Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Candice DeLong

Any similarities to a vampire are surely coincidental.

The real life Clarice Starling, Candice DeLong (above) was a high profile FBI profiler for 20 years. Seeing her on Investigative Discovery's Deadly Women and Facing Evil (Friday nights!) is to see a still button-cute but steely-eyed brunette who's brittle but compassionate demeanor is tried and tested in the forge of evil, poring over testimony and evidence and motives of specifically (for the shows) homicidal women. Interviewing them on Facing Evil in a style as intimate as a Barbara Walters, Delong guides their story from childhood to the moment the trigger is pulled or knife inserted, the moment sanity is left behind. Before that moment they were just normal people losing their minds; once the first shot is fired or cut is made, their whole world--and that of their victim--has now forever changed; so here they are, in for life. And it's all because they let a man blur their own private line between good and evil. 

Facing Evil

Their stories follow a general similarity of a vulnerable woman and a predatory, usually older schemer. On the surface, this undeniable facet of our modern mediated life validates some of the feminist concerns about the Twilight series --that it glamorizes abusive relationships, encourages dependence on older men and encourages leaving conventional reality behind for the fascist bubble that love and submission create.

In this fourth in the series, Breaking Dawn, Edward tells a story of his days hunting and drinking the blood of 'molestors.' A flashback to a screening of Bride of Frankenstein (1933) cements him to a lineage that dates back to the first Universal horror films, the dawn of dread in cinema, implying that his kind are in a sense, truly evil in that they are predatory. Whether they curb their habits, only drink bad guys (like Dexter), or only hunt deer, they're still evil -- maybe that's the true difference between staying out of jail in civilization and survival in the wilderness. Predatory instincts ensure the latter, but the sharper they are the harder it must be not to kill everyone around you, sooner or later, just because you do it so well. As they say in AA, "if you hang out all day in a barber shop, sooner or later you're going to get a haircut."

Small wonder, then, that the character of a romantic fantasy demon lover like Edward in the Twilight series and a real life murderer are often indistinguishable. Remember all. the girls who sent love letters to Ted Bundy and the Night Stalker? Bundy even married one of them during his trial. I'm sure the physical absence of the killer helped boost that along. The saga of Bella and Edward is similarly based on denial - there's no nagging wife to dispose of first, but there are... other things... that make their story conflate with the prison nurse who shot a guard to help her bad boy escape, over which comes DeLong's memorable words (approx.) about the nurse's love for hot prison guys: "You liked the bad boys. But these bad boys mean business."

I mention all that in relation to blood and Twilight: Breaking Dawn for a very good reason: the blood, as Dracula once said, "is the life." In 1931, the 'other' Bela, Lugosi, at his most masterful and deathless, played him - his movement... corpse-like, his speech... slowed... as if each... word.. took effort through a dust-caked, bloodless mouth (a Hungarian, he had to learn his lines phonetically). You could believe Bella had turned into a bat when the bat appeared. He seemed more dead than death.

 

You don't get that level of 'death'-like behavior in any subsequent vamp movie. Certainly not the nonetheless blood-enriched Dawn. If Bella has to drink blood, the ever mollycoddling Edward puts it in an empty Big Gulp cup with a straw and plastic lid so she doesn't have to see it. To add to the freakiness, it's her blood type, which they keep around just for her - which doesn't seem to make sense - since when does one have to drink their own blood type? That's incest!


I love the first three Twilight films (well, let's just say, 'fascinated by') but Breaking Dawn sure takes its time getting going, and the fundamental problems that set it apart from earlier entries are herewith summed up in the three M's: Maturity, Martyrdom, and Music, and the one saving grace D, Disillusionment:

1. Music: Instead of the nearly nonstop flow of emotional sadcore songs that ran like a nightmare chorus through the first three we're burdened with a rather dull, listless minor key piano score that occasionally breaks for tired croons from Christina Perri and Bruno Mars. Blechh. Part of what drew me to the first three films was, in fact, the sad music which actually seemed to be what Bella Swan the character would actually listen to while moping around in her bedroom dreaming of her shadow self vamp protector. When the pop songs finally sneak into this fourth installment they're apparently all sound the same and lack any kind of legitimate sadness, except in the most perfunctory of Brooklyn hipster harmony sort of ways.

 2. Maturity: Whenever a teen series moves into marriage or out of high school you know you're headed for trouble and that's why I maybe forgive Dawn a little bit more than I forgave, say, season IV of Buffy. The theater I saw Dawn in was freezing cold (broken heater) and that made the extended, strange marriage ceremony both better and unbearably slow -- time slowed, half the ceiling exposed presumably from a flood, the cherry blossoms onscreen seemed made of ice, and the dream of the 'death-size' wedding cake froze my blood thanks to the help from the winter. For a second I had a sense of overwhelming fear hat Bella was already dead and marrying Edward would mean literal death -- it reminded me of the climax of Psychomania!

The intervening year/s since the last film have been kind to Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner: posture and definition and a sense of gravitas are theirs. Kristen gets Julia Roberts-length stretches of time to do bits of post-marital daydreaming while unwrapping food or combing her hair. Pattinson seems extra bleached--his face a white paste glowing blur-- vamps don't age. In general they have all avoided the pasty hungover look that dogged the aging Harry Potter gang, and I loved the awesome selection of fully sketched-out 'relatives' of the Cullen clan, all gorgeous and interesting and probably worthy of spin-off films. Checking out those glowing eyes and Goth but not too Goth dresses made me desperately want to be at that wedding, and made me think I already had in weird teenage dreams I still remember. PS - My favorite Cullen is the nurturing but still badass 'older sister/advisor' psychic vampire, Alice, played by Ashley Greene.

Break: If you're still unclear why/how this series is so popular, let's examine the still below:

Note the purple and violet color coordination that's been the key luscious art design since the first film, and the way these two cute vampires fuss, with their centuries of beauty tip expertise, over this 18 year-old slacker with her hunched over posture and vaguely mannish profile. As a viewer you're identification locus moves in three directions if you study the picture, mirroring the three components of consciousness:

   1) Bella: cute but frail and human, easily led (ego)
   2) Vampire helpers: examining our human weakness from their superior position (super ego)
   3) The Gaze: the unborn child's free-floating ghost, eying Bela's womb like a tired wanderer eyes a warm, toasty Motel 6, coupled to the 'male gaze' - where death, sex, and reincarnation all tangle up in the unconscious webs of fear and desire\ 'female gaze' - the unseen third vamp in the room, reacting to Bella with a mix of jealousy and adoration (id).

In a sense, it's perfect just as it is, this preparations for the wedding. There's nowhere to go but down - the deeper and harder Edward pushes to make the honeymoon just perfect, the more it will begin to crack at the seams. After a certain point no amount of stalling and pretty baubles and nice scenery will help when it's down to you, in your nakedness, facing the end point of desire's long trip down the river Niagara, when the three aspects of consciousness are forced to face the three unconscious aspects, the sides of self you never even knew were there, the ones hiding at the bottom of the lake, the unconscious!

3. Disillusionment: That said, Jacob (Taylor Lautner) shows up and steals the film halfway through the wedding reception, bursting with lycanthropic life, sweeping Bella off her feet and right away from the only mildly more animated than the plastic wedding cake groom, Edward. Jacob's derisive scoffing that their honeymoon will be a sad sick joke, and his incredulity that Edward 'hasn't told her yet' implies some massive sterile impotence on the part of all vampires that makes the 'waiting' til they're married to have sex aspect suddenly seem like a sad con job. Once that ring is on her finger, the fact that this Ken doll has only a plastic absence in his pants will no longer be something she can protest about.


Sure enough, after this long beautiful wedding scene and lengthy travelogue to this exotic secret honeymoon location we in the audience are as as jet-lagged as Bella. We'd been expecting some serious fireworks, and instead Edward drags her down to the middle of nowhere, just to be by the beach, and feebly tries to humiliate her because she's not mad enough at him for leaving her bruised up from the roughness of his, how you say? lovemaking? Ah yes. In the film's best scene she looks down at him while he sits on the smashed up marital bed, defeated and wormy, for the first time he's not a gentlemen of vamping anymore but a self-sabotaging undead toad, a loser with weird teeth who's spent three films postponing this inevitable de-pantsing. A fraud, like all men!

 Thus we come to the realization that those people who wait to get married before fucking are perhaps either terrified of sex or terrible at it  - and Edward, one supposes, is a little of both, or else completely oblivious to the tenets of Lacanian psychoanalysis and/or Buddhism. Having sex before marriage is like getting your head out of the clouds and acknowledging that yes, there will be arguments over whose turn it is to do the dishes, but the longer you stay in the virgin white clouds, the more you're sink fills up with crap, until by the time you're all married and finally disillusioned, the dishes are so dirty and so numerous that you can't even find the sink, or the soap... and you run!

So while Bella and Edward's flatline honeymoon is not what we want to see it's what needs to be seen. It's closer to being genuine rather than giving us the trite softcore display of conspicuous enjoyment we only think we want to see and which would be just not 'true' and would, in the Lacanian sense, collapse both Bella's and our own identification construct. If they really enjoyed their honeymoon the whole grand mythic aspect of their love would be lost. But as long as she's miserable we can still safely identify with Bella and enjoy her squirming from our hidden masochistic perspective. Once she's 'well laid' as it were, she becomes no longer our commiserator but a threat. 

 A key moment is at the Rio airport where Edward makes arrangements with a Brazilian pilot for a private jet home because she's pregnant... with a demon baby! The impression Edward creates as such a hip, rich, happenin' dude in his cargo shorts (he can speak fluent Portuguese!) is denuded by the nonplussed way Bella regards the whole thing from her passenger window in the nearby cab. By now, Edward's brand of 'I'll take care of everything' is seen by her, finally, for the mollycoddling it is; there's no demarcation line between his old-fashioned chivalry, his Victorian/compulsive need to keep her co-dependent and his own insecurity. So, like the women interviewed by Candice DeLong in Facing Evil, Bella is getting a  brainwash by a bad boy but unlike them she's finally seeing through his Jedi mind tricks.

The thing is, the women by and large interviewed by Candice are 'made' into killers through this technique. And Bella technically will let Edward make her into a killer (a vampire) but she has chosen it in advance of his proposal. She deliberately seeks it out, is drawn to the darkness, and on a certain level and at first her bad boy tries to keep her out of it. And without death, what do you have? Sans petite mort? Vous n'avez rien!

4) Martyrdom - Bela she indirectly uses martyrdom--the oppressed feminine's ultimate trump card-- to force Edward into finally letting her become the undead wraith she's always longed to be, Bella regains control, and steers the film into waters where feminism foams up around patriarchy's boat like an unstoppable surf.  The only way to get Edward to finally punk her into vampness is via the pretext of pro-life sacrifice. Of course it's annoying that this all has to be in service of a pro-life subtext, but, if you follow the 3rd wave feminism all the way down to the twisted roots you'll see it drinking heavily from the forbidden waters of pregnancy and rough sex--the twin magnets of darkness no amount of feminist rationale can brighten.

So let me ask you this: If a woman starts out independent and chooses to be overwhelmed by the male other and chthonic nature, is she betraying her gender, even if its by her own choice? Is she allowed to examine the paradox of being free through surrender? Is she allowed to choose a deeper darkness than even death or prison can contain?

Won't get fooled again.

Accusations of Twilight being pro-life as a whole are evaded by Edward being so pro-abortion, hating his own semi-dead child (as opposed to the doofus husband in Steel Magnolias, above). Bela's refusal to give up her half-vamp infant even as it's killing her is seen as foolhardy by everyone but herself... and part of it is her unconscious wish to die and be reborn as a vampire, which Edward postpones indefinitely (of course he does, as he will lose his power over her). So in the end, feminists and pro-choice types alike go snarling back to the Exit out of the woods, both ill-served by the myth they cautiously hoped to adopt. That may not be the perfect answer, but there's no real way out of this dank, chthonic forest. They ain't goin' anywhere

It is, after all, only a myth, except that's not quite correct: something can be 'only' life, but never 'only' a myth. The danger of ignoring the true nature of the mythic archetypal unconscious--of presuming the mythic dimension has no power other than cheap entertainment--is that you leave your unconscious with  no avenue of conscious expression, so it festers in your pressure cooker subconscious... then creeps up and bites you in the dimension of 'real life' when you're most vulnerable.  This is a sad, Freudian truth seen all too well through the steel blue eyes of Candice DeLong on Facing Evil. Without an archetypal context by which to recognize the big bad wolf when it comes pawing up at her basket, these Red Riding Hoods are easy prey for any passing wolf. Haters can sneer at it, feminists can rear back at it, but girls currently immersed in the Twilight world will all grow up knowing how to recognize wolves when they see them. Those who don't have a myth can't grow out of it, because they leave themselves nothing to grow out of. They stay frozen in the amber light until suddenly the wolf is right up in there, and instead of knowing one when they see one they are instead themselves are only seen, and sucked... through Candice DeLong's steely blue vampire eyes.

PS - Free Brenda Wiley!