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?