In which your fearless tourguide contemplates the dangers of being an English major. Interested? Then, boys and girls, let us rock.
Plot: Bella has a dream. Jacob turns into a wolf, and Edward shows up in full vampire-mode and performs an interpretative dance based on the life of Klaus Kinski. Also, foreshadowing. Actually, this is more like fore-spotlighting, fore-neonoutlining, and fore-powerpointingwith50ptfont, but whatever. Bella wakes up. She googles "vampires." I wonder how SM became a published author, because based on this scene her only contact with a computer involved a senile great-aunt describing one once, but again, whatever. Bella goes outside and tries to read Jane Austen, which fails becasue Austen wrote heroes with names beginning in E. Yes, really. That scene exists. Bella wonders if Edward is a vampire. She contemplates ignoring him for the rest of forever, but decides against it because the though is too painful. I make confused noises. Our heroine returns to school. Things of much boringness occur. Big E isn't there, so Bella decides to go dress-shopping with other girls. Finis.
Rant: I don't even know where to start. Maybe the Jane Austen scene, with its ham-fisted namedropping of literary classics whose titles this book is not worthy of mentioning? Perhaps the computer scene, which reads like a collaboration between an Alzheimers patient and an overcaffienated six-year old who just wants to look at the pretty pictures. Or, we could turn our attention to the dream, which manages to squeeze the entire plot of the series into a single-page insomnia cure. But no, ladies and gents, we will discuss none of those things. One, because they all suck. And two, because none of them represent the real problem with this overhyped pile of crap.
Stephenie Meyer wrote a bad book and got rich. Good for her- and I say that with total sincerity. I'd never resent anyone for providing a great living for their children (and several generations after, based on her book sales & movie rights). This though… this is more than bad. Its dangerous. I've been in love and I've been infatuated. It took years and lots of pain before I figured out the difference. SM is older than I am. She is a wife and a mother. And she's written a book about a seventeen-year old girl risking her life for an infatuation. I… I don't like where this is going, folks. I don't like the message, the moral compass or the intellectual process underlying it. I really don't like that this story is based on Romeo and Juliet.
That play, for anyone who has bothered to give it the time and attention it deserves, is not a romance. Its a story about idiotic, hormonal kids giving up everything to be together. Guess what, they die. Badly. Uselessly. And now Stephanie Meyer has re-written it for the 21st century. This chapter is the choice, the first rumble of fate avalanching into the abyss. And SM thinks its ok. I can almost hear her applauding as Bella mopes about not being able to sit with a GODDAMN VAMPIRE. Love is terrifying in so many ways, but its isn't dangerous. Go read Shakespeare and be warned.
I thought the google search scene was sort of funny. It gave me the idea that the Twilight series must be set in the mid Nineties, instead of ten years later - characters don't really know how to use a computer, or what their cell phones are for. They always need to get home before they make a phone call.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Jane Austen non-mention: WTH.
Yeah, funny in a Three Stooges eyepoke kind of way. I just don't get how this is so popular. There are positives, which I'll talk about in other posts, but the writing is so terrible I can never really get invested in the story.
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