When Forks is ashes, you have my permission to die: The Twilight Post Concludes

Writers kill a lot of women. I'm not an exception.

Well, I've killed fictional women. Actually, I've killed a lot more men. My women have a tendency to survive whatever nightmares I throw at them. Regardless, the traumas I've inflicted on my fictional women strike me as more memorable, because, hey, it turns out I didn't come out of the womb having a perfect understanding of culture and privilege and stuff.

Superhero comics, in which the line between death and not-death is more permeable, also follow the trend, and women are statistically a lot more likely to be burned up for drama than their male counterparts. People will occasionally refer to these doomed women as "disposable," which I think misses the point. Put on your Dworkin decoder glasses. Our stories don't kill women because they don't matter, because they serve no purpose. They kill women because their purpose is to be killed. We scream in cathedrals, and it ain't gonna be beautiful without a sacrifice.

Which is about what I knew about Breaking Dawn when I started the series, and the prospect was kind of exciting. Not because I'm a misogynistic sadist, although that is also almost certainly true. No, I was excited because Twilight had thus presented me with a world that could be easily enough enacted by Willingham's wooden soldiers. When Bella talks of Edward's beauty, she speaks first of light, but second of hardness. Bella and Edward kiss, and there's talk of breath, but there's no saliva. Edward is cold, Jacob is hot, but there are few references of sweat. And, lest we forget, Bella twists every which way to avoid thinking or saying the word "sex" if she can possibly avoid it. (Other words Bella avoids: cowgirl, blowjob, teabag, synecdoche, butch cock.)

There's also a fair deal of violence in the first three books, but those diamond-skinned vampires? They don't bleed. They break apart like goddamned statues. Werewolves theoretically break apart like the good ol' mammals they are, but we only see the post-triage form. Bella, of course, bleeds like a clumsy human, but she also tends to pass out whenever anything violent happens around her. Her main contribution in the big superhero battle royale that concludes Eclipse is to stab herself in the gut, leaving both of the male leads to kick themselves for not seeing it coming, because the chick is seriously a danger to herself. But that's just not a lot of moisture, really.

So, going into Breaking Dawn, I knew that a) Bella and Edward were going to fuck, despite the nominal chance that he might get excited and vibrate so fast Bella might explode like the bad guy in Death and Return of Superman, and b) Bella was going to get pregnant, and enjoy a birth that would sever her spine. It seemed impossible that either of these would be able to happen with the same plastic-action-figure detachment. Life, it turns out, is wet, gooey, and gross, and what fun is reading about vampire-fucking if we avoid that?

The sex, unsurprisingly, is glossed over. I suppose we, as readers, should be grateful our narrator doesn't simply pass out, considering the panic attack she has at the prospect of her husband--not boyfriend, not fiance, husband--seeing her in a bathing suit.

So, I invite you now to imagine a montage of trains going into tunnels and slow zooms into fireplaces. When you get back, briefly acknowledge a broken bedframe, piles of feathers, an ashamed Edward, and an ecstatic Bella who is surprised to find herself covered in bruises.

Read Holly Black's take here.

This is a point worth considering. There is no avoiding the abuse imagery here. Even Edward, I think, is a bit disturbed by it. (This is not the only incident of self-awareness on the part of the Twilight cast. Rosalie, for example, seems to be embarrassed to be in these books at all. I suspect, when Bella's not around, she re-reads John Steakley's Vampire$ and sighs wistfully.)

And it's ok to like this stuff. It's ok to want to perform it from time to time, with one or more consenting and informed partners. You need not compromise your politics if scary or dangerous things turn you on.

We make extraordinary excuses for individual rapists, but evince a disgust for rapists in the abstract that is entirely disproportionate to any other human sins or crimes. I'll not speculate on the whys and hows here, suffice to mumble idly about feedback loops and performative overcompensation. But rape in our culture is less an aberrant incident than it is a psi-field. Words and ideas replicate in minds, material patterns in material entities. And nothing appears ex nihilio, but has to be jury-rigged from what came before.

Our religious and military iconographies have not yet shed their feudal origins, so it shouldn't be so surprising that our sex iconography has also yet to catch up to factories, gunpowder, and individual rights. This idea of sex as consensual unless otherwise stated is not only unprecedented, it would appear as abject nonsense to the world from which many of our most enduring romantic images originate. Most of our romantic imagery is drenched in rape connotation. Low-level rape play is probably present in nearly all human sexual endeavors.

To quote another group of well-meaning crazy people, This is Who We Are.

So that's Twilight, folks. It's a whirlwind tour of the very worst parts of ourselves that we can't quite bring ourselves to get rid of. We rejigger the code with every new generation, every glowing fuck, every neatly formatted sentence. Dworkin, being crazy, saw the horror a bit more clearly than most of us do. Most of us have to strain a bit to see the nightmare she describes. It gets fainter over time. Hell, it's gotten fainter since Dworkin stopped writing about it.

Other highlights: the first mention of menstruation, when Bella experiences a classic teen drama late-period panic. (Spoiler alert: too late. No more periods for Bella, ever. Do her eggs turn shiny and diamond-like?)

The first (and only) mention of homosexuality, when one of Jacob's pals is teasing him. Said pal has imprinted on a child, which means he'll fall in love with her as soon as the creepiness of this concept drops below a certain level--and the girl, object of said imprinting, will obviously be in love with the (adult) man who's been her most persistent company since she was in kindergarten, from the sheer crushing weight of her gratitude and familial affection. Certainly the shared and unquestioned expectations of this among her entire community won't do her any harm.

The second mention of menstruation, when Leah--who, by the way, is the only female werewolf in the history of ever, not that this is a detail anyone is concerned about--notes that her cycle stopped when she started, erm, cycling. Her telepathic link to the boys in the pack grosses everyone out, and I assume she had to go sit in the hut for a week. There's something terribly amusing about werewolves blanching at the thought of a little blood.

A brief novelette in which Jacob gets to take over narrating duties for a while, and wastes our time with a bunch of bullshit. Like, wastes our time even by the standard of people who've read over a thousand pages of Twilight.

And finally, the big vampire battle royale, with a cast so big it requires a chart in the back of the book, culminating in the greatest anti-climax since that time I failed to climax. Think X-Men: The Last Stand meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Numerous media scholars have noted the great favor Rob Thomas did for Veronica Mars fans by easing the community into the show's inevitable cancellation by slowly making the show suck over the course of a season. Twilight finishes much the same way, unravelling its limited coherence strand by strand. It leaves us in the really real world to marvel at the mad journey we've finished, like the pursuit of Sunday.

As from a Nightmare, we awake.

And we promise to write something substantive about videogames soon. Seriously.

Like a Trash Can Fire in a Prison Cell: Twilight Continued

Finished Twilight? Good. Now, get on with your life.

If you insist on continuing to read, I suggest you put on your theory glasses. Because Twilightas series is a much darker and funnier story. Not for the writing, or the plot, but because of the ideas of a woman named Andrea Dworkin, who made it all clear to me.

Dworkin is not a popular name in feminist circles these days. Truthfully, she wasn't a terribly popular name even during the wave for which she's often cited as an icon. Which is the first thing to notice about Dworkin these days: she's hugely popular with people trying to discredit things. Right-wing authors cite her to discredit feminism, third-wave-or-better feminists cite her to discredit second-wavers/white women/the 80s. I, personally, have once cited her to discredit the writing on True Blood. Dworkin is versatile that way.

But the defining moment in my travels with Dworkin came in the post-script to Woman-Hating, in which she railed against the tyranny of punctuation, and claimed that punctuation was the difference between an essay read in a book, and a conversation had between people. I so rarely get to use my media studies cred to pull rank, but this was one such opportunity: paper and ink is the difference between an essay read in a book and a conversation. And if it's not good enough for you, I've got bad news for you, because Andrea Dworkin is fucking dead and not conversing with anybody.

But, like mt feelings on Twilight, this should not be read as a condemnation of Dworkin. I'm a fan. I just feel she needs to be approached as something of a mad hierophant. Living writers can do a fine job writing about what patriarchy is, how it works, and even how it feels. Dworkin writes the way patriarchy smells, the way it tastes. Because our present is only an ongoing escape from our past, and our past is darker, sicker, and scarier than most of us can imagine. We can never be so far from it that its horror won't leak through when we aren't watching.

Lunatics, like Fools, are useful to have around now and then.

In Woman-Hating, Dworkin looks at fairy tales and pornography, two rather disparate ends of the media spectrum, and essentially comes to the same conclusion about them. For the patriarchy's purposes, man exists, and is good, in a pleasantly Augustinian sort of way. Woman is the opposite of that. So, since it is good for man to be active, it is good for a woman to be passive; since it is good for a man to be bold, it is good for a woman to be timid; since it is good for a man to be awake, it is good for a woman to be unconscious. And, of course, since it's good for a man to be alive, it's good for a woman to be dead.

There are, of course, active women, who seek to gain and wield power, and go about their value-defining way. The evil queens, the evil stepmothers, witches and paganae galore. Their counterparts, to be heralded as right and true and noble, are the sleeping ones, the poisoned ones, and the dead. Men exist to fuck, kill, and eat; women exist to be raped, killed, and eaten.

Which brings us to Bella Swann.

Aside from being a whiny little shit, as is to be expected from an early-21st-century American teen, Bella seems to have quite a bit going for her when we meet her. We are told that she is, diegetically, quite smart. She is well-read, although it doesn't seem to affect her conversations very much, and we never see much of her writing. Her parents appear to be semi-literate morons, and her success is even more impressive in that light.

At school, she is presented with an established clique of people dying to be her friend. She plays it down, preferring to complain to us about her physical awkwardness. In fact, the only thing that interrupts her internal monologue of complaint is that there's a boy who doesn't seem to like her. She obsesses about this for weeks.

And we've covered that one, and it's past, and past is prologue. So let's jump ahead to the payoff: he dumps her, and she goes into a depression of horrifying mopiness, too bleak even for an emo montage. Out on the town, in an attempt to look normal again, she encounters a shady group of men she believes to be the ones who assaulted her the previous year, and, operating on instinct, walks toward them. It isn't clear why, at first; she's not trying to reclaim her violated sense of autonomy, she's not daring them to offer a repeat performance in front of witnesses. What stops her--and what inspires her to continue--is discovering that, as she intentionally walks forward into the vital prospect of pain, humiliation, and possibly death, Edward's voice pops into her head.

Clearer than in her memories.

Because the feeling of imminent destruction, especially self-destruction, reminds her of her ex-boyfriend more than all the My Morning Jacket songs in the world. She follows up this performance by buying a motorbike, which are diegetically considered to be dangerous even for people with nominal control of their arms and legs, a group that excludes Bella. Finally, Bella inaugurates New Moon's third act by throwing herself off a goddamn cliff. Alice, our friendly neighborhood psychic with pretty hair, thinks it's a suicide attempt, and is in all likelihood half-right.

New Moon opens with a discussion of Romeo and Juliet, so it's appropriate that the interaction between Bella and Edward consists of a kind of competitive suicidal ideation. Following Meyer's tradition of having about one chapter of better-than-mediocre material, there's an iteresting mediation about settling for Paris, and what that means for love, death, and superficial readings of canonical literature. Jacob, whose abs are certainly not described with the breathtaking narrative force Taylor Lautner would later give them, is basically just a trailer for Eclipse, in terms of Bella's world, but it's nice to acknowledge that it wouldn't have been impossible for him to have been a meaningful player in the present.

We move on. Edward and the Cullens are, predictably, horrified that Bella has been hanging out with werewolves. The Quileuttes are predictably horrified that Bella has been hanging out with vampires. It's too dangerous, they remind her in unison.

And the hell of it is, they're right. Even in this friendly diegetic world, vampires and werewolves are both incredibly dangerous. When Bella cuts herself at her birthday party, Jasper loses control and tries to eat her. Sam, Jacob's pack leader, is married to a woman who is missing half of her face, because he lost his temper with her once. One of Jacob's bros accidentally transforms in her presence, and only Jacob following suit seems to keep her safe.

I think all of us, at some time or another, have done things we aren't proud of in the heat of the moment. All of us have found ourselves staying a little too late at that party, having a bit too many rum-and-cokes, and saying things we don't really mean, like "I love you," or "I never want to see you again," or "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." But I don't know anyone who has ever torn anyone's face off in a fit of pique. Everyone I know who's torn someone's face off has done so with careful, sober deliberation.

Even with all the self-control that only twue wuv can bring, Bella stays physically intact--literature majors, please hold your comments until the end of the post--only be ensuring that the barely controlled supernatural forces around her are consistently in even numbers.

Bella just isn't interested unless she's got a reasonable chance of dying. And it seems she has standards as to what constitutes a good death. She's not going for some weak-ass chick-suicide like an overdose, and she's not going to butch up and borrow her father's handgun, either. No, the kind of death Bella wants, the kind of death she draws hearts around in her diary, is one in which she is beaten and broken, her soft, soft will spent against an unstoppable, relentless force of power and will and hardness. One that's both brutally fast and agonizingly slow. Bent limbs akimbo, her innermost fluids flowing out into the open air, under the watchful eyes of an impenetrable, invulnerable predator.

Conclusion to follow, in which, over a thousand pages into the series, something wet finally happens. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, I think I need a cigarette.