Up My Own Ass

Before we get to this I have to issue a disclaimer/warning. The following article will feature spoilers of major plot points in the Twilight Series and will do so with a level of contempt previously unheard of outside of the average review for a Michael Bay film. If you don’t want to have things spoiled or you cannot bare criticism on your beloved series, particularly in reference to Douchemaster Supreme Edward, then you should really find something more to your liking such as a current issue of Tiger Beat or anything found in the first third of your local Hot Topic. You have been warned.

So obviously I am going to talk about Twilight and, in the interest of full disclosure, it will be the first of at least two. Depending on how badly New Moon sucks when it is released in a couple of months, there may be even more than that. I don’t want to beat an undead horse here but when something sucks as spectacularly as Twilight there is a lot to say.

Before going forward I have to attempt to disarm potential criticism from twidiots who may very well ignore the warning above and lose their pre and post adolescent minds in the sort of righteous anger only found in zealots of bizarre and kooky religions and fans of fiction so bad it is the punishment for murder in some countries. To this end I reveal that I have read all of the Twilight books and seen the first movie. I intend to see the remaining movies because I enjoy watching massive failure almost more than unmitigated success. I went in hoping that the book would make the likable elements of the movie rise up from the swirling cauldron of failsauce in which it was spinning and that those friends of mine who swear by its brilliance were not completely batshit insane. Remarkably, I found the opposite. But that is getting ahead of myself. The point is that I have read these festering piles of goat shit, okay? So don’t try to pull this ‘you just don’t know because you haven’t read the books.’ I have and I did so with the hope that there was real quality there. There was none.

During this process I asked people what it was that appealed to them so much about such a creatively bankrupt and hopelessly banal series when there was any number of better choices. The vampire genre is not found wanting for content after all and there is much better material out there. The overwhelming answer I received from such queries is that I couldn’t possibly understand the appeal because I am not now, nor have I ever been, a teenage girl in high school who maybe wasn’t the prettiest or most popular but desperately wanted the hot, popular dude and if I had I would be able to understand the appeal of a fantasy in which the dumbest and clumsiest girl on god’s green earth manages to pull an emotionally vacant and drop dead gorgeous popular guy. Fair enough, I have never been that girl. But what I have been is THE GUY WHO FUCKING WANTS TO GO OUT WITH THAT GIRL BUT CAN’T BECAUSE SHE IS SO HUNG UP ON SIR DICKSALOT THAT SHE DOESN’T NOTICE ME AND IF SHE DID WOULDN’T CARE BECAUSE I AM NOT HIM. Or the college equivalent which is ‘Dated That Guy Eventually and He Was Such a Fucking Asshole That She is Now Completely Fucked for Life.’ So thanks for the heads up but I understand that plenty.

What I found myself really wondering, based on the above, is what makes Edward Cullen so special that bitches in their late 30s and 40s are salivating over him like he was the last steak in a world full of spam. And honestly, I have still yet to get any kind of meaningful answer that doesn’t involve how gorgeous he is. This, by the way, leaves little hope for those of us who don’t have pasty white skin which is as hard as granite and features so perfect it looks like one of the great masters carved them out of it. It might sound insecure to sweat something like this about a character who fails completely to exist in the real world and it would be if so many girls and women weren’t constantly making status updates about how they wished they could find their Edward. In the case of the middle aged women I am sure that makes their husbands feel good. Actually, now that I think about it, fuck them because they are probably wishing that they were railing Megan Fox, unrepentant bitch be damned.

In all seriousness, I think this is a problem. Normally I would blow it off as a fad the way that I did with Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh as something that people will eventually grow out of but when you have teen girls running Robert Pattinson down to show him how they have gouged their throats with their finger nails so they would bleed for him or the poor guy gets hit by a car trying to escape the crazy throngs, I think the problem is more severe. And in terms of some of the older ladies, they are going to be on Medi-care before they grow out of it.

But why is this idealized hero worship a problem? If Edward were a good guy then there would probably be none. There isn’t much wrong with being into a character or having fantasies of being whisked away by one of them. I mean hell, Johnny Depp’s box-office receipts pretty much depend on it. Unless you talk about the characters and actors like they are your best buddies and actually think they would be jealous if, say, they saw you get off a plane with another celebrity or if you think that one of your favorite baseball players has your picture up in his locker and who’s divorce ended because his wife saw you in his top 8 and wouldn’t believe he’s never met you, then there is really no problem with this kind of fantasy. If there were, 100% of men would be locked up in some kind of J Harvey Kellogg compound de-toxing right now.

As an aside, I think that some women think that men’s general aversion to Twilight in general and Edward in particular is that they are really jealous of the attention they aren’t getting because of it. I am sure there is an element of that as the average male’s ego has the tensile strength of a half-eaten length of Red Rope Licorice but I think it has more to do with it not being Football, an affectation I don’t understand any more than I do this love affair with a character so devoid of any representable personality and all the tact and subtly of a claw hammer.

And that brings us to the problem. Edward is a twat of the highest order and the ‘true love’ the two characters share is based on nothing more than chemical imperative. While he does improve somewhat throughout the course of the books, when we first see Edward he is busy being a dick to Bella, the clumsy and plain girl from Phoenix who, despite being as smart as a deformed sheep with its brain in its ass, thinks that she is so much better than everyone else, who Edward really wants to eat. It is explained later that he is a dick because he wants her to stay away from him so he doesn’t eat her. He then proceeds to stalk her mercilessly until she decides she is in love with him and forces herself into his life. We end up with a push pull dynamic where he is an asshole who does everything he can to push her away while she keeps pushing forward insisting that there is a soft center underneath all that cold rock that makes up his flawless pecks and abs. He saves her from dying about every other Thursday and sneaks in her room to watch her sleep at night. Perfectly healthy, perfectly normal.

The glorification of co-dependency here is truly staggering. In New Moon we see a burgeoning relationship between Bella and Jacob which actually seems to develop on the strength of a real mutual affection. Sure, it starts with Bella wanting to do dangerous shit so that the Edward voice in her head will tell her not to, but eventually it grows into real friendship and a sort of love. Not True Love though. No, no Bella makes it clear that she and Edward have the truest of true love. I guess that is why he left her when a homicidal vampire was stalking her because he drips with more pussy juice than a $2 hooker on a Friday night.

New Moon really opens up an even bigger can of worms. In the first book we have Edward abusing his way into her heart, basically creating a demand by limiting the supply and then putting her even more solidly in harm’s way by acting like a possessive tool in front of psychopathic tracker James when if he would have just played it cool everything would have been hunky dory. And that was bad enough, that their ‘love’ was based completely on biological chemical attraction designed to make Bella easier to eat, but then we get to the next book where it gets really sick.

Everything seems to be peaches at first until Bella cuts herself and Edward’s ‘brother-in-law’ Jasper loses his shit and tries to eat the fuck out of Bella. Okay, I will grant you that this sort of thing is a big hurdle. I don’t have brothers or sisters but if one of them tried to eat my girlfriend I would see it as a stumbling block. Especially if I was the one who wanted to eat her. I mean no one wants some other asshole doing ‘your own personal brand of heroin.’ Anyway, instead of just child-proofing the house so that Bella doesn’t cut herself, Edward bounces. He gives Bella the line about it is too dangerous and she shouldn’t be around him and look at all the times he put her in danger. He legs it and she passes out in the forest. Thank god the local werewolves are kindly Native American good guys and not true badass werewolves or skin walkers and find her out there. For someone so concerned about her safety he sure did leave her a sitting duck for the vindictive bitch out for revenge.

So he bounces and she goes crazy. She is wandering around hearing his voice in her head all the time and doing self destructive shit all the while being hunted by James’s mate Victoria. So she hangs out with Jacob a bunch until he becomes cold and distant and tells her to stay away. I am not sure what Stephanie Meyer’s husband thinks about all this but maybe he is too busy telling her to stay the fuck away from him to even notice.

It turns out that Jacob is now a werewolf and after a fair amount of fighting and arguing, Bella manages to worm her way into his life and the pack protects her from the vampire coming after her. That is all great but Bella still can’t quite commit to loving Jacob because she and Edward are the truest of true loves and all, this despite calling Jacob her werewolf while she waits with the other werewolf wife for the men folk to come home. So here we have just what I was talking about earlier. A generally nice guy stuck in the friend zone because of her asshole ex-boyfriend. And true to form, right when it seems like all that time spent is finally panning out? Emobaby Edward decides to kill himself in Italy so Bella has to run off to stop him, thus putting everyone in even more danger and setting up the final conflict two books later. Holy fucking shit.

Then when Edward comes back, as we see in Eclipse,  he doesn’t want Bella seeing Jacob anymore even though they are just friends. He goes so far as to disconnect shit in her truck to keep her from driving out to the Reservation to see Jacob. She cuts class and goes out anyway and they get into a lot of fights about it until he begrudgingly allows her to see her friend.

Honestly I don’t know what I need to say about this. Their relationship is so abusive and dysfunctional it is horrifying. That it is a template for the perfect relationship in the hearts and minds of a large portion of our nation’s women, from adolescence through middle age is the best thing to happen to assholes since the date-rape drug. For the rest of the guys who aren’t sociopaths, well we are shit out of luck.

Sure there is a precedent for such douche bags in classic literature from Mr. Darcy to Heathcliff (not the cartoon cat guys) but those characters followed the sort of anti-hero tradition typified by Lord Byron such that they became known as the Byronic Hero. These dark brooding characters do tend to have a good heart in the end but also come with a laundry list of character defects that include cynicism, arrogance, self-destructive behavior, criminal tendencies, moodiness or bi-polar tendencies…the list goes on. They make for interesting and compelling characters but are not the sort of person you really want to date.

Still, despite the constant conflict and mood swings, women still manage to become enraptured by these types of guys ensuring the security of psychotherapists and internet porn for years to come. Nice guys have been screaming that girls only seem to want assholes for years and things like Twilight just lend further support for the theory.

I’ve spent many lonely, masturbation fueled nights wondering why women dig on this kind of guy and I think it is mostly for two reasons. One is the Beauty and the Beast model where they think that if they just stick out his abuse and nastiness, eventually he will turn into a wonderful prince and they will live happily ever after. This goes hand in hand with the ‘love will conquer all’ fallacy in which women believe that if they just love enough everything will be okay. I can think of a few things love can’t conquer. Off the top of my head?  Fists. Baseball bats. Steel toed work boots. Bullets. Far too many women die every year from trying to love their husband or boyfriend out of beating the shit out of them. There is a place for idealism and wistful romanticism regarding love but the emergency room is not it.

I think maybe the second reason women are attracted to this kind of character is that there is a certain excitement and mystery to these sorts of dudes. The same things that make the Byronic Hero compelling to read make them attractive to be around, at least for awhile. The problem is that, unlike the literary heroes, these sorts of guys don’t typically have a heart of gold. If I had a nickel for every time I have had to answer the phone at 3am to listen to one of my friends tell me about how the dark, brooding, emotionally unavailable guy who says he will never love her who I warned her about to begin with is a huge dick who doesn’t love her and is completely unavailable I would have enough money to get the psychiatric care I need for the frustration of seeing them go back to the guy or finding another guy just like him. If there is one plus to nice, boring guys it is stability. Of course that isn’t nearly as exciting as trying to date Patrick Bateman.

The unfortunate by-product of all this is that over the course of his life, the typically nice guy begins to collect enough rejection, disappointment and insecurity that eventually he becomes a brooding, emotionally unavailable asshole just ready to ruin the life of a woman out looking for adventure. I suppose that is okay because deep down, they have a heart of gold right?

I guess the thing that bothers me the most about the worship of Edward is how unwavering this worship of him is when the abuse and misogyny is right out there in the open. He is possessive, controlling and downright abusive to Bella and refuses to let her think for herself. Given what she does when she thinks for herself I can’t say that I really blame him but there is such a tone of anti-feminism through these books that I find myself very concerned about the girls reading these things and then entering the dating pool. Sure this literary archetype has existed for a very long time but the penetration of Twilight in both the consciousness and the marketplace as well as its disturbing acceptance as a romantic template make it that much more dangerous. I am not the sort of reactionary who thinks that every little thing in media is going to lead to bad behavior and cataclysmic social consequences but in this case I am really quite alarmed.

My comments here have both indicted Twilight of causing a problem and being symptomatic of that problem and I don’t really see that as a contradiction. Rather than pointing out how unhealthy it is to fall in love with an abusive person, Twilight glorifies it. Edward has a heart of gold after all and once he finally gets his way he is a big sweetie. I would wonder what would have happened had Bella been a stronger person, unwilling to give up her entire life for him and serve her free will up on a platter but that would be a waste of time given that predators don’t pick the strong ones.