Watch out, screaming Twi-hards: I’m on Team Dad.

Tonight, as I am left holding down the fort with my daughters (sleeping, thankfully), my wife will venture out to a private showing of a movie due to be released to the public at midnight: Twilight: Breaking Dawn–Part 1 (because one movie can’t encapsulate the cuckoo bird sufficiently–it’ll be two parts).

Rather than spend a lot of time explaining why Twilight and its sequels have the same effect on me as fingernails on a chalkboard, I’ll just reprise a few comments from David Edelstein that I quoted last year, as well as a few well written words from Linda Holmes.

First, David Edelstein, in a review I quoted first here, to bring us up to speed on the action leading up to Breaking Dawn:

Back in Forks in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, Bella and Edward repose in a meadow of soft-focus violets, in which Edward, his ivory skin bejeweled under the sun’s rays, asks Bella once again to be his bride. Bella stares at her lap and twists up her wide mouth on her long jaw and refuses to give him a firm yes or no until he promises to turn her into a vampire. Edward waffles. Better to wait a few weeks, he says, until after their high-school graduation. Restive, the virgin Bella wants to make love with Edward before he kills and resurrects her — so she’ll know what it’s like “while I’m still me.” But Edward is old-fashioned, having come of age a century earlier when “things were less … complicated.” Therefore, he says, they must wait until they’re married before they have sex and he kills her. As you can imagine, his pure-mindedness puts a strain on the relationship, and, also, there’s a werewolf at the door: Jacob the Human Muscle Chart, a hot-blooded Native American with no patience for tortured paleface bloodsucker Mormon-esque sexual circumlocutions. He wants Bella to choose him instead of Edward — or, as he puts it, “I want you to choose me instead of him.” Imprudently, he tries to steal a kiss, but she whomps him and sprains her hand. Jacob is chastened. Though bestial, he’s still a gentleman.

Yeah. That was Eclipse.

Now, says Linda Holmes, Bella and Edward are finally tying the knot: marriage, that “dweam within a dweam.”

When we join them, vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) and human Bella (Kristen Stewart) are in the final stages of event planning, which is always a stressful time, even if you and your groom have compatible DNA. Werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner), now relegated to the role of loser, stomps around snorting. (Lautner is a master thespian of the nostrils, though it must be said that he does gamely attempt, later in the film, to make lemonade out of a scene that cannot be explained without the phrase, “Well, when a teen wolf and a baby love each other very much …”)

Around this time, we learn that while Bella still wishes to be transformed into a vampire, she doesn’t intend to do so until after the honeymoon. This leads Jacob and Edward to have — right in front of Bella — the most awkward confrontation in the history of awkward confrontations, in which Bella’s new husband and her jealous ex face off over whether the sheer power of her husband’s affection will kill her on her wedding night.

Little does Jacob know that the better conversation would have focused less on vigor in the bridal suite and more on the importance of birth control; it seems that Edward, who offers an antenuptial confession to a past as a murderous, bloody-mouthed menace, has somehow managed to live for more than a hundred years and graduate from a gaggle of high schools without understanding where babies come from.

Awkward…

But then, the women above don’t really seem fazed by it.

Enough mockery, you say. Is the movie any good?

I have no idea. That’s time I can never have back, and I just won’t go there. But I can tell you what Holmes thinks:

There’s a sense in which this is the most enjoyable Twilight chapter ever, in which author Stephenie Meyer takes the boring solemnity her heavy writing has always insisted on and throws it into a food processor with a few cups of Fangoria, a scoop of I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant, and three tablespoons of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! What comes out is utterly joyless, lifeless and pointless, but it’s somewhat more audaciously so than the earlier films. Director Bill Condon (who directed and wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Gods and Monsters) may not have a light hand here, but he fully commits to a few bizarre plot elements that many expected would disappear from a Hollywood adaptation.

Backhanded compliment?

You bet. Especially when you see what she says next:

But when a saga popular with pre-adolescent girls peaks romantically on a night that leaves the heroine to wake up covered with bruises in the shape of her husband’s hands — and when that heroine then spends the morning explaining to her husband that she’s incredibly happy even though he injured her, and that it’s not his fault because she understands he couldn’t help it in light of the depth of his passion — that’s profoundly irresponsible.

Yes, we’re all having a good yuk over the unhinged quality of it all. And yes, it’s a movie with a monster baby. (And an angry argument among a pack of wolves that’s about as menacing as an outtake from Oliver & Company.)

But romanticizing an intimate relationship that leaves bruises and scars is a particularly terrible idea in a film aimed at girls. Talking about this is tiresome, but then so is putting it in the movie. From depicting the loss of virginity as a naturally violent, frightening, physically dangerous experience to making Bella a woman with no life at all outside of her literally all-consuming pregnancy, the narrative sledgehammers are all as distasteful as they are inelegant.

You know what this is. You won’t be surprised, if you’ve read the books. This is a descent into madness, of a particularly gruesome kind.

Is this a movie that I want my daughters to see? I’m not so sure. As Linda puts it, perhaps I should count myself on “Team Dad.”

[NPR][New York Magazine]

Related articles

• Bonnie Fuller: Movie Review: Breaking Dawn Is Breathtaking. Twi-Hards Will Be in Heaven (huffingtonpost.com)
• Consummating ‘Twilight’ – the honeymoon is over, but not fast enough (macleans.ca)
• Review: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1 (canada.com)
• ‘Dawn’ Breaks, And Much Baroque Nonsense Ensues (npr.org)