First Flags (Chapters 1 and 2)

I've heard a lot of grousing about Meyer's Mormon leanings, and the opening splash page with a Genesis warning against the tree of knowledge of good and evil explains the apple cover image. This isn't enough to be an actual warning flag, but I'm paying attention for Ricean bemoaning of eternal knowledge and existence. No, the first flag waves tenderly in the preface with the following line during the appropriately vague perspective of someone's death.

“When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it's not reasonable to grieve when it comes to and end.”

Alongside Twilight, I'm reading Viktor Frankl's “Man's Search for Meaning,” which is dreadfully unfair to Ms. Meyer. But it struck me on page fucking one that if I found myself living a life more perfect and kick-ass than I ever imagined, I would sure as shit find it reasonable to mourn when it ended. This kind of phrase echoes from a pseudo-transcendent perspective popular among self-help gurus and cult leaders, and horribly romantic leads.

Thus my first mental error message flickered into being. Page. Fucking. One.

Chapter 1 introduces us to Bella, a bland heroine who is inexplicably distant to anyone she meets, paying lip service to social interaction while her hyperactive emotional sensitivity sends her in self-defeating spirals of teenaged angst over absolutely nothing. She is utterly misaligned with the universe. Friendless and awkward, Bella is fleeing a life of servitude to her dysfunctional mother, who I am assuming is a meth head or lapsed alcoholic. But upon arriving in her girlhood home in Forks, Washington, she tends to float about with no real attachment to her father, (a man she only refers to as “Charlie”,) or memories of growing up. From this, and her immediate decision to take up a domestic role for her father, I believe Bella is deeply emotionally stunted as a result of trauma in her childhood. My internal subtext decided that some uncle introduced her to “hide the pickle” early on, the fallout triggering the divorce and relocation to Arizona where her mother sought comfort at the bottom of a bottle. This would explain her lack of synchronization with her own body, resulting in her Sailor Moon level klutziness.

She meets the cool kids in high school. And by cool kids, I mean vampires. Meyer busts out the thesaurus for her adoration of brooding pretties, brought to penultimate perfection with Edward. Bella's spastic sense of self is only further maligned when Edward takes to a raging hate-on for her, furiously refusing to make eye contact to her as his lab partner and then arguing with the school administration to change classes to avoid her. Bella, heartbroken by childhood abuse and clinging to the role of caretaker in lieu of emotional connection to her family, processes Edward's actions as only she knows how; staggering gut-checks to her ego.

At this point I would like to pause and talk about visualization. When I read, I like to picture familiar faces to assist in remembering and savoring the story. For Twilight, I don't want to automatically use the actors from the movie. Thus I've decided that Bella is Michelle Trachtenberg from her first appearance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Post-Harriet the Spy, pre-Eurotrip (I judge myself for having seen the latter,) Michelle's role as the preteen Dawn is the Wesley Crusher of BTVS, allowing me to both appreciate and loathe her visually. For Edward, Meyer constantly describes him as the most boyish of the vamps. Now, I had a mad-on for Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but Robert Pattison is too stylishly handsome to be “boyish”. To make things interesting, I decided upon Chris Colfer, or Kurt Hummel from Glee. Immediately the role of Bella's father, Charlie, went to Kurt's dad Burt as played by Mike O'Malley.

Giggling at the thought of Kurt smooching on Dawn, I returned to Chapter 2 and ran head first into fan fiction. Now, way back in the first days of the internet, I furiously keyed a few indigo epics of my own. I can recognize at a glance when a storytelling corner barks the shins of reality. And nothing says “lack of actual research” like Bella utilizing her father's jar labeled “Food Money” in order to go grocery shopping. What? The fuck? I know Meyer wants to beat us to death with how devout her heroine is to servitude. But for fuck's sake, her father is a goddamn chief of police. He makes more money than any other civil servant in BFE, Washington and can't be bothered with direct deposit? No, the divorce left him so socially backward that his only means of self-preservation was to remind himself with labels of his need to exist, thus the “Food Money” stash in the cupboard. What's next, “Face, not Throat” labels for his razors? A “Shit Here” post-it over the toilet? This is the man who has his television set to automatically shut off at midnight so he remembers to climb into bed and cry himself to sleep. I fear for the people of Forks. But it sure does explain Bella's dissociative personality disorder.

I gave up about the point where Bella actually broaches conversation with her father, an act that could trigger the development of a relationship, and he fucking shuts her down for judging the Cullens. Way to go, dad. I'll pick up the rest of Chapter 2 in my next post.