New Moon

So, the frustrating thing about Twilight isn't actually that it's terrible. Lots of things are terrible. I hate 24 and Red Dawn much more than I hate Twilight, because while they all have pretty terrible underpinnings, it's hard to find something that encourages teenaged mooning (and more seriously, problematic gender issues) as horrible as something that encourages torture or murder fantasies. But Twilight... there's just so much there that could have been interesting, but instead turns into more endless mooning.

One of those things, the one that's most striking, is the sense of Edward as a guy who is endlessly holding himself rigid against the temptation to do something he knows is wrong, but which both his instincts and most of his society would view as day-to-day business. Not the turning her into a vampire aspect, although that's a whole further set of missed opportunities, but the idea that he's constantly in a state of just barely restraining himself from killing her. As presented in the series, this is seriously problematic. The implications include: that all men are predisposed to attack women and women are helpless to prevent this, and thus should do their best to keep from provoking the men. That attraction and temptation to violence are a reasonable equivalency. That sex is more or less the same thing as violence. That sort of thing.

In different hands, though, it could come off as one of the more interesting kind of characters- the T.E. Lawrence, the Johnny Cash, the dark figure who is driven to do dark things but manages to keep that drive in check... mostly. Who doesn't like himself (or herself) much because of those drives, but who may appear saintly to the outside world. Who doesn't naturally have a conscience, but decides painfully to acquire one. It's a common enough thing in fantasy fiction, and I think Buffy has a character like that, but it's one that never gets old- the idea that moral horror is a marvelous gift that people have, and the terror of imaging what kind of life you would lead if you didn't have it.

That kind of fiction is exactly the opposite of 24, which celebrates the amoral Nietzschean victory against the self, and argues that sacrificing one's soul should be viewed as heroic, rather than as more or less the worst thing in the world. Twilight could have gone there. It has the material for it. Instead, it stuck to recreating the version of Romeo and Juliet that people who have never read or seen it tend to make in their heads. Pass.

edit: I meant to mention Jules from Pulp Fiction here. Jules isn't quite the monster trying to be good trope, so much as a bad man who has an epiphany, but he has a line- "See now I'm thinkin', maybe it means you're the evil man. And I'm the righteous man. And Mr. 9 Milimeter here, he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could mean you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd and it's the world that's evil and selfish. Now I'd like that. But that shit ain't the truth. The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd." That recognition, and its interpretation of the (entirely made up) Bible quote Jules uses, is a perfect Flannery O'Connor moment of grace, and the characters I'm talking about are people trying to live with what happens after that moment. But those moments are just the most beautiful things in the world.