"These Bad Boys Mean Business" - TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN Vs. FACING EVIL with Candice DeLong

 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 whose brittle but compassionate demeanor is tried and tested in the forge of crime solving, poring over testimony and evidence against, and motives of, homicidal women. Interviewing them on on death row 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 and sanity left behind. Before that moment they were just normal people but 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 jail for life. And it's all because they let a man (almost always) 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. And once you switch --get bitten or bite as it were --there's no going back.

In this fourth film, Breaking Dawn Part 1, Edward tells a story of his days hunting and drinking the blood of 'molesters' (before he became a 'vegan' - drinking only animals). A flashback to a London screening of Bride of Frankenstein (1935) cements him to a lineage that dates back to the first big wave of Universal horror films, offering a kind of hatchet burying with classic horror fans for whom Twilight is an embarrassing abomination scarcely deserving of its horror genre keywords. He tells Bella this story perhaps implying that his kind are in a sense, truly evil, in that they are predatory against humans. Whether they curb their habits, only drink bad guys (like Dexter or Anne Parillaud in Innocent Blood), or only hunt deer, they're still evil, i.e. sociopaths. 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 one's skills in the latter they are the harder becomes the former. For a killer not to kill, it's like me not killing whiskey bottles... a crime against nature.

It's on this tenet, however, that the romance in Twilight works (way better than just the guilt mongering of Anne Rice). A romantic fantasy animus (demon lover)  like Edward in the Twilight series and a real life (young handsome male) murderer are, based on this tenet, indistinguishable. Like sending love letters to Richard Ramirez or Ted Bundy--the thrill of bad boy danger tempered is by the impossibility of their release--the saga of Bella and Edward is similarly based on thrills and danger welded to 'safety' (he protects her and keeps his urges in check) and denial (he has no sex organs or corporeal presence): 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 in their interview: "You liked the bad boys. But these bad boys mean business."

I love the first three Twilight films (well, let's just say, I'm at least 'fascinated' by them) but Breaking Dawn is a huge let-down, like what might happen if Ramirez finally got out of jail to marry one of his pen pals, and he turned out to be old and bald and fat and a convert to Christianity. The problems with Breaking Dawn aren't as bad as that, but herewith are summed up in the three M's: Maturity, Martyrdom, and Music, and the one saving grace against all three-- Disillusionment:

1. Music: Instead of Carter Burwell's trippy electric guitar in the first film or the nearly nonstop flow of emotional sadcore songs that ran like a nightmare chorus through the next two, we get a lot of listless minor key piano that occasionally breaks for tired croons from Christina Perri and Bruno Mars. Blechh. Part of what drew me to the first three films was the way the music stirred long dormant druggy love vibes inn the blood, the kind of deep sense of thrilled longing that Bella Swan clearly felt moping around in her bedroom. When the pop songs finally sneak into this fourth installment, they all sound the same--lots of flat tweedy male neo-folk harmonies-- and lack any kind of legitimate sadness, except in the most perfunctory of Urban Outfitters Americana hipster harmony kind of way. The first songs were chosen for mood - these are chosen--I don't doubt--for corporate synergy.

 2. Maturity: Whenever a teen series moves out of high school and into marriage you know you're headed for trouble and that's why I maybe forgive Dawn a little bit more than I forgave, say, season four of Buffy. The theater I saw Dawn in was freezing cold (broken heater) and that made the extended, strange marriage ceremony both better and worse: time slowed, half the ceiling was dripping and exposed, presumably from a burst pipe; the cherry blossoms onscreen seemed made of ice, and the dream of the 'death-size' wedding cake froze my blood, literally. For a second I had a sense of overwhelming fear that Bella was already dead and marrying Edward be like the scary climax of Psychomania! And I was dead, too.

And of course the cast is in real life maturing all the while, and though the year/s since the last film have been kind to Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner: posture and facial feature definition and a sense of gravitas are all up several points, Pattinson just seems washed out like he's being overly CGI airbrushed like Courtney Cox in Scream IV.

Still, 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 at the wedding, all gorgeous and interesting and probably worthy of spin-off films. Their glowing eyes and Goth-but not too Goth-off-white dresses made me desperately want to be at that wedding, and made me think I already had in weird 'teenage dream I still remember fondly' kind of way.

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 behind the 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 your 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 / mirroring / metatextual subjective position : the unborn child's free-floating ghost, eying Bella's womb like a tired wanderer eyes a warm, toasty Motel 6 (id)

In a sense, it's perfect just as it is, this preparations for the wedding. There's nowhere to go but down. After a certain point no amount of stalling and pretty baubles and nice scenery will help when it's down to you, it all comes 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, like evil sea wolves!

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 paler-than-the-wedding-cake groom. Jacob's derisive scoffing that her and Edward's honeymoon will be a sad sick joke-- 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 (and frozen to death in an unheated cineplex). 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 yesss.

In the film's best scene she looks down at him while he sits on the smashed up marital bed, 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 because he is, 'ow you say? A fraud, like all ze Kens!

 Thus we come to the realization that those people who wait to get married before fucking are perhaps either terrified they'll be terrible at it 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 into the dust and grime of who's turn it is to do the dishes; the longer you stay in the virgin white clouds the more your sink fills up until the dishes are so dirty and so numerous that you can't even find the sink, or the soap... and you run from that sink, don't you, Bella? But now you're chained to it!

So while Bella and Edward's flatline honeymoon is not what we want to see it's what needs to be seen for the film to have a larger meaning than just button-nosed girl promise ring erotica. Rather than giving us the trite softcore displays of conspicuous enjoyment we only think we want to see and which would, in the Lacanian sense, collapse both Bella's and our own identification construct, they give us the truth, the awareness, the realization that the whole grand mythic aspect of their love would be lost if a happy-ever-after truly arrived. 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 misery-loving company but a threat to our enjoyment. We are, in other words, the cockblocking DUFF.

 A key moment is at the Rio airport where Edward makes arrangements with a Brazilian pilot for a private jet home because he's learned 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 recognized by her, finally, as mollycoddling. His Victorian/compulsive need to keep her co-dependent is based more on his own insecurity and self-loathing than on any truly chivalrous impulse. So, like the women interviewed by Candice DeLong in Facing Evil, Bella is waking up out of a brainwash by a bad boy.

The thing is, the real time-serving inmates interviewed by Candice are 'made' into killers through this same brainwashing technique. And Bella technically will let Edward make her into a killer (a vampire) but she has chosen it in advance of all his brainwashing; she is drawn to the darkness, and her bad boy actually tries to keep her out of it. It's not the sex of the honeymoon she really wants, for without death, what do you have? Sans petite mort? Vous n'avez rien!

4) Martyrdom - Bella 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; like Steel Magnolias in reverse! The only way to get Edward to finally turn her, to 'kill her,' is via the pretext of sacrifice, rather than a personal and morbid self interest. 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 abject underground stream of pregnancy and rough sex--the twin magnets of darkness no amount of feminist rationale can brighten.

So let me ask you this, my Jezebel coterie: If a woman starts out independent and chooses to be overwhelmed by the male other 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?

Steel survivor: 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 unborn child (as opposed to the doofus husband from Steel Magnolias for whom the sick wife seems little more than a baby wrapper). Meanwhile Bella's refusal to give up her fetus even as it's killing her is seen as foolhardy by everyone but herself... and part of it isn't just her connection with the child but her wish to die and be reborn as a vampire, which Edward would clearly postpone indefinitely (naturally since once she's turned he will lose his power over her). In other words, her choice is based on her own desire to die, and her connection to her baby, sans any desire to please or obey her man's selfish edicts. So in the end, feminists and pro-choice types alike go snarling back to the Exit of this film, both ill-served by the myth they cautiously hoped to adopt. And those of us who seek genuine subversion recognize it in this very sly Antigone-like renouncement.

It is, after all, only a myth...

But... that's not quite right. 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 until it explodes in sudden violence or bad boy brainwash submission.

 This is a sad, Freudian truth seen all too well through the pale blue eyes of Candice DeLong on Facing Evil. Without an archetypal context by which to recognize the big bad wolf when it came pawing at her basket, the Red Riding Hoods DeLong interviews were easy prey. Maybe they never learned to read, or their dads were fundamentalist zealots who refused to let them hear the story (telling her Red Riding Hood shouldn't be allowed out without a male escort, and the hood should cover her whole face like a burka!), and now they've paid the price. Haters can sneer at it, feminists can rear back and bare fangs, but girls currently immersed in the Twilight world will all grow up knowing how to recognize wolves when they see them. The bad boys they meet will just seem 'sooo fifth grade', only slightly less outre than ponies, or those phallus-free Ken dolls.

But those red riders who don't have a wolf to chase them in their youth can never grow out of the need for one, so they become the wild-eyed deer in the headlights-types that the bad boy wolves can spot from a mile off at any bus depot. Instead of knowing a devil when they see one these mythless runaways are instead themselves are only seen, and sucked... first through lupine head trips, then into murder, then through Candice DeLong's icy vampire eyes and back out into the hell paved by Christendom's good intentions.

Head Under Heels: GIRLY (1970)

Much as I love grindhouse cinema, I'll confess some of the themes--the rape-revenge and WIP sub-genres in particular--often leave me feeling soiled and soured on humanity, resentful of having my empathic response and innate chivalry used as a cheap fuel for 'sharpening me up' and conservative catharsis (that never full catharts). Walking the streets afterwards, in a state of semi-shock, like a Tennessee Williams heroine pining for dead 'friend' and sensing only brusque, misogynist licentious hostility all around, it takes me weeks to recover, memories of the vile recreations I endured dredging up at the oddest times. I've been told by many girlfriends that this venomous anti-misogynist rage is not sexy but what am I to do? As an English major at Syracuse during the mid-to-late 1980s, I was caught up in a time of great liberal backlash/sexual hysteria--Satanic panic and the dawn of PC thuggery--wherein sensitive new age guys like me were conditioned to feel guilty for every impure thought and meanwhile our friends in the dorm were being date-raped before there was such a phrase, and too cowed to go the cops. By senior year, there was "take back the night" marches, but by then militant feminist backlash had so overreached it targeted even me!

That's why, perhaps, I've always long been in love with dangerous women, the type who kick ass, smoke, drink, dose, carry guns, laugh at the cosmic joke and who don't need to be assaulted before they've earned the right to beat a frat boy to death with a champagne bottle. Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted is my guru. Yes, I know that's a pretty bad choice for a guru --but it's movies, man --not reality --reality died in the 80s. trouble is 99% of films don't know it.

As such, I'm always ready to walk a long way for a glimpse at the glint of true madness in a young Lolita's eye, the kind that's not kindness-of-strangers-dependent/delusional but the opposite. They absolve me of a great burden, for they don't need my anguished pounding at the ovular gates of the screen, offering like some interdimensional woodsman to enter frame and rescue them. If these women could traverse the other way they'd likely kill me instead, and I like that.

And now, I'm right with the times: the poster girl for the current era is Sarah Palin, with her tan and form-fitted bright red raincoat and MILF glasses, standing on a podium surrounded by crisp white Alaskan snow; her hot breath steaming the microphone, spouting enough fear-inducing fascist rhetoric to make Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate let loose a dove. I would never vote for her, but I dig when girls rise up and use their sexual super powers for evil instead of good, and if they can't have their revenge on Seattle, like Francis Farmer one day will, let them destroy all the side-burned swingers, angry lawyers, priests, parents, and homeless they can get their drive-in claws on! Hence my deep love for: Spider Baby, Don't Deliver Us From Evil,  Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!, Vampyres, Mesa of Lost Women, Daughter of Darkness, and so on (if you know any others, do let me know).

Thank heaven, then, for little Girly. The film's treacly but rundown dead flowers and sickly sunshine decor (lots of dolls and paneling) could have been too much to handle but cinematographer-cum-director Freddie Francis does the impossible and makes the whole dreary Grey Gardens-gone-quite-gold-from-grief Brit tackiness thing seem actually cozy in its overgrown gone-to-seed, dead plant and smashed china kinda way (a good DVD transfer helps immeasurably I'm sure). Girly is the exception to the 'dotty gentry' Brit genre, that offshoot of the Baby Jane tree, for it is truly mad. Rather than the visualized madness and soapy starvation of the horror hag genre, it possesses a sense of giddy feral freedom, unwinding as a constantly devolving children's game with endless chanting and macabre undertones, sexually voracious (or arrested) family members fussing over and doting on innocent debauched wayfarers, the sort of raincoated men who seem old enough to vote but surely have no ID or worried next-of-kin. So what's not to love, even as the axe comes roaring down? The insanity of the depicted matriarchy is more honest in its scripting than Little Edie was in her imrov. Their dolls, pre-empathic (latent) sadism, games like 'Grocery Store' and 'Cowboys and Indians' and other sexy macabre head games seem all of a piece, part of a devolution brought on by incest and apparent lax mansion real estate tax, and/or big trust funds. They have no father to initiate the children into the social order, so it all comes down to lots of macabre nursery rhymes and strange "rules" of the house, and the way, even here in this macabre paradise, sex destroys everything, but oh! Oh! That Girly.

A knock-out of the Sue Lyon in Night of the Iguana /Jill Banner as Virginia (aka Spider Baby) / Carroll Baker as Baby Doll variety, Vanessa Howard captures the spirit of wicked evil as only young pre-empathetic, unsocialized wild-and-ever-nubile girlies can. Her eyes are alight with unholy mischief, and then -- later -- the guilty pangs of blossoming womanhood, and all the drag that implies. Sexual awakening drives even ordinary teenagers insane, prompting a whole slew of irrational behavior, so how crazy then must this insane girl get? Sexual awakening might even mean a kind of awful late-blooming sanity! Her rapport with the sad but savvy eyes of "New Friend" --who learns to play the game pretty damned fast--causes a rift within the deranged clan, but it's one her craziness fights against, so she winds up oscillating between compassion and sadism, or-- illustrated in a great single long-held shot of her face as she lies in bed and he goes down on her (below camera) a slow change from childish joy to passion to sadness to contentment to guilt, with the same finesse as Jim Siedow in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (with Michael Bryant in the Marilyn Burns position) if harnessed to Jane Fonda in that similar scene from Coming Home. And she's got lovely legs which in little socks and schoolgirl maroon skirts are fit drive straight male viewers like myself into moaning fits and seizures; her long long straight perfectly dirty blonde hair demarcates a princesses of the late 60s/early 70s variety; her simmering red schoolgirl uniform is like a pomegranate-squeezed hallucination against the perennial grey and mud green garden fog of parks and the zoo. She's a great complex character and Howard bites into the part with such a cunning glee that you want to lick the juice off her chin, even if means she's going to turn around bite your tongue off.

Full of joyous relish in this macabre set-up, the rest of this all-Brit cast eats it up too, this being the land of Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, Joseph Loesy, the C-of-E, and Shakespeare, they're more than capable of nailing every nuance in these bizarre characters. We simply adore the droll restraint (and throaty seductive purr come late night bed jostling) of Ursula Howells as Mumsy (the British title of the film is Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly) and the simmering of Pat Heywood as sexually frustrated murderous Nanny, with her bottle of acid and long needle ala the poison used in Hamlet. There are all sorts of sly references to decadent English royalty going on I'm probably too Yank to get but I can recognize the Shakespeare references -- at time Girly herself even rocks a Lady Macbeth-style hallway creep and murderous intent range of emotions. Even the interloper who wisely seduces the lot of them, "New Friend" as they call him, Michael Bryant (who kind of looks like a hungover James Coburn), does a good job registering a fusion of aghast and intrigued, the louche swinger slowly triumphing over the reactionary; giallo fixture Imogen Hassall is his initial fur and white-dress clad girlfriend, who dies early-on. She's excellent at being bored by the drunken dawn kid games and unaware of immanent danger as they meet and drunkenly cavort at the park playground with Girly and Sonny as the sun comes up. Francis's camerawork is imaginative and rich as always, replete with some good crane shots (he won the Oscars for his cinematography in The Elephant Man and Glory). Some of the interiors seem flatly-lit and the palette is very mushy, but that's the style of the weird kitchen sink-upstairs/downstairs Pinter-esque dramas Girly slyly satirizes. There are still plenty of dark olive greens and seething maroons. Bernard Ebbinghouse's score is a nicely subversive mix of bouncy elevator muzak and pensive classical bits that always seem on the verge of a funeral, running antithetical and brave against the nursery school maniacal zest.

Man, this film's got my number. I'm trying to less subjective here but if I love a film I take it very personally. Love kills everything it touches, including objectivity, so bear my prejudice in mind. As Burt Lancaster said in Visconti's The Leopard: "Marriage is six months of fire and forty years of ashes." If you ever were a swinger, you might use that line to justify a lifestyle that includes occasionally waking up from a two-day bender on a stranger's couch, snuggled against a snoring pit bull whom you do not know. To this day, I still don't know what happened that night, or whose couch that was, but I've chosen the swinging path over that of the spouse and ungrey garden and that's my life, and I'll probably do it again. God forgive us ("no blasphemy here," notes mumsy when New Friend tries to mention the lord at  dinner). men like New Friend, me, and countless others have let ourselves be led all through history by spirited and charismatic emotionally-unstable blondes into iron maws such as this. Some of us made it out alive, or in a state that resembles aliveness (the usual shambling relic, shivering over park bench muscatel). What have we learned? That insanity is as easy to absorb in cloistered surroundings as a local accent, that survival can depend on one's being open to the rules of childish lunacy (as true in life as in sexual procreation), that movies don't need moral centers (no bobbies or barristers appear here like unwelcome censor-demanded buzzkills to decry such upper crust depravity), that clinging to worn-out ideals can be fatal, and that the trick to staying alive--as a man trapped in a crazy woman's world--is going down early and often.

PS - And strange coincidence, almost all my own films have the same Venus Flytrap / Vagina Dentata theme, particularly QUEEN OF DIC/SKS. Will you see it?