Review of Dark Twilight Fanfic: Hide And Drink by Savage

Hide and Drink

Hide and Drink

http://youtu.be/4aoqfNidOZI  Dark and dangerous film clip from Twilight footage illustrating what Hide and Drink is like.

I find most Twilight fanfic simply piggy-backing off Stephenie Meyer, and then degenerating into banal and boring genre because the writer is just not a good enough writer - not well  read and going for the cliched ending. Like Sarah Gruen in Water For Elephants just offing people at the end because she didn't know what else to do. 

BUT Hide and Drink is a challenge thrown in the face of Meyer! And this is what makes it so intriguing to me. When Edward first smells Bella in the biology classroom the monster appears. That is, the Double appears. The Double always appears with Death (Cosmopolis) and takes the person or character into Symbolic Exchange and Death: reversibility, Destiny, seduction,surprise, risk, challenge, duel, pact, out of the Order of Production: irreversibility, accumulation, reproduction, contract, denial of death, simulation, and survival.  This moves the person and/or story into the Order of Seduction and out of the Order of Production (plot). It is clear that Stephenie has Edward willing himself to deny himself Bella's blood. Good old-fashioned capitalistic moral  self-control. Hide and Drink surprises by exploring the monster Double, what the acting out of the fantasy Edward has in the classroom in Twilight might lead to. Edward's dangerousness appears that Pattinson saw and wanted to portray, but that frightened Catherine Hardwicke, Scummit and all the rest of them. 

The great Herzog in Nosferatu confronts the erotic vampire head-on in consummate artistic brilliance.  In Hide and Drink Edward initially gives his will over to instinct and then to Bella, letting her decide. This is Jean Baudrillard and cutting edge post modern theory. Turning and offloading your will on to another is part of many cultures, historically and in the present, (Canetti The Human Province). Relying on your own autonomy, good old-fashioned rugged individualism, is a denial of the Order of Seduction and Destiny. 

Hide and Drink explores the complicity of the captive/abductor dyad so wonderfully elucidated for us by Baudrillard, (and denounced for)  and, in its beginning is a frightening and bravely erotic parallel to Jaycee Dugard's captivity, resonating with all of the Marquis de Sade's work. It is quite simply, Beauty and the Beast. The Master/Slave  concept so beautifully clarified by Baudrillard is presented fictionally in Hide and Drink and astonishes, as it parallels and exemplifies Baudrillardian theory, following in the shadow  of Barthes.  

Hide and Drink is not plot driven except in an internal mythological way.  The other extraordinary aspect of Hide and Drink is the avoidance of relying on external superficial occurrences and characters to move the story onward. It just does not deteriorate into plot occurrences, normality (marriage and family in BD) and become ho-hum what else is new Happy Ending. Hide and Drink has an ambiguous ending, certainly an ending in Death with Bella's change that reveals and conceals a secret meaning.  Edward's descent into madness is classical, and Savage does not fall into the interpretive psychological swamp of either pop clinical psychology or psychoanalytic theory, another amazing surprise. And since it is full of clinical case study referents it would be so easy to slide into that way of thinking about this Edward. Edward's slow movement into madness is not hysterically portrayed with only some wild actions and gestures, but  perceptually, and even more important, linguistically, resonating with the subtle and prevailing influence of Lacanian theory, and Antonin Artaud's own linguistic descent so excruciatingly quoted in Deleuze's The Logic of Sense.  

The new invention of Meyer's sign ambiguous masculine figure of Edward is extended in Hide and Drink and Baudrillard's doubts as to the counterpart of the femme fatale feminine being imagined in a new and modern archetype of the masculine emerges more fully in Hide and Drink's Edward and disappears Baudrillard's objections to the male's inability to satisfy the woman endlessly. Women can offer themselves  and receive the male endlessly, but the male is limited by his ability to sustain an erection over and over and over and over. Baudrillard's observation has been overcome fictionally by Hide and Drink's vampire Edward, but Edward's hands, fingers and mouth speak to the non-vampire male.  

And so this does exactly what Baudrillard wishes, it disappears his doubting theoretical meditations. Just as Eric Packer in Cosmopolis sees the chink in Vija Kinski's theoretical oral musings - following Baudrilard - and commits an act of intellectual terrorism, imploding the global currency market, thus disappearing Kinski's Baudrillardian observations to Packer in his moment of self-transcendence. DeLillo believes in the transcendence of the narrative  and differs from Baudrillard, who does not accept transcendence following Foucault. In Cosmopolis DeLillo has thrown the challenge fictionally to Baudrillard, and in Hide and Drink Savage has thrown the challenge of darkness, dangerousness, lust and perversion to Meyer.  

Of course the underlying structure of Twilight and all the fanfic seduction part in the beginnings is based on Time and resonates with Proust's In Search of Lost Time. As soon as plot takes over, and the pace increases, thus accelerating Time, all the fanfic stories lose it. They just come undone, every single one of them and every time Meyer succumbs the same thing occurs in the Twilight Saga. It is the difference between the Meadow Scene imaginatively written by Meyer and the jump cuts CH made out of it to destroy contemplation. Savage in Hide and Drink does not make that mistake. 

Edward and Bella in Twilight are Tristan and Iseult but Bella and Edward in Hide and Drink and the captive Jaycee Dugard/Phillip Garrido are Beauty and the Beast.

I have discussed many of these concepts elsewhere on other of my blogs.