Friday 20 March 2009

Twilight: The Beautiful Undead

Jenny Turner has written a piece about Twilight in the London Review of Books and has expressed everything I wanted to much more accurately and in much more poetic prose. I highly recommend it.

"It’s not that the books read like Mormon propaganda exactly...(but) religion bulges out in unacknowledged places – in the interest in immortality and eternal bonding, sects, and the very odd and uninformed fascination with ‘addiction’ and ‘obsession’, among other forbidden things – and, above all, in the centrality of ‘abstaining’, which is one word Edward’s sect uses for its refusal to feed on humans and, of course, the description for what Bella and Edward are doing when they renounce sex. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, teen chastity was fit only for the bluntest satire; and yet, here it is, a decade later, stronger than ever, the most moral and the most erotic position to take, the practice that brings the human closest to the god."

"Bella’s character, in accordance with the conventions of the most finely mashed romantic fiction, has no features at all, apart from a mild emo-ish dysthymia...as Helen Fielding did with Bridget Jones, Meyer has hitched a ride on the Mr Darcy plotline, but without bothering to give her heroine any of Elizabeth Bennet’s spirit – raising a reprise of the Bridget question, why would a man of any style or substance fall for a lummox like her?"

And most importantly, and probably a view I didn't stress enough in my review since I was concentrating on the subtext rather than the cinematography, casting, special effects and acting of the film itself:

"In accordance with the adage about the rubbishy book making for the better movie, Twilight the film is great."

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