Tag Archives: Robert Pattinson
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)
First, a refresher.
Twilight taught us all young men are monsters whose rampant sexual urges will, without exception, KILL YOU. Their desire to do so is what’s known as “love.” Keep them at arm’s length and you’ll gain a loyal attack dog sure to lay waste your enemies and cause their women to lament. Sure, your new pet monster might stalk you and creep into your room at night…or whenever you’re not at home…or just whenever the hell he feels like it…but so long as his family accepts you and your family hates him, everything will work out in the end.
New Moon reinforced these lessons while simultaneously teaching us that all teenage girls are evil, scheming, serial-users, much closer to classical vampire archetypes than the Family Cullen. Girls’ll suck you emotionally dry while you sit there, fruitlessly hoping that, one day, they’ll suck you physically dry as well. Even doing that thing they do where they catch your bottom lip in their teeth and pull back until all those little tendons holding your lip to your jaw start to hurt so good…even that would be better than nothing. Because “nothing” is about all you’re gonna get. After all, you’re a monster, right? Why in God’s name would they touch you, you muscley slab of man-beef? Besides, it’s not like they don’t already have an abusive boyfriend. And once he snaps his fingers expect them to go running back faster than a zombie with the Rage virus…no matter how badly he’s treated them in the recent past. Continue reading The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)
The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)
Twilight continues to utterly blindside me.
Back in 2006, when New-Moon-the-book first slithered its way out of Stephanie Meyer’s head, I had more important things to care about. Like getting divorced, finding a new job, helping a friend weather her own, much-worse divorce through the ego-boosting medium of casual sex, and do it all while working to maintain an emotionally fulfilling relationship with an intelligent, independent-minded woman who refuses to take shit from you, me, God, or anyone. The key word there being working.
I bring this up, not to brag, but to illustrate the emotional paucity of Twilight‘s Saga in particular, and the dominant culture’s representations of romance in general. Tonight’s entry serves as a convenient whipping boy, which seems only fair, considering New Moon damn-near whipped me. {More}
Twilight (2008)
What’s that you say? A blatantly-cliched, Designated Romance has achieved undeserved popularity through canny advertising and a near-religious fandom of desperate, everyday Americans who don’t know Romance from their own house cats? And you’re actually surprised by this? Am I the only one who’s wondered how large a structure one could build from all the VHS copies of Titanic everyone bought in 1998, watched once…and never bothered with again? The only one who’s noticed that to read Twilight is to read your girlfriend’s old high school diary with all the proper names replaced by “Edward” and all the sex expunged?
Turgid, repetitive, and ill-paced, the Twilight saga is a series of books designed to be picked up and put down between the soul-deadening chores of “normal” everyday American life…which fits, considering that’s exactly how it was written. (You try crafting a piece of literature with a house full of teenage boys.) Author Stephanie Meyer insists she’d never read a vampire story or seen a horror film before beginning her magnum opus, and you know what? I believe her. Twilight is exactly what someone who’s never allowed themselves to experience a vampire story would dream up, given half a chance and a boring life in the suburbs of Phoenix…surely the most forsaken place on Planet America…outside of Southwest Missouri. {More}