the brutalized housewife: part 2

And most notoriously, we have this. I personally don't feel remiss in suggesting that the entire Twilight series is an affront to women in general. The notion that a woman has to choose between two guys who are both on the constant verge of destroying her, that she should be completely submissive to her male counterparts and constantly demure, it's a very offensive idea, and even more so when you see how it is geared towards pre-teens. The last in the series, Breaking Dawn, was given the British Book Award for Children's Book of the Year! Which just goes to make what follows all the more disturbing.

MLIT: Careerism pt. 1

Let's say you're a 20-something actor whose career has been launched by a vampire film franchise. No, not you, Chris Massoglia! I'm referring to Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Ashley Greene and Jackson Rathbone. If you were one of those people, what would you do with all of your newfound fame and clout? Would you blow it on cheap rom-coms? Would you throw yourself into another surefire franchise only to have it blow up in your face? Would you just buy some blow? Or would you try to forge a real career for yourself, blow all your critics away? For the stars of Twilight, that is an open question that really will be answered after Breaking Dawn wraps in a few months. But a glance at projects said actors have already completed between installments might give us an indication of what they are thinking. Today we look at Ashley Greene, A.K.A. Alice Cullen.

MLIT: Real Wedding Planners Plan Bella's Fake Wedding

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn pt. 1: First Blood will be released to theaters on November 18, 2011, in sha' Allah. If you are interested in the boring black-and-red "title treatment" to the film, which was released to much fanfare this morning, then, well, fuck you. But here it is. Spoiler Alert, but Breaking Dawn more or less opens with a wedding scene. Edward Cullen, the mind-reading vampire who is also a skilled negotiator, has basically argued Bella into a corner and she agrees to make their love legit in God's and the state's eyes in order to achieve immortality and an orgasm.

(That god's wishes matter to vampires is a little weird, no? Religion is strangely grafted-on to the Twilight Saga. The drama over impending nuptials eclipses a majority of the ostensible plot of Eclipse [see what I did there? You're welcome] which is theoretically mostly about an attack from an army of zombie-like newborn vampires. That book is the most galling example, but it's present in earlier ones, too. Marriage and souls and Jesus and they way all three relate raise up their ugly heads at odd intervals. It raises questions about Stephenie Meyer's brain, or editor, or both.

MLIT: Vampire Film School 101

Say what you will about the original Twilight film. True, the pancake make-up is laughably bad (though it gets better as the film goes on, almost as if they were running out toward the end). True, a lot of misguided effort went into practical effects (like, say, a complex-looking treadmill system used to make the vampires move quickly in sequences that were ultimately shown in slow motion, WHOOPS). True, Robert Pattinson doesn't have a grip on his American accent yet. But in many ways, it's an admirably weird film, especially when you remember that it was hugely popular with pre-teens. Most films popular with that set are slick, glossy-looking artless things. Twilight (directed by Catherine Hardwicke) is scrappy and nervy. The color palate is almost entirely blue, green, and black (including, weirdly, a few sequences set in Arizona).

I'm particularly a fan of the (admittedly) corny scene in which Edward forces Bella to speak aloud her suspicions that he is a vampire. It's a popular one among the Twi-Hards because it's quotable. "How long have you been seventeen?" Bella asks. "A long time," Edward replies. Ha ha. But someone like me can get behind it too, because the editing is way bizarre, and kind of... awesome?

For comparison's sake, take a look at a sequence of shots from the sequel, New Moon (directed by Chris Weitz):

MLIT: Look Upon This Work And Despair

You look at something like this and you think No Big Deal, this is just some crazy person making some misguided fan art from their favorite scene in the Twilight Saga which is when [spoiler alert] Bella and Edward finally have sex in Breaking Dawn. But then you remember that this scene is actually not sexy at all-- for one thing Bella is covered in bruises which is a disconcerting enough image as it is, made all the more disconcerting when you remember that there is a side character in New Moon who is covered in scars from when she was mauled by her lover who is also a werewolf and Bella, when presented with the image of this scarred up girl and her lover, feels nothing but jealousy and pain in the face of the great love she sees between the abuser and abusee because Edward, her sometimes inadvertently abusive vampire beau, is absent at the time. It's a terrifying scene that comes right back into your mind's eye when you read about the bruises. Here, Bella's been fucked so hard she's covered in black and blue, which is notably absent from the above image. Photoshop is (clearly) difficult. But the feathers are very much present. The feathers, you see, result from Edward biting pillows during intercourse because he simply can't control himself. This is discovered by Bella the morning after because she apparently fell asleep immediately post-sex and made no note of her surroundings which is strange but not the most important thing. The most important thing is that The Feathers carry a lot of weight in certain Twilight circles. Look around and you will see references to them everywhere. To some people, these feathers are sexy, this scene is sexy. Fans breathlessly anticipate the film adaptation of Breaking Dawn and speculate as to how explicit the scene will be, as if they expect 9 Songs or some shit. But when you really get down to it, this scene, and The Feathers, are not sexy. This scene is about all of Edward's fears about sex being confirmed, about his over protective father-like attitude toward Bella being resumed despite their recent marriage. For three books and hundreds of pages he stalls on making Bella a vampire, which is also symbolic sex until real sex also comes into play. He uses Bella's eventual immortality as a bargaining chip to get her to marry him, which we eventually discover is a ploy to protect her virtue. Edward is religious (seriously) and he is worried that pre-marital sex (or pre-marital vamping, again, they are confusingly equated until they just aren't anymore) will blow Bella's chances at eternity at Jesus's side. Bella plans on being immortal anyway, and is generally painted as being of a secular inclination, but she gives in nonetheless, throwing up her hands in exasperation with the rest of us after several scenes of dizzying rhetorical loopty-loops. For a while Edward resists Bella's request in turn that he have sex with her before she becomes immortal (she is worried that her thirst for blood will outweigh her thirst for sex when that happens). By the way, it's important to understand that in the text the word "sex" is avoided at all costs. Euphemisms like "a real honeymoon" are used in order to befuddle younger readers, which has the unintended effect of also confusing older readers. Anyway, Edward eventually relents and after the wedding spirits Bella away to an island his father bought for his mother (sure) in order to give her "a real honeymoon." At this point you can speculate freely as to what kind of Oedipofreudian (if that isn't a word, it is now) shit is going on in Edward's head that he would take his new wife off to his father's love nest for a shag. All we really get in the text is the morning after said shag, the implicit sex is made all the more implicit by Stephenie Meyer's odd penchant for having a disoriented narrator as frequently as possible, regardless of whether or not it has a narrative purpose. And during said morning after, Edward is filled with self-loathing over the physical damage he has done to Bella. When he sees her naked, he turns away in disgust and clenches his fists (no really). He swears to never "make love" to Bella again until she has changed into a vampire. It's a fundamentally unsexy scene that brings back a lot of the uncomfortable religious and patriarchal overtones from the first three books, which were gloriously absent from the first hundred pages or so of Breaking Dawn. You realize that people who find this scene sexy find Edward's self-loathing and overprotectiveness sexy. They find bossiness sexy. They find lack of sex sexy. It's that, or they aren't reading so much as moving their eyes over the page and liking it because everybody else likes it. So all of that runs through your mind when you look at something like this, and pretty soon it's replacing every image from the horror movies that stayed with you from childhood. Your brain re-maps around it, like the way you forget the faces of your high school classmates in college. This image is burned into the backs of my eyelids, and now it will haunt you too. You're welcome.

I'm not a twi-hard but I examine them on my blog.

Why Don't YOU Caption It? Kristen Stewart Holds What Appears To Be A Giant Glass Dildo

Kristen Stewart was at the People's Choice Awards last night, and I don't know what that actually is, but she looks quite good, does she not? Keep on keeping on, KStew (or as I call her: Mini Mary Louise Parker).

My Life Is Twilight: A Jashley Primer

In order to understand the Jashley thing, you need to understand the Disney thing, which I (admittedly) do not understand very well. You have to understand Jonas Brothers fans, and when you try to understand Jonas Brothers fans you start to go crazy, a little bit. I mean, Black Swan hit a little close to home, you know? I think it's because of the reporting I have done on the Jashley controversy since last fall.

When I was younger my sister really liked New Kids On The Block, but she actually liked the idea of them; she owned a NKOTB sleeping bag and probably matching pajamas but didn't actually have any of their cassettes. Since the dawn of time, shady executives have been exploiting the predilections of pre-teen girls-- I'm pretty sure that's how Jesus got started, even. And there is probably no harm in it, by itself. My sister grew up to be a (relatively) normal person.

But when you mix the fervent fandom attracted by the Jonases and Biebers of the world with the Internet, specifically with the relatively anonymous world of social networking, it can be an explosive combination. Bieber-heads infamously mocked Lily Allen when she suffered a miscarriage, in what may be the most high profile example of this phenomenon. But then you see something like this, which is a collection of death threats leveled at Twilight actress Ashley Greene, and you realize the Lily Allen thing wasn't a one-off event. For some people this is EVERY DAY.

My Life Is Twilight: Informed Hatred

People hate Twilight for the wrong reasons. It's totally worthy of hatred, don't get me wrong. It's maybe the most worthy. But if you really want to be informed with your hatred, and I sense that you do, you've got to get past the sparkly vampire thing.

Yes, in Twilight, vampires sparkle in sunlight. It is presented, in Twilight, as a kind of joke about vampire mythology. Vampires are aware of the rumors that they burst into flames in the sun, have an aversion to garlic and crosses, and so on. Within the reality of Twilight, those are exaggerations of the truth. One could easily see how a human seeing a vampire sparkling a few hundred years ago could have been distorted by oral tradition into the whole bursting into flames thing. People who complain about faggy sparkling vampires seem to be implying that Twilight is not totally self-aware about this (Here's a complaint I hear constantly about zombie movies: don't the people in these movies see zombie movies? Don't they know how to deal with a zombie invasion? Yet here is Twilight, a world in which vampires have seen vampire movies, and those same people [unknowingly] complain about it. Be more ideologically coherent with your objections to pop culture, people). But they sparkle! It's so gay! WE KNOW. Get over it.

My Life Is Twilight: I'm Dreaming Of A Bite Christmas (Sorry)

I'm not Twi-Hard, I just play one on my blog.

I want to thank Kira for bringing my attention to the fact that the folks over at the Examiner have rounded up a disconcerting number of photos of Twilight-themed Christmas trees. It's important to remember that most of the people who have the ability to buy and decorate their own Christmas tree, that is to have full thematic control over said tree, are almost always adults who have jobs. You're probably at work right now. Look at the person to your left. Now to your right. One of them is going home to this fucking thing:

There but for the grace of God go AYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY, am I right? Notice down at the bottom that there's a yellow Porsche decoration. That's the car Alice steals in Italy at the end of New Moon. I knew that off the top of my head! Did you? What are we even DOING with our lives? Anyway, head over to the Examiner for the full gallery, or just imagine it because you'll pretty much come up with the same stuff.