FILM In Which We Misunderstand Eclipse Very Badly
Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 9:22AM 
Which One Is The Gay?
by ELLEN COPPERFIELD
Eclipse
dir. David Slade
124 minutes
I have never seen Twilight, not because I'm too good for it, or because I realize we have cognitive biases towards things we've experienced, but because with the recent horror of coyote attacks on Long Island, it all hits too perilously close to home. I didn't watch New Moon either, perhaps because I correctly assumed there is but one moon, unless you're counting moons of other planets, and that I never do.
Kristen Stewart is exceptionally talented at looking conflicted. She has to decide between three men in Eclipse, which is strange because she's looking pretty puffy and maybe not totally at her best. Also, one of them is her Dad (Ed Begley Jr.). Despite being in her mid-twenties, she's still somehow in high school. She tells her dad she's a virgin; maybe she honestly thinks she is.
Except for that one fib, no one lies in Eclipse, everyone else tells the complete and exact truth and in fact passes along exactly what they were thinking. The only subtext is in Edward's refusal to have sex with his "girlfriend." He tells her that he doesn't want to hurt her, potentially an allusion to the size of his penis, or possibly a literary allusion to the part of Finnegan's Wake where a vampire didn't have sex with his gf b/c he was gay. (See A Skeleton's Key to Finnegan's Wake.)
There is also one other lie. Forgive me. When Taylor Lautner turns into a wolf and becomes 40 times the size of himself, that puts the lie to the conservation of mass. Then again, I don't think anyone really thought through the particulars of combat between creatures who have the proportional strength of ants in comparison to what they're lifting.
When it comes time for the climatic battle, the vampires decide to put Bella alone in a tent with a half-nude Taylor Lautner. This is a plan the same way a small paper bag is a useful stratagem if they are showing The Proposal on the in-flight video. Maybe Edward wasn't aware Taylor Lautner has been on forty-six consecutive covers of Tiger Beat, and feels awesome to snuggle with.
No one told me Twilight consistents entirely of planning for battles in the wilderness where no one you know dies. If they did, I likely would have been a lot more interested. The cast of this drama is constantly at a loss. "There are no words," Edward tells Taylor Lautner at one point when the latter is in the midst of flexing his bicep. There is no way for human speech to describe what's going on here.
Taylor Lautner finds out Bella is getting married to the pale guy when Edward tips him off purposefully. Bella stomps off really mad. No one knows why she's getting really mad, except it's obvious she's not too keen on having a frozen penis impregnate her at some point during the honeymoon after the dry humping. This is the substitute for subtext.
She then sticks her tongue down Taylor Lautner's throat, after asking him to. Granted, I suppose we've all wanted that thing inside us at one time or another, but can't it wait until her undead boyfriend is amusing himself with Jack's-Blood-in-the-Box and Transformers 2 for the PSP?
Eclipse reminds me a lot of Felicity, except she went all the way many times, often in pools. I guess that's sort of an underhanded compliment, or an allusion to the fact that J.J. Abrams includes some of his real-life personal problems in every project he encounters. Keri Russell would have been perfect in this role.
There's a really great scene between Bella and her mother in the middle of all this bickering. She visits her mom to say "what's up" the last time before she becomes a vampire. It isn't her own idea; Edward books the flight and pays for the tickets. Her mother tells her, "He's always watching you." That's when it hit me: she feels the same way about him that I would about my dog if he could afford my air travel.
Ellen Copperfield is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here.
"My Love" - Sia (mp3)
"The Line" - Battles (mp3)
"How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep?" - Bombay Bicycle Club (mp3)
