[Plot spoilers: if you haven't seen the movie, save yourself the time and read on; if you have, I can commiserate.]
The whole of Twilight is about how two warring tribes of supernatural people go out of their way to inexplicable protect Bella. It became really irritating to hear people drop her name as a reason to or not to do something.
"We should butcher that whole house of vampires living on our land. There are like a hundred werewolves here, so it shouldn't be a problem."
"NO! Bella is there and we must protect Bella!"
I would really like to know what Bella has ever done in any of the movies or books that deserves such personal risk and devotion. By all accounts, her sole purpose is to create problems: falling in with vampires who don't like her for her humanness, falling in with werewolves who don't like her vampire friends, falling back in with vampires who don't like these massive dogs hanging around, alienating her single-parent father who did nothing but inexplicably love what is a mostly ungrateful daughter. She gets pregnant due to her own poorly made choices (lesson learned here: go on the pill or wear a condom, every time with everyone; don't pay attention to his claim that he's a vampire and vampires can't conceive; or, "Come on baby. It's my birthday."). That act alone breaks a tenuous treaty between the previously peaceful supernatural tribes (how is not entirely clear; apparently there was a baby clause in the contract). And once she realizes that she is brewing a problem, she brings said brew into THE MIDDLE OF THE TWO WARRING TRIBES! This causes massive rifts in the werewolves, breaking up a family and causing one man to, creepily mind you, "imprint" himself on a small child to save her life.
Here's the thing, though: Bella's whole point in life, the end game of this little chess match, is to become a vampire, which by all definitions is dead. When someone's whole goal in life is to die, the narrative lacks some tension. Granted, this is not like when we know someone dies, and we watch in horror as it happens, praying it won't. Bella wants to die, but seems to take pointless steps in her life to avoid what she wants, and can very easily attain. I know that Bella supposedly needs to die in a precise way in order to become a vampire, and I also realize that becoming a vampire is one of the oldest, most thinly veiled metaphors for sex in the history of metaphors for things, so before all you fans start jumping on me that Edward needed to pump Bella full of his venom at just the right time, and was saving himself for that right time (in fact, as he said, "I waited an entire century to marry you, Bella"), realize that she was going to die anyways. So, let's say she slips down a flight of stairs and breaks her neck. For most of us that would be a horrible, life altering and ultimately tragic moment. For someone who wants to be dead, a quick bite on the neck and you can go along with your day.
Despite her end goal being easily attainable, the whole of the movie surrounds how she continues to put this off for some unexplained reason. In this first installment of the last movie, there is a lot of fretting over her pregnancy and how it might kill her.
Here's a list of problems with this:
1) Edward is undead. He has been for quite a while. With out blood, no warmth. Any doctor will tell you that is a quick and immediate death for all Edwards little swimmers, not to mention his ability to get an erection. Edwards frustration with their sex life would be more with his inability to perform, not in the way he hurts Bella every time they're intimate. In fact, maybe his avoidance of sex might be a cover up.
2) Even if Edward did have a heart beat and blood flow (and this is a point of contention among vampire theorist), he is often mentioned as being frigid. Again, no heat = no ability to produce children.
3) Getting beyond that, if he did manage to somehow have some superhuman conception abilities, the baby would be immortal, or at least like Achilles, mostly immortal. Once it was decidedly alive, there would be nothing they could do to kill it, at least easily, save how ever it is you kill vampires in Stephanie Meyers' mind.
4) Bella wants to be a vampire; the baby is at least half vampire. It would seem that, obviously, the solution is to turn Bella into a vampire. Again, I heard them say it wasn't that easy, but no one really explains why. They just sit around fretting about it. And making her drink blood on the misguided belief that drinking is the fastest way to get something into the blood stream, as opposed to directly through intravenous needles which Bella was stuffed with during the whole second half of the movie. In fact, Stephanie Meyers and whoever wrote the movie must have a misguided understanding of the workings of the human body: babies don't eat food in the womb; they take in nourishment and blood through the umbilical chord. Whatever goes through that magic pipe will drop the vitamins and what not into the baby.
5) Vampires, as the undead, wouldn't see her being dead as a problem. If her heart doesn't beat as a vampire, then it could be assumed that, with the injection of Edward's Secret Sauce...er...poison, Bella would just spring back to unlife. So her dying, and at the risk of repeating myself, I'll say this one more time because I think it's important: IS NOT A PROBLEM. Once a vampire, the baby couldn't kill her, and it was doing a good job of that when she was human. So, here again, being a vampire seems like the only and obvious choice.
Here is the key problem: in order for the movie to have tension, Bella has to remain alive; however, the obvious answer is to become a vampire, which strips the movie of tension. Stephanie Meyer wrote herself into a corner, and got out of it by just saying, "Oh man! This is terrible! Bella could die!" Logically, she probably wouldn't. And even if she did, that might benefit all involved.
Another point that completely sucks (see what I did there) the drama from the movie is having this massive thing turned into two movies. Clearly, even if I could suspend my disbelief enough to worry that Sadsack McGee might kick it at some point, I would know, with another three hour extravaganza due in a year's time, she is likely to not actually die. Unless the last Twilight movie is the Edward/Jacob buddy pic we've all been waiting for. Thing Odd Couple meets Blade meets Van Helsing. I would see that movie. Unfortunately for Twilight, the first movie was turned into a long trailer for the next movie. And trailers tend not to be rife with tension.
Finally, and to return to a dead horse I beat quite thoroughly in the last post on this book/movie, this is a really bad message to give young women in their life (which feels odd to say about a romance book that shops the abstinence and self-restraint agenda). It seems to say, out of one side of the mouth, that young women should wait to find love before becoming physically intimate. With rising number of high school aged single mothers, this is a welcome message. However, out of the other side, it seems to suggest that women should invest a good part of their lives in this pursuit. In fact, what does Bella do well beside get into trouble? Is she smart (see Hermione, again)? Does she aspire to a trade? Does she love anything other than mass amounts of drama in her life? Her whole life, four books and five movies worth of this vapidness, highlight how Bella just wants to be with Edward. I realize that feminism is all about the choice for women to work equal paying jobs if they choose to, but I would imagine some feminist from the sixties and seventies have got to be clenching their fists a bit watching Bella run around as an empty sack of a woman looking to find the best man to...fill her needs.
I might be bitter. The last post I wrote about Twilight certainly was. But there are romantic movies that I like: Amelie, Punchdrunk Love, Finding Neverland, Napoleon Dynamite, and Stranger Than Fiction are smart, well-developed romances with well-rounded characters who all have back-stories and personalities. Even romantic comedies like American Pie, Ten Things I Hate About You, Can't Hardly Wait, or Bridget Jones Diary do a better job of rounding out the central characters (and American Pie, Ten Things I Hate About You and Can't Hardly Wait had a TON of them who were all better realized human beings than all of the Twilight movies). For a romantic comedy to really be good, it needs to both provide an escapist fantasy (which Twilight does in spades) and give us characters we can care about. Bella is not a character, but a shell in which lots of love sick teenagers (and several older women) can dump their own hopes and dreams into. But no one really cares about Bella. No one is out there wearing "Team Bella" shirts. They care about Edward Twilight and Jacob Kindness Werewolf, and which of these totally implausible stereotypes might wander into the reader's life, whisk her off her feet, and say canned romantic things to her.
In the end, I think that is Twilights biggest crime against entertainment. Not that it bends a lot of the mythology of vampires (I don't believe they can cross water or come into a room uninvited, though these vampires jump huge gorges filled with rushing rivers and walk into an out of rooms without much concern). Not that it defies logic or strips itself of inherent drama and tension (dead is dead is dead; also, self-restraint never gave a civilization longevity, especially marginalized civilizations; if the vampires continue to deny themselves the unlife-sustaining human blood they crave, they will eventually die out; after all, when I am hungry, so hungry the drive for food overwhelms my ability to make rational choices, my body is trying to tell me something pretty urgently; and what value do soulless, human-eating vampires find in saving humanity other than to manage a dwindling food source?). It's not that the movie is devoid of decent acting (Kiernan disagrees here, but I can't see what he sees) or coherent writing.
The worse thing that Twilight does, and continues to do, is suggest to women (and some men) that love and happiness is a passive, all-encompassing pursuit in life. Young women of America: you are never going to find an Edward or Jacob to fight for you just because you exist. But, if you look and try hard enough, a young man might actually like you for who you are, falling in love with you for your interests, intelligence and personality.
In this way, reality might be better than fiction.
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