For Twihards: Reading The Meadow Scene Through Walter Benjamin

Eclipse Meadow Scene Too Little Too Late and All Wrong

This is for all the Twihards who have taken so much shit over their opinions and criticisms. Let me start off by telling you that you have been correct all along. Stephenie Meyer wrote Twilight, and especially the Meadow Scene, as a novel about seduction. Not sex, not PC feminism, but the seduction of Courtly Love from the 12th century. What you imagined it from the novel was not what you got in the film by Catherine Blabbermouth Hardwicke. You got the PC feminist version not the secret heart of the story by Meyer.

Now imagine if Twilight, or even just the Meadow Scene had been shot by an artist director like Terrence Malick. Forget the fact that he wouldn't have done it with all the baggage accompanying it. It would have looked, sounded and felt like The Tree of Life, all long slow shots allowing contemplation and associations to develop in your mind.( Click on the link to get the flavor if you haven't seen it and then go to my other blog focusfree for more if you so desire.) I haven't finished with Tree of Life but I'll say here that it is a film experience not to be missed in a lifetime. It is that wonderful. Now what I am going to say is from Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay The Work of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction. Read it as if your life depended on it as it does.


In 1936 he foresaw the fate of film in our time. This fate is exactly why Twilight was fucked up good by the Scummit film merchants and the PC feminists. Twihards have been right from the beginning as they are the only ones who really knew how it should be. But alas they were fighting the wall of what Foucault calls the Dominating Discourse both of film theory and criticism and the PC feminist domination and censorship of all things girly and feminine.


more to come...

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. 

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.