In Which There Are No Vampires Left In New York

The Once and Future Fairytale

by SHAHIRAH MAJUMDAR

There are those of us who are too stiff-fingered, too hardened by our many years around the merry-go-round to feel the tug of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga. As stories go, this is one that's come around many times before.

We all know the gist by now: first love; a lion and a lamb; star-crossed lovers; suffering and redemption; a life given meaning by the presence of the other. Twilight tacks on vampires, a YA label, and a happy ending? just enough to make this book appropriate for the younger set. It also gives us a boy and a girl so consumed by their love for another that they are willing to endure any sacrifice, any indignity, any bodily pain or mental anguish for the sake of the other's happiness. For Bella and Edward, the complete erasure of the self would not to be too great a sacrifice to express the totality of their devotion. The Story of O doesn't have much on the Twilight Saga. On the other hand, Jesus might.

A couple of nights after New Moon was released, I gave into the onslaught: to Caitlin Flanagan's piece in The Atlantic, to my married cousin's A++ reviews, to K-Stew and R-Pattz with his sanpaku eyes. I read all four books in one stretch and I dreamt hazy dreams which, unlike Bella, I can't remember, but, like Bella, I awoke disturbed, conscious of things unsettled inside of me: subdued desires, long-resigned ideals.

It's pure fantasy, of course, pure revisionist nostalgia, unrealistic not because of its vampires and werewolves, but because of the way it limns that old story, the first fairy tale: that love is the whole history of a woman's life. To enter into the Twilight world is to slip into a lost continent, a Gondwanaland of the hormones that existed for a brief moment before the violence of experience tore everything apart. There is no shading here, neither in the book's thematic treatment nor in the extraordinary literalness of the writing itself. Light pools. Shadows bloom. Skin is either winter cold or burning hot. The story unwinds like the pet fantasy of teenage girl, lingering on every thought and touch and observation. No action is presented without being analyzed. No misunderstanding is cleared up if it can be dragged on for a hundred pages. And, if that misunderstanding is nearly fatal, if Bella can be pushed to the brink of destruction, and Edward can be left hating himself for bringing her so far, so much the better. The resolution is that much sweeter. The "torture the woman" school of storytelling has never gone out of style.

Despite all the atmospheric gloom, this is a universe of blinding emotional and moral clarity. Twilight is no noir; it's a nighttime soap opera in high key lighting. For Bella, Edward and beleaguered best friend Jacob, love is the light that illuminates everything. Pain is the result of confusion, of trying to force things together that don't fit, or of trying to keep things apart that are meant to be together. And the ultimate lesson Twilight offers, the notion that hooks so many starry-eyed girls, is that love will never betray you. That is: The boy will always come back to you. The best friend will be there for you. Even your parents, however much they question your decisions, will melt in the face of any prospective unhappiness and ultimately support you.

The lesson of modern life, in contrast, is rather the opposite. In life as I know it, among all the savvy boys and girls gliding in dark jeans down the Bowery, it's simply not safe to feel the way Bella feels about Edward. We were seventeen once, but now we know better. After years of dating, of crashing in and out of love, of the resulting flattening of the soul, the damaged ego, the imagined humiliations most of us have learned that it is prudent to set the dial low. To love that much, to have one's happiness revolve so completely around another person, is a recipe for disaster. To love someone that much is to give them the power to hurt you, and which one of us wants to go through all of that again?

And yet, I awoke one morning after consuming some 2400 pages of emotional pornography and wondered at the cost of a highly developed instinct for self-preservation. It's that instinct that separates Bella from me: there's a lot I wouldn't do for love; there' nothing Bella wouldn't. Ever the intrepid heroine, neither college, nor career, nor villainous vampires and nor a rib-shattering Rosemary's baby can swerve her from her single-minded devotion. For the millions of Twilight fans, Bella's is an ideal worth emulating. For the pink-sweatered kids among them, well, life hasn't taught them any better yet. As for the others, the mothers and the grandmothers and the young marrieds like my cousin, there somehow still exists a secret self, one that doesn't belong to the drudgery of car pools or cubicles or two-for-one supermarket specials; a secret self that swells in the night, pleasuring itself with dreams of fevered romanticism.

That secret self doesn't question Bella's sanity when she announces that Edward loves her unconditionally and irrevocably and, to be honest, irrationally. It doesn't find Edward's beauty (bronze haired, angel-like, sparkly in the sunlight) as cheap as a Chinatown trinket. Nor does it wince at the lengthy arguments about who loves the other better, nor cringe at the words forever, soul mate and lines in the tenor of eyes like stars or meteors in a moonless sky. As the sold out midnight screenings across America testify, this is a secret self that still knows how to swoon.

The experts say that Bella is a terrible role model, and I daresay they are right. But what they seem to assume is that weaning a girl on feminist approved YA books will set her course straight for life which is not unlike saying that a kid raised on a sugar free diet will always win a battle with an ice cream sundae. As any girl who loved Talking to Dragons as well as Wuthering Heights and still ended up betting it all on the love the first time and maybe even the second time can attest, it's only experience that can work that kind of magic. It takes a broken heart to make lessons about not falling for the wrong kind of guy stick. And then, chastened, wary, more certain of ourselves, instead of mooning over prom dates and first kisses, we learn to focus our energy on work and career, on engaging with the outside world and shaping it in ways we can control. We think in terms of realpolitik. We separate sex from romance. We learn to self-actualize. Some of us do yoga. Some of us are man-eaters. Some of us are in relationships with a good enough kind of guy.

Most of all, we resign ourselves to the knowledge that - irrevocably, unconditionally, irrationally - is only for the crazies. After a while, we forget what it felt like to even harbor that craving. I loved my last boyfriend, though never in the swooning sort of way, and we spent two years together until I decided to take an extended trip outside of the States. I said we'll take a break but then I never came back. This was easy because I never expected us to do anything but fail in the long run; my running out on him was just an accelerated means to an already foregone conclusion.

It is a sign of my apathy that I regard my own romantic history with a certain amount of cynicism. This is in contrast to Bella who catalogs every moment of Edward's courtship and charges them with torrid and terrible portent. I could tell you about my first love (he changed his name after we broke up; I dropped out of school) or my second love (he said, "I can't do this anymore, I need to focus on my art"; I felt my entire existence had been negated) but it's hard to muster the enthusiasm to go beyond the barest details. Somewhere along the way, maybe around the time my best friend called me after watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona to inform me that I was definitely Cristina, or the summer all four of my siblings stayed with me and my boyfriend in our loft on Varick Street and each of them told me separately that they couldn't stand him, or maybe it was just after I quit my last job and realized that I was broke and we weren't in love and that maybe I'd never write a damn thing worth publishing - it occurred to me that love wasn't the most important thing to me after all.

Do you ever really recover from heartbreak? Bella is never unlucky to have to find out. What I know is that the boy from whom you were once inseparable will indeed move on from you, and sometimes good friends, great friends, will disappear so deep into their own drama that they are no longer capable of being there for you. The world spins on. You soldier on. And if you can hold on to your secret, swooning, sweatered self while you do, then so much the better for you. It's not such a terrible thing to wish for Bella's innocence. There are far worse things to face in the daylight.

Shahirah Majumdar is a contributor to This Recording. You can find her website here.

"Everlasting Gobstopper" - Apollo Heights (mp3)

"Disco Lights" - Apollo Heights (mp3)

"Black and Blue" - Apollo Heights (mp3)

In Which This Beautiful New Moon Will Still Be Around

Puddles of Infatuation

by MOLLY LANGMUIR

New Moon

dir. Chris Weitz

130 minutes

I want to get one thing out of the way up front. The whole Christian values, abstinence thing feels a little heavy handed in the movie. Oddly enough, it didn’t really hit me when I read the book. I mean, sure, Bella and Edward can’t have sex until she changes into a vampire, and sure, that event is supposed to happen directly after they get married, but this is only because as long as Bella’s still human, Edward’s desire for her blood means he’d probably rip her to shreds if he got too turned on. And that’s sort of hot, right?

But on the big screen it’s harder to watch two obviously lustful teenagers (even if one is actually a centenarian stuck in a 17-year-old body) discuss Edward’s decision not to drink human blood in the following manner without twittering just a little about what “it” might really refer to.

Bella: How do you do it?
Edward: Years and years of practice.
Bella: Did you ever think of doing it the easy way?
Edward: No, I knew who I wanted to be.

This isn’t what I want to talk about, though, mostly because everyone else already has. Besides, while I don’t much like being preached to (particularly where pre-marital sex is concerned) one consolation is that the unmarried (as yet!) actors who play Edward and Bella are probably boning right now in a hotel somewhere, at least according to In Touch.

I also don’t want to talk about how bad the movie was, even though that’s what everyone else has said too. Because, honestly, I think it provides exactly what it promises. That is, it delivers an incredibly faithful adaption of the book and depicts teenage romance in all its overwrought, hormone-raging, I’ll-probably-die-without-you and-I’ll-definitely-never-love-again glory. This is especially impressive considering the storyline’s fairly severe handicap—that the two main characters spend most of it apart.

The movie begins with Edward leaving Bella, ostensibly to protect her. Edward then moves to some favela in Rio, at least according to the movie. Here New Moon does diverge from the book, where Edward gallivants around in exotic locales hunting large game, a version I greatly prefer.

Meanwhile, the audience is asked to consider a new love interest for Bella—hot-blooded werewolf Jacob. I found this aspect of things slightly confusing, because Jacob is funny and warm and confident and if I had to choose one person to spoon with for the rest of time I would probably choose him over anemic stony Edward.

Bella, however, is lovesick for Edward, and spends a great deal of her time either writhing in agony or staring moodily out the window. “Sometimes you have to learn to love what’s good for you,” Bella’s dad tells her at one point, and as someone who has not been a teenager for over a decade, I found this a sage piece of advice. Of course as a teenager I would have completely disregarded it.

New Moon is based on a teenager’s understanding of the world. This is enjoyable because I fondly remember when I used to see things this way, and also slightly troubling, because if I’d stuck with that worldview I would still be mooning after my first serious boyfriend, who left me for camp. I couldn’t help but wonder if all the teenage girls in the theater were having their eventual acceptance of adulthood’s romantic realities deferred a year or two.

You see, what I haven’t mentioned yet is that I have particular insight into Bella’s situation. Just like her, I went to a school where I didn’t really fit in. I soon developed what I thought were world-altering feelings for a young man who seemed altogether way too good for me. He had all the makings of high school fantasy. In my case, this meant he was a handsome, slightly tortured skater who wrote poetry. Every time I saw him I sunk a little deeper into my puddle of infatuation. And then, after a very long time (it felt this way for Bella but in my case it really was) he eventually decided he liked me too. And we totally fell in love and spent a few months making out to The Beatles.

Sometimes he too seemed distant, just like Edward (except this was because he’d been smoking pot and not because he was concerned with protecting me from dangerous monsters). But I would have forgiven him anything, of course, because I was utterly, head over heels in love in a way that only a 17-year-old can be.

I also really wanted to lose my virginity to this boy. And I did, on prom night, of all things. The other movies haven’t come out yet, but suffice to say Edward’s whole marriage plan involves waiting until graduation.

I was ready to drop all other plans for my post high school life to stay with this boy (he was a year behind me). But that summer he went away to be a camp counselor and one day he called to say it was too hard to miss me so much while he was there, and that therefore we had to break up. At this point I responded just like Bella when Edward leaves. More than anything in the world I wanted him to come back to me and realize we were fated to be together forever. This never happened, though, and eventually I got on with things.

Most of the teenage girls I knew at the time experienced some version of this story as well. But most of us also managed to eventually grow out of our teenage versions of romantic bliss (and move on to the version embedded within Jennifer Aniston vehicles, but that’s a whole other story). The movie makes no room for this reality, though, and simply goes about affirming my early conceptions of love with the delicacy of a chainsaw.

Why I would expect New Moon to offer anything other than a superficial take on love? I’m not sure. Maybe my hopes were raised by the way it so perfectly evokes that exact moment when I was experienced enough to understand life was complicated, but naïve enough to believe love, at least, was simple. Giving that idea up was difficult and sad, and remembering how this happened made me want some credit for all the hard won knowledge about love I’ve acquired since then. New Moon doesn’t offer any, but neither do most movies. The only real difference, perhaps, is that other romances are based on fantasies I still sort of believe in.

But I am clearly holding what is essentially a satisfying silly movie to too high a standard. Watching the tidal wave powers of melodramatic teenage love play out in a monster-person sandwich is very entertaining. And while the CGI leaves a bit to be desired (particularly during one odd moment when Edward floats up from the bottom of the ocean only to disappear into what appears to be a cloud of squid ink), the movie remains strangely engrossing. Besides, I have heard it has improved some middle-aged ladies’ sex lives. That is a lot more than you can say for most movies, particularly ones rated PG-13, and tells us something about the enduring power of those first simple fantasies of love.

Molly Langmuir is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appeance in these pages. She blogs here.

"Think Harder" - Sneaker Pimps (mp3)

"Bloodsport" - Sneaker Pimps (mp3)

"Loretta Young Silks" - Sneaker Pimps (mp3)