Stephenie Meyer Dreamtime: Dreaming Edward Cullen Into Existence and Robert Pattinson

In discussing the feminine and outraging PC feminists Jean Baudrillard says that the femme fatale was hallucinated into existence from male hysteria. But now there are no men for her. Madonna keeps changing herself in the hopes of finding one but there is no one there. Perhaps the situation can be saved by female hysteria inventing a male counterpart of the femme fatale?

 Possible Solution - hystericization of the masculine by women as quid pro quo of masculine
hysteria of the feminine, (Baudrillard - Screened Out p 53)

This is what Stephenie Meyer did by creating the character of Edward Cullen played by Rob Pattinson

It would seem that Stephenie Meyer has responded to the challenge by dreaming Edward Cullen, a vampire who falls in love with a human girl. Upon waking from this dream Meyer began writing instead of getting her kids off to school with breakfast and their packed lunches.

Against the 'objective' analysis of an 'objective' state of affairs (the stupidity of sociology!) it must be seen that we think and speak well only of what we have not experienced - that is to say, of what  we have not exhausted the imagining of by lived experience - just as one truly loves a woman only if one has not exhausted one's imagining of her in physical pleasure. (Baudrillard Fragments 145)

Stephenie has said  - on Oprah? - that she never knew an Edward. Ah, that truly is a loss for her but a gift to the world's women. For in imagining Edward Cullen, she has brought Robert Pattinson into existence. Yes, I know, he says he is not like Edward at all, but he contradicts himself all the time by the way he behaves with Kristen. He is loving, affectionate, considerate, protective, sensitive, honorable, all those things modern men have no idea how to be because the originals are gone in their lives. 

The subject/object cannot be separated. In experimental research the experiment must be designed as a double-blind experiment. As the experimenter, or even the lab assistant giving the dose, pill, treatment situation, the assistant cannot be allowed to know whether it is the real one or the placebo, nor can the recipient know either. When one or the other or both know, the results are contaminated. Almost all behavioral research before the 1960's is contaminated. A mathematical correction has been applied to the previous data, but the raw data is gone now, so we are stuck with what we have in all its contamination.

At the micro-particle level it is the same. A particle cannot be observed without being affected. Can anyone expect that Robert Pattinson was completely separate and unaffected by the character of Edward Cullen? Or Edward Cullen unaffected by Robert Pattinson? Who is the subject? Who is the object? I have no idea.

Toby McGuire

I only know that now there is a new type of masculine seduction out there. And I have noticed that male actors are imitating certain of Rob Pattinson's habitual gestures. Like biting his lower lip. You will see the abandoned bridegroom in The Adjustment Bureau doing this as he stands against the wall - doorway - smoldering. And Toby McGuire in his new Prada ad seems to be creating a new look for himself. Smoldering.

"Psychoanalysis overturned. Instead of the dream being the fulfillment of desires unsatisfied in real life, real life would be the site where desires born of dreams were fulfilled. Instead of being the dumping ground of the unconscious, dreams would be the matrices of real events - thus becoming like the 'dream' of the Aborigines, for whom a child has to be dreamt before he can be begotten, 'real' paternity being merely the fulfillment of the dream." (Cool Memories IV 105)

Bella dreams her child into existence, does she not? (Breaking Dawn)

Dreamtime

Herzog's film Where the Green Ants Dream follows a group of Aborigines in Australia following the Songlines of the Green Ants. They believe that the world was dreamt into existence. The mountains, the hills, the valleys, Rocks, rivers,and they make pilgrimages to these places dreamt into existence. They know where to go because the Songlines are an orally remembered song map of where these places are. The Whites have built over many of them, or there is a store where they sit in the corner and hum because that's where the Green Ants are. These pilgrimages last months and they walk all the way with their babies and children teaching them the songs and places. The first toys of the babies are leaves, pieces of grass, flowers, and so they learn to love the earth this way.

Songlines

Bruce Chatwin's Songlines is Chatwin's walking tour of Australia. He used to be a very successful antiquities specialist for Sothebys. He bagan going blind and his doctor advised him to quit and go traveling. As Chatwin walked across the tarmac to his plane, his vision returned. His books are a marvel to read.

Breaking Dawn: Sex and The Back of Rob Pattinson: Cloned Into Muscles For Adoration

The squealing and drooling over Rob Pattinson's back makes one wonder what women and teens are turning into. As Jean Baudrillard says: Children are carrying the virus of the future. Does that go for teens and pre and post menopausal women? I didn't mention all the younger women with husbands and children nor those hoping for the same. Now his back has been added to the fetish collection. Even guys weren't this bad over Marilyn's tits and ass.

The cinema today: end or impossibility of ending? Most current films, through the bloody drift of their content, the weakness of their plots and their technological trumpery - useless high-tech - reveal an extraordinary contempt on the part of the film-makers for the tools of their own trade, for their own profession: a supreme contempt for the image itself, which is prostituted to any special effect whatsoever; and consequently, contempt for the viewer, who is called upon to figure as important voyeur of this prostitution of images, of this promiscuity of all forms beneath the alibi of violence. There is in fact no real violence in  this, nothing of the theatre of cruelty, but merely  a second-level irony, the knowing wink of quotation, which no longer has anything to do with  cinematic culture, but derives from the resentment that culture feels for itself, that culture which precisely cannot manage to come to an end and is becoming infinitely debased - a debasement being raised to the power of an aesthetic and spiritual commodity, bitter and obsolescent, which we consume as a 'work of art'  with the same complicity with which we savour the debasement of the political class. The sabotaging of the image by the image professionals is akin to the sabotaging of the political by the politicians themselves. (Baudrillard, Fragments p117)

This is why Rob Pattinson said yes to Cronenberg right away.


Are these complicit fans the fans Pattinson wants? Are these fans the fans Pattinson deserves? What order of fans does Pattinson himself desire?                                                                                                                                        

Do you want more? Do you want different? Do you want every little banal gesture he makes? Maybe we can see him pick his nose? Eat some cake? Ruffle his hair for the zillionth time? Squat? Open a car door? Smile at someone? Frown at someone? Rub his eye?

This is conspicuous consumption. His digital code is global. Rob images circulate like the numbers on Eric Packer's screens. At what point will Rob images implode? Which image will be the one to bring on the implosion? Which dollar of Eric Packer's was the one that started the implosion of the yen?

Are you understanding Cosmopolis yet? DeLillo means what he writes you know.

Twilight Is A Modern Variation of Tristan and Iseult

Twilight is a retelling - not a template -  of the old old tale of Tristan and Iseult from the 12th century. The revealed and concealed meaning is of a passion love to be consummated in death. All of western romances based on this template avoid expressing the truth of this now mythological story, that death is the desired outcome so that Oneness will be forever. In no other civilization has sexual passion been coupled with death. Asia couples sex with eroticism and sensuality within a variety of rituals, but death is not the desired outcome of passion love although the circumstances may lead to it. It is not wished for. But in western civilization it is to die for a love that is so passionate separation is inconceivable.  Millions of women have wished to experience such a love and many of those who have, never wish to be cured of it. So deep has this myth permeated western civilization that even the pill and the PC feminists have not been able to efface it. It captured the imaginations of women of the leisure class in the middle ages who read romance novels and poetry and listened to the troubadours. And then continued on into our modern romances.

And this lies at the root of the present hysteria around Twilight, the movies, Edward and Robert Pattinson. About the only thing any commentator has come up with is that it is a phenomenon. No it is not. It is an Event, and Irruption into the world of many women and young teens. It has reopened a Foucauldian cut in sexuality that has been obscured and virtually invisible since the pill became widely available. The past fifty years of contraception control has had consequences undreamed of by the women who flew to the pharmacy to get it. Unfortunately the women screaming about it have been right wing political activists and their followers, and they embrace Twilight in all innocence and are very pleased their sons and daughters are in love with the books and the films.

Seduction has virtually disappeared but Twilight has breathed new life into this practice, this ritual of sexual play with desire. The pill put an end to it but Stephenie Meyer has brought it back. How did she do it? Her secret is very simple. She has followed Jean Baudrillard's demand. If you are going to write about seduction, then you must write even more seductively than what you are writing about. Twilight particularly the first book, a great amount of New Moon and some of Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, does exactly that.

Desire is coupled with lack. Always. Lacan has developed this carefully and repeatedly. When the desire of the couple is consummated then lack disappears. When lack disappears then desire does also. This is why sex does not happen in the myth. Since consummation is not to take place there must be obstacles, external and internal to keep desire at a fever pitch. Because it is the all consuming desire that the two wish to prolong forever and they will do anything to ensure that those feelings continue. It is the feelings that they are in love with. The intense and irreplaceable feelings.

So we have the underlying motif of death for the final and everlasting union. This is rarely made explicit. Romeo and Juliet  ending in death is an accident as is Tristan's death. It takes tremendous courage for that fact to be faced. Wagner's  music in the  opera Tristan and Isolde is unmistakable in the desire of death. And Toni Morrison's Sula  is equally brave. But all the hundreds of thousands of romances based on this template avoid saying it, and most often go for the triangle as obstacle and the happy ending.  Emily Bronte, that courageous young girl, does not mince words:

'And we must past by Gimmerton Kirk,' cries Catherine to Heathcliff, in her last interview with him, 'to go that journey! We've braved its ghosts often together, and dared each other to stand among the graves and ask them to come. But, Heathcliff, if I dare you now, will you venture? If you do, I'll keep you. I'll not lie there by myself: they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won't rest till you are with me. (Cecil- Victorian Novelists, p. 178)(Wuthering Heights)

And Catherine means what she says and takes him to death 400 pages later.

Stephenie Meyer knows this full well but has said she could not have anything but a happy ending. Happy ending? I don't think so. But she conceals so wonderfully that no one has noticed. Edward is the only voice of warning. He labels Bella's wish for changing as a tragedy. And it is. And she does die even though the reader does not read her change as death. And this is where it all gets fascinating. Edward is already dead. He is immortal and unchanging. He is a clone as a matter of fact. He is the Foucauldian and Deleuzean Body Without Organs. And Bella's wish and her change is to become that Body Without Organs. So Edward has been right all along. He has been warning all of us that living in a simulated world is not to be desired. Virtual Reality is hell and as Baudrillard says we are embracing it as fast as we can. Reality is being stolen from us in homeopathic doses. We are living within The Perfect Crime. DeLillo's Eric Packer wakes up to the fact that he is not living, that he is only surviving, however sumptuously. Survival maintains a denial of death. Living embraces it as a stake in living fully.


And now Baudrillard through Nietzsche:

14. Fatal Strategies  

(a) page 104: Seduction begins with Christianity – it is a “diabolical curse that comes to fracture the divine order – or else it is Christ himself, according to Nietzsche, Christ come to seduce people to his own person, come to pervert them with psychology and love?” Refers, it appears, to Genealogy I:8. Compare Will to Power§ 172. 

Letting the Other Think You - Following Baudrillard

From Rose at pattinsonintoxication-link here

Rob said this on a Nightline interview a long time ago.
"I don't really want to try to sell it either.
Maybe if i was selling it, I'd talk about it more."


Of course almost everyone else is trying to pimp it, eh?


He has also said, when asked how he would play Edward in Breaking Dawn, that he would follow Kristen.

Blindly, that is the only elegant way to love. What reproach could there be for someone who discreetly and totally devotes himself to another; what reproach could there be for someone who is the object of such devotion? Blind destination: that is the direction dreams go, in ideas and love. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 105)

So far as existence is concerned, as Ajar (Romain Gary's alter ego) would say, it needs to be taken in charge by someone. No one can be expected to bear the responsibility for their own life. This Christian and modern idea is a vain and arrogant proposition.  Moreover, it is a groundless utopian notion....It is so much more human to put one's fate, one's desire, one's will into the hands of another. Circulation of responsibilities, declension of wills, perpetual transfer of forms. Apart from this subtle path, which is attested to by a great many cultures, there is only the totalitarian path of a collective assumption. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 119)

Reading Edward Cullen As Dangerous Through Baudrillard

Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen in Twilight

I would see how he enjoyed the hunt when he was the prey. I would see what he thought of my 

style of hunting. (MS)

I was a predator. She was my prey. There was nothing else in the whole world but that truth.

KILLING POSSESSING DEVOURING - the entirety of our individual unconscious is organized around these terms and the phantasmas that surround them, under the sign of repression. (Baudrillard - SEAD p. 139)

Edward Cullen

I made it through the hour in this way. _imagining the best ways to kill her. I tried to avoid imagining the actual act. That might be too much for me; I might lose this battle and end up killing everyone in sight. So I planned strategy and nothing more. It carried me through the hour.

The smell of her blood saturated every particle of air in the tiny, hot room. My throat burst into flames.(MS)

GIVING RETURNING EXCHANGING - with the primitives, everything operates in the manifest collective exchange around these three terms, in the myths that underlie them. .... The verbs of the symbolic assume, on the contrary, a reversibility, and indefinite cyclical transition. (Symbolic Exchange And Death p. 139)


I wanted his death so savagely that the need for it rang in my ears and clouded my sight and was a flavor on my tongue. My muscles were coiled with the urgency, the craving, the necessity of it. I had  to kill him. I would peel him slowly apart, piece by piece, skin from muscle, muscle from bone.... (MS)

Bella: Did you ever think that maybe my number was up that first time, with the van, and that you've been interfering with fate?
Edward: That wasn't the first time.
My barriers were down, the truth spilling free recklessly.Your number was up the first time I met you. (T and MS) 

And of course your number was up the first time I met you was also eliminated. Anathema to PC Feminist Discourse.

In the primitive order, murder is neither  violence nor an acting out of the unconscious.  So for those who kill the king, there is no seizure of power nor any increase in guilt, as there is in the Freudian myth. Neither does the king simply endure this. Instead, he gives his death, returns it in exchange, ......(SEAD p. 139)

Reading through Twilight:
Edward: I'm dangerous, Bella - please, grasp that.
Bella: No.
Edward: I'm serious.
Bella: So am I. I told you, it doesn't matter what you are. It's too late.
Edward: Never say that.

I intuitively knew - and sensed that he did , too - that tomorrow would be pivotal. Our relationship couldn't continue to balance, as it did, on the point of a knife. We would fall off one edge or the other, depending entirely upon his decision, or his instincts. My decision was made, made before I'd ever consciously chosen, and I was committed to seeing it through. Because there was nothing more terrifying to me, more excruciating, than the thought of turning away from him. It was an impossibility. (T p. 248)

In the meadow where Bella is with Edward, with no one knowing she is with him:

You already know how I feel, of course.... I'm here... which, roughly translated, means I would rather die than stay away from you. (T p. 274)

Entering the Symbolic Exchange Order, we have Bella offering herself, giving herself, making a sacrifice of herself, making a gift of herself. A sacrificial death is artificial, unnatural, non-biological. Why deaths in car crashes are so fascinating to us.

The meadow scene which is not filmed in Twilight, an omission that outrages twihard fans is a dangerous scene for PC feminists to contemplate. It does not fall into the feminist Discourse of modern courtship at all. So it must be eliminated and turned into a travesty of jump cuts, which is far better analyzed by Walter Benjamin in his essay Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

I'm getting there I hope.