BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 13: Rosalie V. Wade

When we last left our, uh, Jacob, he was rolling up to the Cullen house ready to fuck up some shit. But Carlisle opens the door and already the kid is diffused. Carlisle tells Jacob it's not the best time, and could they do this later? Carlisle presumably knows, thanks to Edward, exactly what Jacob is coming here to do. So he's saying, "Can you come back and kill all of us later?" which is kind of funny, and a useful thematic sign post. I mean, as much as Breaking Dawn has already gone off the rails, it's about to go even more off the rails, which I sense is just a prelude to something even off-the-railsier, like this metaphorical train we're on jumped the tracks and plowed through a busy city street Inception-style, and now it's about to plunge into the ocean and then launch into outer space. There's no graceful way to transition into something like that, and this is one of the rare occasions where it seems like S. Meyer even tried to a little bit.

To Say This Is Getting Weird Would Indicate It Wasn't Weird Enough Before

All day we've been following the shitstorm that erupted amongst the members of the Ashley Greene-Hating Twitter Community (AGHTC). I accidentally reported earlier that FuckUJashley had turned on TrashTheAshley-- it turns out that was FuckUTrashley. I can't believe I mixed that up; this is like when Woodward and Berstein accidentally published that story about Richard N. Mixon. But then it happened anyway: FUJ and TTA are currently at each other's throats. So what went wrong?

Bottle Up And Explode!

Well now! So this is possibly/probably fake, but I don't really understand what this supposed debunking is about. It'd be more fun to believe that Ashley Greene got drunk (or was fucked up on pain meds) and sent this fucker out. As is her right! I mean, obviously everything is going to get worse now, but I can't say I wouldn't have done something similar. That's supposing this is real, which is (probably?) isn't. More on this as it develops.

Catching Up: While You Were Out Edition

I'll be out of town for a few days visiting family, so feel free to, in my absence, discuss Stephenie Meyer and Native Americans, or Twilight and Mormonism (and Feminism), or Internet Anonymity, or the Oscars, or the most recent chapter of Breaking Dawn. If anybody can tie that shit into one coherent thread, it's y'all.

Consider The Lobster Ravioli

Way back when, I criticized Natalie Wilson and her Twilight class/blog for being a bunch of bland, standard-issue academic/PC complaints based on a surface reading of the text. Which it is. And the way you can tell his: her book is coming out in March. Oh, I kid Natalie Wilson, I kid!

But that doesn't mean her bland, standard-issue, academic/PC essays aren't worth a look from time to time. Today I read "The Colonial Gaze Of Stephenie Meyer and the Resulting Representation of Indigenous Peoples as Monstrous" (whoa). It's a nice base-layer for a lot of the things we have sort of already been discussing. Most academic writing is either too basic or too esoteric; this blog is the latter and her blog is the former (and of course I apply the term "academic" to this blog with a liberal dash of salt. Once my brother made some cookies but he misread the recipe and added 1/4 cup of salt instead of 1/4 teaspoon. Take this blog with a few of those and a White Russian).

Ashley Greene Is Cooking Meth In Her Trailer

Probably.

BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 12: Stare Decisis

Last time, Jacob took over as narrator. Here, it gets interesting. Unfortunately, just as S. Meyer makes a real innovation, we hit several uncomfortable moments in a row. If you missed it, we had kind of a great discussion about the possible impact of S. Meyer's Mormonism and even her attitudes regarding feminism on these sort of moments, which are becoming more and more numerous. These are issues I want to keep exploring. Keep up the good work, everybody.

Chapter 8: Waiting For The Damn Fight To Start Already

Jacob leaves Quil when they hear Sam howl from the woods. Jacob wolf-ifies (the term they use is "phasing," which I have been resisting because it is stupid) and then remarks at how easy it is for him now. That prompts him to recall Bella's wedding, when apparently the stress of realizing that Edward was planning on fucking Bella temporarily disabled the ease of that ability. It confuses and frustrates him even now. I totally get that. You accidentally think about someone you find unattractive having sex, and suddenly you can't, uh, phase. It's a drag! Jacob doubts himself further-- even if he'd been able to get himself straight, would he have gone through with it and put it in? His claw into Edward's face or whatever, I mean.

Jackson Rathbone Nominated For Prestigious Award

Videogum has the full list of Razzie nominees-- the Razzies, you will recall, are the annual anti-Oscars, which honor the worst films and performances of the year (winning one is somewhere below a Dundie and somewhere above a Grammy)-- and surprise, surprise: they are uninspired. And, relevant to our purposes: Eclipse is nominated for nearly every category. Weirdly, so is Vampires Suck, the Twilight parody; the lame joke the Razzies are trying to make about Twilight was already made by the lame parody they have also nominated. That should give you a sense of the Inception-like depths of the general irrelevance of the Razzies. They are something middle schoolers will have a five-minute conversation about at lunch tomorrow (and maybe a 30-second conversation whenever the winners are announced).

One of the few places Eclipse was overlooked is the Worst Supporting Actress category, so good on y'all, Elizabth Reaser, Ashley Greene, Nikki Reed and Anna Kendrick (though the whole cast is nominated for Worst Ensemble-- again with the redundant joke, who writes this stuff). Jackson Rathbone got himself double-nominated, however: his performances in both The Last Airbender and Eclipse (which, fun fact, were released on the same day) were nominated for Worst Supporting Actor. Now, I actually had no problem with Rathbone's performance in Eclipse, and if we're going to single someone out for sucking (because of vampirez) it should REALLY be Peter Facinelli. But my hate for Rathbone as a person feeds like a tributary into my Nile of Hatred for M. Night Shyamalan, so I support his nomination wholeheartedly and wish him the best of luck. This is your year, Jackson. I can feel it.

The Mormon Church, Mitt Romney, Marriott Porn, And Twilight

Following up on the conversation about the blind morality of LDS Church members, the story broke yesterday that the Marriott Hotel chain is phasing out pay-per-view porn. Does it have anything to do with Mitt Romney's 2012 election chances? Do vampires watch porn? These are the questions in my head this morning.

That'll Be The Day

As we well know, the Internet is a hateful place. I personally have been lucky enough to maintain a relatively widespread presence without attracting much invective – even my YouTube comments are pretty civil, for fuck's sake – but my coverage of Jashleygate here and elsewhere has made me pretty familiar with the routine. Routine is the right word, by the way; most of the negativity on the Internet is casual and carried out with little consideration of the act itself or the consequences, if there are any. I've tried to understand what motivates the anonymous online attacker, particularly the teenage (one assumes) Twitter armies who carry out campaigns against Ashley Greene, Joe Jonas, Lily Allen et. al, but maybe there's nothing to it but anonymity itself. Such is (sort of) the supposition of Jeff Pearlman, a writer for Sports Illustrated, who went so far as to track down one of his haters to see what made him tick. Via his CNN Column:

Quite frankly, I wanted to hate him. I wanted to bash him. I wanted to plaster his name, address and personal information atop a column on CNN.com, so that when someone Googled his name for future employment, they'd find the words "Sent me a link to pornographic material."

Then we spoke. And I (dammit) liked him. Without invisibility or the support of his 54 Twitter followers or the superhuman powers supplied by a warm keyboard, Matt was meek and apologetic. "I was just trying to get a rise out of you," he said. "You're a known sports writer, and I thought it was cool. That's all. I never meant for it to reach this point."

First of all, Pearlman strikes me as being a little too sensitive for all of this. Tracking down the person who attacks you on Twitter strikes me as an almost sociopathic gesture; someone in the comments section says it's worse than the original act, and I think I concur. Second of all, the whole article has an “old people writing about their tenuous grasp on the internet” vibe to it. Witness the mention of “54 Twitter followers” above. And who has a warm keyboard, anyway? Plus, there's shit like this:

"It's about consequences, and not suffering from any," says Jacqueline Whitmore, an etiquette expert and founder of etiquetteexpert.com.

LOL what? “Etiquette Expert and founder of etiquetteexpert.com.” Say that five times fast. Thirdly, that you could track down a particular Internet character and discover he is a normal dude IRL is an overwrought narrative already. It's 2011, and we've known Moot from 4Chan is a nice guy for like, years. And fourthly, just because Moot and a few other people are nice guys doesn't mean the Internet is not by and large an unstoppable, Hobbesian nightmare. Most of what Pearlman suggests is demonstrably untrue about most trolls, particularly the mob still yapping at Ashley Greene's heels.

"I don't know how many times I've tracked down someone who's sent a vile or nasty e-mail, tweet or Facebook post," says Richard Sandomir, the New York Times' sports media columnist. "It often results in their being so astonished, even honored, that you'd find them, that they act normally."

[ESPN's Howard] Bryant says, "I reply all the time by saying, 'Thank you for writing, I appreciate your opinion though I don't know why you needed to insult me.' The general response is 'Gee, I didn't think anyone was paying attention.' And they want to be pals with you. It's the kick-the-dog syndrome. People believe no one's listening; they think we're not people, they think there are these giant monoliths controlling thought. Then when they realize someone is listening, they rediscover their manners.

Real (and imagined) interactions with Caitie Uhlmann, Ashley Greene's brother Joe, and several others only ever added fuel to the fire. That someone is listening only makes @FuckUJashley more excitable. Pearlman's conclusion about the enduring humanity of haters is even belied by the comments on the article. “Wow Jeff Pearlman you're a pathetic d0uche,” reads the very first one.

I'd like to believe that all people are generally good, that if you confront anonymous trolls they will shuffle their feet and apologize like Pearlman's did. But I can't imagine that is the case, I can't buy the sunshine this dude is peddling. I'm happy for him, I really am. But I don't think we're any closer to understanding what motivates these people than we ever were.

Highlights From InStyle's Speculative Piece On The Bella/Edward Wedding

Can be found here.

Late To The Party: Mary H.K. Choi and Natasha Vargas-Cooper Discuss New Moon

Mary H.K. Choi and Natasha Vargas-Cooper (The Awl's "official correspondents for lady-related media and culture") discussed New Moon way back in 2009. Their conversation has been bookmarked on my computer for at least six months. I regret the oversight.

Natasha: OK SO WHAT'S BELLA'S SECRET??
Mary: What's the opposite of being a monster?
Natasha: Oh no, she's an angel?????
Mary: Gross! But also possibly?
Natasha: A WIZARD??!!??!!
Mary: That's the gayest shit ever, can you imagine? 'What's up guys? I've turned… INTO A WIZARD.'
Natasha: More like dopest (you Hermione)!!!!!!

YES. You should definitely check out the entire dialog, but for our purposes I noticed two interesting things. First of all, Choi and Vargas-Cooper seem to be coming at Twilight entirely from seeing the movies alone. So their notion of Twilight's sexuality is markedly less demented than ours.

Natasha: What I liked about Edward (and this is going to sound way academic for a sec BUT FEEL ME ON IT) is like this notion that sex is this very dark force NOT JUST FOR VAMPIRES but teenagers and just HUMANS (who are kind of like teenagers), this dark primitive force that makes us all bonkers, it's dangerous and consuming and terrifying and EDWARD GETS THAT. HE BRINGS THE DARKNESS. HE BRINGS THE THREAT OF SOMETHING CLOSE TO RAPE. REALLY SCARY AS PUNCH YOUR SOUL GIVE YOU A BLADDER INFECTION SEX. Bella is naive and doesn't know the soul-bomb she'd be setting off and that she has to absolutely trust him to work against his instincts not to kill her-and like a parable for modern dating kinda?

Clearly the insanity still translates to the relatively shallow films, but in that sanitized, Melissa Rosenberg-filtered way. I wish the above was the interpretation I had, you know? I'd sleep easier at night. It also got me to thinking in gendered terms for the first time in a long time. When I started this blog, I had some idea of bringing a "male perspective" to the Twilight saga. Then I realized that if a "male perspective" even existed, I didn't have it. Moral outrage and sex jokes are gender-blind. But is there anything to gender-specific interpretations?

Natasha: AHHHHH I COULD DIE. [Edward]'s just teenage female desire manifest.
Mary: And that's why these movies will always win. It's like riding roller coasters.
Natasha: YES.
Mary: Because you can't do hard drugs every day
Natasha: Twilight: it's mainlining teen hormones.
Mary: Yes, and why the saga wins is because you're chasing the fucking dragon.

I was never a teenage girl. I don't even really remember being a teenage boy (my memory goes back five years, tops) so this idea of Twilight being "teenage female desire manifest" is interesting and foreign to me. Is my relative lack of estrogen making me miss something? I have never gotten that sense from the comments, but is it? I'm not saying I would take medical steps to rectify this issue, but I was just curious.

Previously:

Part 10: Mama, I'm Swollen

Part 11: Jacob The Obscure

BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 11: Jacob The Obscure

Well, okay, so here's book 2, which is predictably narrated by Jacob. We got a hint of this at the end of Eclipse, and call me crazy, but I'm willing to give him a try. Appropriately, I think the wedding was the beginning of the end of my love affair with Bella-as-narrator. In the comments last time, Xocolatl mentioned Bella's double betrayal of our trust: she didn't want to be married until she just did, she didn't want to have a baby until she just did. On both occasions, she just "sees the light" or some bullshit, there isn't even a reasonable explanation. The "little nudger" was just the last straw. (The little nudger, by the way. Dear has the best joke Re: Little Nudger so far.)

In high school I loved the novel The River Why, which is a meditation on various Western philosophies including but not limited to fly fishing. The narrator goes off and lives in the wilderness and tries to reconcile the different worldviews of his parents as well as the worldviews of various people he meets. He ends up encountering a skinny-dipping manic pixie dream girl in the river behind his cabin, and we're off to the races. (Every young man's dream is to run into a naked MPDG on the side of a river one day, though preferably not a dead one, Bridge To Terebithia-style.) It is, among other things, an environmentalist novel that was originally published by the Sierra Club. Unfortunately, it takes a weird Right turn toward the end, when the narrator finds god more literally than Bella has (so far). It's jarring and unexpected, and every time I mentally revisit the book it drops a little more in my estimation because of that turn. It wraps up with a Vietnam-bashing coda though, so maybe it's a wash.

I like to tell myself that what bothers me about The River Why and Bella's recent transformation is that it feels disingenuous in a narrative sense and not that it offends my personal sensibilities. I can't be sure about that, of course. But the point is, for whatever reason, I welcome a break from Bella.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I hate me some Jacob too. But whatever, it can't get worse. Plus I'm assuming we'll come back to Bella sooner or later (though it would be kind of audacious if we didn't, if that was the last glimpse of her "subconscious mind" we got and we only experienced her in the third person from now on. Especially if she becomes a vampire-- it would keep the minds and inner-lives of vampires unknowable. But I doubt that will happen).

Epigraph

Another epigraph! On page 142! You crazy for this one, Steph.

And yet, to say the truth,

reason and love keep little company together nowadays.

Well, we all knew Shakespeare was going to show up here sooner or later. What's amusing to me is I have frequently invoked A Midsummer Night's Dream as a counterpoint to Twilight in general and Eclipse specifically, given that Midsummer also involves love triangles and love spells which are not unlike imprinting. Of course, where Midsummer is simultaneously making clever points about love and superstition, Twilight never makes any clever points about anything. Why continue to invite the unflattering comparison?

Especially since this is about as bland a sentiment as one could find in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Throw a dart at the folio and you're liable to find a more insightful passage. It also doesn't tell us anything new about Jacob or what he'll be getting into; "irrational love" is practically his middle name. This epigraph does nothing for me.

Preface

What's weird here is that there's sort of another epigraph: "Life sucks, and then you die" in the middle of the page in italics. Why so many epigraphs, Jacob? Is it to indicate that Jacob isn't as good at book-writin' as Bella? Whatever, the point is we are mostly spared a flash-forward to nothing. (What was that first preface supposed to be, by the way? A flash-forward to that dream where Bella became fiercely-pro life? Can you really flash-forward to a dream, outside of Inception?) "Yeah, I should be so lucky," Jacob says, and that's the whole preface. RIMSHOT.

"Did someone say 'rimjob'?"-Alice Cullen

ANOTHER RIMSHOT.

Chapter 8: Waiting For The Damn Fight To Start Already

We're changing up just the right amount here; Avon Barksdale would approve. We've got this longer, weirder chapter title, we've got Jacob essentially blowing off the preface, and we didn't switch fonts or do anything stupid like that. So far so okay.

We start at Jacob's house, he's arguing with Paul over a bag of Doritos. Paul is in his house because, we learn pretty quickly, Jacob's sister Rachel has recently returned from college and Paul has imprinted on her. OH SNAP. The wolves are always bringing the interpersonal drama. So now every time Jacob switches to wolf form he's bombarded with images of one of his friends banging his sister in all kinds of high-powered, lupine ways (one assumes, anyway). Whereas there are basically no drawbacks to being a vampire (no matter what anyone says), the drawbacks of wolf-dom are almost too numerous to name. You get to keep your soul, so the fuck what? At these prices, you can have my soul!

They argue about nothing for about three seconds before Paul crushes the Doritos on purpose and Jacob pretends to give up and then punches Paul in the face and breaks his nose. Paul calls him an idiot and Jacob takes the bag of Doritos away. I'm feeling a little... deflated here. The sex in the last few chapters was underwhelming but now we're just watching two assholes bicker over Doritos? (Also: the wolfpack seems like the group of guys you see at a bar who are all shouting at the top of their voices and aggressively slapping each other on the back and shit, freaking everybody out and ruining the whole vibe.)

"Watching" is the operative word here, because we're not really in Jacob's head (yet). Okay, sure, Bella had a 800-or-so-page head start on Jacob in terms of establishing her voice, and it's not as though Jacob's narration sounds like Bella; it doesn't. There are notably shorter sentences (though only in bursts, like every fifth paragraph S. Meyer remembers she's writing in the voice of a new character) and significant influx of "stupid guy" dialect. (Jacob talks about "when Rachel'd come home" and talks about being made "real sympathetic" to the troubles of his fellow wolves. Later he says "bada bing, bada boom"!) The problem is that despite S. Meyer's cosmetic efforts, we're still seeing Jacob more or less in the third person. It doesn't sound like Bella, it sounds like no one.

I stood there for a second, and then I stalked off to my room, muttering about alien abductions.

Why aren't we hearing specifically what Jacob is muttering? Isn't he our narrator? Is he not even listening to himself? So these first few pages were apparently supposed to show us how miserable Jacob is, but all of this problems seem incredibly petty. When he wonders if "a bullet through [his] temple" would actually kill him or just leave "a really big mess" to clean up, it feels crass and unearned. Your friend is dating your sister and you didn't get the girl you like. That's it! On the other hand, you're functionally immortal and can heal from wounds almost instantly. Try to see the nice forest instead of those two shitty trees, dude.

(Now I'm thinking of that horrible Wolverine movie, where if you can heal instantly and you catch a bullet in the head it just erases your memory. Maybe Jacob should actually give it a shot, PUN SO INTENDED.)

Jacob spends a while in his room imagining all the different ways he and the rest of Forks will be informed of Bella's "death," since he assumes she won't be returning to Forks ever again. He's bothered by the fact that he won't even know if Bella is successfully vamped or not. "Maybe he'd smashed her like a bag of chips in his drive to get some," he says, which is a callback to Paul crushing the Doritos bag from like 200 words ago. Uh-oh, is that bag of Doritos going to be like, the central motif of this section?

Discuss the symbolic significance of Jacob's Doritos bag.

Sorry, I just want to remember that for when I publish my Twilight Reader's Guide. (CALL ME, PUBLISHERS!) Jacob cycles through violent fantasies--is he jerking off or something?-- the Cullen house burning down, the Cullens subbing in charred bodies for their own and making a clean getaway. He weirdly connects it with his mother's death; she died in a car crash, which is another scenario he imagines. He assumes the funeral will be closed-casket. "My mom's coffin had been nailed shut..." he says. Is S. Meyer just trying to get us to empathize right now or is it going to turn out that Jacob's mom is a vampire? I'm not sure if that would be good or not.

Anyway, Jacob moves from fantasizing about Bella's death to fantasizing about hunting down and killing the Cullens, making use of his extra long life to really do a job of it. "If you had forever, you could check out every single piece of straw in the haystack, one by one, to see if it was the needle." Interesting metaphor, except the Cullens will be moving around. So any number of of pieces of straw you once checked could become the needle at any time. Maybe this is just more of S. Meyer establishing Jacob is stupid? Also: this is really creepy! Note to S. Meyer: hearing an obsessive psychopath plot murders is not amusing!

"We could go tonight," Jacob says. "We could kill every one of them that we could find." SHUT UP JACOB. I will not have you hurting Alice. Or Jasper. The rest of them are fair game, actually. But Sam Uley has apparently forbid that until they know for sure that Bella has been bitten. Then it's "game on." So okay, I guess we know what's next.

Apparently wolves have super-sensitive hearing, so there's kind of a nice break here where Jacob describes everything he can hear in the mile or so radius from his house (This is when a sense of him as a narrator starts to develop). He talks about the last bend in the road where you can finally see the beach-- "The La Push cops liked to hang out right around there. Tourists never noticed the reduced speed limit sign on the other side of the road." The speed limit sign is on the OTHER SIDE OF THE ROAD? What kind of crazy signage laws do they have on the Reservation?

When he hears Paul laughing in the other room, he heads down to the beach, annoyed. If you're like me, you are sitting here going, Hey, S. Meyer hasn't done anything outrageous in like, a dozen pages. Well, wait no more, because who should Jacob run into but Quil and his imprint victim Claire, who is THREE FUCKING YEARS OLD. What follows is, unbelievably, a scene that is supposed to play as cute. Jacob talks to Quil while Claire prattles on in an adowabow baby voice. We just learned a few sentences ago that there are, in fact, police officers on the Reservation. So that answers one question, but raises another: WHY THE FUCK AREN'T THEY DOING THEIR JOBS?

Quil and Claire are playing by the water-- Quil's holding her upside down by the ankle. He lets her down and she runs to the approaching Jacob. Good instinct, Claire! Keep running! "Where's your mama?" Jacob asks. Good question, Jake!

"Gone, gone, gone," Claire sang, "Cwaire pway wid Qwil aaawl day. Cwaire nebber gowin home."

Ugh. So her mom's a deadbeat, which explains a lot. Secondly, how WIDICKUWUS is that child-speak up there? It goes on, and on, and on, and on. So does the disconcerting "speaking in the third-person" thing (this chapter has layers upon layers of third-person problems). The reasons for calling child protective services just get more and more NUMAWUS. Jacob watches Quil dote on Claire, calling him an "abused nanny." He says it's "puke-inducing." RIGHT ON. But he's talking about the "peace and certainty" radiating from Quil. OH.

And I couldn't even make fun of him for it-- I envied him too much.

REALLY!? I mean, WEELY!? Jacob and Quil have a conversation, and Quil's attention is divided because Claire is asking him for a rock on the ground. To bash him in the head and kill him. Good instinct again, Claire! Jacob asks Quil why he doesn't date some girls in the meantime, Quil asks Jacob why he doesn't date girls. They express more or less the same sentiment that they don't see other girls anymore, they don't "see their faces." But don't you guys at least see their tits and their asses and stuff?

We're supposed to take a minute and sigh with these two heartsick dudes, I guess. Is that what we're supposed to do? If you were reading this book and barely paying attention, like, if you had something in your eye and you were blinking a lot, I feel like you would read it the way S. Meyer intended. Otherwise it's pretty hard not to see it as evil, basically. Because Quil is not a cute abused nanny, he's a near adult male who is waiting for a toddler to get old enough that he can stick his dick in her without going to jail. And Jacob is gradually channeling his sexual frustration into murderous rage.

And then to top it all off, there's a nice homophobic back and forth. When Quil says he doesn't see girls anymore, Jacob alludes to Quil's earlier confession that he wore a tiara at Claire's third birthday party (an image so dark and wrought with psychosexual despair I don't even want to think about it) and says Claire might have a different kind of competition to worry about.

Quil laughed and made kissing noises at me. "You available this Friday, Jacob?"

No homo! Hahahahahaha I hate these people.

Skateland Trailer Re-Surfaces, Joe Jonas's Dog Doesn't Die

MTV has released the new trailer for Skateland, which is starting to seem less like a period piece and more like a movie that was actually filmed three decades ago. It's more or less the same trailer we've seen before, sans New Order, but check it out here.

Meanwhile, Skateland star and proud new puppy owner Ashley Greene is under fire again among Jonas fans, this time for bragging about the aforementioned puppy while Joe Jonas's dog was sick. First of all, didn't AG give JJ that fucking dog? She couldn't have picked one that wasn't a lemon? But seriously, that's a very weird thing to get mad about! And yet it was the first Twitter salvo to break through Ashley Greene's steely resolve. First she RT'd a rather insolent sounding @reply that took her to task for not mentioning Winston (the sick dog, I know, this is more complicated than it needs to be, because it doesn't even need to be), then threw up her hands and gave the monsters what they wanted. It's sad to see AG defeated like this. And then the dog didn't even die. Hardly seems worth it.

Final Scene Of Breaking Dawn Has Been Filmed

Movies are almost never filmed chronologically, which is not super difficult to understand. At least, you wouldn't think it was hard to understand. Anyway, apparently the last scene of Breaking Dawn pt. 2 (AKA 2 Breaking 2 Dawn) has been filmed. Peter Facinelli spoke to MTV, and said it was a sort of somber occasion. That's because all of the characters die, right? That must be what he means. Please tell me that is what he means.

Vanity Fair Is Unfair To Kristen Stewart('s Face)

It will be interesting to see how many months in a row Twilight stars show up on magazine covers. How the hell else are you going to keep the momentum going until November or whenever the hell Breaking Dawn pt. 1 comes out? Remember: BOTH Deathly Hallows installments will have been released in the space between Eclipse and BD1. Sure, Deathly Hallows pt. 1 failed to break all of Eclipse's box-office records, but Deathly Hallows pt. 2 is going to blow that shit to pieces. And Twilight's going to have to get up off the mat fast. Motherfuckers in the Summit Entertainment marketing department are chained to their desks right now, trying to figure out a way to keep Twilight names and faces in the news for 10 more god damn months. Not an enviable position, you know? For now, we have Ashley Greene on the cover of Cosmopolitan in January, and Kristen Stewart on Vogue for February. Whereas Greene's cover/photo spread was flattering (if I wasn't a gentlemen I'd say something like sideboobilicious), Stewart's is... something else.

I think K Stew is great and all but GAH, GET THIS AWAY FROM ME

The article itself is kind of nothing new. Hey this girl from Twilight is weird and talented! She smokes and swears! People you respect more than her say you should respect her more! A few of the sentences are really "upscale magazine"-tastic, though. Check the lede:

Kristen Stewart’s body can tell a million stories. Kinetic, she jiggles, feints, and darts as she talks, hanging back, looking off to the side, signaling resistance, a combative intelligence.

Uh-huh. It's like there's nothing you can do about writing like this, you just have to stand there and let it happen to you. If you are interested in doing that, you can read the article here. If you are more interested in seeing Kristen Stewart bear more than a passing resemblance to Cleatus The Slack-Jawed Yokel, the slideshow of photographs (by Mario Testino) is here.

We'll meet back here next month when Taylor Lautner graces the cover of GQ, or perhaps when Jackson Rathbone is featured on the cover of Basement Guitar Douchebag Monthly. Or when Ashley Greene shows up in the pages of the Atlantic again, but that one's a long shot.

Related:
Rock and Sock and Robot: Popular Magazines pt. 1

Vampire Film School

The original Twilight film is constantly rising in my estimation, if not because of quality than because of cultural import, like Pinkerton or some shit. Anyway, I've just posted an appreciation of a particular sequence from Catherine Hardwicke's film at MOBFD.

BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 10: Mama, I'm Swollen

First of all: y'all KILLED IT in the comments last time. I laughed AND I learned. But we kind of got away from the events of the chapter, what with our discussion of S. Meyer's FAQ section on her website and whether or not it made her an asshole (I'm paraphrasing). So as we finish up chapter seven and book one of Breaking Dawn, I'll give you a straighter forward question. Bella getting pregnant: good or bad? I have made my distaste with this turn of events rather clear, and am about to continue to do so. But what do you think?

So at the end of chapter seven, Bella comes to the conclusion that having her baby is a no brainer. Edward has other ideas. The language is pretty heavily coded--this is some white supremacist literature-level subliminal shit. We start talking abortion for real here, and that is all well and good; choosing to have a baby or not is a tough decision, and the moral implications thereof ought to be explored in YA fiction. Too bad S. Meyer makes Bella's decision easier for her every step of the way. I'll be pointing out these deck-stacking moments as we go along.

Previous entries can now be found in the sidebar. Does it help to have a directory post too? Does it matter either way? I'm not entirely sure how people go about reading this blog.

Chapter 7 (cont'd): Unexpected

Edward's sitting on the floor of the bathroom, "frozen" with shock. That Bella continues to use adjectives like "icy" to describe his demeanor makes this all a little confusing. Is he actually encrusted with ice? In earlier Twilight books, I wouldn't have felt the need to ask. And yet now, I do. All bets are off, science-wise. Literally anything could happen. Bella considers other possibilities for her sudden baby bump: a strange disease that mimics the symptoms of pregnancy? Could be!

Then she has an odd and lengthy flashback to her night researching vampires online. Maybe I should have paid more attention to that scene instead of obsessing over the phrase "my favorite search engine"--this is the second time Bella has flashed back to it! Bella again goes over her pet theory that vampire myths were used back in the day to explain away infant mortality and infidelity--men could tell their wives that the beautiful women they were caught with were succubi, that (it is implied) the sex was involuntary. "Of course," Bella says, "with what I knew about Tanya and her sisters, I suspected that some of those excuses had been nothing but fact." Whoa now, Bella. I get that being single for hundreds of years would kind of be a drag, but we're calling Tanya a rapist now? Also: there should be a "people in glass houses" kind of saying for this situation. Like, "married pregnant ladies shouldn't pick on spinsters."

Bella starts thinking about Rosalie and Esme. If vampires could have children, "Rosalie would have found a way by now." Bella is on a roll betraying her gender today, huh? But our narrator is a human, and Edward is a male vampire. It seems like that distinction shouldn't matter, but Bella offers a convoluted explanation (more or less on her first try! A thing like that). Vampires are totally unchanging, and women need to be changing all the time to have a baby. "The constant change of a monthly cycle for one thing, and then the bigger changes needed to accomodate a growing child." Men, on the other hand, "pretty much stayed the same from puberty to death." Huh. Is that good enough for you all? Bella surmises that vampire males have always been able to father children, but no human female has ever made it as far as she has. This baby is like no other!

WAYS S. MEYER STACKS THE DECK OF HER OWN ABORTION PARABLE #1:

The baby they are going to have is the first of its kind, a miracle baby on the order of the immaculate conception, or at least Sarah finally having Isaac after that whole Ishmael thing.

And then the baby kicks. WHAT. Edward's phone starts ringing and they both stand there in shocked silence while it rings and rings. Bella starts crying silent tears she barely notices and doesn't understand. Taken alone, this little moment is a great, cinematic one. I can hear the phone ringing, you know? (Though S. Meyer blows it a few lines down by actually writing "Ring! Ring! Ring!" Ugh.) Bill Condon will really impress me if, in the film version of this scene, Edward has some kind of wacky ringtone. Like the chorus of "California Gurls" playing on loop. It would be so much darker, for me at least. "I was having a moment," Bella says. "Probably the biggest of my life." Well, at the very least this is one of the better moments of this book. That's ignoring every connotation around it, of course.

Alice is calling, of course, but Bella has to dig Edward's phone out of his pocket because he's still motionless. (What a little bitch he is, huh?) Bella asks for Carlisle, and Alice asks what's going on.

"I just saw--"

"What did you see?"

There was a silence. "Here's Carlisle," she finally said.

It felt like ice water had been injected into my veins. If Alice had seen a vision of me with a green-eyed, angel-faced child in my arms, she would have answered me, wouldn't she?

Sort of hilariously, just thinking about NOT getting a green-eyed angel-faced child makes Bella picture GETTING such a creature, which causes her to recover from her dread and feel better, all in the space of time it takes for Carlisle to start talking. That's some baby-crazy brain you've got (all of a sudden) there, Bella! She gives Carlisle the news that she's with child, or with demon spawn, or whatever. She starts going over the details with the good doctor, and when she mentions feeling something move inside her Edward finally wakes up and asks for the phone. The men talk for a minute, and when Edward hangs up this happens:

"What did Carlisle say?" I asked impatiently.

Edward answered in a lifeless voice. "He thinks you're pregnant."

The words sent a warm shiver down my spine. The little nudger fluttered inside me.

WAYS S. MEYER STACKS THE DECK OF HER OWN ABORTION PARABLE #2:

Bella immediately loves being pregnant. I get that mothers share an instant connection with their child when they see it for the first time, but she has no misgivings about this whatsoever from the outset. Later she talks about how she'd never wanted to be a mother, had never really considered it. But now that she's going to be one, she could not be more thrilled. Of course, her baby is already moving around inside her, which brings us to...

WAYS S. MEYER STACKS THE DECK OF HER OWN ABORTION PARABLE #3:

Her baby is already fully formed! The argument that life begins at conception is given a huge rhetorical baseball bat when your baby is already kicking before you even know you're having it. S. Meyer wants to get in on the abortion debate but she drives past the real battlefield. OF COURSE Bella is not going to want to abort a baby that seems to already be communicating with her (she starts talking to it on the next page and it responds with the "nudging"). It is obviously, non-negotiably "a life." You don't have to do the cognitive work of rationalizing the life or nonlife of a blastocyst if Bella's kid was basically talking by the time Edward rolled off of her!

Edward starts making a flurry of phone calls, scheduling a flight home and shouting in Portuguese at people. (It will be interesting to see if all of this polyglot stuff makes it into the film. Robert Pattinson just learned to do an American accident, now you're throwing this at him?) Bella follows him around wondering what could possibly be wrong.

Surprising, absolutely. Astonishing, even. But wrong?

It's bizarre that Bella has completely discounted the notion that this thing growing rapidly inside of her could be anything but a green-eyed loving angel baby. IT'S KICKING ALREADY DUDE. It's only ever so slightly hinted that she is in denial about that possibility, that she could be having Rosemary's baby, basically--the overwhelming thrust of this passage is: Bella's protective, motherly instinct is kicking in. It's like S. Meyer herself can't bear the possibility that it would be anything but a darling little creature, even if the hole she's written herself into doesn't plausibly permit that. (In any other book, just a slight indication of that denial would be fine. But in Twilight, slight literary touches come off as accidental. It it isn't a broad stroke, it's hard to believe S. Meyer is responsible for it.) Bella looks out the window and feels the baby "nudge" again. "I don't want to go either," she tells it. Yikes.

In typical S. Meyer fashion, Bella stops to consider how strange it is that she loves this baby so instantly. "From that first little touch, the whole world had shifted. Where before there was just one thing I could not live without, now there were two." It's a good thing that "first little touch" came about ten minutes after you realized you were pregnant, and not like, say, after TWENTY WEEKS. She says she wants this child "like I wanted air to breathe." Then the important part [emphasis added]:

Not a choice--a necessity.

Edward comes into the kitchen and finds Bella crying by the window. He asks if she is in pain and tells her, tellingly, that they will "take care of this." The language used to indicate termination of the pregnancy is universally cold and unfeeling, the language used with respect to the baby is, in a word, miraculous. Edward goes on to say they will "get that thing out" before it can hurt Bella. The man has a point, but according to Bella (and S. Meyer) he doesn't.

Did this explain Alice's strange silence on the phone? Is that what she'd seen? Edward and Carlisle killing that pale, perfect child before he could live?

I don't know, I kind of feel like Alice would have been laughing if that's what she'd seen. Also, how crazy is it that Bella is suddenly the morally righteous one with respect to EDWARD and CARLISLE of all people? She jumped pretty far across the political spectrum in a single bound. "I would not allow it," she says firmly, meaning an abortion. Then the cleaning crew shows up, and there is a long, weird scene where Kaure (the suspicious maid) comes in, figures out that Bella is pregnant (when Bella brings a hand to her "womb," in another telling word choice) almost instantly, and then gets into a multilingual fight with Edward (he seems to be able to speak her native tribal language, and explains to her that he is upset about the devil baby too). It builds to the woman simply walking up to Bella, putting her hand on her stomach, and saying "morte."

I knew enough Spanish for that one.

Bella earlier indicated (vaguely) that by knowing a little Spanish, she can suss out the meaning of a few Portuguese words, but it reads more like she just doesn't know the difference. Also, most of S. Meyer's readers probably don't know enough to conclude what "morte" means, right? I'm personally at a loss for the part of speech it's supposed to be--is "morte" a command? Is the woman telling the baby to die, or indicating that it will die, or indicating that Bella will die? Or, most likely: is S. Meyer just trying to do a little "foreign lady says something ominous that sounds sorta like death" foreshadowing?

Edward brings their bags to the boat, leaving his cell phone on the counter. Bella makes a desperate play: she picks up the phone and calls Rosalie. "You have to help me," she says. Hey, why didn't she call Alice?"

"Um, I've got a solution for you and it rhymes with 'shmashmortion.'"-Alice Cullen

Oh right, that's why.

Skateland Posters Do not Necessarily Indicate That Skateland Will Ever Be Released

Ashley Greene's own Midnight Sun, which is itself S. Meyer's own Cardenio, is the perpetually unreleased Skateland. Trailers pop up every now and then, and there was one set to that New Order song that kind of made it look great, but it has since disappeared and release details remain sketchy. @247Greene tells me there is a tentative March 25 limited release, but take that with a couple of those big-ass ice-melting grains of salt. Throw the salt over your left shoulder, cross your fingers, turn around three times and spit. Then knock on some wood. Meanwhile, there are some posters now. They're decent posters! [Click to enlarge]

Dig the tagline on the right, though. "Discover... yourself." No. No thanks, I won't do that. The one on the left (the one with the Hollister font) is the newer poster, so hopefully they've dropped it. Desperate times call for desperate taglines, though. Whatever gets your boat a release date.

First Look At The XXX-plicit Sex Scene From Breaking Dawn!

JKJKJKJKJKJK, this isn't it. This is a crazy person's sketch/photoshop abortion. But it's still sexier than the airbrushed-as-fuck, Vaseline-smeared still frame that blew up the Internet last night after it showed up on Entertainment Tonight. I hope you guys are comfortable with how much is being shown in the frame (hands and faces if you don't feel like following the link), because that's pretty much all you are going to get.

I know that in the past, the Twilight films have managed to be sexier, less objectionable, and altogether more self-aware than the books. But that train is going to end with Breaking Dawn. You know how when Harry Potter 7 was being made into a movie and we were all like, "how are they going to pull this off?" and they managed to pull it off? Lightning doesn't strike twice. Especially not when you expect lightning to strike something as ridiculous as Breaking Dawn. I don't want to rain on everyone's masturbation parade, but this is not and will not be hot. Sorry.

The Twilight Twitterati Are Kind Of Blowing My Mind Right Now

I never know how to feel about the Twilight-themed twitter accounts I follow. On the one hand, they maintain expansive websites and wildly comprehensive Twitter accounts with thousands of followers. On the other hand, they seem to love Twilight unabashedly. And I feel like if you are a reasonable person you should at least be a little abashed. People like @247Greene are down for promoting say, a piece of fan fiction in which Alice is cartoonishly slutty, but he or she is usually not up for teasing Ashley Greene herself even a little bit. I never know exactly where any of them fall on the spectrum (there is a spectrum, and we're on one of the far ends of it. The people on the other end can be found in Twilight In Forks.)

Anyway, today these guys are really fucking my shit up. There was the above tweet about a letter from Jack Kerouac to Marlon Brando (which I have read, and maybe even linked to in the past). Talk about a cool thing to be bringing to the attention of Twilight fans, eh? Earlier, Twilight Poison was one of the first people to make a reasonable, measured comment about Ted Williams (which by the way, oy gevalt):

Faced with stuff like this, it's hard not to feel like most Twilight fans could be normal and reasonable people. But of course, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Maybe too much.

BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt 9: Knocked Up!

Well, sure. Of course. I resisted the easy argument that Twilight is abstinence porn for a long time. It has a tangled relationship with sexuality, sure. Edward himself gets off on abstinence, and this is not painted as unsexy (though it isn't really painted as sexy, either), sure. S. Meyer seems almost pathologically unable to use the word "sex," unless it is in a conversation about maintaining one's virginity, sure. Of course. But still, it felt too easy.

AND YET. And yet Edward and Bella finally had sex, and it was thoroughly unremarkable. The furniture destruction was such a feeble attempt at being kinky that S. Meyer herself didn't seem to commit to it fully. Bella's enthusiasm for sex has a serious "protest too much" element to it (because S. Meyer is either unwilling or unable to depict sexuality in a convincing manner and seems to know it). Bella's having fertility dreams with weird pro-life overtones now. She's eating eggs by the dozen, feeling dizzy in the mornings now.

Twilight emphatically is abstinence porn. Or rather, it was. Now that our heroes have done the deed it needs to be something else. An honest, if paranormal, portrait of the early sexual experiences of a young couple? YEAH RIGHT. It's about teen pregnancy vis-a-vis abortion now, get used to it.

(And that tonal shift is why Breaking Dawn feels off compared to the other books. Or such is my working theory so far.)

Chapter 7: Unexpected

Bella has the same dream where she's trying to protect a baby from abortion doctors--er--the Volturi. Yet in this dream, something is different. There's a flash, a burst of light (hmm), and everything changes. Bella suddenly wants the Volturi to come at her, she's ready, she's fierce. She's a pro-life crusader! She's got the power of Jesus on her side! Or vampires, or whatever. I'm still trying to figure out how these symbols are supposed to shake out. I'm guessing vampires=Jesus, right?

She wakes up sweaty, because her personal air-conditioner is out hunting. They don't also have a real air conditioner Edward could have turned on when he left? He's left a note telling Bella to go back to sleep, but instead she gets up and starts making fried chicken at one in the morning. I'm not saying I haven't done basically the same thing, but still, that's weird. She starts eating it right out of the pan, but is immediately disgusted and nauseous and throws it all away. She falls asleep on the couch, and when Edward wakes her in the morning she feels a sharp pain in her stomach. Huh.

Edward apologizes about the lack of AC (ha!), but Bella shoves her way our of his arms and runs to the bathroom to throw up. She blames it on the chicken, which she says must have been rancid. Gee. How about that.

Bella says she feels fine, and Edward makes her breakfast. They watch the news, and Bella gets bored (of course) and turns to kiss Edward. Stomach pain again. She runs to the kitchen sink to vomit. Hmm. Very interesting.

Bella goes to her suitcase to look for some Pepto-Bismol, but before she can find it she gets distracted by "something else that Alice had packed for me." She picks up a "small blue box" and holds it thoughtfully. My first thought was condoms, like "oh, maybe we should have used some of these." But then she starts doing what we all realize is period math. (It takes another page before Bella confirms they are tampons.) When Edward checks on her and she shows him her box (you are welcome) he asks if she's trying to "pass this illness off as PMS?" Nice, Edward. She tells him she's late. Oh man, isn't that feeling the fucking worst, Edward?

Let's a take a moment to all groan in unison, yes? OYYYYYYY VEYYYYYYYYYYY, you know? I mean, on some level, I knew this was going to happen. But on almost all other levels, I was thinking, there is no fucking way something so stupid will happen.

S. Meyer's sexual politics only SEEMED impossibly reductive until now. S. Meyer's only SEEMED to be influencing her readers in a morally reprehensible way until now. This book only SEEMED like the worst book ever. Until now. There's a flash, a burst of light, and everything has changed. For the worse. Or maybe for THE WORST.

My fears about Book 1's curious epigraph seem to have been confirmed. I'm now almost certain S. Meyer flipped open a copy of Bartlett's and picked the first "difficult"-seeming line about childhood she could find. That is how S. Meyer's brain works. Never mind that Edna St. Vincent Millay's quote seems to criticize the basic premise of Twilight-- I don't think S. Meyer was reading that far into it. Like the eggs and the baby dreams, she was trying to foreshadow a baby with the subtlety of basically a jackhammer.

It occurs to Bella that the pregnancy symptoms she has been feeling are coming on a little too quickly for someone who has only been sexually active for a week or two. She examines her stomach in a mirror, and sees a "small but defined bump." Were it that this monster baby were not also a reflection of S. Meyer's sexual politics (the sexual politics of a gym teacher in 1954) because otherwise it could be a morbid good time. And maybe it still will be. "There was no way I could be pregnant," Bella says. "The only person I'd ever had sex with was a vampire, for crying out loud."

Good point. S. Meyer has never been very specific with the science of vampirification. They still breathe, but their hearts don't work. They don't seem to go to bathroom, and the female reproductive organs apparently don't make babies, but I guess guys can still ejaculate? (This deal just gets better and better!) Now, this is sort of crazy to suggest, but if Edward has never had sex and never masturbated-- which for some reason, I would believe-- if Edward has never ejaculated EVER before, I guess it's possible that there is still some sperm kicking around in him from 1917 or whatever. Maybe that's why the first time was so difficult for him? Dude was backed up like whoa. If you'd been waiting to get off for a century you'd bite a pillow too! In that light, and there is no way to put this delicately: Bella's lucky that when he came it didn't blow the top of her head off, you know?

S. Meyer's vagueness really paid off here; it's actually more ridiculous that someone would get pregnant the first time they had sex than it is that a vampire would have operational semen.

"I told him to pull out!"-Alice Cullen

Let's stop here, because I feel like you all will have something to say about this. Plus, you know, it gets worse.

Kenneth Tong Was Faking It, Is Somehow Now Even More Of A Fuckwad

We (and Ashley Greene) have been had! Apparently. That or Kenneth Tong decided it was time to walk back this crazy shit he's been saying! He is now claiming his advocacy for "managed anorexia" was all part of a bet he made with a friend. Okay, sure. "The discussion centered around whether it was possible, to go from nowhere to be a globally recognized figure within a week harnessing the power of the internet and specifically Twitter, which I have always maintained is a better medium than national TV," Tong says now. "My friend said it wasn't possible. I said it was. To prove him wrong, I decided as a hoax to promote via Twitter something that was universally appalling, I chose managed anorexia. I would like to make it clear, I chose the subject as a hoax as I knew it'd be appalling to men and women."

Someone do me a favor: take a picture of Kenneth "confused about commas" Tong and show him to ten strangers. Is he a globally recognized figure then? And just because S#*t My Dad Says is on CBS doesn't mean Twitter is more powerful than TV, buddy. More people watched the last Two And A Half Men re-run than have even heard of Twitter. Why am I even bothering parsing this fucking statement?

I mean, the fundamental problem is, what did he prove again? That someone can become famous just by making fun of fat kids for a few days? Well done, Mr. Tong. You were right that saying a horrible thing would make people mad. Good work.

And wasn't this guy on Big Brother or something? I'm not going to Google him, I wouldn't want to give him the satisfaction. The point is, he isn't building nothing out of something. Assholes in basements have been saying mean things on the Internet for years without hitting it big. This was just a fluke. Let us never speak of this (or him) again.

Bad Ideas Jeans

David Duchovny says he would go gay for either Robert Pattinson or Taylor Lautner. That guy is really good at being kind of a creep! The writers of Californication are scrambling to work that into the plot for the next season, by the way. The ratings would be so high, they'd make the M.A.S.H finale look like the [insert cult show everyone loves now but didn't watch at the time, probably Joss Whedon was involved] finale!

Jessica Szohr, the new face of Sobe's naked paint ads, apparently asked Ashley Greene for her advice. What did Greene tell her? "You can take naps while they paint you." Hardest working woman in showbiz, right there. Meanwhile, a new round of Sobe ads have allowed a few people to discover the old ones for the first time. Have fun with those, guys.

"Illegal immigrants to face new barriers to health insurance" is not the kind of headline your normally expect to see in your Twilight-related Google Alerts, but the Salt Lake Tribune has a writer named Kristen Stewart. Hey, Mormons live in Utah! Do you think that is how S. Meyer got the idea to cast Kristen Stewart? Does that even make sense? Anyway, if you click the other Stewart's byline, you'll see that she's basically on the "brown people" beat for the SLT. I'm not saying people from Utah are racist, but if the cowboy boot fits or whatever. Sorry, I'm still a little pissed about S. Meyer describing someone as "coffee-skinned."

Previously: A Perfect Day For Bananafish

BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN pt. 8: A Perfect Day For Bananafish

Try doing an image search for Isle Esme sometime. There's really nothing like it. Previously: The Honeymooners.

Chapter 6: Distractions

Edward makes use of the sights and sounds of Isle Esme to distract Bella from the sights and sounds of sex. The film version of Twilight and this book were released in the same year (2008) which probably explains S. Meyer's sudden urge to write basically an island vacation montage: Edward and Bella go snorkeling (Edward doesn't have to wear a snorkel, ha ha, he's a vampire!), they watch the sunset over the water, they swim with porpoises and play with parrots. All in the space of a paragraph! (We have this paragraph to thank for "Jumping Rob," by the way. Thank you, this paragraph!) The accountants at Summit read this part and they were like, "that bitch." To Bella it's apparent that he is trying to keep her too tired to have sex-- she uses the phrase "the sex thing" which is a (weird) step in the right direction, if you are still keeping track of S. Meyer's willingness to use the word "sex" in a sexual context, which I am. Bella mentions trying to coax Edward into staying indoors and watching movies (good move, Bella, I played it that way all the time), "but he would lure me out of the house with words like coral reefs and submerged caves and sea turtles."

Those italics are S. Meyer's own, I'm not sure why they are there. Have you noticed that the Internet and blogging and Twitter have sort of dealt a death blow to italics? I still use them for emphasis (and titles, because Blogger does not have an underline button-- though for what it's worth I tend to only italicize Twilight when referring specifically to the first book. I indicate Twilight as a general phenomenon by absence of italics. I'm sure you found all that very interesting) because I'm old school, but the general style these days is CAPITAL LETTERS, which has made italics sort of a man without a country. I'm all for capital letters (and I use them to indicate emphasis mixed with exasperation, wow I'm being SO ENTERTAINING today), but that basically leaves italics for when you have to emphasize the word "I." If this blog had footnotes all of this would be in a footnote, but it doesn't. If I had my way they would, but again, Blogger. And the necessity of incorporating exemplary sentences into this paragraph. But anyway, my point is, since when is Bella this outdoorsy explorer who wants to kick it with sea turtles?

It's hard to know when S. Meyer's double (and even single) entendres are intentional and when they aren't. "We were going, going, going all day," Bella says, referring to everything but "the sex thing," sadly. Every night after their adventuring, Bella tries to "press [her] case"-- by "case" I assume she means "body up against Edward"-- but falls asleep before she can get too far. "I tried reasoning, pleading, and grouching, all to no avail," Bella says. Well, there's your problem. You should be trying licking, stroking, dry humping before you give up like that. She has nightmares, and GET READY FOR THOSE, but that's all we hear for now.

Bella resorts eventually to wearing the lingerie Alice packed for her. "I wondered if she'd seen a vision of why I would want such things," Bella says, "and then shuddered, embarrassed by the thought." Good point, Bella! Jeez, how did Alice contain her hysterical laughter around Bella during the whole wedding?

She starts with the most modest stuff, realizing that "revealing more of my skin would be the opposite of helpful." Another good point, Bella! When you want to turn Edward on, you can't think "is this what a normal man would like?" You have to think "would Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Taskhiri approve?" (I mean, maybe it's because she doesn't want him to see the bruises, but you have to admit that Edward would prefer a turtleneck over a tube top.) She works herself up to a "black, lacy, and embarrassing" number that makes Edward's eyes "pop open wide" (whether it's with attraction or disapproval is uncertain). She proposes they make a deal. Edward refuses, and Bella says "you haven't even heard what I'm offering." A blow job? A strip-tease? A strip-tease AND a blowjob? No. She offers to go to college for a semester as a human. Edward gets angry, as expected. I'd be bummed too if that was all she was offering, but for a different reason.

It is a little weird that Bella is suddenly willing to move the (un)deadline back like that; her justification is that she likes having sex so much, she wants to keep her human vagina around for a while. But don't vampires have like, heightened senses and everything? Isn't she only upgrading her software, so to speak? Edward bit a bunch of pillows when he had sex, after all. (If I'd done that metaphor for Edward I would have said hardware. I put more work into this than you'd think. That's what she said.) Edward starts trying to sing Bella to sleep, and let's not even get into that, and Bella says she's been having nightmares. He presses her for specifics, but she's reluctant to tell him "about the child." She's been dreaming about a human baby. It's not sitting on a pile of dead bodies anymore, but the Volturi are still coming after it. GET READY NOW:

I simply had to protect the unknown child. There was no other option. At the same time, I knew that I would fail.

Welcome back, nebulous abortion symbolism! S. Meyer has this horrible way of seeming to come down on the religious side of issues while representing the worst stereotypes about them. Edward is a condescending and sexist theologian, but he gets his way and protects Bella's virtue. Bella is irrationally pro-life, and in fact, that she's irrational about it is the ONLY DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC of her pro-life-ness, but still, you can see where this is going. Of course you can. Bella falls asleep, and after the first of several very suggestive line breaks, wakes up from what we realize eventually is a sex dream.

Outstanding. Well done, Internet!

She's disoriented, as usual. S. Meyer is getting worse at doing these "disoriented" scenes, though. "The dream had been so real," Bella says, and then a few lines later realizes it was "just a dream." WE/YOU KNOW. But anyway, when Bella's dream ends mid-fuck, she starts crying. Edward panics, and starts asking her what is wrong. "We were on the beach..." Bella says. [EDIT: There was a period missing there earlier, sort of like how there will be for Bella soon!] (Dream) Sex on the (dream) beach? I'm impressed, (dream) Bella! Edward susses out what the dream was about, and his opposition is suddenly very weak. I know that makes a certain amount of intuitive sense-- a girl starts crying and the guy just gives in-- but Dr. Noam Sobel has recently conducted a study that reveals that women's tears actually reduce a man's sex drive. Via Jezebel:

According to Pam Belluck the Times [sic], researchers in this amusing-sounding study recruited women who were "easy criers," then harvested their tears during screenings of sad movies. As a control, they also poured saline solution down the women's faces. Then they bottled both, and instructed men to sniff them. Those who sniffed real tears were less aroused by the sexy movie 9 1/2 Weeks than those who only got a whiff of saline.

But then again, Edward does not act like a normal dude, and it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense that he would get off on misery. He surrenders "with a groan" and it is once again (only) implied that they have sex. There's another line break and we cut to the next morning. S. Meyer is messing with us, trying to get us hot with text formatting. People confess to reading Twilight over and over again-- do you think by now some of them have a Pavlovian sort of reaction to double-spacing?

Next morning, Edward is still in a weird mood, but Bella inspects herself and is free of new bruises. Edward tells her she slept for twelve hours, and whenever she tries to move she gets dizzy. Okay. Again, they survey the damage. Bella's lingerie is torn to shreds. Nice work, Edward. Also: large chunks of wood have been gouged from the headboard. S. Meyer continues with the nasty habit of calling attention to her own writing problems:

"Hmm." I frowned. "You'd think I would have heard that."

"You seem to be extraordinarily unobservant when your attention is otherwise involved. It really strains credulity, but you have to wonder if anyone is engaged with this book at this point anyway, right?" Edward said.

Edward indicates he might be willing to screw Bella again. It's ridiculous that this feels like a victory, but it does. Edward himself calls attention to this problem, telling Bella she shouldn't feel guilty for seducing her "all-too-willing husband." Very charitable for Edward to describe himself as that, eh? Bella goes and cooks herself breakfast, and GET READY NOW: Edward calls attention to how many eggs she has been eating this week. Oy gevalt.

They start talking about going to Dartmouth in the fall, which isn't going to happen, but let's pretend for a second it is. Edward remarks that sex was the key all along, he could have "saved myself a lot of arguments." Sure, if you weren't a virtue-obsessed religious bigot. But anyway, should we be mad at Bella for selling out like this? We've been waiting for this fucking vamping almost as long as we've been waiting for the fucking! Now as soon as we get one we lose the other? I call bullshit.

Edward tells her he already owns a house near Dartmouth. "Real estate is a good investment," he says. Not with the property taxes in New Hampshire, buddy! But anyway I wonder if there is a way we can blame the sub-prime crisis on Edward? The cleaning crew shows up, because of course, Carlisle's deserted island no one has been to for years requires a staff, and Bella looks for a movie to watch while Edward speaks in Portuguese to the help. "The two Brazillians looked incredibly short and dark next to him," Bella says. My god, woman, can you go thirty seconds without picking on the visual appearance of minorities? What the FUCK?

The "coffee-skinned" (thanks, S. Meyer) woman in the crew seems to have an aversion to Bella, and Edward explains that she more or less suspects that Edward is a vampire. Well, it's nice that Carlisle keeps them employed on his PRIVATE ISLAND. First Rule of Vampire Club: Keep a low profile. So only buy ONE ISLAND and only employ ONE SUSPICIOUS PORTUGUESE WOMAN. Edward and Bella start making out, and Edward kisses Bella's neck, and the woman (Kaure) walks in and gasps. Busted. S. Meyer doesn't wait very long to use her punchlines, huh?

"She was thinking what I was think she was thinking, wasn't she?" I muttered.

He laughed at my convoluted sentence.

HA! I know that feeling too well, Edward. Anyway, for what it is worth, we finally have something close to a sexy scene undiluted by S. Meyer's creepiness. After the crew leaves, Edward suggests they go swimming with the dolphins to burn off the calories from lunch. Bella says she has other ideas for burning calories, and Edward carries her into the bedroom. Line break. Just a very sexy line break. No bruises, no weird post-sex guilt, nothing. But then you remember the dreams, and the eggs, and you get it. That should put more of a damper on your sex drive than a vial of tears ever could.

Ashley Greene And The Case Of The Tweaked Cosmo Cover

When I think about Cosmopolitan I think about lists like 68 New Moves That Will Blow His Mind and quizzes like How Gay Is Your Guy? (In this imaginary quiz, you'd probably answer questions about girly things your boyfriend does-- "Is he afraid of spiders?"-- and you'd tabulate a percentage of gayness at the end.) It doesn't exactly compute that Cosmo would be trying to put on chaste airs, but we live in strange times.

The January issue of Cosmopolitan, which features Ashley Greene on the cover, has come under fire after Jezebel discovered that the version sent to advertisers features significantly less sexual language on the cover. And yet the amount of cleavage remains the same! That Cosmo would run away from "60 Sex Tips" is especially hilarious ("the mag's been providing sex advice and orgasm pointers to eager middle-schoolers for decades," Anna North writes), but the scrubbing of the "orgasm virgins" story is notable in that it is another in a long string of signs of a cultural aversion to the female orgasm. See also Blue Valentine getting stuck briefly with an NC-17 rating. It's hard to know what to make of all of this, but it definitely seems to be relevant to Twilight.

Ashley Greene Takes Controversial Stand Against Some Asshole

I don't know who Kenneth Tong is, exactly. I guess he was on a reality show, which is your first red flag right there. But anyway, this asshole is on Twitter and elsewhere preaching "managed anorexia" and telling girls to "skip dinner" so they can get a boyfriend. Nice. I could mention that managed anorexia is an oxymoron, but it's easier just to say that Kenneth Tong is a fucking moron, and a fuckwad, and a bag of dicks.

Actress and avowed fan of eating things (that is not a gay joke, I swear! She just mentions food a lot, which is actually a really good thing to do. Whenever Ashley Greene talks about eating lots of pizza I think about the scene in Little Miss Sunshine when Miss California or whoever tells Abigail Breslin about her favorite flavors of ice cream. Awwwww) Ashley Greene has taken to Twitter, along with many others, to voice her discontent with Tong and his dickish ways.

I don't totally understand the need for extended-length tweets on this matter. "Fuck Kenneth Tong Forever" is way under 140 characters. But Greene goes on to say people should "eat well," and "work with what ya got," and that people who are a size zero should be that way naturally, "not because of deprivation and starvation." Indeed. She doesn't @ Kenneth Tong on her tweets, but it is clear that is who she is talking about (Greene has a curious style of writing in which she attaches her @replies to the end of her messages, which goes against the Twitter grain).

Anyway, it is interesting seeing stars who seem obsessive about their careers wade into activism. Opposition to anorexia and/or some asshole is not particularly controversial, I know, but still. What's the motivation? Speaking out about Kenneth Tong is clearly the right thing to do, but there are plenty of other obvious issues Greene has not sounded off on. I'm not suggesting anything cynical about these tweets, this is something Ashley Greene seems to care a lot about. But total silence w/r/t most political issues seems to be the watchword for most careerist stars. Where Ashley Greene acts and why is significant in the nightmare Disney-Jonas Universe. There was also that curious moment a few weeks ago when Greene RT'd a several-day-old CNN link about DADT repeal for reasons passing understanding. What was that about?

What makes Ashley Greene interesting to write about is that she, like S. Meyer, is bad at keeping up appearances. She's trying to be Miley Cyrus, but she's even worse at it than Miley Cyrus is, you know?

CATCHING UP: State Of The Unions Edition

Cast photo for an 80's teen show: Saved By The Bella!

We'll move past Edward & Bella's post-coital scene soon, but I have to be honest: I've kind of been obsessing about it. I mean, what was that? I feel like I didn't do the weirdness of it justice. Just in case, I published a kind of half-crazy meditation on that scene and some other, general stuff over at MOBFD.

Meanwhile, Kristen Stewart won "Favorite Movie Actress" at the People's Choice Awards the other night, so uh, good for her? I mean, have you seen the categories they have at that fucker? "Favorite TV Crime Fighter"? "Favorite TV Doctor"? "Favorite TV Family"? (The Simpsons won that last one, as they probably have for literally the last 100 years.) I suspect that award is not going to get pride of place at Kristen Stewart's apartment, which is on the side table next to her bong. Actually, she probably will put her PCA next to her piece (drug punz!) because it resembles an enormous glass dildo. I have a lot of questions for the People's Choice Awards, including "What separates 'Favorite TV Obsession' from 'Favorite TV Guilty Pleasure'?" but now is not the time for that.

Six Thoughts On A Six-Part Documentary About Eclipse

Blogging Breaking Dawn: The Honeymooners (alt. title: Forget-Me-Now)

Writing Breaking Dawn: Edward Asks His Family About Sex (alt. title: The Aristocrats)

What it is time for, however, is taking stock of Breaking Dawn so far. What are your thoughts? This is like the State Of The Union or something. I mean, we know what the state of Bella and Edward's Union is: unsatisfying, dread-filled. But I'm talking about a larger sense. I am enjoying this book probably more than I did Eclipse, but that's partly in a "what the fuck will happen next" sort of way. I mean, we could go anywhere from here. We've been building up to sex for three books. Now that that's done, the sky is literally the limit, because I don't see outer space factoring in. But I guess you never know. S. Meyer pulls out all the stops to get herself out of a jam, and now she's in kind of a big narrative jam!

I'll leave you with this: