare; its witches are only voices, and you know they’ll stop when the story does. But what else will stop? If history is a ghost story, who’s telling it ? If there’s a frame, what’s outside it? A secret’s a truth; a story’s a mystery. Harry may have been born for glory, but Hiccup is born for who knows what — his future coming towards him like a ghost, frightening and awkward and indistinct, the story he will be.

Twilight vs. Buffy — Battle to the Death?

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Inspired by Joy DeLyria’s post about Evil in Speculative Fiction, Charles Reece and I have been engaged in a knock-down/drag-out about the relative morality of Buffy’s vision of vampires and Twilight’s vision of vampires. It’s been pretty enjoyable, so I thought I’d highlight it in a post. My comments are in italics; Charles is in plain text.
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Noah: This is a way in which Twilight is much superior to Buffy, I think. Twilight vampires can choose good or evil just like the rest of us. Most of them choose evil because they need to drink blood and they’re very powerful, but it doesn’t have to be that way, as Carlisle and his family show.

This complicates the criticism that Bella should kill vampires the way Buffy does too. Vampires have souls in Twilight; killing them is as morally repugnant as killing people. Of course, they’re mass murderers too, many of them…but extrajudicial killing even of murderers is not morally neutral.
 
Charles:I think the veggie vampire idea is pretty dumb, too, certainly worse than Buffy’s problems. They’re a master race who are expected to treat us as equals. Yeah, bullshit. They might argue over whether they should breed us without legs and keep us in cages, though. If we were lucky, a Peter Singer would be turned. True Blood, as dumb as it is, is probably a more realistic depiction. They don’t eat us for pragmatic reasons, as a matter of realpolitik. We outnumber them and move about in the daylight (a problem that makes Twilight even dumber for getting rid of it).
 
Noah: I don’t really get your objection, Charles. You argue that they’re stupid because they’re not acting like a master race…but it’s you who is arguing that they’re a master race. That’s really not Meyer. She sees them as having souls. To the extent that the veggie vampires are better than us, it’s because they’re vegetarian. Suffering and renunciation makes you superior, not strength. I guess lots of people think that’s inherently stupider than realpolitik, but I strongly, strongly disagree.

Buffy raises theological issues (why are vampires hurt by crosses?) that it is completely unwilling to answer. Twilight is much more ready to confront them — by, for example, getting rid of the cross nonsense and talking explicitly about theology. Where Twilight’s world falls apart is not in the logic of the vampires per se, but with its secret world conceit. Vampires kill way too many people; either they would have been discovered, or else all of humanity would have been dead a long time ago. The mechanics just don’t work. (Buffy has this problem too…but it tends to get around it by just treating the whole thing as a joke. People just conveniently forget after they meet vampires, which is treated as a goof. This points to one of Buffy’s big strengths over Twilight, which is that the writing is much wittier and smarter on the microlevel, even if a lot of the big issue plotting is less thought through.)
 
Charles: By “soul”, I assume you mean a “conscience,” which we have, too, but if something’s deemed a lower form of life, we apply different rules. That’s why I think vegetarian vampirism is an inherently dumb idea, not necessarily the characters themselves for not eating humans. Basically, it’s a fantasy that power has no effect on beliefs. That’s pure bullshit.

I don’t see why masochism makes you more superior than strength. The former perfectly supports the latter.
 
Noah: No; by soul, Meyer means “soul”, not conscience. She’s a Christian. The two concepts aren’t reducible to each other. Buffy uses the former too; it just isn’t willing to think about what that means.

As for your comments on power — that’s just more realpolitik bullshit. Cynicism sneering at ideology by erasing its own deep commitment to its own ideology. If you think that’s sophisticated thinking, good on you I guess.

Meyer’s vision of renunciation and suffering is explicitly tied to love. Strength comes out of caring for others and for your family rather than from having super strength. Bella saves everyone she loves through nonviolence. Reducing that to masochism seems fairly myopic…but consistent with cynical realpolitik nonsense, sure.

It’s not a fantasy that power has no effect on beliefs. It’s a fantasy that human choices matter, and that power alone is not determinative of actions. For many of the vampires, power makes them cruel killers. Carlyle’s power, on the other hand, makes him a better man. It absolutely affects him; it just doesn’t have to make him a monster. If you reject that, you reject free will, and good and evil become meaningless. In that world, owning a gun means you’re inevitably going to start shooting your enemies in the head. I just don’t understand why that’s a complex or even remotely interesting moral vision.
 
Charles: Yes, of course Meyer believes in a soul, but who cares? Many power-mad people believe in a soul. My point to you was that you were setting it up as if it mattered to a godlike species with clearly superior power that they had a soul when it comes to how they’d treat us. What effect, if it’s not as a conscience, does having a soul have on them in that scenario? It would otherwise seem completely useless. Now, granting that (which you do with your talk of a free will), what’s the chance that a master species who needs us as food would treat us better than we treat chickens and cows or even indigenous populations of the past? It’s a fantasy about power, essentially worshipping it — submission, or what you seem to favorably call suffering and renunciation. I’d suggest that the only way the rights of humans would be recognized is through resistance. Unless, of course, you’re lucky enough to be turned. Even better if you’re turned by the good vampires, who keep their good old fashioned humanistic values, so none of this matters much to the silly narrative.
 
Noah: Human beings’ relationships with each other are often horrible, but it simply is not universally true that human cultures always in every instance treat neighboring cultures with less power as chickens. It’s not true that everyone with a gun always in every case shoots everyone who doesn’t have one. Suggesting that they do is knee-jerk cynicism. It just further justifies me in my long-held belief that at its heart realpolitik is deeply naive.

Maybe this confusion is because you haven’t read the books, but…it’s not the humans who submit and renounce. It’s Carlyle and his coven. The book doesn’t worship or idolize power (or, you know, not especially on the scale of pop culture.) On the contrary, it’s unusually committed to pacifism and resolving conflicts peacefully. Its moral center is occupied by a group which specifically renounces violence and bloodshed. Bella’s triumph is in forcing the vampires to resolve their problems peacefully. That’s fairly unusual by the standards of pop narrative, and I think meaningful (though not exactly logical.)

Part of your problem is that you want the vampires to be treated as a strictly materialist other race. Meyer doesn’t do that. The vampires are, among other things, angels; being transformed is a utopian dream of becoming perfected, where perfected means not just more powerful, but also more good, and less willing to use that power (also, and not coincidentally, it means becoming more egalitarian in terms of gender roles.)

Oh, and having a soul. Soul is really not a concept that can be reduced to material or psychological explanations; if it were, you wouldn’t need or use the concept at all. Lots of people with souls don’t have consciences; whether you can have a conscience without a soul is an interesting theological issue that I’m not up to parsing. Anyway, the point is that the soul is as much about your moral standing as it is about your actions, and as much about your relationship with god as with other people. You comment that lots of people who believe in souls act badly doesn’t actually have anything to do with the conversation, as far as I can tell. As Joy says, the point is that in the moral universe of Buffy, the vampires have no standing. In Twilight they do. That creates a very different ethical world.

That ethical world is not always thought through very clearly, and as John notes the banal wish fulfillment and the spiritual vision (not to mention sheer cluelessness) get in each other’s way to no small extent. But getting mad at it because it doesn’t embrace pragmatism seems really misguided. There are a lot of things that are silly about Twilight, but its failure to adopt the ethics and outlook of Richard Nixon is simply not one of them.
 
Charles:

it’s not the humans who submit and renounce. It’s Carlyle and his coven. The book doesn’t worship or idolize power (or, you know, not especially on the scale of pop culture.) On the contrary, it’s unusually committed to pacifism and resolving conflicts peacefully. Its moral center is occupied by a group which specifically renounces violence and bloodshed.

I’m not mad at it for being a fantasy like the unrealistic ones Joy is calling for. I’m not mad at all, in fact. I just don’t see it as any more plausible than the Buffyverse. It is, if anything, a step backwards. The only reason the humans don’t have to make the choice between resistance (as in Buffy to some degree) or submission is precisely because the good Twilight vampires choose to renounce their superiority. Basically, your defense is that it’s moral for the good guys to have power. How is that different from a Nixonian worldview? We avoid war because of a show of power against others who have power. Everyone is afraid of too many casualties on their respective sides. There’s your peace. Where we differ is that I find it highly implausible to draw any moral lesson from the narrative, since it relies on the assumption/hope/wish fulfillment that in the case of asymmetrical power, there will be a significant enough resistance against the biological and cultural order of things, “renunciation” of their status, from the haves to save the have-nots. Sure, there were admirable and highly moral people who recognized the rights of the redskins back before America was a country, but look how that turned out. If you insist on drawing a realworld moral analogy, then it fails miserably.

Regarding the soul, no, we don’t need the concept at all, but since we’re granting the supernatural worlds of these fantasies: Buffy and Twilight don’t much differ on their views. It’s the soul that functions to give an agent the ability to care about humans. Since Buffy’s vamps don’t have souls, it makes the human response more obvious: resist. With Twilight, since the vamps have souls, we have reason to question whether they might share some of our values. Okay, then deal with that. How should we react to them? Trust that enough of them are decent folk who’ll resist their biological urge and their superior power, or prepare for the possibility that they might just give in. Would angels, demons and vampires really be held to same morality as humans? More importantly, would such beings think that the same moral obligations obtain to their status? Meyer just assumes this to be case. I don’t, but I’m not a Christian.

What’s better about Buffy’s supernaturalism is that it doesn’t much trust in its inherent potential for goodness (I agree that all of these stories are inconsistent). It’s more skeptical of beings with great power. Angel was even more explicit regarding this, but essentially the powers-that-be weren’t obviously humanistic, like the good vampires of Twilight. And look at the guilt experienced by Angel, living off of rats, hiding from everyone for years, feeling remorse for what he did without a soul versus Edward who only fed on bad guys. Meyer really wants to believe in the goodness of power, so much so that she stacks the deck. That way, we don’t have to feel so bad about identifying with a vampire. Why would nonhumans be humanistic? That’s all fanciful nonsense. Fine by me, as long as you treat it as pure fantasy without drawing any realworld morality from it.
 
Noah: Charles, Twilight isn’t about a balance of power being the only way to create peace. Carlyle and his coven choose peace with humans because they believe it’s the right thing to do, not because they’re afraid of humans.

The difference between Buffy and Twilight is that Buffy arbitrarily decides that it’s bad guys are outside the moral order. It says that our enemies don’t have souls. I think that’s pretty profoundly different from saying that yes, your enemies are also people, even if they look and act very differently from you.

Both Buffy and Twilight are pretty into power. It’s a hard thing to escape in pulp narratives. I mean, can you think of any adventure narratives that unequivocally separate power and goodness? Twilight doesn’t do it entirely, but Carlyle is the book’s moral center, and the reason he is the moral center is not because he’s the best fighter or the most powerful (like Superman or Buffy) but because he chooses to go against his nature and not kill. He makes treaties with the wolves when he can; he doesn’t kill humans; he makes treaties with other vampires when he can.

You’re objection really is based on your insistence that (a) vampires aren’t human, and (b) the powerful will always prey on the weak. Twilight rejects both of those assumptions, the first because it believes that creatures with souls are creatures with souls and the second because it believes that creatures with souls have the ability to make moral choices. Again, I find those contentions entirely reasonable ethical descriptions, much more so than a naive mapping of Darwinism onto social interactions. You really think you need to be Christian to think that people who look differently from you might have some kind of moral standing?

Twilight’s commitment to the idea that people who look and behave differently from each other are still people is why it’s surprisingly queer friendly, by the by. Much more so than Hunger Games, though not more than Buffy, largely because Buffy’s desouling of the vampires isn’t grounded in any particular ideology — it’s just a convenient plot point. The show doesn’t really believe in it, so it doesn’t ever really work through the genocidal ethical implications consistently.
 
Charles:

Carlyle and his coven choose peace with humans because they believe it’s the right thing to do, not because they’re afraid of humans.

The balance of power is their acting on the behalf of humans against the bad vampires. They behave with human morality. That’s why they’re good, which brings me to:

Twilight’s commitment to the idea that people who look and behave differently from each other are still people is why it’s surprisingly queer friendly, by the by.

This is like those Christian de-queering camps, right? Love the gay as long as he behaves like you do. That’s not a celebration of difference. Good vampires are the humanistic ones who act against their kind.

You’re objection really is based on your insistence that (a) vampires aren’t human, and (b) the powerful will always prey on the weak. Twilight rejects both of those assumptions, the first because it believes that creatures with souls are creatures with souls and the second because it believes that creatures with souls have the ability to make moral choices.

Vampires are genetically different. I’m not sure why possessing a soul makes them the same as us. They’re beings of a different order, just like angels. They don’t have to face their mortality for one and need us as food for another. It’s simpleminded to assume they wouldn’t come up with a different morality. While it’s true that I’m not very trusting of power, my objection here has more to do with your belief that a carnivore is being moral only by not being a carnivore. Rather than address this potential conflict of moral systems, Twilight circumvents it with the fantasy of good vampires who’ll save us. Again, True Blood thinks this through a lot better than Twilight.

You really think you need to be Christian to think that people who look differently from you might have some kind of moral standing?

Quite the opposite.

Noah: The werewolves can’t act like us; they change into werewolves. Twilight is happy with people acting very differently as long as they don’t kill each other. It’s quite queer friendly, and not in a Christian gays-must-be-like-us-way. It’s less so than Buffy, which has actual gay characters and is definitely pro-queer, but much more so than Hunger Games, which peddles gay stereotypes with enthusiasm and equates gayness with decadence and evil.

Vampires aren’t genetically different. They don’t exist; they’re magic. They’re not carnivores unless they want to be, much like humans. It just seems silly to me to insist that any fantasy that doesn’t ascribe to materialist fantasies about the universal applicability of Darwinism to social situations is necessarily simplistic.

Also, relativism is not necessarily a more complex or thoughtful moral stand. Murder is wrong; I’m willing to go with that cross-culturally, thanks, even if it means that Aztec culture was really kind of fucked up.

C.S. Lewis has some really thoughtful things to say about why creatures who are intelligent and have souls are all much more alike than they are different in the first book of his space trilogy. And I believe that applies to angels for him too; angels aren’t different than us in the sense that we have nothing to do with them, so much as they’re different from us because they’re what we could be, or can aspire to. In any case, angels, humans, non-humans — we’re all part of the same moral world.

Which I really like about Twilight. There are just a lot of fantasy series, from LOTR to Buffy to Priest and on and on, where villains are denied moral status. Body count films can be really fun, but they really do play into the logic of war and genocide in a way that makes their prevalence a little disturbing. I’m happy to have a major megasuccessful series that explicitly rejects that, and says instead that killing is killing, even when the enemy is terrifying and seems so different that you are tempted not to call them human.

I don’t really get where you see the good vampires fighting on behalf of the humans in Twilight? That’s not the plot at all. The good vampires and the bad vampires are at each other’s throats (as it were) for reason having to do with their own internal politics. They defend Bella, but that’s because she’s family, not because she’s a human. Carlyle doesn’t kill humans, and works as a doctor to help humans, but he doesn’t set himself up as a superhero running around defending random humans from vampires. It’s not a fantasy about superpowered people saving everyone, as in most superhero comics — and, indeed, at the end, all the vampires haven’t been killed, and humans aren’t all “saved”. At least, the books aren’t like that, and the movies I”ve seen don’t seem to be either…I’m not sure where you’re getting that?
 
Charles: As with the vampires, the most moral werewolf is the one obsessed with a human. Jacob is moral for deserting his pack. The good vamps and the good werewolves are brought together over protecting a human. There’s no more of a notion that vampire or werewolves might have moral status outside of being just like humans than there is in Buffy. The essential difference is that Buffy uses her powers to combat evil rather than compromise with it.

If vampires aren’t genetically different, then why does it matter if Bella is a human or vampire when giving birth? Why do vampires need human blood? Why do vampires sparkle in the sunlight? Etc.. The magic has genetic effects.

And I’m not really talking about moral relativism, but the new universal biological order that would occur with the introduction of a new species superior to us on the food chain. Is it relativistic to suggest some animals eat other animals and some eat plants, and that affects how they see the world? Is that an excuse for murder? ‘Murder’ would get redefined universally in such a situation. At least, a new definition would have to negotiated.

And isn’t a major part of the internal conflict of vampires over how they relate to humans? Regardless, the main characters and their story has a lot to do with the vampires that the audience is supposed to sympathize with helping/saving/protecting the main human the audience is supposed to identify with. The more you defend Carlyle, the more he sounds just like the majority of the people on the planet. The family is most important, and he’ll do what he has to protect them, but not much else. Yeah, he’s a decent fellow (from a human perspective, at least), but that’s a pretty average moral center.
 
Noah: Wait…I think there is some nonsense in Twilight where she babbles about genetic difference. I had repressed it because it was idiotic….

It’s supposed to be really difficult for vampires to give up blood. Carlisle was the only one who did it, and he’s attempting to prosletyze other vampires to do it as well, by persuasion rather than by fighting them. Renunciation, self-sacrifice, love, starting with family but including others. I don’t see why that’s a worse morality than, hey, my enemies are absolutely evil, so I should kill as many of them as I can.

It’s certainly true that the plot revolves around Bella to a ridiculous degree. But I don’t think it’s right to say that Jacob is more moral because he’s more focused on humans. He isn’t more focused on humans; he’s only focused on Bella. And I don’t know that the book really presents him as a moral paragon; he’s pretty clearly a horny teenager, not a moral paragon. The book certainly believes that peace is good and prejudice against others who are different is bad, but again, I’m not really seeing what’s wrong with that or why it’s particularly unrealistic. Again, I just don’t believe that pragmatism is either more moral or more realistic than other philosophical systems, and applying pragmatism to vampires and werewolves seems kind of ridiculous on its face.
 
Charles:

Renunciation, self-sacrifice, love, starting with family but including others. I don’t see why that’s a worse morality than, hey, my enemies are absolutely evil, so I should kill as many of them as I can.

I’ll give this one more go: Renunciation, sacrifice, etc. aren’t inherently good acts. They’re good if done for a good cause (cf., a gay renouncing his desire to be more like — and thereby more accepted by — his conservative Christian family). The vampires are evil unless they act like humans. That’s no different from the Buffyverse. Buffy uses her power to vanquish evil. If your enemies are really absolutely evil, then fighting them is a good act. Instead, Carlyle is attempting to make compromises with those who want to devour us humans. I’d suggest that extremism in defense of not being eaten is no vice.

And what is Carlyle if he’s not pragmatic? That’s the position your defending, not me.
 
Noah: Are you on crack? The pragmatic choice for Carlyle is to accept that he’s a vampire and eat people. He needs blood; he’s a different species (as you’ve said) — surely the Obama solution is to just try to eat as few people as possible and maybe not torture them before finishing them off. Instead, Carlisle renounces his power out of love and decides to suffer so that others won’t be killed. Again, I fail to see why that’s a compromised renunciation.

And one more time…the vampires don’t act like humans. I mean, there are superficial similarities, but they still do stuff like go hunting with their bare hands and play vampire baseball and have sex for weeks at a time and so on and so forth. They are not unqueer, in various ways. They are seen as good not as long as they act like humans, but as long as they don’t kill people. Which really seems reasonable to me.

An eye for an eye is still pragmatism. Even so, the claim that genocidal warfare is necessarily safer and less destructive than moderate efforts at peace is neither self-evident nor, as far as I can tell from human history, accurate. Buffy makes genocidal warfare the easy choice by making the enemy utterly inhuman and outside moral strictures. Meyer isn’t willing to do that in the same way. In the Buffyverse, vampires really can’t choose good. In Twilight, they could all potentially stop killing people if they wished. That doesn’t excuse them at all; on the contrary. But it means that killing them isn’t different than killing a human murderer. As I said, I think that that’s a significant, and welcome, difference.

White: Not the New Black

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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.

Cinderella, Feminist

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We’ve been having an interesting discussion over the past week or so about Twilight, the Hunger Games, and the place of empowerment in feminism. Specifically, does a feminist heroine need to be empowered and in control of her own life? Or is the experience of disempowerment — including passivity (or selflessness) and irrationality (or emotional sensitivity) — valuable in itself? Or to put it another way, is feminism’s goal to integrate women into the male world on equal terms, or is it’s goal to change the world in accordance with female experiences?

The 2004 film Ella, Enchanted has an interesting take on these questions. Based on a (better than either Twilight or the Hunger Games) book by Gail Levine, the movie is a reworking of the Cinderella legend. Ella (Anne Hathaway) is as an infant visited by her incompetent fairy godmother Lucinda (Vivica Fox). The godmother gives Ella the gift of obedience.

As Ella’s mother instantly recognizes, and as Ella herself learns as she grows older, the gift is not really a gift, but a curse. Ella has to do everything anyone tells her to do. If her mother tells her to practice her music lessons, she has to practice her music lessons. If she’s told to shovel cake into her mouth, she shovels cake into her mouth. More painfully, after her mother dies and Ella’s evil stepsister discovers her secret, she is forced to perform a series of ever-more-terrible tasks — giving away the broach her mother handed her on her death bed; stealing from a store; and finally, insulting her best friend and telling her she will never see her again.

The film, in other words, is one long treatise about the dangers of disempowerment; the traditionally female virtue of obedience is presented as a kind of fierce and unrelenting slavery. The film, in this sense, is clearly, and strongly, in favor of empowerment — not least in the way in which it takes pains to demonstrate that, while Ella is controlled by her curse, she is not defined by it. Whenever she can, Ella thinks her way around her obedience — when an antagonist tells her “bite me!”, young Ella obliges instantly; older and told to gather bouquets for her stepsisters, she smirkingly collects poison ivy. Moreover, it is not Ella’s obedience, but her feisty independence and her refusal to be charmed by his beauty or rank which attracts the romantic lead, Prince Charmont (Hugh Dancy.)

And yet…is it so clear that Ella is not what she is because of her obedience? The narrator at one point says that Ella’s gift is actually what gave her strength of mind — it is the ordeal of having to obey everyone all the time that made her so determined to think for herself. Even more telling, one of the ways in which Ella has most conspicuously thought for herself is in her political views. She doesn’t like the prince because his uncle’s government has been systematically enslaving other races — ogres, giants, and elves. Ella makes the link quite explicit for the viewer in a discussion with the prince (who is not in on her secret.) After seeing some giants being forced to work in the fields, Ella tells him: “No one should be forced to do anything they don’t want to. Take it from somebody who knows.”

The dichotomy here between obedience-as-a-curse (slavery) and obedience-as-a-gift (source of wisdom and character) can perhaps be traced to the fairy tale source material. As I said, this is a retelling of Cinderella, and a retelling in a feminist vein. The original tale is about a woman being saved by marriage and love; the new tale wants to be a story of an independent woman. At many moments, you can see the fissures. For example, the climactic scene involves a (quite entertainingly silly) battle with a horde of ninja-knights. Prince Charmont battles ferociously — and so, too, does Ella, who has not previously shown any particular capacity for battle (except in one scene where someone ordered her to fight skillfully, that is.) Diagetically, there’s no reason for her to be able to defeat trained warriors; it’s just thrown in to make her look empowered and equal. As such, it comes across (for all its obvious goofiness) as almost condescending. You want empowerment; okay, we don’t really believe in it, but we figure you’re easily satisfied. Here you go.

The tension between Cinderella and Ella is perhaps most apparent, though, at the film’s emotional climax. Prince Charmont’s evil uncle Edgar (Cary Elwes) finds out Ella’s secret and orders her to stab the Prince through the heart at the moment when he asks her to marry him. Despite desperate attempts to escape, Ella has no choice — and as he asks her, she raises the knife. But…a miracle occurs. The strength of her true love releases her from her curse, and she lets the knife drop to the floor as she weeps in relief.

The movie makes some effort to suggest that the breaking of the curse is the result of Ella’s will-power, rather than of true love per se. But…well, come on, now. It’s true love. And even if you insist that it’s true-love-providing-incentive-for-will-power, you’ve still got some explaining to do. After all, as I mentioned, obedience made Ella break off her friendship with her closest friend whom she had known for years. Why wasn’t her love for that friend enough to break the command, while the love for some guy she’d known about a week was? However it’s parsed, heterosexual romantic love, and, indeed, the offer of marriage, is what breaks the spell. Which makes it hard to shake off the sense that the reason Ella is no longer under compulsion to all the world is because she’s under compulsion to one man in particular. And, indeed, Ella at the film’s end is not her own person, but a bride. Her signature achievement is not becoming a lawyer (like her elf friend) or ruling a kingdom (like Charmont. Instead, it’s marrying the king, and influencing him through her love to be a better man and a better ruler.

It would be possible to see these tensions as a sign of the film’s failure to shake off the Cinderella’s stories gushy romance of disempowerment; Ella is more empowered than Cinderella, but she’s not truly empowered.

I think, though, you could also see the ambiguity as a potentially more thoughtful conclusion. When the film goes for empowerment-for-empowerment’s sake in essentially male terms — beating up ninjas — it seems crass and stupid. It’s at its best when it reaches for an empowerment that learns from, rather than entirely rejecting, the Cinderella story. That fairy tale, after all, is about both the injustice of slavery and the beauty of love. Both of those insights, it seems to me, come out of distinctively female experience, and so it makes sense that Ella, Enchanted build its feminism — not perfectly, but still with some conviction and heart — on both.

 


Gratuitous Harry Clarke illustration, because Harry Clarke is bad ass.

Monika Bartyzel on Bella, Buffy, Katniss, and Femininity

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I linked this article by Monika Bartyzel last week. Monika showed up in comments here and has had a bunch of interesting thoughts. I thought I’d highlight some of them here.

This is Monika’s first comment.

I was quite surprised to see the responses to your piece. They seemed to decide that you have some sort of antiquated view of men and women, rather than note that the piece is speaking in stereotypical generalities. I thought you brought up an interesting and important alternative to consider.

I’m sick of the arguments against Bella because I’ve yet to see one that doesn’t try to morph the facts to fit the argument. Any agency or personality that Bella has is removed before arguments fly against her. Likewise, any blemishes sported by characters like Katniss or Buffy are dulled. The tough girls are coded in perfect terms, and Bella is made into the perfect loser. Essentially, they’re perfect because all faults can be forgiven by the overall package. People hate the romance and Meyer’s writing, so she doesn’t receive the same privilege.

Even in Amber’s piece, the similarities between K and Bella are obvious. If we boil all of this YA entertainment into checklist points, the girls are not all that different. No amount of bad writing, Mormon values, or indignation changes that.

What I thought was fascinating about Bella was that as much as the book journey was about Edward, it ultimately became about her. I completely disagree with: “Contra Berlatsky, it is laughable to read Bella’s desire for Edward as secondary to her desire to be a vampire—if Edward died, would Bella want to become undead? I think not.” She most definitely would. In fact, some might argue that Edward’s appeal is infinitely enhanced by how much his world helps Bella find her identity. The confused human klutz becomes the calm, impressively controlled vampire. Humanity was a banana peel that always kept her off-kilter.

I think there is a certain.. allergy to femininity because of its implications. Classic definitions of femininity certainly have their place, but I think many of us see that as problematic because of how those notions are fostered by the suffocating media presence around us. It is hard, if not impossible, to signify “natural” moments of femininity because of how much shlock girls get taught from an early age. I often see women act in ways that clash with their own personal ideologies, but are right in-line with the plentiful stereotypical characterizations we’re fed.

So perhaps it’s not so much a matter of hating the feminine, but mistrusting it, and finding it problematic in today’s social environment. But it’s still something we need to consider.

Also: It’d be interesting to talk about how strength fires up forgiveness. The stronger a heroine is, no matter how well or poorly she’s written, the more likely we are to forgive problematic aspects that surround her. Most Buffy fans seem to all-out deny the darker side of Buffy’s world (stalker boyfriends, forgiveness of killers, etc). With Katniss, we get a strong heroine who is literally kept out of a hearing about her life while literally watching her skin melt off, who has no choice about where and how to live, is pressured into having children she doesn’t feel comfortable having, is in a romance that still doesn’t inspire her to say “love”. She seems to never be in control of herself. If no one watched/read either Buffy or Hunger Games, it’d be easy to turn off the populace by the same methods used to turn Bella into a complete fool.

btw: I’ve got to thank you for that 2009 piece, which I hadn’t seen before. I had completely forgotten about the hideous storyline that condemned Buffy’s strength and made Riley morally superior with his blood-prostitute ways. (Much like the other Xander gem when killing a frat-massacring Anya would make Buffy cruel, but trying to help Angel made her foolish and selfish.) I imagine that I find it easy to see Buffy’s weaknesses and Bella’s strengths for this very reason.

And here’s a follow up.

I agree about Buffy. Perhaps for a little while in the beginning she was allowed to revel in her strength, but there was so much condemnation in that show. Since Xander most often lobbed the bullshit condemnation, I just funneled my hatred into him rather than the show. He seemed to act like some sort of condescending moral compass that always emotionally beat her down with flawed, self-serving opinions. There IS one moment where Buffy really flourished in her strength though – Prophecy Girl when she killed the Master. After she was resuscitated, she seemed downright gleeful about her role as a slayer. Unfortunately, the beginning of Season 2 took that all away and re-coded her as being severely emotionally damaged by the whole thing.

Funny, I was just going to type about Katniss’ failure to feel much of anything except loyalty/protectiveness and aggravation/anger … but that once again makes her more like Bella. She just gets “better” reasons to feel it, whereas Bella’s are much more realistic to people today.

I think it’s said in the book, but it’s definitely in the movie that Bella tells Edward she wants to marry him because of how she finally feels like herself. “This wasn’t a choice between you and Jacob. It was between who I should be and who I am. I’ve always felt out of step. Like literally stumbling through my life. I’ve never felt normal, because I’m not normal, and I don’t wanna be. I’ve had to face death and loss and pain in your world, but I’ve also never felt stronger, like more real, more myself, because it’s my world too. It’s where I belong.” And then she specifically says it’s not just about him. It’s just that these points get muddled in the Edward lust.

Yes, I think Bella is attracted to that familial life, but I think that the audience is even more. Twilight might be ridiculous and in some ways problematic, but it fills holes. If your familial life is traumatic or nonexistant, you can go into the books feel the warmth of the family. If you have relationship problems, you can get swept up in the love. More than anything, the Saga speaks to the dissatisfaction and emptiness in life, or most distinctly, offers a really defined sense of reliability. The Cullens are honest and reliable without condemnations about how people live their lives; they love their family no matter what crazy choices they (Edward, Alice, etc) might make. I think that probably appeals to the readership just as much as the romance. (I know that to be true for some friends of mine who like the series.) Of course, it also means exacerbating expectations of love to inhuman forms.

And yes, there is a real problem with how loathed Bella is. If she was just immediately dismissed as problematic with a list of reasons and that was the end of the story, fine. She is far from an ideal heroine. However, the vehemence against her is strange, and not at all in line with how she’s presented in either the books or the films. I think that’s partly due to people taking up the argument from other’s opinions and not reading for themselves, and maybe some of it is the anger towards Meyer’s style making any positive point irrelevant? I don’t know…