Reading The Longing of Edward Cullen Through Marguerite Duras

‘Am I in love? –Yes, since I’m waiting.’ The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.


Sasha and the Silverfish on Owning Roland Barthes - This post is very very beautiful. You may even weep.

Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen in Twilight

Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen in Twilight

I'm sorry Tanya....  I just haven't found what I'm looking for yet. (MS)

In the last hundred years or so,... I never imagined anything like this. I didn't believe I would ever find someone I wanted to be with...(T 300)

For almost ninety years I've walked among my kind, and yours... all the time thinking I was complete in myself, not realizing what I was seeking. And not finding anything, because you weren't alive yet....(T 304)

You see, Bella, I was always that boy. In my world I was already a man. I wasn't looking for love....___but if I had found .....He paused......I was going to say if I had found someone, but that won't do. If I had found you , there isn't a doubt in my mind how I would have proceeded. I was that boy, who would have ___as soon as I discovered that you were what I was looking for ___gotten down on one knee and endeavored to secure your hand. I would have wanted you for eternity, even when the word didn't have quite the same connotations.(E 276-277)

Jacob: You have more patience than I do.
Edward: I should. I've had a hundred years to
gain it. A hundred years of waiting for her.(E 497)





I wanted to tell you what I think, which is that
one always ought to keep oneself a ...place, yes, that's the word, a private place, where one can be alone and love. To love one knows not what, nor whom, nor how, nor for how long. To love... now all the words are suddenly coming back... To set aside a place inside oneself to wait, you never know, to wait for a love, perhaps for a love without a person attached to it yet, but for that and only that. For love.  I wanted to tell you you were what I had waited for. You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die...(Emily L. 98-99)

Emily L. by Marguerite Duras (Amazon $0.01)

Other books by the French writer Marguerite Duras and film:Hiroshima Mon Amour

Film by Alain Resnais

Hiroshima Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras

.....And we cry sometimes, because we are lonely. And we cry sometimes because the other is asleep and you want to wake him up and read him two pages, three. And we cry sometimes because it is not fair to love the way we do; it is not fair for Barthes to show us how raw we are when we love. And how right he is. And how beautiful the words are and how they make us cry and how they make us love and how they make us want to hate......

sasha and the Silverfysh 

Robert Pattinson and His Film History With Mediocre To Poor Directors

Vanity Fair

I have discussed VF elsewhere. Pattinson is so beautiful in it that Reese Witherspoon looks like a hag in drag. They had to age her to be his mother, of course, but in the same frame with him she is shabby even though she is supposed to be that way. Her image couldn't be tarnished in this last scene where Becky Sharp gets her come uppence for her social climbing ways. Pattinson was deleted for his beauty and for a fake happy ending as Hollywood demands. And they let him go to the premiere without telling him they killed him. Now the DVD sells only because of that one deleted scene. Mira Nair is better than this as a director.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Cedric is beautiful and they are careful not to have the camera too long on Pattinson's face in the same frame with Radcliffe. Castrated again the character of Cedric is murdered never to appear to have his face trouble our Harry.

The Haunted Airman is a nasty film. It is the BBC's attempt to do a low budget stupid film noir a la retro. Pattinson is directed to screw up his face into endless contortions, use cigarettes as props (useless directors rely heavily on props) so we see him chain smoking all through the movie to show that he is older than he is and to portray his psychological condition. His face is used pornographically and one wonders at the sexual orientation of the director and camera person because this is simply Smut Film Lite!

The Haunted Airman

In How To Be Pattinson's audition on the DVD shows a classic preppy Pattinson auditioning to portray a slacker type, trying desperately to get something from his dysfunctional cold family. Untalented and clumsy and as unattractive as he can make himself Pattinson tries to downplay his looks, face, voice into a character that won't threaten anyone. He succeeds. The cast is very good but the screenplay is mediocre. Another attempt to castrate him and in this one he helps them along.

Bad Mother's Handbook

In Bad Mother's Handbook Pattinson now has a funny script, and a good supporting cast. Still he is so goofy, awkward, adorable though, that we can almost overlook another attempt to emasculate him.

How To Be

The Summer House

The Summer House has a number of vignettes with substantial people in them (Amy Adams, Robert Downey Jr, James Franco etc) and none of them are particularly interesting. Summer House is the worst and Pattinson is in it for only a few minutes. It is his star power that sold the DVD until people found they were spammed. Daniel Radcliffe was one of the backers for Summer House and what was he thinking? The director has the girl moping, Pattinson moping, inane conversations as the first moon landing occurs to vainlessly attempt a theme of interest. Very boring and another try to murder Pattinson.

Ring of the Nieblings

In the Ring it is painful to watch Pattinson trying so hard to be what he thinks they want. Everything about this film is so awful it is a disaster. No one's performance could have saved it. And then he was castrated by having his voice amputated and dubbed.


After having studied art history with some of the greats

of the 20th century and always appreciative of Dali, I 

learned something from Pattinson's performance I

never expected to learn. Dali's expressiveness was

always on the surface to be seen but evidently I 

couldn't see it. The melting clocks dripping over the 

tablecloth, Ayn Rand's favorite painting was Dali's crucifixion

and so this to me was wonderful. Was it the screenplay? Was it Pattinson's performance as he tries very hard with little direction and evidently not much friendliness on the set as they all spoke Spanish and 

Bel Ami

Little Ashes

this left him out? His moustache is so obviously fake 

that it is annoying and only poor attention to this detail 

can explain it. His character is impotent and nervous

and seems in way over his head with a cast from Spain

where Lorca is adored. Not likely anyone had sympathy for the flamboyant Dali. Did they project these feelings for his character onto Pattinson? Dunno but it has a sad feel to 

Pattinson's performance which is a brave one under trying

circumstances. You can feel his anxiety as he tries.

It is difficult to know what they will do with Bel Ami, a small budget European film. IMO they have been waiting to see if Pattinson could carry Water For Elephants which I have reviewed elsewhere. Then cowards that film merchants are, they will figure out how to jump on the Pattinson bandwagon to cash in on him. 

And then of course we have Edward Cullen, a fine performance, whenever possible, under a Chick With a Dick director named Catherine Blabbermouth Hardwicke, who tries to castrate him every chance she gets. PC feminists get very nervous when faced with male beauty and kindness and talent combined. Let's kill it!

Does he remind her that she is stupid, boring, silly and an untalented director who specializes in chemistry between costars and make out scenes on her bed because she cannot figure out any other way of doing it other than to turn them into a movie? Poor Amanda Seyfried had to kiss 40 studs so CH could watch.  Hmmmmm. I'm not gonna go there.

Cronenberg on casting and its great importance for a director. How he intuits the chemistry between his actors on youtube: Go to youtbe yourself and put in search engine. I can't make it work any other way. v=jO0zPLQaVWQ 

I am reminded of that Vietnam Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh ,who went to Paris to help orphaned children get adopted. The way he placed them was:

He looked at the picture of the children and the prospective adoptive parents. And that is the way he matched them up, reading the longing in the hearts of both.

Reading Photographs of Rob Pattinson and Kristen Stewart Through Baudrillard

Kristen Stewart

Rob Pattinson

Beings, objects are such that, in themselves, their disappearance changes them.....But it is in this sense that they are faithful to themselves, and that we must be faithful to them....in the sensuous illusion of their appearance .....For illusion is not the opposite of reality; It is a more subtle reality which enwraps the primary one in the sign of its disappearance. Every photographed object is merely the trace left by the disappearance of everything else. ....the absence of the world which is present in every detail, reinforced by every detail - like the absence of the subject reinforced by every feature of a face. (TPC 87)

Rob Pattinson London Water for Elephants Premiere

The silence of photography. One of the most precious qualities, unlike the cinema, TV, or advertisements, on which you always have to impose a silence. ....Silence of the image, which requires....no commentary. But silence of the object, too,  which photography wrests from the thunderous context of the real world.  Whatever the violence, speed or noise which surrounds it, it gives the object back its immobility and its silence. ....it re-creates the equivalent of the desert, of the stillness of phenomena.....All retouching, all repentance, has, like all posing, an abominably aesthetic character. The solitude of the photographic subject in space and time is correlative with the solitude of the object and its temperamental silence. What photographs well is what has found its temperamental identity, that is, no longer has need of the desire of the other....The only deep desire is not for what I lack, nor even for the person who lacks me (though that is, itself, more subtle), but for the person who does not lack me, for what is perfectly capable of existing without me. Someone who does not lack me - that is radical otherness.  Desire is always the desire for that alien perfection, at the same time as it is the desire to shatter it, to break it down. You get aroused only for things whose perfection and impunity you want both to share and to shatter.  Where does the objective magic of photography come from? The answer is that it is the object which does all the work.  Photographers will never admit it, and always argue that all the originality lies in their vision of the world. This is how they take photos that are too good, confusing their subjective vision with the reflex miracle of the photographic act.  ....making people a little more enigmatic to themselves, a little more alien to one another. ....in the photographic act, it is not a question of taking them for objects but of making them become objects, and hence making them become other - that is, of taking them for what they are.(TPC 88-90) From The Perfect Crime

These four photos are pure appearance.  No coiffed hair, designer lipstick, makeup, clothes,arranged setting with props, posed  bodies, professional smiles. They are just there. Simply there in their otherness.  

Kristen Stewart Out Take

Breaking Dawn: Edward and Bella's Wedding Night NC-17

WARNING: SOFT PORN AHEAD 

Breaking Dawn Scummit Release

Breaking Dawn Wedding Night?

I see from these pictures that Condon is going to go for the soft porn look. Actually the one officially released looks like an ad for Cialis if they were a wee bit older. All airbrushed, soft lighting, artfully posed, cliched of course. What can one expect of Scumit and their director for hire of the month.  I am already expecting the worst and I know I am gonna get it.

Stephenie Meyer wrote the wedding night as she wanted it: In your imagination! If she had wanted to be explicit she would have been. But what she did was leave a rather large white blank space. And then they woke up the next morning. Now why did she do that? Because she didn't know what to write? Because she wanted to be sure it would pass the censors for young adult fiction? I don't think any of the above. She just wanted her readers to imagine it. The movie is going to deprive you of your imagination but you have had a few years to wonder so you can decide if he did it better than you did in your mind. I doubt it though.

In interviews Stephenie has said she leaves clues in the earlier books as to what is going to come. She has left plenty of clues about what to expect on this night of nights for them. Now we are going to get the production of sex rather than seduction. But what else to expect from the film merchants.

Stephenie has been leaving clues all over the place. Bella has practically memorized Wuthering Heights and Edward has also read it. They have discussed it together. Then we read about all the feathers all over Bella and the shredded pillow that Edward has bitten. If you have read Wuthering Heights you will know exactly how it went down. Bella did almost die. Edward did almost kill her. Theirs was no soft rather chaste embrace as shown in the pics. The images are to program your mind into thinking that that's the way it was. Soft porn. And that makes it PG-13. All passionate feelings rinsed out in the warm water and we get languid sex without deep feelings between two people and that is what is supposed to be the way it's supposed to be. 

Here's Emily Bronte, that young girl with great courage writing with enormous passion. You the reader were supposed to connect the dots and if not right away perhaps some time in the future when you could say to yourself, Ah ha! There's no reason you had to get it immediately.

Tossing about, she increased her feverish bewilderment to madness, and tore the pillow with her teeth; then raising herself  up all burning, desired that I would open the window. We were in the middle of winter, the wind blew strong from the north-west, and I objected. Both the expressions flitting over her face, and the changes of her moods, began to alarm me terribly; and brought to my recollection her former illness, and the doctor's injunction that she should not be crossed.  A minute previously she was violent; now, supported on one arm, and not noticing my refusal to obey her, she seemed to find childish diversion in pulling the feathers from the rents she had just made, and .....she begins to separate the feathers, naming the birds they are, following mad Ophelia's  monologue with her bouquet of flowers in Hamlet. 

The scene reveals the emotional intensity and frenzy as the gender inversion conceals Meyer's referent to Edward. Useless as feathers float all over the room and bed as would happen when pillows are torn in the heat of passion. I can't find a good image and am not going to make one so you will have to use your imagination.

In Abel Gance's Napolean there is a dormitory pillow fight and Lindsay Anderson copied it in his movie If.... Actually I saw a special screening of Abel Gance's silent film and when the intermission came I stood up and who was sitting behind me but Lindsay Anderson! I laughed out loud and said to him, "So that's where you got your pillow fight from!" and he roared with laughter at me. In both movies the feathers are flying all over the room. I hope you get to see them someday.

But please, let's cleanse all emotional intensity from young minds and give them soft porn instead. Much better for their psychic health, don't you think? And while we are at it let's steal their imagination from them too in another homeopathic painless dose. They're too stupid to notice and it's important to program their emotional responses to suit the Order of Production/Reproduction/Cloning. We don't want our young people, especially young girls becoming too excited. It might be more difficult to control their behavior then.

Stephenie Meyer has respect for her readers. Hollywood does not. Hollywood holds them in contempt.

Kristen Stewart Is Not Pretty, Not Hot, Just Beautiful

Joni Mitchell

All these other women were considered very beautiful in the 60's, their time of celebrity. Baez is still exquisite, as I saw her at Camp Casey in 2005. Yoko is also and Joni has been ill in these past few years.

Joni Mitchell

To read and listen to criticism of Kristen Stewart as Bella is annoying to me. She is playing Bella as Bella was written as much as she can with mediocre directors and a script by Rosenberg that indicates a lack of understanding of the novel and the characters. But I am guessing Scummit called the shots and they were hired help, not artists, so what can one expect.

Beauty has its fashionable time and then tastes change. None of these women would be considered beautiful today along with Kristen unless they donned masquerade signs that shouted hot. (See my blog on Judith Butler.) Men today only see the signs that say hot: make-up; hair color bright of course; designer clothes; higher than high heels, so read hyper high stilettos; cleavage and well you get the idea I am sure. Scrub it all off and they think she is plain, not worth the attention.

Let's read Shiloh's account of auditioning for Edward with Kristen:

Young Joan Baez

I tried to re-find the magazine this interview was in and it seems to have been scrubbed off google. Even the ones who quote it can't find it so here it is. I did see the original article when it came out but do not remember where. If you know please put it in the comments.  A link would be great. I have searched for hours and cannot find it.

The fact that he would ever have given this out in an interview says it all.

Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan in New Moon

Kristen Stewart as Tracy in Into the Wild youtube footage

Yoko and John

Older Joan Baez
The most beautiful hands and fingers you will ever see.