Thursday, February 24, 2011

What is this, comedy?




Imagine an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus guest directed by David Lynch and guest starring Andy Kaufman. Now imagine that immediately after watching that episode you fall asleep and have nightmares about it, and in your nightmares there are two Andy Kaufmans, one short, babyfaced and blond, the other tall, lumbering, bespectacled and brunette—a sort of modern day George and Lennie from Of Mice and Men if George and Lennie were hipsters and George was also retarded.




Congratulations! You’ve just imagined Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, a sketch comedy series produced by, created by, directed by and starring college buddies Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim that aired for five seasons on Cartoon Network’s after-hours network-within-a-network Adult Swim before its cancellation in May of last year.

Very probably it's an exercise in futility to attempt to analyze the comedic stylings of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, or as they’re simply referred to among their fan base, Tim and Eric (pronounced as one word, “Timmuhneric”, almost as if they were one entity). At first glance it all seems so obvious, so uninhibitedly stream-of-consciousness, that to do so would be to miss the point: to apply too much thought to a brand of humor of which the chief appeal is that it requires no thought. But I will attempt to do just that, because I believe that over the course of its five seasons the recognition it received was criminally less than the recognition it deserved, and I intend to remedy that in whatever inconsequential way I can by wielding my considerable non-influence as one of the literally millions of anonymous bloggers currently dumping their teaspoons of opinionated water into the journalistic ocean of the internet.

My friend Larry likes to tell the story of how the first time he saw TaEAS,GJ! he was too busy marveling at the fact that he had never seen his own esoteric sense of humor captured so perfectly on screen to laugh.


He even sort of looks like Tim!

My first experience watching TaEAS,GJ! was similar, except that in my case it didn’t prevent me from partaking in more than my fair share of lolz (alright, that will officially be the last time you see me resorting to LOL speak on this blog, and if you ever catch me using it again you have my permission to find out where I live, drive to my apartment and personally bust an anticonformist cap in my pandering ass). The sense of humor that so impressed my friend Larry and me I would describe as this: the amplification of everything that is awkward, pompous, banal and dehumanizing about television culture, particularly sitcoms, public access channels and infomercials, augmented by the juxtaposition with that culture of subject matter that is usually considered too taboo, sensitive or shocking, enhanced by a preoccupation with gross-out humor, slapstick and bad puns. Others have used terms like absurdism, Dadaism, satire, camp and anti-humor, but I would substitute the term meta-humor, a term I rather optimistically hoped I might have invented but a quick Googling just now informed me not only already exists but even has its very own Wikipedia page (although to my credit, none of the styles of joke described on that that page is the type to which I am referring).

When I say “meta-humor” what I mean is that the central joke of the series seemed at times to be that it wasn't funny. It was as if you the audience and Tim and Eric the performers were laughing together at a hypothetical third party who did find it funny, although at other times it felt uncomfortably like Tim and Eric were laughing at you for thinking you were in on the joke when really you were as much the butt of it as that hypothetical third party, which of course only resulted in more laughter, albeit of a decidedly different sort.

What made the show truly genius, though, is that Tim and Eric managed to accomplish all this without ever acting smug, or breaking character, or winking at the camera, or exchanging knowing glances, or resorting to any of the other tactics most satirists or “camp” comedians use to indicate to their audiences that they consider themselves above their material, so much so that I often find myself chuckling aloud at a comment one of them makes in a magazine or on a TV talk show that someone less familiar with their comedy would have read as perfectly straight, and for all I know was perfectly straight, except that I’ve been conditioned never to trust anything that comes out of their mouths as genuine.

Even the death of one of their frequent cast mates, Richard Dunn, wasn’t enough to convince me of their sincerity. I remember laughing despite myself upon reading a comment that Tim had posted to his Twitter—or was to their website?—addressing it, something along the lines of “Eric and I are deeply saddened to learn of the death of Richard Dunn . . . He was a very special friend and a very special spirit xoxo”.


Richard Dunn, 1936-2010
A very special friend and
a very special spirit
xoxo

It was the “xoxo” that did it. And frankly, I don’t blame him if the comment wasn’t sincere, because it seems only right that he should memorialize his friend according to the sensibilities of the show on which they collaborated, one of those sensibilities being that any display of pomp is necessarily self-parodying, and another being that there is nothing funnier under the sun than a thing which other people take seriously. In fact, I am fond of saying that if the Joker watched TV then his favorite show would be TaEAS,GJ!, which is pretty damn high praise indeed coming from me, as twisted as that sounds.

Can’t you just imagine him laughing his abnormally long head off at sketches like this:




I compared the pair to David Lynch earlier, and in their commitment to unsettling, hallucinatory surrealism it is that director to whom they are indeed most comparable, but there is something Coenesque about them as well, in their nihilism, their indiscriminate misanthropy, although the Coen brothers themselves have balked at the use of those terms to describe their work, insisting that their scathing mockery of their characters is ultimately affectionate. One gets the feeling that Tim and Eric would make similar assurances, and considering that their demeanors are so unflaggingly jovial one would be inclined to believe them. But use those terms I will, for when a comedian aims such merciless ridicule so liberally at so many targets then there must be something of the misanthrope about him, even if he is good enough to have a sense of humor about it.

I can imagine the pair getting on well with Jeff Bridges’s “The Dude” from what is probably the Coen brother’s most beloved movie, though not necessarily their most accomplished, The Big Lebowski, who similarly saw through the affectations and plagiaristic passions of those around him, but rather than getting angry instead chose to sit back, light up a “jay” or mix himself a White Russian, and shake his head amusedly. Don’t think for a moment, though, that perpetually laid-back stoner types escaped the eagle eye of their derision, either:




There is another aspect to their comedy that I have failed to mention, which, in truth, is probably the aspect my friend Larry responded to even more than the misanthropy, the Lynchian surrealism or the meta-humor. Rather than immediately launch into trying to define it, however, I will instead share with you a personal anecdote:

Back in high school, I accepted a ride home from a party one night with an attractive female friend of mine. After we had pulled up to the curb in front of my house we continued to sit in the car and talk as two friends will, and over the course of the conversation I brought up my cousin Jacob--only, for whatever reason, my mouth turned traitor and formed the wrong vowel subsequently to pronouncing the letter "J". As a result, instead of beginning my cousin's name with the syllable "Jay" as would have been in accordance with tradition, I began it with the syllable "Jah". Realizing my mistake, I attempted to correct my mispronunciation midway through the first syllable, so that my cousin's name came out sounding like this: "Jahaaaycob." Given the choice between ignoring what had just occurred and acknowledging the fact that for a moment there I had sounded like one of the cast of The Beverly Hillbillies, both my friend and I chose to ignore it, which resulted in there being a palpable awkwardness between us for the remainder of the conversation from which my night never recovered.

Tim and Eric would have found this hilarious. In fact, had their cameras been rolling, they would have slapped a subtitle on the screen at the precise moment I said my cousin's name just to draw further attention to my mispronunciation of it, as they did whenever someone on their show got tongue-tied, stuttered, or simply pronounced a word in a way that they thought was weird.

This celebration, this pointing out, of those small moments of absurdity that most people either ignore or just plain fail to notice, and the two friends' obvious delight in them, is one of the pair's most endearing qualities. It also made for some of the shows funniest gags, as when guest star Zach Galifianakis, who is supposed to be playing a character named "Terry Green", when introducing himself sounds more like he's saying "Tairy", and this is pointed out to the audience by means of, you guessed it, a subtitle. Or when in another collaboration with Galfianakis, a short film they made for Absolut Vodka called A Vodka Movie, Galifianakis serves them cartoonishly large martini glasses filled with Absolut on ice and the following exchange takes place:

TIM: What is this, ice?

ZACH: Um, Absolut on ice.

TIM: Ah.

Now that may not be very funny in print, but trust me, on film it's hilarious. It is also the kind of joke (if you can even call it a "joke") that no one would ever think to write into a script. Luckily, A Vodka Movie is entirely improvised, and out of all the many minutes and possibly even hours of footage that wound up on the proverbial cutting room floor, the filmmakers chose to include that brief and utterly mundane exchange.

Why did they? Well, my friend Larry and I have spent hours trying to answer that question--to figure out just what makes it so gosh darn funny--and this is what we've come up with:

In the film, when Tim asks the question "What is this, ice?" it seems apparent that he is asking not what the drink is that Zach has served them but referring to the ice itself, asking if that is, indeed, what it is. Zach, by responding, "Um, Absolut on ice," would then be betraying himself as having misunderstood Tim's question. But then Tim, instead of explaining to Zach that what he was actually referring to was the ice, simply lets Zach continue to think that he was referring to the drink, and the misunderstanding goes unacknowledged.

This is funny for several reasons:

1) "What is this, ice?" is a stupid thing to ask, as the ice is obviously ice.

2) If Tim had indeed been asking "What is this drink you have served us, ice?" then that would have been an even stupider thing to ask, since A) ice is not a drink, B) it is obvious that there is more than just ice in the glass, and C) Zach has already told him what it is by the time this exchange takes place.

3) If "What is this drink you have served us, ice?" is indeed a stupid question to ask for all the reasons expounded upon in #2, then it was as stupid of Zach to assume that that was what Tim was asking as it would have been of Tim to ask it.

4) If that is indeed what Zach thought Tim was asking, then surely he too must have thought it was a stupid thing to ask, and yet he pretends not to.

5) Upon realizing that Zach thought he was asking if the drink was ice, Tim himself must have felt embarrassed that Zach thought he was asking such a stupid question, and yet he pretends not to, perhaps because he is so embarrassed that he simply wants to move on to another subject, perhaps because he doesn't want to hurt Zach's feelings by correcting him.

6) It is stupid to be embarrassed over such a small thing.

7) It is stupid to try to assuage your embarrassment by changing the subject when simply explaining that you were not asking what the other person thinks you were asking would do a better job of it, as that would eliminate your reason for being embarrassed in the first place.

8) It is stupid to think that someone's feelings would be hurt by your merely explaining to them that they had misunderstood your question.

9) After all that misunderstanding, and all that embarrassment, and all that pretense, the amount of information communicated is so minuscule, so utterly inconsequential, that the exchange might as well not have taken place at all.

Now, am I suggesting that all or even some of this went through the heads of the performers, either when they spoke those lines or when they decided to leave them in the film? Of course not. Nor am I suggesting that it goes through the heads of the people who watch it and laugh at it (at least not consciously). I'm sure that if you asked any of them, performer or audience member, why it was funny, they would respond the same way: "It just is!" And who knows, maybe that's the better answer. Hell, they might even respond that it wasn't funny, because, after all, humor is irreconcilably subjective, and there's no better way to ensure that someone will continue to think something isn't funny than by trying to explain to them why it is.

And so, in that spirit, rather than continue trying to explain to you why Tim and Eric's comedy is funny, I will simply invite you to see for yourself by going out and buying one of their DVDs. Or better yet, thanks to the miracle of the internet, you can watch any one of their sketches here. Or check out their wubsite.

Er, I mean website.

Friday, February 18, 2011

A Many-Splendored Thing Pt. 2.5

I am not going to continue with my list of the Top Ten Depictions of blah blah blah because I have grown bored with it.

And as I currently have all of two followers, both of whom are friends of mine, I don't expect to disappoint anyone.

I will, however, provide the rest of the list right now sans explanations, and if someday in the future, after I have amassed thousands of followers, one of them should be browsing through my back catalog of entries and come upon this entry, and if he or she should see an item on that list that they would have liked to read my thoughts on, then he or she may leave a comment saying so, and I will most likely oblige them.

So, here they are: the final eight.


8) Chasing Amy, written and directed by Kevin Smith

7) The relationship between Batman and Catwoman, as written (and occasionally directed) by various

6) "If I Loved You" from Carousel, music by Richard Rogers and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein

5) The couples of Mad Men, as written and directed by Matthew Weiner and various

4) Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

3) Say Anything, written and directed by Cameron Crowe

2) Moulin Rouge!, written by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce and directed by Baz Luhrmann

1) The Last 5 Years, music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown


Now that that's out of the way I can move onto bigger and better things, like writing about how fly Michael Fassbender looks dressed as a 19th century British lord. (Spoiler alert: pretty fucking fly.)

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

A Many-Splendored Thing Pt. 2


9) The "Doug & Patti Sittin' in a Tree" episode of Nickelodeon's Doug, written by Matt Steinglass and directed by Ken Kimmelman


Between the years 1991 and 1994 Nickelodeon's Doug was the single greatest cartoon on television, and yes, I am prepared to stand by the statement. It had a cast of characters to rival that of The Simpsons and took place in an imaginary town called Bluffington with as clear a sense of its own geography and almost as many familiar locations as that other show's Springfield, and at the center of it all was an eleven year-old protagonist who was far more sympathetic to preadolescent audiences than his more famous counter-Bart could ever be.



His name was Doug Yancey Funnie. He kept a journal, played the banjo, had a slew of Hollywood-inspired alter egos, an anthropomorphic dog named Porkchop, and most importantly a crush on the spunky, sporty, raspy-voiced Patti Mayonnaise. Over the course of four seasons we watched him struggle to understand these new and sometimes frightening feelings, as well as try and fail countless times to find a way to express them to Patti.

Then this happened:



"You know, your grass is really...springy!"
"Yeah, they water it...a lot."

Until now I hadn't seen that episode for twelve years, and yet I could still have recited those two lines for you verbatim. That's the impression it made on me. It just does so many things right! Capturing that inexplicable feeling of shame you felt as a kid at the idea that your parents might suspect you were interested in the opposite sex, the reluctance even to admit it to yourself because, in some small way you couldn't quite put your finger on, it meant the end of your childhood, which is a kind of loss, the absolute bafflement you felt in the face of a whole new world with its own indecipherable set of rules and rituals, not knowing where to turn for help in deciphering them, afraid to ask, afraid of being laughed at, afraid that you would never understand...

But most of all what it captures perfectly is the feeling of looking into the face of someone you love, or at least to whom you are intensely attracted, having every reason in the world to believe that they feel the same way, knowing all that separates you from the consummation of that mutual attraction is for one of you to take the leap, to make the first move, to speak the unspoken, and still being unable to bring yourself to speak it, because it's just too damn big, because it means the end of everything you know and the beginning of everything that scares you, because it means there will be no hiding anymore, no going back, because it means that everything is going to change forever...

...so instead you comment on the grass, or offer them a gummy bunny.

A Many-Splendored Thing




These days everyone seems to hate Valentine's Day.

But if there's one thing that everyone seems to love, it's "top ten" lists.

So, in honor of Valentine's Day--and because, for a wet-behind-the-ears blogger like myself, it's an easy and familiar template--I decided to compile a list of the Top Ten Depictions of Love in Popular Culture.

"Depictions?" you ask. "Why 'depictions'?"

Well, rather than limit myself to just one medium--movies, songs, TV shows, comic books, etc.--I decided to leave it open, if only because I stated in my last entry that this was not going to be a film blog, and posting a list of the ten best movies about love immediately after stating that this is not going to be a film blog, well, that would be sending mixed messages, wouldn't it?

And if there's one day on which you're not supposed to send mixed messages, it's Valentine's Day.

So, without further ado, I present to you the first entry in my list of the Ten Best Depictions of Love in Popular Culture:

10) The relationship between Belle and the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, as written by Linda Woolverton, directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise and acted by Paige O'Hara and Robby Benson



I put this at the bottom of the list because, as has been pointed out many times before, Belle and the Beast's relationship is a little, well, fucked up.

The way they meet is as follows: He kidnaps her father, she shows up at his castle in search of him, and he (the Beast) releases him (Belle's father) on the condition that she remain in his place, in the hope that, after enough time spent in his company, voluntarily or otherwise, she may fall in love with him.

Not exactly a story you can tell at dinner parties. In fact, except for the part about kidnapping her father, it's pretty much exactly the plot of The Collector by John Fowles, one of the creepiest novels ever. The difference is that, whereas in The Collector the girl winds up (SPOILER ALERT!) dead, in Beauty and the Beast it actually works, and one escape attempt/wolf attack/thrilling rescue later we are treated to one of the sweetest, most believably intimate scenes in any romantic movie ever:





You see, fucked up as the origin of their relationship may be, Beauty and the Beast is the only Disney Princess movie in which the heroine and her respective love interest actually have a relationship, fucked up or nay, which would have been enough to earn it a spot on this list alone. But what's more, when it would have been all too easy to fall into the trap of having her fall in love with him at least a little bit because he is a beast, as with certain other pieces of popular fiction marketed towards young girls, Belle's affection for the Beast is always markedly in spite of his beastly qualities, as over the course of the film she responds to those qualities first with genuine and wholly unerotic terror, and then, after she has learned that, despite his appearance, his outbursts are not the displays of aggression of a dangerous predator but the temper tantrums thrown by a petulant child, annoyance. The arc of their relationship is that she must learn to see through his temper tantrums and defense mechanisms to the lonely, insecure little boy underneath, while he must learn to control his temper and lower his defense mechanisms, thereby making himself vulnerable, probably for the first time in his life, to another person.

In order for the Beast to earn the love of the Beauty, he must first learn to stop acting like a beast, something that, in the end, he is only able to do because of the love of the Beauty, in the form of her forgiveness.

If that’s not romantic, I don’t know what is.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Introductions

Now that I've made what I'm sure my acquaintances would tell you is, for better or worse, an accurate first impression with that rather lengthy and impassioned diatribe against Twilight, I suppose I should tell you a little bit about myself, this blog, and what I'm doing here.

First and foremost, this is not a film blog. It is not that kind of blog, despite my love for/preoccupation with that medium, for two reasons: One, I know I will inevitably want to write about other things, and two, there is already someone out there in the blogosphere writing exactly the kinds of reviews I would write, about exactly the kinds of films I would write them about, and writing them more eloquently and more eruditely than I ever could. (In fact, when recommending his blog to friends and family I almost always describe him thus: "Imagine me if I had gone to film school." Coming from someone as narcissistic as I am, and with as romanticized a notion of film school, there really could be no higher praise.)

The person I am talking about is Tim Brayton over at Antagony & Ecstasy, and if you have never read one of his film reviews I will give you a moment to do so now.

Second and slightly less fore, you may have noticed that the title of this blog is a reference to Hamlet by William Shakespeare--or more specifically, to the famed "to be or not to be" speech from that play. This is not meant to convey any of the following messages:

1) "I consider myself a modern day Hamlet."
2) "I consider myself a modern day Shakespeare."
3) "I am super-duper cultured."
4) "I am suicidal."

I chose it for the title of my blog because the larger passage from which it is taken...

And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.


...is I think a really fantastic way of explaining what it feels like to be the kind of person who over-thinks things, which is the kind if person I am--which, come to think of it, does sort of make me a modern day Hamlet, albeit one with a much less exciting and glamorous life story. (Also, I don't dress all in black because that would be emo.)

Anyway, that is what this blog will mostly consist of: me over-thinking things. What kinds of things? Mostly pop-cultural things, things like films, comic books, TV shows, TV shows based on comic books, TV shows based on films, films based on TV shows, films based on TV shows based on comic books, comic books based on films based on TV shows, and comic books based on films based on crappy abuse-excusing young adult horror/fantasy romance novels.


Fucking Twilight!!!! *shakes fist*


Also, you can expect some (not particularly well informed but I'm trying) thoughts on politics, social mores and private life, though I tend not to delve too deeply into the latter for fear of coming off as touchy-feely.

Or as Don Draper puts it: "I can't tell you about my childhood. It'd ruin the first half of my novel."

Oh, that's another thing you can expect to read a lot about: Mad Men, my favorite show.

And Batman. Expect lots of Batman.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight": Erotic Romance of a Particularly American/Trashy Sort







Lizzie met her at the gate
Full of wise upbraidings:
‘Dear, you should not stay so late,
Twilight is not good for maidens;
Should not loiter in the glen
In the haunts of goblin men.’

-Christina Rossetti, Goblin Men (1862)

  
I have a philosophy. It goes: It’s all well and good to be dismissive of commercial fluff, but let us not be too dismissive, lest we allow something truly malignant to fly in under our radar.
    Case in point: Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. For it is not its ardent devotees—the so called "Twihards"—who confound me the most, but rather the blithe apologists who shrug off its phenomenal popularity with the words, “Who cares if a few confused teenagers and emotionally stunted housewives misread it as an endorsement of abusive relationships? It’s not literature. It’s just entertainment.” (And yet these same people condemn dozens of Hollywood action movies each year for their misogyny, their homophobia, their racism and their hyperviolence. Why the double standard? If Twilight’s status as “mere entertainment” gets it off the hook for its warped psychosexual politics, why not the James Bond franchise or Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen? But I digress.)
    Twilight’s unpardonable crime is not that it defends, and at times even seems to preach, submission on the part of women, or that it portrays a victim of abuse’s silent and patient suffering as proper and her abuser’s possessive and domineering behavior as chivalrous and romantic. These are crimes, yes, but they would be pardonable if they were in the service of art. Its unpardonable crime is that it refuses to compensate for these offenses by being well-written. Its unpardonable crime is that it is not art.
    You see, contrary to the apparent opinion of those aforementioned apologists, a work of art’s being recognized as Literature does not make it more dangerous to society. In fact it makes it less, as Literature, being that it is taken seriously, is more likely to be scrutinized, analyzed and dissected. Just think how many papers have been written, to cite one particularly germane example, on the incongruity of Heathcliff’s reputation as a romantic hero in popular culture when Emily Bronte herself denounced him as a monster, one who stands unredeemed at the end of the novel of which he is the central character.
    This marks an important difference between the imaginative, psychologically astute Bronte, and the hackish, narcissistic Meyer: Bronte knew she was creating a monster. Meyer thought she was creating the perfect man. And in that she is more like Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein than the reverent sculptor Pygmalion, though I have compared her to that figure in the past, for even now her creation is rampaging across our cultural landscape, wreaking havoc upon the psyches of our daughters, nieces, sisters, wives and girlfriends. Meyer’s transparent coattail-riding in the form of her repeated references to Wuthering Heights in her own novels only serves to show how much she missed the point of that far superior work, which she has presumed to cite as an influence.
    She would do well to pay attention to the passage in Chapter 10 in which the mercurial and independent Cathy corrects her naïve and adolescent sister-in-law, whom she has discovered is infatuated with the brooding antihero:

I’d as soon put that little canary into the park on a winter’s day, as recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It is deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray, don’t imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He’s not a rough diamond—a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.

    Never has a more succinct and devastating repudiation of the myth of the Sensitive Bad Boy been written! And yet, were she alive today, poor Miss Bronte would be mortified to see a whole generation of women mistaking her rejection of that myth as just another entry in it.
    Worse than the idea that Meyer’s ears were simply deaf to Bronte’s words of warning* is the idea that they pricked up to them in titillation. The similarity to the above passage of some of the imagery from her own novel—lines like, “I felt like a bird locked in the eyes of a snake” and the oft tattooed “And so the lion fell in love with the lamb”—support that theory.
    Here is an excerpt from a review by Tim Brayton off his blog Antagony & Ecstasy:

This is a film About Sex . . . a very specific kind of sex: the erotic charge of death and danger. The [type of predator] trappings that make the movie seem like something entirely else are only there to facilitate the development of a character who is quite unambiguously aroused by the constant threat of being butchered . . . At the center of this sexual fantasia . . . is a maddeningly opaque heroine . . . At the film's end, we understand nothing about her other than her actions . . . This fact about [name of film] makes it perhaps more challenging than might be strictly necessary: we like to have sturdy protagonists to sink out teeth into, and [name of protagonist] is a defiantly blank slate. At the same time, I can't imagine the film working the same way with a "stronger" lead. It is at heart the story of a non-existent personality being filled up with dark sexual energies . . . and in order to work, [name of protagonist] must be an empty vessel at the start.

    Now suppose I asked you to restore the omitted pronouns. I’m betting you would substitute “vampire” for “type of predator”, “Twilight” for “name of film” and “Bella Swan” for “name of protagonist”. Am I right?
    Well, imaginary internet reader, you’d be wrong. The name of the film is In the Cut, by director Jane Campion, the type of predator is “serial killer” and the name of the protagonist is Frannie Avery (Brayton’s use of the phrase “sink our teeth into” is purely coincidental).


Notice any similarities?


    Still, it is uncanny how well the summary applies. “The erotic charge of death and danger” is in fact exactly what Twilight is about, whether it knows it or not, and Bella, as has been pointed out by many critics before me, is in fact both a “maddenly opaque heroine” and a “defiantly blank slate”.
    Therein lies the single most important distinction between the two works: Jane Campion set out to make a movie about that subject. Stephenie Meyer wrote a series of books about it completely by accident. The whole thing is one big Freudian slip. Meyer betrays her own submissive, borderline masochistic tendencies again and again, not just with the two lines I quoted above, but with others that comingle the concepts of fear, physical powerlessness and sexual arousal with equal reflexivity: “[H]e turned slowly to glare at me—his face was absurdly handsome—with piercing, hate-filled eyes”, “I was still frightened of the hostility I sometimes felt emanating from him, and I was still tongue-tied whenever I pictured his perfect face”, “I studied his flawless features in the limited light . . . until it occurred to me that his expression was murderously angry”, “If I’d ever feared death in his presence, it was nothing compared to how I felt now”, “I sat without moving, more frightened of him than I’d ever been . . . He’d never been less human, or more beautiful”, “I knew at any moment it could be too much, and my life could end . . . and I couldn’t make myself be afraid. I couldn’t think of anything except that he was touching me”, “He held my hands between his. They felt so feeble in his iron strength”, “His arm created an inescapable snare around my waist”, “I sat very still, the chill of his touch a natural warning telling me to be terrified. But there was no feeling of fear in me. There were, however, other feelings. . . .”
    ...etcetera ad nauseam. (For further evidence of the fact that Edward's hostile and predatory behavior is an integral part of what makes him so attractive to his fans, consider that the poster they most commonly hang on the walls of their dorms and bedrooms is a closeup of the character as portrayed by Robert Pattinson staring directly into the camera not lovingly, or seductively, or even forlornly, but utterly fucking furiously.)
    I could compile similar lists of every time Bella describes feeling like a child in the presence of an adult when she is with Edward, or every time he “commands” or “orders” her to do something and she obeys, or every time he responds to her anger, frustration or confusion with laughter, or every time he speaks to her “patronizingly”, “condescendingly” or “mockingly”, or every time he warns her that he is “dangerous” or “one of the bad guys” and cautions her to “stay away”, warning that it is “stupid” and “unwise” of her to be his friend—a practice of which the implication, as Lucy Mangan of the British newspaper the Guardian perceptively points out in her essay Dangerous Liaisons, is that "Bella chooses to put herself in danger and the further implication of which is that she must therefore bear full responsibility for the consequences”, which she goes on to say “smacks uncomfortably of the ‘asking for it’ defence [sic]” and makes Edward “less an ideal boyfriend than a proto-rapist”, an observation with which I couldn’t agree more—but those lists alone would take up pages, and this essay is already shaping up to be longer than I intended.
    I will, however, point out the fact that whenever Bella is in a car with Edward--on which occasions it should go without saying she is permanently consigned to the passenger seat--he drives perilously fast, ignoring pesky things like stop signs and traffic lights and prompting panicky requests from her to slow down, which he of course then flippantly ignores—at least until he becomes so annoyed with her for not trusting in his superior reflexes that he firmly instructs her to “relax”.
    And the fact that the incident which sparks their relationship—which, in point of fact, marks their very first sustained interaction—is his pushing her out of the path of an out-of-control minivan, during which passage she recounts in loving detail the sensation of Edward’s body “pinning” her to the ground, and of his hands “dragging” and “spinning” her around “like a ragdoll”, holding her against his body in an “iron grasp” and pushing her back down when she attempts to stand not just once but twice.
    Oh, and the fact that the bulk of the second book concerns Bella’s attempts to win back Edward—who has broken up with her, as he does so many of the things he does, for her "own good”—by repeatedly placing herself in mortal danger under the logic that it was that which brought him to her side in the first place, as when she was nearly struck by that minivan in the beginning of the first book, or when she was nearly raped by a gang of ruffians in—well, slightly later in the beginning of the first book (the absurd number of mishaps, accidents, injuries and attacks to which Bella falls victim over the course of the series provides Meyer with the chance to engage in a truly marathon bout of what Bidisha, also of the Guardian, calls "the fetishisation of female victimhood", a subject that, again, I could spend pages on, but let me not get sidetracked).
    It’s not just that she expects Edward to turn up in the nick of time and save her, you see, but that when she is in a state of mortal danger—when she has suffered a severe injury and her veins are pumping with adrenaline—she forms a sort of psychic link with Edward, and can feel his presence, as if he is right next to her, as if he is inside her mind.
    If that’s not a metaphor for sadomasochistic sex, I don’t know what is.
    Add to that the facts that 1) Edward explicitly warns Bella that, were they ever to have sex, he would almost certainly become so crazed with pleasure that he would lose control and slaughter her, 2) that this not only fails to deter her but seems to make the prospect more enticing, and 3) that when they finally do have sex it is so rough that Bella loses consciousness, only to wake up a few hours later covered in bruises.
    If that’s not literally sadomasochistic sex, I don’t know what is.
    But most disturbing of all is the central premise. By now everyone knows the story: a plain teenage girl and an impossibly beautiful teenage boy immortal vampire must struggle to overcome the latter’s overwhelming desire to have sex with kill and eat the former before they are married before she too has become a vampire and hence also immortal. This would be slightly less disturbing if the vampire was of the sort who routinely surrenders to his instincts and goes around killing and eating people indiscriminately, only making an exception in the case of his beloved because he loves her.
    But he is not that sort of vampire. He is the vegetarian sort of vampire, the sort who has vowed to resist his killer instincts out of respect for the sanctity of human life, only to find it oh so much more difficult in the case of his beloved because she smells so damn delicious. In fact that is the very reason he loves her: because she smells, as Meyer has him put it in yet another unconscious invocation of the pseudo-sexual mystique of high-risk behaviors, like his “own personal brand of heroin”.**
    “Wait a second," you ask. "If Edward routinely killed and ate people, that would make it less disturbing?”
    That's right, imaginary internet reader. Allow me to explain.
    If Edward routinely killed and ate people, and only made an exception in Bella’s case because he loved her, then that would mean his desire to kill and his desire to love were fundamentally separate and conflicting instincts, as they would be in any emotionally well-adjusted person. But if he refrains from killing and eating everybody, and finds it more difficult in Bella’s case because he loves her, then that means his instinct to kill and his instinct to love are linked.
    It’s no secret that Meyer, like so many authors before her, uses the vampire’s lust for blood to represent carnal lust. That is the central metaphor of the series. But if we follow Meyer’s logic—if we accept that the desire to drink somebody’s blood, to devour them, is the same as the desire to have sex with them—then it follows that in the Twilight universe, sex equals death and vice versa.
    Sex equals death. The desire to copulate, and especially to deflower, equals the desire to kill. There is no difference between the two. Thus, if Edward were to give into his desire to sleep with Bella, a virgin, then he would both literally and symbolically become her murderer, and if Bella were to give into her desire to allow him to (I say “allow him to” because there is no question that in Stephenie Meyer’s idea of sex the female is passive and the male the aggressor) it would be tantamount to suicide.
    There’s a name for this portrayal of sex. It’s called Death and the Maiden, and it hasn’t been this prevalent in our society since the Renaissance, when it was a common motif in paintings and frescoes (though in truth it dates all the way back to medieval times, a variation on the Danse Macabre or Dance of Death).
    The imagery is always the same: Death, sometimes in the form of a black-winged angel but most often a skeleton or a decaying corpse, embraces, often forcibly, a pale and voluptuous young woman whose expression is somewhere between revulsion and intense sensual pleasure. Occasionally, Death stands just outside the woman’s door or window and watches her sleep (this should be familiar to readers of Twilight as Edward does this very thing on more than one occasion). In the latter case, the door or window is a symbol for the woman’s hymen, or “maidenhead”, the intended metaphor being—well, by now it should be obvious what the intended metaphor is.


Pictured: "true love"

    The motif made its way from the fine arts into myths and folklore (such as the story of Little Red Riding Hood***, in which the titular garment represents the hymen, or, in its chromatic resemblance to blood, the beginning of the menstrual cycle, and the wolf a seducer or sexual predator who threatens the heroine’s virginity); classical music (such as the Death and the Maiden Quartet by Franz Schubert); and even onto the stage (the play Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman, which was adapted into a film in 1994 by Roman Polanski, who was himself convicted of the rape of a minor in 1977, but that’s a topic for another essay).
    Joyce Carol Oates gave us her take on the motif in 1966 in the form of a short story—in fact Death and the Maiden was the original title, though she later changed it, one presumes in the name of subtlety, to Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, a lyric from the song “Tangled Up In Blue” by Bob Dylan, to whom the story is dedicated—in which a teenage girl, alone in her home, is terrorized by a mysterious and seductive stranger named Arnold Friend who lingers on her front porch, threatening to wait for her parents to return home and then kill them if she does not let him through the door.
    In an essay she wrote for the New York Times in 1986 (actually a review of the film Smooth Talk, adapted from her short story by director Joyce Chopra that same year, but I’ll get to that in a moment) Carol Oates describes how she got the idea from an article in Life magazine about the serial killer Charles Schmid, also known as “The Pied Piper of Tucson”, who, between the years 1964 and 1966, killed three teenage girls in Tucson, Arizona, and buried their bodies in the desert.
    When Schmid was arrested in 1966, it came to light that several other teenagers in the community had known he was the murderer and neglected to go to the police. This had not been out of fear, but out of admiration for the killer, who had attained the status of a local folk hero, especially among young girls, by hanging around the high school, offering students pearls of his aged wisdom (he was in his early 30’s), providing them with drugs and alcohol and hosting parties at his parents’ home while they were away. He had even, it seems, rather actorishly affected the slang, dress and mannerisms of the youth of the day, going as far as to dye his hair black, apply pancake makeup to his face and stretch out his lower lip by the repeated application of a clothespin to better resemble his idol, and the darling of many a teen girl’s heart, Elvis Presley.
    In the words of Carol Oates, he was “a trashy dream, a tabloid archetype, sheer artifice, comedy, cartoon.” She explains that it was not he himself that intrigued her but rather the fact of his above described exalted position among the local youth. It was this phenomenon, she says, that she endeavored to explore in her story, inventing the character of a teen girl who, in her words, “is seduced by way of her own vanity; she mistakes death for erotic romance of a particularly American/trashy sort.”
    Here we come back to Smooth Talk: In talking about the film, she observes—as many critics did at the time—that actor Treat Williams’s performance as Friend is an uncanny impersonation of James Dean—“or is it James Dean regarding himself in mirrors,” she muses, “doing James Dean impersonations?”
    Speculative meta-impersonations notwithstanding, I submit for your approval a collection of excerpts from various publications’ reviews of the 2008 film adaptation of Twilight:

“[Bella is] Natalie Wood to Edward's James Dean.” -Richard CorlissTIME; “Edward shivers like James Dean without his jacket.” –Ty BurrThe Boston Globe; “The dashing vampire Edward Cullen [has] James Dean hair, golden eyes, [and an] eternal stricken look.” -Owen GleibermanEntertainment Weekly; “[Edward] cops a James Dean attitude.” -James BerardinelliReelviews.com; “[Edward Cullen] is rebel cool incarnated—the James Dean of the un-dead.” –James WolcottVanity Fair

    But the similarities between the character of Edward Cullen and the Charles Schmid/Arnold Friend amalgam don’t end there...
    Like Schmid, Cullen hangs around the local high school despite being much too old (again, Schmid was in his 30’s, Cullen well into his 100’s); Cullen displays a preference for teenage girls (Bella is, after all, a mere 17 at the start of the series); Cullen, as he freely explains to Bella, has an appearance specifically designed to draw in his prey (though his defenders will no doubt argue that in his case it is involuntary, a side-effect of his transmutation into a vampire****); and then of course there is their common thirst for blood (yes, Cullen resists his urges while Schmid succumbed to them, but surely when one is going to live forever, one is eventually going to lose one’s constant battle with one’s overwhelming urges, and anyway, isn't the important thing that one has them?).


From left to right: Charles Schmid, Treat Williams as Arnold Friend, Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen

    I know what you're thinking, imaginary internet reader. You're thinking, “Man, has this guy read way too much into this.”
    Let me make myself clear: By no means do I mean to suggest that Stephenie Meyer deliberately based her creation on Charles Schmid, or, indeed, that she has even heard of him. And I certainly do not mean to suggest that either a fictional character or the author who created him could ever be as dangerous, or as deserving of hatred and condemnation, as a flesh-and-blood psychopath. Of course not. The families of Schmid’s victims would undoubtedly attest to that.
    Nor do I mean to suggest that Stephenie Meyer has read Joyce Carol Oates’s short story—or that she has listened to Franz Schubert’s quartet, or seen Ariel Dorfman’s play or Jane Campion’s film, or viewed any of those paintings or frescoes. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that Stephenie Meyer has never even heard of the Death and the Maiden motif (though I must be fair and admit it is possible; the woman did graduate from Brigham Young University with a bachelor's degree in English, where she claims, mindbogglingly, to have written most of her papers from a feminist perspective).
    But do I think she meant for her novels to be a study in that motif? No, I absolutely do not. Again, I think she made them that completely by accident, not in the pursuit of any artistic or scholarly objective, but simply by being, innately and unconsciously, exactly the type of maiden who is that motif’s subject, one who would likely have fallen for the wiles of serial killer Charles Schmid, precisely because, like the protagonist of Joyce Carol Oates’s short story, “she mistakes death for erotic romance of a particularly American/trashy sort.”
    Why do I think this instead of giving her the benefit of the doubt? Because she has stated time and again that she considers the story of Edward and Bella to be a sweet, even wholesome love story, going as far as to boast in an interview with the Volterra Television Network in 2007 that she believes theirs is a healthier relationship than Romeo and Juliet’s, Wesley and Buttercup's (of William Goldman's The Princess Bride) or even Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett’s (an act of hubris which Janeites like my girlfriend will surely regard as nothing short of blasphemy). Because she has strongly implied—and there is abundant evidence in her novels to support this, not the least of which is her physical characterization of Bella—that she based the character of Bella Swan on herself and the character of Edward Cullen on her own private erotic fantasies.
    On that point even Robert Pattinson, the actor charged with playing Edward in the films—and who has therefore, one feels safe in assuming, met and spoken with the woman on at least one occasion—agrees. Here is what he told a reporter for E! in 2008:

"When I read [Twilight] I was convinced Stephenie was convinced she was Bella and it was like it was a book that wasn't supposed to be published. It was like reading her sexual fantasy, especially when she said it was based on a dream and it was like, ‘Oh I've had this dream about this really sexy guy,’ and she just writes this book about it. Like some things about Edward are so specific, I was just convinced, like, ‘This woman is mad. She's completely mad and she's in love with her own fictional creation.’”

    Oh, did I forget to mention the idea came to her in a dream? How’s that for proof that it springs from a deeply ingrained, Jungian place in her unconscious?
    But even more telling than Meyer’s frequent public defenses of Edward and Bella’s relationship is the following fact--and pay attention, children, because here is the absolutely most crucially important difference between the Twilight series and every other work I have mentioned: whereas at the end of all those works the protagonist ends up either A) rejecting or being rescued from her respective incarnation of Death having learned a valuable lesson or B) dead (as in dead dead, not dead in a way that’s exactly like being alive only more awesome because now you have superpowers and sparkle), Bella ends up married to and living happily ever after with her incarnation of Death with absolutely no negative consequences whatsoever.
    Now, it’s tempting to read this as a sign of progress. After all, in these enlightened times the loss of a young woman’s virginity—her sexual awakening, if you will—is no longer viewed as a tragedy: bittersweet, perhaps, but normal and healthy, even necessary for her development into a sexually empowered and well-adjusted adult. But there is nothing healthy about a girl embracing the loss of her virginity as long as she continues to equate that loss with death, for as long as she equates sex and death she will ascribe to situations and activities that present a risk of death a perverse pseudo-sexual mystique, and what’s more, she will perceive her suitors and romantic partners as predators and aggressors, and as a result expect them to behave as such, as I have no doubt Stephenie Meyer herself does.*****
     “What makes you an authority on the unconscious workings of Stephenie Meyer’s mind? Do you really think you can glean that much about a person just by reading something they wrote? A fantasy about vampires and werewolves?”
    My, you're mouthy today, imaginary internet reader! But yes. Ask any practicing therapist and they’ll tell you they’ve gained volumes of insight into the minds of patients just by reading pieces of creative fiction they’ve written, or, say in the case of child therapists, examining pictures they’ve scribbled in crayon. (Am I a practicing therapist? Far from it. But when the clues are as blatant as they are in Meyer’s writing you don’t have to be.)
    Oscar Wilde, in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, writes, “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter.” In other words, any work of art—be it visual, musical, cinematic or literary—reveals more about the artist than it does about its subject. This is true even of commercial art, true even of bad art—both of which, it goes without saying, are categories into which the Twilight series falls.
     “But wait, didn’t you say Twilight wasn’t art?”
    You got me there, imaginary internet reader. Yes, yes I did. And I hereby retract that statement, for over the course of this essay I have convinced myself that anything written with such obvious pathos, and from as obviously personal a place as Stephenie Meyer wrote it—indeed, anything that taps into such timeless themes, even unwittingly, or succeeds in provoking as impassioned a response as mine, even a negative one—must be called art. Bad art—awful, terrible, insultingly bad art, offensive not just in its perverse philosophies on love and sex and gender roles but in its astonishingly incompetent craftsmanship: its clumsy syntax, its purple prose, its reliance on clichés, its counterintuitive, uneven structure, its refusal to develop its protagonist beyond her obsessive affection for Edward, its transparent bid for literary merit by means of constant allusions to older classics and a comically evident overuse of the thesaurus—but, in the end, art.
    Perhaps, after all, there is no such thing as art that is not Art. Perhaps the distinction between Art and Not Art is a false one. Perhaps the only true distinction is between Good Art and Bad Art.
    Aldous Huxley said, “A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.”
    Of course, John Ruskin said, “Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books,” and I’m inclined to agree, adding, if I may take a moment to proselytize off topic, that it is better to watch a valuable film or television series than it is to read a valueless book, the myth of the automatic intellectual superiority of the written word to the moving picture being particularly offensive to this cinephile.
    But, again, all of that is a topic for another essay.
  I must now, for the purpose of coherency, return to that thesis to which I was purportedly going to return several paragraphs ago: Is analyzing and worrying over the societal effects/implications of commercial art—what we have up till now been calling “mere entertainment”—a waste of time? Does a work of art’s being perceived as “mere entertainment” mean its effects on/implications concerning the cultural landscape and the minds of its consumers are negligible and irrelevant?
    I maintain that the answer is no. Indeed, I believe a work of art’s status as “mere entertainment” makes its effects more penetrating and injurious, for we lower our defenses in the face of what we perceive as “mere entertainment”—we switch off our critical thinking, and that makes us more susceptible. And for that same reason I believe that the “mere entertainment” in which we choose to indulge reveals more about us than the so-called Serious Art for which we profess appreciation, for whatever regard in which we hold a work of art consciously, it is our unconscious that responds to art.
    Or to apply the Freudian model (because nothing sets my pen a-wagging like Freud, and just imagine the fun he would have with that statement): whatever universally agreed upon literary classics or politically conscious Oscar-winning films of which our Superegos approve, it is “mere entertainment” that speaks directly to our Ids.
    That is what makes it so frightening that so many women’s Ids are responding so ecstatically to Twilight. If there is truly nothing artful about the prose (which there isn’t) then it can only be the themes—the images, impulses and desires that Stephenie Meyer unconsciously embedded in that prose—to which they are responding.
    And what an unsettling set of themes for our nation’s daughters, nieces, sisters, wives and girlfriends to be responding to! Not just responding to but identifying with! To think how many of these women consider Bella, this victim, this masochist, to be an admirable heroine, strong and brave in her stoic endurance of the strife she suffers in the name of love! To think how many of these women see themselves in Bella, who is so submissive, so evidently aroused by death and danger, by the feelings of utter powerlessness and physical vulnerability she experiences in the presence of her potential killer! And to think how many of these women consider Edward to be the perfect man! This predator, this villain, who is so possessive, so patronizing, so manipulative, so menacing, at times even physically abusive! Who routinely reminds Bella of how, at any moment, he could easily destroy her, and what’s more, how much he longs to!
    What does that say about our society? What does that say about how we are raising our daughters? What does it say about us that despite all this we encourage them to read the books because we imagine they teach abstinence, as if that were the most pertinent consideration?****** And what does it say about us that, on May 7th of last year, when the Social Security Administration released its annual list of the year’s most popular baby names, number one on the girls list was “Isabella”, and near the top of the boys list were the names “Jacob” and “Cullen”, the former being the name of Bella’s werewolf suitor, and Edward’s competition, Jacob Black, and the latter of course being a reference to both Edward Cullen himself and the whole vampiric Cullen clan?
    As Julie Weiner at VanityFair.com put it, “the repercussions . . .  are almost incomparable. This means that generations other than this one will be forced to justify the existence of Twilight. Twilight is literally congenital.”
    Like Joyce Carol Oates was not so much disturbed by the serial killer Charles Schmid as by the regard in which his teenage cohorts held him, I am disturbed not so much by the novels themselves—which I consider to be, to again quote Carol Oates, “a trashy dream, a tabloid archetype, sheer artifice, comedy, cartoon”—but by their exalted position among their legions of mostly young, impressionable female readers, not because I worry that Twilight will teach them to mistake visceral physical attraction for true love, or to be so flattered by the attentions of older men that they will endure all manners of abuse in order that they might continue to receive them, or even to romanticize all this as a means of coping with the resultant damage to their self-esteem—after all, how can it teach them what it is already their nature to do?—but because it validates this way of thinking, because it teaches its readers that if they can only endure the abuse a little longer then it will eventually stop and they will get the fairy tale ending they hope for, when what literature aimed at teenage girls ought to do, and what the really good literature aimed at teenage girls always has done, is hold a mirror up to these immature and self-destructive tendencies in a way that reveals them for what they truly are: immature and self-destructive.
     “So what are you saying? That the primary function of art is to instruct?”
     In the grand scheme of things? No. Of course not. The primary function of art is, always has been and always should be to move—to elicit a response in its audience. But when it comes to art, and especially literature, aimed at young adults, then yes, I think the primary function, or at least one of the primary functions, should be to instruct, to assist in the delicate process of coming of age--or at the very least not to derail that process in the name of mere entertainment. After all, it is possible to move, to instruct and to entertain all at the same time—just look at the works of Judy Blume, Lois Lowry, Meg Cabot and J.K. Rowling.
    “But why hold art aimed at young adults to a different set of standards than any other kind of art?”
    Because young adults, like I said, are impressionable. Because life, particularly the lives of teenagers, imitates art. Because teenagers define themselves by the books they read, the movies they watch and the music they listen to. Because they will look to any and all external sources to help them to form their still developing senses of self. Because it takes a village to raise a child, and our pop culture is our village.
    “Are you saying we should censor Stephenie Meyer? Burn her books in the streets? I thought liberal elitist intellectuals like you thought censorship was a bad thing!”
     We do, imaginary internet reader, we do! That is why, as much pleasure as it would give me to personally take a blowtorch to a whole stack of copies of Twilight (and it would, imaginary internet reader, it really would), I am not suggesting that we censor Stephenie Meyer or her writing—only that we as a society consume her books as we consume other potentially harmful recreational substances: responsibly, in moderation, and taking care to educate our children as to the dangers of mindless indulgence.
    And yet, most adults have turned a blind eye to the phenomenon of Twilight’s popularity, to its pervasiveness in our culture, seeming to adopt the attitude that because it is commercial art it is not worthy of prolonged examination, not worth getting riled up about, as if to consider its deeper implications—indeed, to even admit that it has deeper implications—would be beneath them.
    Or perhaps they’ve simply convinced themselves that because the series’ fan base is made up mostly of teenage girls, and because teenagers are by their very definition naïve and oblivious, then even if it does have deeper implications they must not be aware of them, and what they don’t know can’t hurt them. Presumably these adults have never heard of a little thing called subliminal advertising.
    The truth is you do not need to be versed in literary traditions, criminology, Jungian psychology or the motif of Death and the Maiden to get out of Twilight everything that I have described in this essay. Those schools of thought did not invent these images, impulses and desires—they merely gave names to things that had already existed within us for millennia, buried deep down in the darkest, most primitive corners of our collective unconscious. You need not even realize, or even agree for that matter, that you are getting these things out of the novels. Like I said, it is our unconscious that responds to art. And all the glossy cover art, the purple prose, the paranormal trappings, the pink and purple teen magazine spreads and the protestations on the part of its fans that it is all in good fun, “mere entertainment”, is just so much packaging, and, like Edward Cullen’s sparkling skin, conceals something far more sinister beneath.








*Some of my savvier readers will point out that it is not Bronte herself who delivers these words of warning but Cathy, and that authors do not always share the philosophies of their fictional creations—after all, Shakespeare cannot have been as psychotic as Macbeth, nor Fitzgerald as naïve as Gatsby, nor Updike as egocentric as Rabbit—but I think it stands to reason that this particular author agreed with this particular fictional creation in this particular case, as Cathy’s sister-in-law (whose name, in what can only be the source of a perverse sort of fantasy-fulfilling homage on the part of Meyer, is Isabella) disregards Cathy’s advice, marries Heathcliff and subsequently learns the error of her ways when she is made to suffer repeated verbal, physical and (it is heavily implied) sexual abuse at the hands of her husband before finally fleeing his house for somewhere "south of London".
    Incidentally, during not one but several passages in the third installment of the Twilight series, Edward Cullen, while discussing Wuthering Heights with Bella (it is her favorite book), expresses sympathy for Heathcliff, whom it is important to note is guilty not just of spousal abuse but also of child abuse and quite possibly (again, it is heavily implied) murder, while Bella herself, in a profoundly troubling echo of the oldest abuse-excusing rationalization in the whole long, sad book, insists that “Catherine is really the source of all the trouble, not Heathcliff,” as it is the fact that she is “so selfish” that drives him to commit these evils—the selfishness in question presumably being that she chooses to marry whom she pleases, for her own reasons, instead of him.

**Another explanation for the “heroin” metaphor, which has become one of the most celebrated lines from the series, might be that some young women enjoy thinking of dysfunctional love affairs as things that might not be smart, and might not be good for them, but feel good anyway and are addictiveLike a drug.
   Romantic? Perhaps, in a morbid sort of way. But hardly a tendency that a series aimed at teenage girls ought to be endorsing.

***Inevitably, the folktale has recently been given the “Twilight treatment” in that it has been reimagined as a gothic romance in which the wolf is now a werewolf and the heroine is in love with him. (I bet his eyes and teeth aren't the only body parts that are surprisingly big, wink wink nudge nudge.) The film is called Rid Riding Hood (predicted tagline: “This little girl isn’t little anymore”) and is slated for release in March 2011. And surprise, surprise, it’s from the director of Twilight.
    You can watch the trailer, complete with multiple shots of the heavy breathing protagonist and significant looks delivered across crowded rooms by the brooding and be-pompadoured love interest, here.

****This constant excusing of Edward’s abusive behavior with the rationalization “He can’t help it, it’s his nature, he’s a vampire” is one of the most troubling trends of the series.
    An anecdote: A woman I once spoke to at party confided that she had once tried to read the books and had to stop halfway through the first one because it was giving her panic attacks. It seems she had had an abusive boyfriend of her own in high school, who had even on one occasion attempted to strangle her, and Edward and Bella’s relationship reminded her so much of that relationship that she could not read on. Specifically, she mentioned this constant rationalization, recalling that it echoed eerily what she would tell herself whenever she was faced with the task of justifying her ex’s own abusive behavior: He can’t help it, it’s his nature, it’s just who he is.
    Now, some argue that the fact that it actually is in a vampire’s nature to be predatory, whereas a real life human being presumably has no such excuse, is a meaningful distinction. Indeed, some argue that to apply naturalistic moral standards to a novel about supernatural characters and events—to analyze and pass judgment on the psychosexual dynamics of a relationship in which one of the parties is a vampire—is a waste of time because vampires do not exist, as if the fact that they are alien means the issues that confront them must also be alien and hence irrelevant to our lives. Those people are advised to look up the word “allegory” in the dictionary.

*****Such behavior’s correlation to the enjoyment of Twilight is not a correlation I have worked out solely through theoretical reasoning; I have also observed it in practice, as the overwhelming majority of Twilight fans that I have known in private life (and yes, I am aware that there is a word for what I am making and that word is “generalization”, but when speaking about social phenomena one must speak in generalizations, for it is generalizations, or as sociologists call them, “trends”, that matter, and not the exceptions to the rule, or “anomalies”, of which admittedly there have been a few) have been just such girls: girls who display a greater willingness to conform to patently degrading social conventions than non-Twilight fans and/or enter into dysfunctional relationships more frequently than non-Twilight fans and/or find themselves the victims of psychological and/or physical abuse more frequently than non-Twilight fans.
    Now certainly, as any first-year philosophy major will tell you, correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but even if Twilight does not cause, or even exacerbate, these behaviors—the latter of which, let the record show, I still maintain it does—that there is a correlation between being predisposed towards such behaviors and enjoying Twilight can hardly be denied. Therefore, the sheer number of women who don’t just enjoy Twilight but are driven to distraction by it—naming it as their favorite book or movie, wallpapering their bedrooms with posters of Edward Cullen’s scowling face, tattooing lines and images from the novels on their flesh, commiserating about their mutual obsession with it on websites like mylifeistwilight.com, and even physically attacking those who dare deride it in their presence (or "Antis" as we are called in the "Twiverse") with knives, baseball bats, flare guns or, if none of those things are handy, their bare fists and fingernails—ought to have a lot more people a lot more concerned about the state of women in this country than it currently does.

******What these parents fail to realize is there are far graver losses than the loss of one’s virginity, like the loss of one’s independence or the loss of one’s self-respect, and the brand of self-respect Stephenie Meyer peddles by perpetuating the idea that enduring abuse in the name of love makes a woman noble is an illusory brand of self-respect, one that will wither and disappear when her readers grow old and find themselves locked into unhappy marriages—or worse: raped, murdered and buried in the desert by a man who reminded them of Edward Cullen.