Breaking Dawn Wedding: Bella and Rob - Kristen and Edward? Real or a Simulacrum?

I have been taken to task for intruding on them in this way. I only wish to make crystal clear what the consequences of our entrance into simulated reality are and will be.

Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan

All the quotes are from Rose at http://pattinsonintoxication.blogspot.com/ :

"It’s funny when this question comes up, because I sort of feel like, I don’t really care! People can say whatever they want…. [The interest] is totally understandable, but when it’s personal to you, it’s like your life becomes a product and I’m repelled by that. I don’t like to give away gems that people are gonna be like, ‘Oh my God! So I’ll always just shrug it off – in fact, I always find it kind of funny, and not just with Rob.”

"Rob talks about Edward handling being a dad. Rob: My girlfriend... Ash: Your wife...Rob: My wife, yes, I'm sorry.  Filming with a baby is the most fun and very simple." 

"Rob mentions about having a real priest. 'It was weird as well because there was a real priest, so essentially me and Kristen are married now, because we just did the same thing as in a wedding,[laughs]  like we just don't have a civil union or whatever...not by law but by the eyes of the Church we're actually married.' To Ash 'That is actually true'  

Ashley: "Remember when you kept getting her name wrong?"

But maybe he really feels that way... huh?

Is that so hard to believe?

I mean... seriously.

Rob and Kristen are standing in front of a minister

even if its on a movie set.

Kristen talked about 'her day'

and 'my wedding dress'

A lot of the cast talked about how REAL it was

and how emotional to see their friends walk down the aisle

Don't you think it was Rob and Kristen

walking down the aisle that made it emotional?

And then Rob kept getting her name wrong...

I Edward... take you Kristen...

Yeah.

ALL kinds of cute.

So Rob was interviewed by Extra

and was asked about the 'real' priest...

First off he said...

"I read something like that, which furiously took the piss out of me.

Because they're like, 'Of course you're not [really married].

' Even if it was a real priest, 

it doesn't make any difference, 

you've got to fill out all these forms and blah blah blah!"

"We're married in so many different ways. 

I kind of like the idea of that happening, though." 

 (Rose again at Intoxication)

Blurry boundaries folks. Here you have a wedding in a movie, from a book that is very sincerely overly emotional compared to our modern times of what is cool at a wedding. A Kardashian wedding, she is cool. Reese's wedding as WFE went to promo was cool. Jen and Brad, and all the rest. All very very cool.

Here's uncool Bella from Breaking Dawn:

"Don't let me fall, Dad," I whispered.

One step at a time, 'I told myself.'

"__Until I found him at last,...."

"All I really saw was Edward's face; it filled my vision and overwhelmed my mind."

"And then, at last, at last, I was there. Edward held out his hand. Charlie took my hand and, in a symbol as old as the world, placed it in Edward's."

"I didn't realize I was crying until it was time to say the binding words. I do, I managed to choke out in a nearly unintelligible whisper, blinking my eyes clear so I could see his face."

"He bent his head toward mine, and I stretched up on the tips of my toes, throwing my arms  - bouquet and all - around his neck. He kissed me tenderly, adoringly, I forgot the crowd, the place, the time, the reason...only remembering that he loved me, that he wanted me, that I was his. He began the kiss, and he had to end it; I clung to him, ignoring the titters and the throat-clearing in the audience. Finally, his hands restrained my face and he pulled back - too soon - to look at me." 

When was the last time you saw or felt such emotion at a wedding? Your own? Maybe. Definitely not cool.

This is a movie where the two stars are in a relationship with each other throughout filming. It is almost unbearably obvious that they are very much in love. One just doesn't see this vulnerable feeling between two people in the public eye much any more: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; I'm blocking here.

Is a wedding real because it is in the Order of Production? 
Is it real because it is in the Order of the Symbolic and the Sacred? 
Is it real because it is a civil ceremony obeying the rules of the Law? Which kind of wedding is real? 
Which kind of wedding is a simulacrum, a copy of a copy having no original?

In simulated reality we can never know.

I don't know.

Do you?

Do Rob and Kristen? 

If it feels real, is it real? 

If it is planned and in a church and announced in the paper, does that make it real?

Does the presence of a real ordained minister, or priest, as in this case, what makes a wedding real?

Remember that scene in Cold Mountain between Nicole Kidman and Jude Law: She turns around three times and each time says, "I marry you. I marry you. I marry you," according to the ways of another culture. 

Josephine Hart and Maurice Saatchi
Lord and Lady Saatchi

Another great love story if you can read between the lines and connect dots - a lost art, I know.

Welcome to simulated reality folks. Here you can never know. ______________________________________________
The Kardashian/Humphries wedding/marriage cost 10 million dollars and lasted 72 days. Was it real? It was legal. 


Does legal mean real? DOES IT? DOES IT?


Do you know? I don't.

Rob Pattinson: Breaking Dawn Paris Promotion - Houellebecq

New Image of Rob - Man - Playa

Stroke of genius his new look

Forces the interviewers to relate to him as a man, a playa, a serious contender in the world of celebrity
With this look it is impossible for them to treat him like a beautiful silly adorable boy
who plays a vampire

Xavier in Paris asks some serious questions, not silly American ones about his gf

Xavier: Last question; is it true that you like Michel Houellebecq?
Rob: Yeah, definitely. I was supposed to meet up with him the last time I was in Paris and then I couldn’t do it but yeah, he’s one of my favorite writers.
Xavier is a real interviewer. This is how you do it. (entire interview)


He knew very well that Rob has read Houellebecq because he does his homework.(My post here) The question is a "floating sign" to Rob that he is intelligent, asks interesting questions, and is hip - probably ensuring Rob will favor him in the future. The question is also a "floating sign" that he sees Rob as an intelligent well-read man, not a silly Hollywood movie star, whose fangirls want to "jump his bones".  And it is the very LAST question so it screams out. Perfect placing in time. And clearly Xavier likes Houellebecq or he wouldn't have highlighted him. Nor linked him to Rob. With Paris adoring Rob, and Rob regarding Houellebecq as "one of my favorite writers", Xavier has used Rob's affection for Houellebecq to punch a hole into the media's Dominating Discourse about Houellebecq. This is how it is done folks. Or at least 1 way.



You can bet the farm that his Parisian fangirls will be at the bookstores tomorrow getting Houellebecq and watching The Prophet on DVD, since he mentioned Jacques Audiard. Meanwhile back at the ranch his American fangirls are drooling over his new look, his mouth, his hair, his clothes, his sexiness, etc etc etc. Now do you suppose Rob would prefer a European or an American fangirl?


The MDD about Houellebecq is hatred. BHL and Houllebecq are considered Public Enemies so BHL suggested they write a book of letters to each other. They don't know each other as acquaintances or as friends. Houellebecq is everything BHL is not. The one thing they share is the hatred they inspire. 


This quote translated by curioushairedgal indicates why many would hate him for writing this:

 "But I have come to think that religions are primarily attempts at explaining the world; and none of the attempts to explain the world can hold water if it hurts our need for rational certitude. Mathematical proof, experimental procedure are the definitive acquisitions of human consciousness. I am well aware that it appears the facts contradict me, I am well aware that Islam - by far the most silly, the most fake and the most obscurantist of all religions -- seems to be on the increase; but it is just a superficial and transitory phenomenon; in the long run, Islam is condemned even more so than Christianity."(Atomised)

And in the same book he writes this:

“In the midst of the vast, barbarous world of nature, human beings have sometimes (rarely) been able to create little warm places irradiated by love.  Little enclosed spaces, private spaces, where intersubjectivity and love reigned.”  Les Particules elementaires (“Atomised”)

The Art of Struggle  and other reviews of Houellebecq in The Truth About Lies blog at blogspot

The Art of Struggle … investigates issues of alienation, individualism and disillusionment

"Given the characteristics of the modern era, love can scarcely manifest itself anymore. Yet the ideal of love has not diminished. Being, like all ideals, fundamentally atemporal, it can neither diminish nor disappear."

If you knew the GAN Tower

Then you’d know my life

(from untitled poem on p.47)

There’s even a photo of La Tour First (First Tower) as it’s called these days at the start of the book. It’s in an area of Paris known as La Défense which Houellebecq would know well because he worked there as a computer programmer before making his living as a writer. It crops up in two other poems:

I came across an old prole

Looking for the son he’d lost

In GAN Tower, the graveyard

Of disheartened revolutionaries.

(from untitled poem on p.73) 

Michel Houellebecq, Rester vivant(The Art of Struggle or How To Live) (1999)  

Pieces a blog devoted to reading and also Houellebecq

You will never know exactly what part of you pushes you to write. You will only know it through approximations and contradictions. Egotism or devotion? Cruelty or compassion? All are possibilities. This is proof that, ultimately, you know nothing; so do not behave as if you knew. Before your ignorance, before this mysterious part of yourself, remain honest and humble.]

And this is how Houellebecq got me writing again.

He'd love to work with Jacques Audiard, the French director and Jack Nicholson if he could.  

All you fangirls out there who want to know what he wants to do next, did you get it that he just told you:

Stendhal
"who speaks of beauty as a promise of
happiness" 
Nietzsche in Genealogy
of Morals

Jacques Audiard's recent film was The Prophet (netflix pic and review). I saw it and it was wonderful. This is how Bardot got Godard who had no idea she wanted to work with him. Saying stuff like this got Cronenberg for him. Gus Van Zant audtioned for Breaking Dawn after he heard Rob wanted him for it. Scummit was too dumb though and Van Zant is used to being asked, not competing, so he didn't push himself flamboyantly at them the way they wanted.

Small independent filmmakers don't go after stars like Rob because they think they cost too much and they can't afford it. So he is telling them that he wants to work with them. The Prophet is a low budget very fine film. It got independent theatre distribution.

Reading Twilight Through Foucauldian CUTS: Campbell Soup Cans and Andy Warhol - WTF!!!???

Yeh. Far out, eh.

Warhol's Campbell Soup cans on a screen and reproduced - endlessly. Signed of course for limited "original" editions. 


Campbell soup is known for making the Dorrance family very rich, for all the union problems in Camden New Jersey near where Walt Whitman lived at one time. But it is Andy Warhol who made those cans more than a household name.

Was the Campbell Soup Can a beautiful image? Was it a beautiful painting? Uh-uh.



It was a Foucauldian "cut" into the world of art history, which before had been a linear, progressive, historical field of study as artists winked at their ancestors, threw the gauntlet to the up and coming ones and enabled art historians to critique, discuss, favor, interpret psychologically, psychoanalytically, within and without the formalist frame and so on and so on. 

Warhol stopped it all dead and ushered in the era of pop art. More like a hammer and chisel than a cut.

I used to tape John McCoubrey's lectures on the History of Modern Art. Every so often he would stop dead before a painting he knew very well, and just look at it freshly, differently from the way he had previously seen it. One evening he stopped still before Warhol's Campbell Soup can. When he resumed speaking it was to say that he was seeing it differently and more importantly than he had ever seen it before but he wasn't sure why. 

Then he went on to the next image projected on the screen.

This memory kicked in for me when Baudrilard writes about Warhol's major importance to  the simulated reality we are all mostly embracing.

Baudrillard writes or talks about Rothko's complete change in his work, but says it was Warhol who completely changed art history from a linear, continuous progression to a discontinuous, abrupt, "cut" in its world.

And what has this to do with Twilight? 

Twilight is a Foucauldian "cut" in the power/knowledge matrix of sexuality when the tool (no pun intended) of genealogy is brought to bear (still no pun intended) on that field of human behavior. 

Foucault's three volume History of Sexuality spends many pages on boy love in ancient Greece, but not many pages at all on Courtly Love or Cortezia as it is often known. But never mind, Denis de Rougemont spent an entire book on Courtly Love in the Western World, where it is unique. The problem is that the History of Love in the Western World made its debut in 1940 - never out of print since then -  when Foucault was but a lad. Denis de Rougemont spends many pages rationalizing, justifying his thesis because Foucault has not yet brought genealogy into the mainstream of intellectual understanding of human behavior. Precession allows us to look back to see it clearly. 


Courtly Love was a 12th century "cut" into the grid of sexuality as it is enmeshed in the power/knowledge matrix. 

And a very deep cut it was lasting almost 800 years until the 1960's Foucauldian "cut" that we know as the "pill" came to our friendly pharmacy, adding serious "capital" to the power/knowledge matrix. Porno comes a little later and ahem again.


Twilight "cuts" once again into the fold of Courtly Love that had crusted over, formed a scab, been buried into the deep trench so that it had become invisible. Sort of. 

Stephenie Meyer has said fuck it and taken the can opener to open the "cut" up again, so that it is bleeding all over the globe like tomato soup via a beautiful vampire named Edward Cullen/Rob Pattinson. And women are feeling sexual longing,  passion,  heightened erotic feelings. It is working all the way to the bank as Scummit can attest along with Meyer.


Is Twilight a beautiful literary masterpiece? Not anymore than an image of Campbell Soup. 

But it is a fucking "cut" into the sexual matrix of power/knowledge/capital.

A "cut" changes the Dominating Discourse of an era. And it often happens with lightening speed.