Finally! Finally a movie that comes along and pleases everyone (12 year old girls, stoners, Harlequin romance readers, junk-hounds, lonely middle-aged women, delusional virgins etc.) and leaves no one behind and no one unsatisfied. Finally a movie that's comfortable in its own skin and unafraid to wear its beating heart on its sleeve no matter how man people are pointing and laughing. Finally a movie that sucks so wholly and completely that it ends up becoming a bizarro world masterpiece. You don't know how long I've waited for this.
I hate movies that are just okay, or just kinda crappy. I want my movies to be 4 stars or no stars. There's no in-between for me. I fucking hate 3 star movies. I hate "it was pretty good". Give me Fucking Awful over Pretty Good any day. Twilight and its wicked-awesome sequel (part 2 of a saga that will hopefully drag out so long that comely Bella will eventually pussy whip all of the creatures in Universal's Monster stable) is most certainly a no-star shitter or a 4 star bad-movie, however you want to look at it. I feel like I've been watching a lot of mediocre movies over the last year and not enough truly awful ones. Twilight: New Moon really hit the spot in that regard. And boy is it funny! The funniest movie of last year. For some reason people thought The Hangover took that crown (does anyone ever enjoy when their friends tell "I was so wasted" stories? The Hangover is 2 hours of that) but these same people likely watched New Moon in a different frame of mind (i.e not stoned) and ended up missing out on comedy gold.
New Moon is hilarious. There's no point in making fun of it or parodying it in an SNL skit or a feature-length Wayans bros. genre mashup. It's already a parody of itself and way funnier than any intentional skewering could ever hope to be. In fact, check out the SNL skit on Youtube where Bella and Frankenstein play pensive lovers in a tree top. It's dead-on, but definitely not funnier than the real thing. Why is this self-serious mope-fest so funny? It's precisely its own humourless, sober approach to such a patently absurd high-concept that ends up creating so many laughs. The Twilight movies and their increasingly insane internal logic leave no room for anything else. You're either a swooning Tween or your laughing you're ass off. There's no way to keep a straight face when doe-eyed newly minted celebrities are uttering awkward platitudes about endless love inside an utterly toothless horror format.
Everything you need to know about Twilight and the brand of romanticism it's selling is contained in the name of its main character. Kristin Stewart (K-Stew if you're down with the Mary Hart lingo) plays Bella Swan. Bella fucking Swan. Gee, is Bella Swan a middle-aged price-checker at Wal-Mart? No, of course not. Bella Swan is the name of a creature of immeasurable grace and beauty, it's a princess name. Bella Swan is a pale beauty with the power to enchant mythical creatures with her irresistible pouty glumness. Vampires and werewolves gaze into her chestnut eyes and forget to tear her apart with their teeth and claws. This skinny, whiny teenaged girl makes immortals and Manimals fall instantly in love with her. She doesn't illicit lust either, no she inspires endless patience and understanding. It's completely chaste love. Her tumultuous relationships with unstoppable killing machines are not just free of blood, they're free of all bodily fluids. Bella Swan is the flesh and blood embodiment of a Disney Princess ideal of femininity cooked up in the mind of a Mormon author who is either A) a comedy super genius or B) one of those kinds of chicks who sports a fuzzy troll head on the end of her pencil.
For Twilight author Stephanie Meyer, a woman is to be put on a pedestal and ached for, but NEVER touched... in that way. A woman is to be treated not as an equal or as a human being, but as a priceless, highly breakable treasure. Meyer has managed to find a more extreme and silly next level of conservative romanticism for women who don't like the touchy-fucky before marriage: women who fall in love with vampires and can't EVER touchy-fucky lest they be devoured in a bloody gory mess. That's right, in Twilight, Edward the vampire has to behave himself at all times around Bella or else he might get carried away and murder-fuck her with his teeth. Bella's beautiful blood smells so enticing to him that he has to use his super-human restraint to keep from tearing her apart at every moment. And apparently she's worth the effort. It's exactly like Romeo and Juliet if Romeo was constantly fighting the temptation to eat Juliet. The reason the movies are so funny is that they translate these childish scribbles with absolute faithfulness, nary a wink or nod in sight.
The other reason the Twilight films are so funny (and so bad) is that this serious approach to trash brings with it heaps of pretense that make for scene after scene of befuddled confusion. It should simply be a girl-meets-vampire-and-world-doesn't-understand scenario, but instead its girl-meets-vampire-and-audience-doesn't-understand. The screenwriters keep heaping on loads of emotional baggage, presumably transcribed from the books, that you practically need an accompanying flow chart to keep track of all the characters careening mood swings. I was so utterly lost at times during New Moon that I needed an accompanying dvd commentary track with a twelve year old girl explaining what exactly was supposed to be happening. The filmmakers overuse and abuse the screenwriterly tool of "conflict" to the point where the movie is just one long whining lovers spat punctuated with instantly-dated CGI. Virtually every scene in this movie contains a conflict between the characters. It's nearly impossible (for a 30-something man) to keep track of why everybody is so sad or mad at each other, and with the reasons constantly shifting and doubling I finally just gave up trying to follow it and laughed as the morosity and melodrama stacked up.
In fact, the funniest scenes in the movie take place after Bella and Edward have broken up and she becomes plagued by nights of shrieking agony, as if she were a Vietnam vet with PST. The break-up literally causes her to sweat and writhe and shriek at the top of her lungs. It's fucking great. I never really figured out why they broke up in the first place either. It seemed like it was because he was a vampire and she wasn't, but I didn't get why that issue wasn't immediately apparent. Preceding the break-up are a series of push-pull scenes that also made no sense to me. In one scene Edward is telling Bella that he will never leave her side and then two scenes later he's saying they must never see each other again. What? Anyway, Edward leaves for Europe and that's when Bella develops feelings for the impossibly chiseled Jacob who is played by some child who was forced to undergo some likely dangerous exercise routine in order to achieve dreamboat proportions on screen. It's actually kinda creepy. Should pubescent's really be that ripped? So as I mentioned, the first half of the movie is a confusing push-pull with Edward the vampire, but then the filmmakers have the audacity to simply double-down with Jacob the werewolf, repeating the exact same formula with the second half. Jacob tells Bella he will always be there for her and then turns right around and says that she must never speak to him again. It's absolutely nuts. Again, I think it's because he's a werewolf and she isn't.
The other thing that really confuses me about the whole Twilight phenomenon in general is why it relies on horror tropes in the telling of its schmaltzy love story. Stephanie Meyer and the revolving door of filmmakers who adapt her books are completely disinterested in translating any horror elements, seemingly forgetting the fact that the love triangle at the heart of the story contains two-parts monster to one part skinny white girl. Vampires are barely vampires in Twilight. Instead of getting burned to dust when they come into contact with the sunlight, they sparkle like diamonds and become embarrassed. They attend high school for some reason, despite already being geniuses and hundreds of years old. The great vampire pastime is Thunderstorm Baseball (the fucking BEST thing about the first movie). The werewolf side of things doesn't fare much better, with seemingly the only criteria for wolfing-out being the wearing of jean short cut-offs. There is no sense of duty or history when dealing with these horror archetypes, in fact there seems to be disinterest. Meyer is more comfortable churning out Nicolas Sparks-style hokum than with attempting anything resembling chills or cathartic fright. In fact, Twilight is basically just The Notebook with fangs and is so far removed from anything resembling horror as to be unrecognizable. So why bother with vampires and werewolves? I have a theory:
Traditionally, vampires have been portrayed as fanged Lotharios and have always, ALWAYS been made overtly sexual. No woman is immune to the charms of the Dracula-style vampire gentlemen and will give herself over to him with abandon, even when it means that ecstasy will lead to death. In Twilight, it is Bella who seduces Edward the vampire, not the other way around. But she doesn't seduce him for sex, instead desiring domestic obedience, a boyfriend-girlfriend commitment that shall last no shorter than "forever". Twilight (as least from what I've seen in the 2 movies so far) is about de-emphasizing sex in a romantic relationship and returning to a sanitized, old-fashioned view of love that only really existed in fantasy to begin with. To heighten this idea, Meyer has used the vampire, with their addiction to body fluids, to prove that it's possible to change your man, no matter how tough a nut he is to crack (or how bad he wants his nut busted). It's about changing the nature of your boyfriends or at least getting them to ignore theirs until your moral timetable has been observed. I'm certainly not arguing that young girls shouldn't take some of these lessons to heart, and it's probably good counter-programming to the sexualized trash that is usually fed to young girls, but it's no less a useless, potentially damaging message to broadcast. Saving ones virginity until marriage is a bad idea. Waiting until you're in a committed relationship? Well that just sounds reasonable. By avoiding sexual discussion and trying to prove that sex isn't and shouldn't be the focal point of a relationship, Meyer ends up making sex as big a deal as of course it shouldn't be. She builds epic-sized anticipation and trepidation around one of the basic natural functions of animals and uses vampires to communicate the message that sex before marriage is a potentially dangerous bloodletting.
If it sounds like I regard these subtextual elements with scorn, well I don't. They simply add to the head-scratching comedy of the whole thing and I literally can't wait to see where the series goes next. I could of course just run ahead and read the books to find out, but I think that's crossing a line that I can't return from.
If New Moon has a weakness (for stoners or anyone watching it ironically) it's that it's simply far too long to sustain the laughs. At 2+ hours, the movie wears you down and the laughs become chuckles before trickling off until you're just watching in stunned silence. Again, the length of New Moon speaks to how serious it takes itself and I can only assume that future sequels will only bloat further until the last picture gets released in 3 installments totally 9 hours. And mark my words, once all the Twilight books have been fully mined for tween gold, expect a prequel detailing Edward's tumultuous first love with a teenaged Medusa.
Do you think the next one will finally cover the topic of Bella's menstruation?
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