There is No "I" in Team Edward

There are schisms among the Twilight fans that never cease to tickle my cynicism over my generation. Primarily, the camps are as follows, Team Jacob, devoted to the persona of werewolf Jacob Black played by Taylor Lautner, and Team Edward, lauding the sullen Cullen played by Robert Pattinson.

The differences between both groups of fans seem insuperable.

In the process of writing this blog, I’ve risk sanity lurking among some of the countless forums dedicated to the textual chatter of twilit banter. Discussion boards, which “go on like an argument of insidious intent,” are zealously focused to address the superior personality traits of two fictional characters. It sounds like an English teacher’s dream! Readers invested in reading and talking about a text! Yet, when readers find Edward wanting, they make a cult-following out of Jacob much to my disgust for all the same reasons.

We have to remind ourselves, they’re not cerebrating over a great tome. They’re attempting to justify their fictional attractions to fictional characters, arguing as if across a lunchroom table.

Causal discussions within either camp are often interrupted by guerilla tactics from others.

I remember reading through an eloquent disquisition on whether or not Taylor Lautner was gay. The issue was: how it would jeopardize the reader’s feelings towards their own fantasy. This post started a conversation, which was broken by “Go team Edward!” from some rouge user. A stream of arguments and rebukes followed and eventually involved both sides.

I tend to enjoy a good argument. But, nothing about Twilight being fulfilling, the argument sloshed back and forth between the fans in a vacuum. Neither Team Edward nor Team Jacob scored any points in my eyes. The entire ordeal seemed rather puerile, I laughed though: this is exactly how people talk about politics or religion. I’m glad these fans are getting their education in how to debate.

What’s ironic is instead over uniting over a common literary experience, fans of the same book are finding reasons to split from one another. Though geeks rip on each other for preferring Kurk to Picard, Obi Wan to Darth Vader, I find the Twilight Teams amusing. If there was ever a novel of my generation it would be ripped to pieces! The text wouldn’t rally us around a Holden Caulfield, as much as make us bicker over whether or not he was sexy enough to make the novel worth reading.

To show how far this team business has gone, I will let Tyra Banks illustrate my point.

Keeping Up Appearances

“Pretty is something you're born with. But beautiful, that's an equal opportunity adjective,"—Anonymous

I recently embarked on a voyage to see just how Eclipse, yet another episode in the Twilight saga, was being cast for the screen. I found the information on Entertainment Weekly’s website if you’d like to see for yourself. What caused this sudden curiosity, you ask?



I was curious because this menagerie of brooding bored bloodsuckers (Bella included) all look alike to me. I don't think the entire cast was chosen because they all look like they could be related.

Because they're all the same kind of good-looking. If you've stocked the cast with such individuals, they blend into each other too easily. There's no contrast, there's no chasm between the vampires themselves, Bella and Jacob as portrayed in the film. All the boys we're greeted with are superlatively attractive, each with the required muscles clothed in shirts of deliberate tightness. Bella herself has a small nose, thin hips, thinly tweezéd eyebrows, and clear skin, and indeed the vampire chicks are similarly built.

A follicle of beauty is surprise, in my opinion that's what takes your breath away upon seeing some unanticipated beautiful object. One of the reasons why this beautiful cast appears so dull to me is there is no surprise. Indeed, how could casting have made such an error? Furthermore, why did makeup decide to vamp their pallid appearances in similar ways?

Because beauty and attractiveness remain a specific, suffocating set of standards. Popular culture has always enforced various ideas of beauty. But, in studying what was "a good idea at the time" one finds popular culture's idea of beauty has always been arbitrary. In the 18th century, a man's calves was considered with the same eye as his biceps. In the medieval times women shot for a bloated, pregnant look. Until the twenties, tans weren't common and pallor was popular, in the 19th century, some women ate arsenic cookies to inhibit circulation and achieve that oh-so etiolated look.

Our standards of beauty haven't been leading up to the cast of Twilight. They're an example of how beauty becomes packaged with other ideas which are irrelevant and make beauty less about beauty but more of a look-alike contest with the phantom of the perfect man or woman that haunts every generation's mirror.

Beauty, in my opinion, is too myriad to approach with the same standards in all its given instances. Carey Grant and Jimmy Dean are too different guys, but they are still both appealing without one being superior to the other. It's too easy to approach "beauty" with a prototype in mind, it's also too limiting.

I would rather see a cast of distinct features. Yet, the Eclipse casting calls for individuals who are "beautiful," "tall," and/or "slender." I have nothing against people having a type their after. However, in putting constraints on what is attractive nothing can come across as attractive! Consider how the looks and the makeup of the Twilight cast have been engineered from a similar set of standards. This doesn't leave the impression of some beautiful, supernatural world upon the viewer, but in many ways a cloying, artificial environment where teenage fantasies are acted out by twenty-somethings in heavy makeup.

Tall, dark and handsome suddenly becomes dull, shallow and mediocre.

Fans and Fiction

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart,”—Wordsworth

In an interview, Stephanie Meyer confessed some fans were disappointed with her conclusion to Bella and Edward’s affair. She recommended that her readers write their own stories if they think they could do better, just to see where it leads. I’ll agree with that advice; I could make a killing if I wrote a vampire novel. I finally realize the formula, take as many insipid memes about love, beauty and sexual tension as I possibly can and force them into 300 plus pages.

While I believe creative writing ought to be encouraged, I think writing Twilight fan-fiction is poor practice. For those not in the know, fan-fiction is a genre writing in which one takes characters or celebrities from various films, books, and other media and places them in situations of one’s own choosing. Making Edward have a homosexual affair with Jacob Black no doubt fulfills somebody, but I would be hesitant to call that fine prose.

I think that fan-fiction is a way for people to amuse themselves. Often, the trend with fan-fiction is manipulate the story only slightly, to continue it a different way or to change the characters ever so slightly. I don’t think this is creativity as much as it is rehashing what’s already been written. Though, considering Meyer’s success in burping up the same old pop-culture chime, it’s obviously a lucrative business.

So much of creative writing is highly personal. You cannot use someone else’s characters, ideas and values in the same way without decimating the quality of your own writing. You cannot discover your own voice unless you decide to encounter a blank page go your own way. In process you will reveal facets of yourself, your life and your unique experience which no one else can stake a claim on, regardless of familiarity.

Powerful prose is like a strip tease. You’ve got to show some skin. You’ve got to dance a little bit before taking off another layer so you can make sure the reader is paying attention. But in the end, you’re on stage naked. Books like Twilight don’t have the raw intensity that such writing can give. It inspires wannabes (or, more properly epigones).

Amusement

As a break from my severe readings of Twilight, I've decided to provide some levity. Does this blog feel any lighter to you...?




"Then I hope you enjoy disappointment,"

Lovey-Dovey

“Who being loved is poor?” — Oscar Wilde

While it might appear to be contrary to every single word within every single post: I am a romantic. However, I am an intelligent romantic. There is more than emotion alone involved in romance, this is what makes a love story. To fall in love; to love; to fall out of love. That alone is an insufficient narrative. The values which we possess, the lives we lead, those sophisticated points of our character, these things at once augmenting, conflicting and coloring our love build the true essence of the experience.

Love for love’s sake alone is vapid.

To concoct a good love story requires quite a bit of talent, craft and patience. You need characters that mesh well together. Who not only have personalities, but personalities that put them at odds, values that make loving someone else a risky business. Making love a life or death situation isn’t romantic, it’s a literary copout. It’s easy. It’s especially easy when one character could live no matter what and the other is so disposed to accidents that she’d sooner trip up a flight of stairs, summersault, and break her neck rather than get an inconvenient paper cut.

My generation has fallen prey to love for love’s sake. Phrases like “love conquers all,” “love is all you need,” “love is blind,” “love is a battlefield” uniquely all predate my generation. In fact, many love phrases do. My theory is, the farther into the future you’re born, the more pop music, trashy novels and poor examples will exist to caseate your notions of love.

The English language as prodigious in expression as it is (from anile to zob) there is really only one expression of fondness. At that, the expression accounts for varying ranges of fondness. That being said, it is easy to choke what love means to the exultant, romantic sense. If it is overused or poorly used in a sentence, its value depreciates. Lofty love becomes as commonplace as other kinds of love. My generation inherits an empty obsession of a sentiment it’s a little too young to fathom.

Thus, I think books like Twilight are a threat to understanding love. They’re books which conjure all the stockroom emotions we’re reminded of over and over again. It feeds a hunger for romantic love, but without being realistic it cannot begin to satisfy or inform. Instead, Twilight it gives a hollow narrative affecting the peak of the human experience but with all the energy, nobility and power of a daytime talk show.

Is it too much to ask for some decent prose?

Is it too much to ask for a writer to break the mold when describing that rare, olympian zenith of the heart?

Has anyone really loved enough to write about it successfully?

Shakespeare Didn't Write "Bella and Edward"

"Just like Romeo and Juliet," — The Reflections
"It's like Romeo and Juliet", — Silk E. Fyne
"It's like Romeo and Juliet," — Pink

Twilight is a popular read. Not a great read. Yet, it’s compared with one of the most well-known texts in English literature, Shakespeare’s very own Romeo and Juliet.

This juxtaposition comes up with frequency among fans. However, even people close to me tried conjuring up reasons and motifs which deeply interrelated Twilight with Romeo and Juliet. Something something forbidden love… Something something two different families…

The comparison strikes me as trite and saddening.

What love story hasn’t been compared to Romeo and Juliet? Wasn’t Titanic? Wuthering Heights? Even our own love stories we’re all too willing to compare to the superlatively popular drama.

While I would regard Romeo and Juliet as being something exquisite, I do not think the comparison is very flattering. In fact, that so many people are given to compare Twilight to, as my theatre friends have called it R&J, shows a severe misunderstanding of both texts. Perhaps, what is needed is a second reading of R&J.

What makes R&J a work of art is its accurate and opulent portrayal of the subject matter, and not the love affair between the title-characters itself. We’re all introduced to the bard’s great love story at too young and hormonal an age to realize its depth. By the time we first see an interpretation of the text, either on stage, screen, VHS or blueray, we’ve seen it parodied and alluded to in countless programs. Before actually approaching the play itself, which is inevitable, its ubiquity in the culture predisposes us to a singly premature impression: it’s a love story.

There is always debate in the academic community on whether or not R&J can be classified in such a romantic way. A closer reading of the text might leave one with the impression of two teenagers chasing the other’s loins with “star-crossed” fervor…

While forces outside of either Romeo’s or Juliet’s control, such as family matters (after all, their families were pitted against each other before they both met) make R&J a tragedy—mercurial adolescent megrims don’t assuage the situation. In fact not focusing on either Romeo’s or Juliet’s severe character flaws makes the text fall flat. While they might love each other, the tragedy is they might not be good for one another.

Romeo “falls” for Juliet on sight and initially, Juliet is mighty recalcitrant to his advances.

ROMEO [To JULIET]: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

ROMEO: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

While quick and coy enough to be read as coquettish, Juliet’s words are, in fact, what we might call a “burn.” Romeo, in referring to Julie as a “shrine” and his lips as “pilgrims” he leaves himself open to an acrid riposte. Juliet follows through countering this allusion to divine love by alluding to religious celibacy. She diffuses his sexual advances by asserting chastity. This use of wit is meant to ruffle Romeo’s feathers, to deter him, to shoo him away.

One of the overlooked details in the story is Romeo goes to this fated party to take his mind off of a girl named Rosaline. After meeting Juliet for a moment, "Now Romeo is beloved and loves again" as the Chorus of Act II says. So quickly do teenage passions change! Perhaps because they're a little premature.

Romeo is no Romeo. His boyish angst and stubbornness are apparent throughout the play. He’s a self-aggrandizer, and Juliet quickly falls for this illusion.

Romeo & Juliet is less a tragedy of a love so-strong that was doomed, but of two people who through a series of premature intrigues wind up dead. It’s a story about human fragility. Foibles of pride and pride in love. The story is not about the exalted emotion of the human experience, but how two people could think the other was perfect for them—and in the end be wrong.

After all, what is so perfect and crystalline about the romantic death? I’d be inclined to argue that love is only for the living…

The comparisons between the bard’s bitter tale and Meyer’s mawkish myth certain resonate. Yet, as with R&J, Twilight really isn’t a love story. It’s a story of two people who may love each other but aren’t healthy for one another’s physical, mental and emotional well-being. The emphasis is definitely put on the feeling Bella feels for Edward, and because of this, the narrative falls rather flat. All of the action, depth, and substance that Romeo and Juliet captivates us with is lost in Twilight because it fails to truly focus on the clash of two characters.

Though, considering my previous posts, it’s not as if there are characters in Twilight who have enough personality to clash with one another.

The Swan Princess IV

There's a moment in the book, perfectly visualized in the film. In this scene Edward Cullen describes to Bella his initial curiosity with her. This is one of the main reasons why he is so fascinated with her. Edward's "vampirism" comes with a unique gift; he can read other people's minds. Even so, he cannot cipher Bella's thoughts. He gets a blank every time he tries. This remains unexplained throughout the novel, or it was so terribly explained I forgot it.

Understandably, we each begin our romances questioning the thoughts of our prospective lovers. However, for the purposes of understanding Edward, his inability to read Bella's mind isn't a sufficient reason to explain his interest.

There is also some slop about how Bella's blood smells pleasant to Edward. Yet, this doesn't strike me as romantic either. Nor do I think it reveals anything about Edward's personality at all.

Bella and Edward only fall in love with each other because the book needed to go somewhere, not because they as characters have any chemistry. The novel itself is an amateur effort to keep a plot going. This isn't good writing but people've eaten it up! People claim their love for Edward. Yet, who is it they love? It isn't quite clear.

I cannot make out who he is from the screams of "bite me Robert!" from Edward's fans. I cannot make out who he is from what I've read. I cannot make out who he is from watching a poor young man act out the amorphous role of Edward Cullen on screen. I cannot make out who he is from the girls that are trampled at Robert Pattinson's autograph signings. I cannot make out who he is from this glittering new ideal women I know hold their men too.

Oh! But it's no use! Who is Edward Cullen?