With my first praiseful post on the Twilight series, over at Bright Lights in 09, I felt I was was a defense lawyer for the series, trying to justify my intellectual curiosity against the pooh-poohing of my critic peers, culminating in my opus "Someone to Fight Over Me." But all that gazing into the pool of youth left me aging rapidly, like a common human, and the generations of hyper-evolved youth just kept coming, as did new apps and platforms and operating systems for my Mac; the technology grew at an exponential rate and I just couldn't keep up.
That's why in this last and final incarnation, me older than a mummy or so it feels, the TWILIGHT saga is no longer a contrast or fantasy or escape but a breath of misty old growth forest air, because it outdistances ADD trendiness via teen Methuseles whose every... sentence... takes whole Antonioni films to come out... but the molasses pace is what gives the films their dreamy kick -- one has time to wrestle with the Big Issues of life, not just as a teen girl or old man, but both rolled into one immortal soul; anima and ego swirled together, a Benjamina Button conjoined twin set, one aging chronologically the other the reverse, until they meet as grandparent and newborn child, and then disappear beyond the veil.
In this fifth and final installments the Cullens need help to raise an army of their fellow beings to fight the onrushing Catholic stand-in, the Voltari, come to wipe out the clan on a false charge (as the Volatari do nearly every film). This leads to a gathering of other tribes in the Cullen's defense, all with special powers and stories of fighting in the revolution and war of 1812, allowing a vast new array of options as far as fantasy-adoptive families. It's carefully crafted to create just such a sense of belonging, the 'teams' of Edward and Jacob have just expanded to a whole league, and they would never say a word like 'yolo'. Every character in the clan is unique: creepy, hot, or creepy-hot; as long as the viewer stays unseen in the dark of their seat he or she fits right into the mix.
I may not be able to see the youth clearly now, the world in my ball has gone dim; they shimmer like ghosts in the glow of their digital screen surroundings and my glasses seem to work less and less well with each passing film--but I can still meet them halfway, at the forest of one of their own primal mythic worlds, where everyone is centuries-old and frozen at youth like movie star images on TCM, or how I still see myself as 21 in the bathroom mirror when the Baby Jane clarity is fogged by the steam of showers or my not wearing my glasses. I can still meet them at the halfway point where those who strive for eternal youth settle for an early death. Call my deconstruction of the series dangerous to its intended youthful demographic but there is a rich modernist ancestry to that subtext, as I've pointed out in a past post, particularly to films from the 1930s like DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY, THE WIND, and MOROCCO.
Any true horror film knows that real ambivalent attitudes towards life and death are rare even in the classics; they mistake gore for subversion. In Meyers' work the ambivalence is so pronouned it should scare parents even more than it does. The parallels of the Cullen clan with some kind of cult or drug scene are never avoided and parents should be scared that their impressionable TWILIGHT fan daughters will be predisposed to roll with the next pale, good-looking junky clan that happens by. Such worries were perhaps dispelled, allegedly, originally, through the popular press's misinterpretation of the series as advocating cellibacy, but celibacy isn't always adherence to a restrictive social order --it can be the reverse, especially in permissive times; it can be a renouncement of societal expectations and the impetus towards blind reproduction, marriage, peer pressure, and male desire. Not only do Edward and Bella wait for their wedding to 'do it' but once they do it instantly triggers an accelerated pregnancy that kills the mortal Bella. Not since SPECIES (my explanation here) has a fantasy film so cleverly tapped into our secret revulsion towards the Cronenbergian biological express train nightmare underbelly of sexual desire. Once you slow down time you can speed it up too. God drags pregnancy out as long as possible so the full horror of it doesn't have time to settle.
And you can fault the mopey teen trappings all you want, but this last installment especially has the guts to go deep into the more taboo realms of mating and pair-bonding. Much time is spent explaining that Jacob is not a pedophile just because he's 'imprinted' on Bella's baby girl, Renesme. It's "not like you think!" he explains over and over as anyone who hears about reacts in understandable disgust. A normal film would prove just how much 'it's not like you think' by cutting out that whole sub-plot, lest any unsightly criticism be drawn even by worried parents who've never seen it or read it. But with the substantial heft of Stephanie Meyer behind it, the ickiness goes unfiltered, and Mormon or not that's so punk rock!
Another punk element is the scene with Bella coming home and trying to explain why she's not dead to her one-note worrywart dad Charlie; he doesn't like it, but what choice does he have? Where can you find a deprogrammer in rural Washington State? In the 00s? Meanwhile his granddaughter grows way too fast, and Bella's cold to the touch and has weird eyes, or uses eye drops so he won't see how red her eyes are. But if Charlie says anything to anyone about how weird it all is, she's going to bounce and he can't deal with that and thus it is yet again that Bella uses her dream child to dominate not just Edward (she forces his hand so he has to turn her into a vampire) but her father as well. To create a situation where your father has no choice but to allow you freedom to be stoned and/or stone, to leave you and your bad boy alone as immortal statues left for centuries in overgrown gardens, hidden from his meddling overprotection, this is a situation to be devoutly wished by any and all 6-17 year-olds. In previous films Bella has indirectly attacked Charlie via nightmare screaming, and the reckless pursuit of danger (the only thing that makes a phantom image of Edward appear as if a symptom of adrenalin-poisoning) but nothing beats a miracle gro baby. And besides, dads in coming-of-age myths exist mainly to be ignored and left to stew and think about how they need to give up trying to tell us kids what to do.
Understanding the lost ability of these kind of 'child revenge' sagas can shed light on our darker instincts, and help us in understanding just why American folk heroines are so different than Europe's Red Riding Hoods and Gretels. Through myth we can embrace the irony: America's population is composed of wanderers and the descendants of wanderers, Ellis Island, or Vikings or colonials, or slave-owning ex-Irish penal colonists. The rest of the world is full of people willing to stay where they are; their fidgety neighbors who used to ramble on about their plans for exploring are all long-since moved to America. And so it is that we in the USA find fantasizing about wandering an unrewarding use of time. We have to do it for real, as our ancestors did or not at all. Our fantasies are of staying still, but in a new home where we live surrounded by cool peers-- Hogwarts, the Shire, Forks, as long as parents aren't there. Those who paint the best fantasy homes get visited by others, until a world beautiful is created online, only to have marauders break in and slaughter everyone during the big wedding.
This is our history as a nation and a world, but for vampires its history without the forgetfulness that goes on as generations snake forward through the tunnel of time, leaving only bad habits and alcoholism in their wake. In the Twilight realm, the original explorers who left Europe in the 1800s are all still here, and still in their hot early 20s, and willing to be friends with your sorry ass, thus elevating you to some Wagnerian height of 'belonging' ecstasy, a height missing from your usual low-to-the-ground-so-some-dick-sitting-behind-you-doesn't-flick-your-ears high school height. Here at last, those troglodyte ear-flickers are devoured and forgotten. If each successive generation is just a little more slackjawed than the last, gone soft from suburban slovenliness, then these vampires and shape-shifters represent a chance to undo them all, to clean house, to eradicate the slow moving herd members.
Lastly, perhaps there's no more common dream archetype than that of the instant, fast-growing baby, such as Renesmee, the child of Edward and Bella. By putting digital transplants of one actor's face (Mackenzie Foy) over the younger and older versions, she seems truly creepy, all the more so for being supposedly cute. Her smiling face has floated in a CGI mist over enough younger bodies that by the time she's actually wearing her own face the damage is done and she's still creepy. That weird creative choice makes her every appearance as uncomfortable as stumbling onto a baby skeleton in the lowest ebb of the uncanny valley, but it works. It serves the story, which centers around the child having to prove it's not a vampire but a hybrid, not just between vampires and humans, but between dream and reality, digital and 'real; her CGI-edged face all but matrixes out of the screen in some 3-D Final Cut-layered feedback.
If you've read the book, then you know what happens and then doesn't happen never happened, but it's still a pretty great surprise, a Sam Peckinpah / Walter Hill style bloodbath even Kate Beckinsale and Milla Jovovich franchises at their bloodiest couldn't match. There's an eerie silence that results when characters you've spent the movie getting to know are suddenly absent, with a snap or a blam, as final and startling as an introduction to the finality of death as any child could hope to find. If you do manage to become involved in the Peckinpah-ish finality of it, if you know the sad desperation of the lonesome teenage suburbanite for whom no amount of friends and super powers can compete with that Truman Show sense of isolation, then you know how such blanket cold can radiate so warmly, like a wedding cake corpse cooling in an unheated winter theater. In our lonesomest hours we'll risk our lives just to feel connected, even if that connecting involves the sacrifice of the last few vestiges of your mortal reality on the altar of the fantasy franchise, as long as you both shan't live.
