yes, i am a vampire - by c montgomery burns (foreword by steve allen)
the other day, we decided to watch breaking dawn part 1, because we needed to be made to feel morally and existentially desolate by something other than the obvious. there were bleaker choices - my ongoing and ill-buried obsession with the movie tusk (which i have never seen and will most likely never see when instead i could simply trawl its wikipedia "plot" section at midnight like someone doing a crime on the dark web) springs most obviously to mind - but none so easily accessible, since netflix has for some reason been suggesting the twilight series on loud autoplay every time i sign into my account for something like the past three months. i don't know how this happened - sometimes i think netflix just gets ideas in its head, like that one time i watched chicken run and fucked up the algorithm forever after, so that even today my netflix account will occasionally just be like movies with strong independent fowl - our recs. what i'm saying here is that netflix is no good and cannot think sensibly, and also you can never access half of what it offers because the algorithm seems to wilfully impede this, which is a side point but also something i think about a lot. functionally speaking, netflix is basically the equivalent of your dad pulling vhs tapes out of a bag he found in the attic and squinting at the labels like idk this looks like it says point break, i don't have my glasses. but anyway, this isn't actually my topic for today, because i am not martin scorsese, despite also being a short king with catholic guilt, so let's move on.
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the thing about the movie breaking dawn part 1, is that it is a horror movie trapped inside the body of a wedding pinterest board, trapped inside one of those lifestyles of the rich and famous shows from the late 1980s where they take you around mar-a-lago or whatever like ooh the upholstery's made of endangered water buffalo, and from a tonal perspective, i think that is utterly fascinating. i'm not going to describe to you what happens in the preceding three twilight movies because you probably know already and also because the key descriptor would be nothing, but suffice it to say that breaking dawn part 1, is the only movie in which something actively horrific happens, and keeps on happening, as a fully realised plotpoint, until the very end, and i firmly believe the movie has absolutely no idea how to cope with this or what it wants the audience reaction to be. in brief, then, over the course of breaking dawn part 1, edward cullen (a vampire) and bella swan (a lesbian), get married and go on honeymoon, as evidenced by a forty-five minute musical montage in which everyone is wearing a wig and also appears two seconds away from a benzodiazepine-induced coma, and no one seems happy about it, though this might be because the wedding is a creepy shotgun affair between two 18 year olds or because the cgi botoxing everyone's faces in place is now so tight it restricts all but the most minimal of expression. while on honeymoon, and after some protracted arsing around about whether or not edward's vampire super strength will make sex too sexy to sex, edward and bella have sex. it's all very gauzy and romantic, there are many more musical montages, at one point they make out in the ocean, and then all of that abruptly ceases because bella gets pregnant with a fast-growning demon fetus which drains all her blood and natural resources, and that is the whole rest of the movie.
to say that this is not the face-heel-turn that even the movie's director was apparently expecting would be to wildly understate the extent to which this 2011 blockbuster which really happened simply flails around in horror for the rest of its run time, trying and failing the consolidate the tone it had set out to achieve and tone it now finds itself mired in. subsequent to the demon-fetus bombshell, bella is i guess airlifted back from honeymoon to gestate in demonic high-speed at the cullens' weirdo compound, and the visuals from hereon in are so grotesque that you have to assume they were done on purpose, yet without any corresponding sense that we aren't still meant to find this...what...romantic? in one particularly memorable sequence, the demon fetus starts talking to edward telepathically in a manner so eerily reminiscent of alice lowe's fetus-slasher flick prevenge (2016), that it took me a full minute to realise the scene was actually aiming for heartwarming. add to this various incidental sequences of bella being forced to drink blood from a polystyrene cup, many deeply irresponsible close ups on how thin she becomes mid-demon-pregnancy, and a scene in which the demon-fetus literally breaks her spine, and after a while it's just like...ok...are you all still...feeling sexy about this? at the end edward full-tilt eats the fetus out of her. like, with his teeth. i don't know what else you really want me to say. i suppose you have to feel for the teens who just wanted a cute story about a girl who marries a vampire and gets to go have sex on a private island, but mormon moralising never said life was fair, and in some ways i have to respect the mind that suckered a generation of kids in with three novels of swoony romantic promises and then flung its mask off at the final hurdle like surprise, sinners, it's demon baby town.
(incidentally, i'm not particularly interested in relitigating the feminist failures of stephanie meyer's twilight series because i am an adult woman and we've all done this before and i have not been living on mars for the last decade in a cave with eyes shut and my fingers in my ears, but suffice it to say that my chief opinion is this: the key failing of twilight as a series of books about vampires is not that it is embarrassing or that it is pro-life or that it is weirdly mormon or that it flagrantly glamorises abusive behaviour between intimate partners or that it is boring or that is badly written or that it is trite. all of those things are obviously failings, and egregious ones, but no. the main failing of twilight as a series of books specifically about vampires is that it hacks away at everything that is traditionally interesting about vampires as a transgressive sexual subversion and replaces this with like - marriage, kids and a bunch of volvos - and i think that is just garbage).
what's fascinating, of course, is that breaking dawn part 1 is not a horror movie and nor does it have any active pretensions to be so, which is hilarious and also stupid and also gives rise to the fascinating thought of what this movie would have been like if it actually had wanted to be a horror movie - and honestly, all i want for kristen stewart's future career is this, in some form, because bless her.
anyway, whatever, team jacob i guess.