Breaking Dawn:Reading Bella's Change Through Nietzsche And The Ecstasy Of St. Teresa

You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how else could you become new, if you had not first become ashes? - Thus Spake Zarathustra

Stephenie Meyer wrote Bella's change scene in thrilling, frighteningly seductive, seductively frightening language. Following Baudrillard  she is not the authorial subject describing it to the reader. No, the reader is the object where all the power, interpretation, resonances and emotions lie. Meyer has thrown the challenge to the reader, the literate reader, who seems non-existent, reading the Twilight books.

For the first time, with the dimming shadows and limiting weakness 

of humanity taken off my eyes, I saw his face.

I gasped and then struggled with my vocabulary, 

unable to find the right words.

I needed better words.

Bella Cullen, Breaking Dawn

Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa
The wiki link describes the sexually erotic aspect of St. Teresa's Ecstasy

All mystics, and Saint Teresa as much as any of them, complain of a want of new words (nuevas palabras) with which to praise the works of god as they experience these in spirit. (LITWW p. 161)


To die of not being able to die - Saint Teresa 

The screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, the director Bill Condon, and the Scummit suits are completely unaware of any resonances in the novel or in any of the scenes. Just nope nope nope from the 3 dopes. Bella's internal change is shown through blood red CGI of venom slooshing through her veins and Bella is shown lying on a slab lab table, like an insect with a pin through it, wearing an ugly short blue dress, with her legs parted like the proper specimen, her arms at her sides, shot from above for a bird's eye view. Very very clinical and informative, eh?

How did producer Stephenie Meyer permit this? Does she have no integrity concerning her work? Maybe it's the green stuff - $$$$$$$$$? Is she unconscious about the real power of her work? Mebbe.


Meyer has been clear all along in her writing that Bella is a mystic. All reviews, discussions, arguing, defending, criticizing her have been in the clinical psychological camp. That is not where she belongs. Bella is in the Order of Seduction, not the Order of Production and this is where all the difficulty begins. The films are primarily in the Order of Production and Bella swaying down the aisle in her $30,000 wedding dress designed for provocative back interest with its curved cut out, is for the audience of males who have come with their wives, daughters, girl friends, sisters, mothers, etc. to watch Kristen Stewart undulate down the aisle.  


I'm not even gonna go there to discuss the birth scene, the wolves and the rest of the mess.


This is the dirty, nasty, cynical secret of the movie. It is also very boring.

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.

Jacob Imprinting on Renesme:The End and Loss of Representation

Nothing to do with paedaphilia

Nothing to do with sex

Nothing to do with taking Edward's daughter from him

Stephenie Meyer has fictionalized one of the major Foucauldian "cuts" in Western thinking. The end of representation:in language;science;economics;art;music;history;sex

Everything inside me came undone as I stared at the tiny porceline face of the half-vampire, half human baby. All the lines that held me to my life were sliced apart in swift cuts, like clipping the strings to a bunch of balloons. Everything that made me who I was __ my love for the dead girl upstairs, my love for my father, my loyalty to my new pack, the love for my other brothers, my hatred for my enemies, my home, my name, my self__disconnected from me in that second__snip,snip, snip__and floated up into space.

I was not drifting. A new string held me where I was.

Not one string, but a million. Not strings, but steel cables. A million steel cables all tying me to one thing__to the very center of the universe.

I could see that now__how the universe swirled around this one point. I'd never seen the symmetry of the universe before, but now it was plain. 
The gravity of the earth no longer tied me to the place where I stood.
It was the baby girl in the blond vampire's arms that held me here now.
Renesmee. (BD 360)

It would seem that Meyer is saying that the only tie is love. At the same time she is quoting Orson Scott Card:

Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after

all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone

  you love is a hostage, sapping your courage

and corrupting your judgment

 Orson Scott Card

 Empire

The balloon ties are "cut" from their origins, floating up into the air, filled with a lighter than air substance, helium, - read "hot air" - empty balloons, empty signs, signs "float free" referring only to other signs. "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

I detail it here. It's pretty simple and sound-bitey so don't be afraid. Lots of pics.

This puts Jacob in simulated reality,, no referents, just "floating signs" i.e. images :

Such would be the successive phases of the image.
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum...
The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point. The first reflects a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs.) The second inaugurates the era of simulacra and of simulation, in which there is no longer a God to recognize his own, no longer a Last Judgment to separate the false from the true, the real from its artificial resurrection...(Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation)


And the above applies to all of Rob's images and papp pics.

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.

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)

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.

The Problematization of Sexuality and The Event of Twilight

The Twilight Saga breaks with the dominating prevailing literary Discourse in much the same way as Andy Warhol broke with art history theory with his Campbell Soup Cans and changed the Discourse of contemporary art. I see Twilight as a Foucaultian "cut" into contemporary views of sexuality. Perhaps Event as defined by Foucault would be the term of choice, although Baudrillard's term has been Irruption Into Simulation (encompassing all four books in the series) which I am choosing as it implies the leap into the abyss defined by Baudrillard in his Forget Foucault. For those who are still with me I suggest reading or rereading Baudrillard's Forget Foucault.


A worldwide resonance with the Twilight books cannot be explained away by teenage fanaticism nor the fact that the accompanying films  have generated over one billion dollars. We are in the presence of something extraordinary and the only words I have heard or read about it is phenomenon. It is not that but has crashed into our awareness because of a problematization of sexuality. Fifty years after the pill and widely available contraception, something has happened. In his novels after the Alexandria Quartet, Durrell has one of his male characters say (in Constance, I believe,): Woman has become a commodity like hay or corn. She is no longer an event. Foucault discusses sexual rituals and Baudrillard emphasizes them as crucial in any culture for sexual relations. We seem to have so liberated ourselves that we no longer have any sexual rituals, but have only ever increasing pornography. Women have gained liberation at the expense of their freedom. The two words mean different things and the present confabulation of them is leading to grave misunderstandings and unhappiness.


Young twihards have come to these novels just as they are getting ready to enter the meat market of sex. They see around them multiple marriages, multiple lovers, children of single moms with different fathers, boyfriends that move on after the third date if they won't put out, single career women still without a husband and children although they have had numerous lovers, fathers bringing up their children, shared custody, bi-families and they don't see anything out there that they really want. Girls have lost the freedom to say no because it is expected that they will say yes since they have been told they are liberated from sexual repression.


Twilight addresses this state of affairs. And PC feminists don't like what it is modeling for young women at all. Just what is it really saying?