Twi harder.

A couple of weeks back, Matthew and I took in a late showing of the film version of Stephenie Meyer's magnum opus, Twilight. Twilight takes place in a Washingtonian berg named Forks, all the more convenient because nobody loves rain-as-a-plot-device quite like our girl Stephenie. Rain to symbolize depression, kisses in the rain, rain by which to listen to your Linkin Park CDs and brood about how your vampire boyfriend won't touch you -- and do note that I'm not exaggerating even remotely; SMeyer routinely posts playlists on her website by which to read her tomes and the only comment I'll deign to make is that they're maybe a little heavy on the Blue October and maybe a little light on the anything-listenable.

The two main players of our journey to Forks are:

Edward Cullen - the gay vampire, or possibly "vampyre" depending on how fruity SMeyer wants to go. Edward lives with an adoptive family of Draculas in Forks. The text version of Twilight is careful to remind us how jaw-droppingly beautiful he is, usually through a convoluted string of adjectives and adverbs that read like an entire class of ninth grade creative writing students were jammed through a blender set to "mince." And mince Edward does, poncing about the high school cafeteria with his fellow Draculas in what can only be described as a painfully colour-coordinated wardrobe of navy blues, drab greys, and milky periwinkles that seems a whole lot like the production crew bought the entire far wall of a Le Chateau and then couldn't afford the rest. Edward is over a hundred years old, having been born in a time before women could vote and showing with his every breath that he wishes that were still the case. When it gets sunny, Edward's skin sparkles. I feel like there is nothing I can contribute here to amplify the inherent stupidity of that idea, so why don't we move on?

Bella Swan - Bella arrives from Phoenix to a town full of admirers who are in love with her and want to be her, as often happens outside of the hallowed world of fanfiction, except where it never does. Bella also has the not-actually-a-flaw of being mildly clumsy, possibly included as strike-proofing for when critics invariably call Bella out as a Mary Sue, or worse, a blatant retconning of Stephenie Meyer's adolescence, which she can't be because her eyes are sunset beige and Stephenie's are more of a caramel latte, and those are at least three shades apart on the Home Depot colour wheel. In future installments, Bella will fall into a deep depression when Edward leaves until she finds another man to control her, be elated when he returns and devote her life to him, get married right out of high school, and become pregnant with a Dracula baby that makes her drink blood and kicks so hard it breaks her ribs. It makes the idea that Bella is a Stephenie proxy even more disturbing that it already was, which was "substantially."

(As a note, I've found I really enjoy the phrase "he is a Dracula," much in the same way I enjoy the phrase "she looks like a Frankenstein.")

The plot follows the linear progression one might expect. Bella moves to Forks as some sort of unnecessary act of self-sacrifice for her mother, mostly just to show us right off the top what a selfless martyr she is. (The mother, as an aside, unwittingly scores the film's best line when she asks her daughter of her new undead beau, "is he indie?" I don't know what it is about the use of "indie" as a modifier that absolutely seems to baffle people, but "indie" is the new "groovy" and I'm calling it right now.) She moves in with her father, who mostly exists to make the same kind of "jealous fathers hate boyfriends" jokes you'd expect out of what I would call the Mormonest movie that ever Mormoned, if I didn't feel guilty about saddling the Mormons with the sack of tripe that is this movie. She goes to high school and everyone loves her except! the allegedly beautiful Edward and his allegedly beautiful family, each of whom get roughly one line throughout the film. Bella actually repulses Edward, to the point where it throws off his totally natural American accent and makes him sound like he's talking through a bag of dicks for most of the film.

Of course, Edward secretly loves Bella, protecting her from a car accident induced by the only black person in Forks, a gang of street toughs who want to do something to her that has to at least be more pleasant than a vampire baby ripping your vagina in half, and a host of other misfortunes -- her cereal was too dry so Edward moistened it with his sparkly tears because she's too much of an ineffectual waif to walk to the kitchen and get the milk herself without tripping and falling because whoooa what a zany klutz; that kind of thing -- before finally confessing his love to her. There's something he's not telling her, and rather than taking it to Maury like any sensible girl her age would, she Googles it and of course immediately realises that he's a vampire. Apparently the Cullen family's entire secretive existence in Forks hinges on the fact that nobody ever uses a search engine, because when you Google Image "vampire," pics of '05 Cullen family vacation to Cancún are the first result.

Forced to out himself to her in a creepy, "call me daddy" scene where he all but makes Bella lick his boot, Edward then introduces her to his family of Draculas, each of whom, in the grand tradition of vampires as very sexually-fluid, gender-non-conformist creatures, are jarringly heterosexual and in fact completely monogamous, in committed relationships with the people posing as their adopted siblings because that's not remotely creepy. Then there's vampire baseball, and I begin to realise that this movie is actually the longest in the world because it's been like an hour and a half and there's still no sign of an imminent conflict. Thankfully, a bunch of not-as-beautiful-as-the-Cullens-and-I-bet-they-don't-sparkle-either Draculas arrive and start to hunt Bella, while the Cullens do their best to hide her because that's what you do when someone threatens your thousands-of-years-old secret existence, is you give up all of your potential safety for them. She's just that special, guys. Stephe -- Bella is just that special.

I wish I could relay to you the intensity with which nothing happens in the final scene, a showdown in a dance studio wherein Bella does nothing to buck her streak of being totally helpless and waiting for Edward to save her. I will say that it's funny that she ends up in a Phoenix hospital with her mom being given the cover story that she fell down a few flights of stairs at a hotel, and that that story is accepted without question, which shows you what an utter fucking spaz Bella is. Edward agrees to take Bella to prom, and off they go together, to dance under a conspicuously well-lit gazebo, utterly alone, with her begging someone she's known for a grand total of maybe a week and a half to turn her into a vampire as well. In conclusion, Bella is stupid.

On its own, Twilight is no worse than every other bad movie you've ever seen; in fact, its worst sin is that it's overlong and a bit boring. However, when you realise that this is a movie with a female lead (Kristen Stewart), overseen by a female director (Catherine Hardwicke), and adapted by a female screenwriter (Melissa Rosenberg) from a source text written by a woman (Stephenie Meyer), the whole thing becomes troubling. Far more troubling than the average rom-com, which still upholds antiquated ideas of a woman needing a man to be happy but at least refrains from inflicting the amount of punishment to its female lead that Bella receives, or the Disney movie that creates rigid, structured gender roles but often gives its heroine at least one redeeming characteristic. This is a piece of media that has gone through multiple pairs of female hands and somehow, someway, no one objected.

I guess my point is, far more than something that's vulgar or racy or edgy or peppered with cusses, how could someone in good conscience let their daughter read this without first having a long talk about the gender roles portrayed within the book? It takes a lot to turn me into a pearl clutcher, but here we are. The very last thing I would want of my daughter -- and I want to take the time to say that, while I'm currently not in the mind of having children, if I'm ever in a situation where the pregnant mother is being forced to DRINK BLOOD to support the RAVENOUS, VIOLENT FETUS, we are ABORTING THAT FUCKER before you can say "Bristol Palin" -- is for her to be the kind of personalitiless, spineless, unempowered cypher that the Twilight series glorifies. The even more disturbing idea is this: the fact that the Bella character is so utterly unremarkable save for the lone caveat of her being clumsy makes her perfect for any little girl to insert themselves in her role, which is exactly the point. If the character is outspoken or shy and the reader isn't, then the illusion is lost. But beyond making everyone in the book outstandingly attractive -- which, of course, you should aspire to be, because no one would ever love someone who's not physically beautiful (a notion reinforced in the physical descriptions in SMeyer's other book, The Host, lest you think that she's a one-time offender) -- Bella is left as a blank cheque, a perfect canvas on which one may paint herself, and on which Stephenie Meyer almost certainly did.

(As a bitchy aside, SMeyer has claimed that the Twilight series is based on a variety of books, with the first being framed around Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and the final, Breaking Dawn, around Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. I must not have been reading AMND closely enough, because I missed the part where a demon baby gnaws its way through Hermia's uterine wall. Shakespeare can be tricky.)

As we left a theatre full of squealing pre-teen girls -- every stereotype you could imagine was true -- we heard a woman of maybe her early twenties declare that she wanted an Edward for herself, presumably as a part of some sort of barter whereby she gave away her right to own property and her legal status as a "person." She went home and presumably had some manner of damp dream about Edward Cullen watching her from a dark corner as she slept, the only traces of him visible the end of a lit cigarette and a clump of sparkles. I, on the other hand, went home and sat up through the night, envisioning a nightmarish future wherein Stephenie Meyer is declared military despot and my future daughter rebels by signing her legal rights over to a broody vampire with bad hair and an unconvincing American accent. As she joins a group of like-minded girls, preparing to get vampire-pregnant and to never have to make another decision again in her life, I rend my shirt atwain, drop to my knees in the symbolically pouring rain and wail one question to the heavens:

"IS HE INDIIIIIIE?"



Edit: The original version of this post totally included the epithet "retard," which I was critiqued on and have since removed. I later made a decent-length followup post justifying my use of the word. It touched on the idea of reclamation, thoughtful use of words, etc. - points I still agree with. At the end of the day, though, I've decided I'd rather not make someone with mental illness or disability feel like shit because I'm enamoured with my poetic license, so I've deleted the justification post and changed the article around a bit. Sorry if I was an asshole. I think the spirit of the original article is still preserved; namely, that Stephenie Meyer sucks. And also, I've since seen New Moon and Eclipse, and they suck, too. I can't believe there are two more movies left and that I am going to pay to see both of them.