Escape Characters

In Which Josh Reads Twilight

You may have heard. You have likely already made fun of me for it. I read the first book of the Twilight series.

Spoiler alert, by the way.

Why would I do such a thing? Well... the reasons are not exactly manifold or compelling.

First, I consider it good practice to read the books people give to me. Good practice because I usually never want to have the conversation where somebody asks me if I read the book they gave me, and I say no. As a corollary: I've mostly stopped asking people if they read the books I gave them. Only seems fair. And as a result of this general rule, I've been slowly, ever so slowly, working my way through stacks of books people have given me. The order in which I read them, I guess, is determined by the likelihood the gift-giver will ask me if their books changed my life.

Second, I find myself doing a bad thing sometimes. I find myself disliking certain phenomena because I don't want to be associated with said phenomena's fan-boys and fan-girls. However, if I'm to be a more normal, well-rounded individual, I should seek to understand what makes something interesting, and then try to understand how those things relate to the crazies surrounding it. There's value in that. I'll cite the dark alley scenario: You're walking home, when suddenly you're trapped in a dark alley by a group of members of the 13-50 year-old female demographic, and they look like they mean business. What do you do? One of them pulls a switchblade from her jacket and dramatically clicks it open, menacingly. You can try to talk them down, but what do you say? You're a few feet from being cut to ribbons.

One of my hopes in reading this godawful book is knowing enough about Edward Cullen to distract and confuse said assailants long enough to make my escape. And somewhat more seriously: to gain some insight into what makes this enjoyable, if not voraciously consumed by a wide readership, while at the same time reviled (sometimes even by the people who like them the most). That sort of thing might be valuable if I ever want to write something more substantial than the occasional blog entry.

And so that's why I was reading this book. And now I have read the book. And it did not thrill me. And it did not change my life. And it did not manage to chisel statues of Edward Cullen and Bella Swan into my pantheon of good novel characters. Aside from the things that I had pretty severe problems with in the novel, the book was pretty forgettable. It may be simply for the reason that I'm the completely wrong person to be reading this. I have an almost autism-level indifference to emotions and relationships in stories, which leaves me with nothing if there aren't compelling things going on in the plot itself. I tend to stick with science fiction, fantasy, and modern fiction, whose compositions usually tend to be around great ideas or worlds that the author wanted to write into a story. Being a "dark romance," I understood that the story was going to be all about characters, and all about their "dark" romance. For me, though, romance in books, or film, and maybe in real life, doesn't really register well, for the reason that the basic tenet of romance is that people are in love. And when characters are in love, authors tend to have the characters stop making sense. And that's usually when I stop paying attention and start thinking about space ships.

For example, I read Wuthering Heights in high school. It details a classic, gothic story about a Byronic hero, his troubled past, and his unrequited love. I remember absolutely nothing about it. Well, no, that's not true. I remember they were in England. And I remember that in the 1992 film version, it seemed like all they hired Ralph Fiennes to do was run as fast as he could across the English moors. Yet, it's supposed to be a great romance story, with complex interweavings of people's lives. I remembered wanting it to be interesting, but it wasn't. It was Heathcliff being emo for a couple of hundred pages, and then Catherine dies, and Heathcliff is a jerk to everyone. Nobody ever seemed to behave like a normal human being, or even a normal Victorian human being. The thing I could actually value in the novel was the interesting descriptions, and the occasionally entertaining way the Heathcliff told people off. The lesson I took away was that love makes people behave irrationally, and then like assholes.

Written 150+ years later, Stephanie Meyer is still not quite capturing my attention with the romance genre. In marketing-speak, it wasn't "sticky," in that the ideas presented failed to resonate and pervade one's memory. But, I did see them as they floated on past: love eternal; a forbidden, dangerous relationship; a precocious but shy hero thrust into a conflict between supernatural forces against which they are powerless save for their own wit and cunning. These things together, or even by themselves, make for compelling story elements (see: "The Fountain," "Romeo and Juliet"). However, they were coupled with the two elements that usually destroy any semblance of believability in a fictional narrative: limitless mind-reading, and future-sight / time travel. In the wrong hands, these things are an absolute disaster, for the reason that at every point in the story, the reader has to ask themselves "Why couldn't they just read their thoughts?" or "Why didn't they see that in the future?" Edward's mind-reading capability is supposedly limited by distance, but seemingly only when it's convenient to the plot (If you can read minds, then why would it ever be a challenge to fight somebody else, even if they're a vampire? You can predict their actions). Alice, the fortune-telling vampire, is shown to be fallible in her ability to read the future because she has the "wrong perspective," but again she only seems to make said mistakes when it's necessary to drive the plot (If you saw the evil vampires coming anywhere near Forks, why would you say absolutely nothing while your vampire family plays a thunderous game of baseball?).

From an authoring perspective, these might be convenient to drive plot or provide a cool-factor to characters, but they inherently undermine the validity of the narrative. If a story has a hero, that hero needs a foil. And that foil, whatever, whomever it may be, must necessarily negate or reverse whatever advantages the hero has, lest the hero's struggle be meaningless. You might be saying, "This is a romance, this is no place for heroes." In this context, when I say "hero," I mean protagonist, as in the character about which the story pivots, and witnesses a character change and/or a sacrifice to overcome their antagonist. And, if I had to name the protagonist for this book, it would have to be Edward, because Bella is barely a character, even if she's effectively the narrator.

Things I know about Bella Swan, after reading this book:

Yes, she's developed a little further than that, I'll give some credit on the highlights: she's intelligent, slightly introverted, has the physical dexterity of a kumquat, and has an irresistible smell that vampires describe as "floral." It may be that Stephanie Meyer wanted Bella to be the "every girl," in which other teen and adult females would see their own faults, dreams, and fantasies. We see Bella being annoyed with advances from the boys in her classes, and further annoyed by her gossiping friends, but we never get a feel for what Bella was before she got to Forks, before she was obsessed with Edward, before any point which would describe how or why she belonged in the story. I instead started seeing her as the disembodied voice of the world's most boring cardboard cutout.

Trying to put myself in the shoes of a purposefully bland high school girl in her late teens, and then watching as she tries to form a relationship with a deadly predator that professes that one of his predatory weapons is stunning physical beauty... if it was me, this seems like a bad decision. And this is made worse by the fact that she admits that it's a bad decision, and that it's dangerous, etc. People make bad decisions because they think they are right, not because they think they are wrong. Simply stating that Bella loves Edward, and then predicating the entirety of the character's subsequent decision-making based on that assumption, does not sit well with me. If Bella is supposed to be smart, why doesn't she ever ask herself why she is attracted to Edward? Questioning her own motives may have been interesting: we could have maybe seen some character reflection, or at least, maybe validated some of the questions the readers had about why Bella was doing the things she was doing. Instead, we're left with repeated descriptions of Edwards perfect smile, perfect chest, perfect face, perfect eyes, perfect... hands, at one point? The conclusion I'm left with is lust, which, brings up other weird issues.

Issues like age. I'm expected to believe that Edward, who claims to have died some 90+ years ago, is interested in an underage teen. Yeah, yeah, love conquers all. So do statutory rape charges. More seriously, though: Edward's own intentions are severely suspect, whether they're honest or not. He's supposed to have fallen in love with Bella the moment they saw each other, but that's not really the case. Edward was actually blood-starved, and Bella made the mistake of sitting next to him and smelling delicious. Edward tries to impress Bella later by saying how hard it was to resist drinking Bella's blood right there in biology class, however, we're never really shown this. We never see Edward at the edge, fighting his very being just to keep his family's secret, or really ever exhibit the extreme danger he seems to claim any time he gets close to Bella. Instead, Stephanie Meyer spends a paragraph explaining how hair falls over Bella's face, and Edward just tells us how hard it is being an emo vampire. "Show, don't tell," is probably my biggest criticism for this book.

Because I was being forced to believe everything the characters were saying in the dialogue, I ended up starting my own (and arguably more interesting) plot. I started reading Edward as an extremely clever predator, slowly seducing his prey, involving himself in his prey's life, with the ultimate goal of drinking her blood and having her disappear under the pretense that she had ran away after a lover's quarrel. Maybe in this story, Bella would have slowly grown wise, despite her being at the mercy of Edward's seductive power, and found a way to exploit his arrogance. Maybe Bella would get the drop on him? Or maybe Edward would realize that in seducing Bella, he had actually begun to feel something for her? But then the evil vampires showed up. And I was pretty disappointed. Instead, we've got this bizarre restraint at various points in the story that makes no sense given the character's supposed backgrounds, ages, personalities, and species.

There's also the Cullen vampire family. I think one of them, at one point, has a problem with Edward and Bella. Rosalie? I think... she kind of wasn't around when Edward brought Bella by the house? I forget. But given the Cullen family's predicament, why, oh why, would they be as accepting and welcoming as they were? Yes, they were moral vampires. Yes, they were paragons of the community. Yes, they were all highly educated and strove to a higher standard than their human or vampire brethren as dictated by the oldest vampire, Carlisle. But how is it a good idea to let one of the youngest, most inexperienced, but also apparently the most emotional vampire among your group, who claims that he has fallen in love with a potential food item, bring said food item to the house and potentially undo what decades of effort have brought the Cullens peace in the small community of Forks?

We've already established that characters, whether they're in love or not, don't make choices like normal people. My point in bringing this up is that it's not an interesting story when everybody plays along nicely. Conflicts, and their eventual resolutions, are what make good storytelling, and make the stories interesting to read. It establishes that there are important things are at stake. It's great that almost everyone in the Cullen family is accepting of Bella, save for one, but she eventually warms up to her. However, it's an example of action without consequence. Bella seems to be what the Cullens were waiting for, however, Bella sacrifices absolutely nothing for her decision to pursue a life with Edward. After this short, idyllic scene, and their baseball game, the only struggle Bella has in the story is having to be away from Edward while she is being hunted by the hunterest of the hunting vampires. We see her almost cry. Or maybe she does. I don't know. In my experience, sudden loss is only really made important when it's something you didn't realize you had. She'd known Edward for maybe a few weeks or months, and had professed her love for him not 24-hours prior. Unless her brain was fixated on the super-awesome vampire pheromones that make Edward so irresistible, her distress seemed meaningless.

You might be able to argue that Bella's sacrifice was in overcoming her fear of Edward. After all, he's a vampire. He tells her all the time that he's this close to eating her. Even at the end, when he has to suck the vampire venom from her veins to save her from becoming a vampire herself, he somewhat frighteningly doesn't know why he was able to stop feeding. We're left to assume that the sheer force of love stopped him, but who knows. Regardless, Bella should probably be worried that she won't be so lucky next time. Or maybe realize that she was almost dismembered by what can only be assumed to be what the rest of the vampires in the world are like. Maybe this was the wrong choice. Again. Bella. But, no, she overcame her fear. She gave herself freely to Edward, and she was rewarded with not dying. But this touches on a weird theme to the book: powerlessness, and/or, submission. It's eventually revealed that at no point is Bella control at any point in the story. At any point, Edward can make one wrong move, or one misstep, or sneeze, and he would break Bella in half. But all Bella is concerned about is being with, near, or in the same country as Edward so she can more easily worship him. Yeah, Edward supposedly loves her back, but now that their lives consist of navigating in the world of vampires, Bella is at everyone else's mercy, and that's where she wants to be.

I'm not well-versed in feminism, but this strikes me as counter to the principles it should stand for. I would have hoped at some point Bella would have been empowered in something, even if just to provide some character depth early on. Wait, no, Bella had the power to spurn the advances of poor Tyler, who only wanted somebody to go to the prom with. There's that.

Anyhow. Enough about that book. Common sense dictates that I should have ignored it altogether, but at least my book-debt is paid. What insight I'd hoped to distill from reading this is at odds and at most points perpendicular to things I think I understand about the female psyche, and women. Which tells me one of two things: the phenomenon surrounding the book has nothing to do with the book or the movies, or that I know nothing about women.

I wish I was more certain on which was more likely.