New Moon: The Death Knell of Cinema

If there’s anything true or certain about the second installment in the tween pop phenomenon called Twilight, it’s certain that, akin to abstinence, the socially sanctioned (and heterosexual, but not Catholic) practice it champions---it’s fucking dull. If cinema was a large face, a tabula rasa, if you will, then films like Twilight and New Moon are the boils and rank pustules that pop up on its surface, oozing and then bursting into flares that hose down the rest of the landscape, drowning and devouring anything ever known as quality. The Twilight obsession has gripped our culture like a strange and alarming disease, so much so it seems useless attempting to criticize or point out the obvious low quality of the product. Walking into the theater to see a Twilight film immediately makes me appreciate how Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams feel in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), when they must walk amongst the dangerous aliens posing as humans, but must not display any sign of emotion that would blow their cover, so that they may avoid being slaughtered and devoured by the aggressive presence. But giving into apathy would only align me with the obvious lack of passion instilled in this garbage by the ridiculous authoress, the screenwriter, the directors involved and the sad sack child actors roped into this curdled cess pool called a narrative. The author of these abortions, whose name I don’t even care to write, I despise it to such an extent, has publicly claimed she never read or watched any other vampire literature or lore. Hence, her vampires famously trounce around during the day, glittering like bauxite in your flower garden. How convenient. It removes all those pesky night time rules and all sense of menace or danger. It is interesting to note that each Twilight title invokes a lack of sunlight, however---Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse---and why? Her plot-less, handicapped narratives have nothing to do with creatures of the night. The Twilight creatures are like diabetic vampires, about as watered down and neutered from their original forefathers as their fans are as brain atrophied, distant cousins to the problem solving humans they might once have resembled.

I’m not kidding---either Twilight fans are unable to see the low quality of this series they’ve digested with such zealous idolatry that Mormon gods must be cringing, or they simply don’t care to expect it. After all, I am going on about a series whose main audience is teenage heterosexual females. Except that teenage heterosexual females aren’t the only consumers gulping down this poison. For some insane reason I still can’t seem to wrap my mind around how Robert Pattinson has become a sex symbol. Every scene (of which consisted mainly of uncomfortable and glaring close-ups) in which Pattinson appears in this new film created the most visceral reaction I had to the screening, in that I could just imagine his rank odor oozing out of the celluloid that contained him. Seriously, we get to see nearly every detail of Mr. Pattinson---his dental work, his shriveled, tiny, pale, white body that makes him look like he’s HIV positive (I mean, he’s glittery and more gaunt than anyone dying in Longtime Companion, 1990).

No, I haven’t really even begun to dismantle the plot, have I? Well, that’s because New Moon is like one of those mutated viruses—it’s a replicated version of itself. Daring to have a running time over two hours, the film blasts Kristin Stewart as our heroine in nearly every frame. You can count the number of times she smiles on one hand, instead going for a tortured animal look, the kind employed by Jessica Lange when she played Frances Farmer----after Frances has the lobotomy. Kristin gets dumped by Pattinson, for her own good, at the beginning of the film’s narrative (not unlike when a guilty pedophile struggles with the fact that he’s taking advantage of children) and is thrown into a deep, deep, depression that causes her to be an adrenaline junkie, and into the arms of Taylor Lautner, himself developing into a wolf-cub and running with the shirtless Native American boys in the woods. A note on the popcorn kernel werewolves (as that is what I refer to them as, what with the terrible, mid-90’s CGI level werewolf effects)---their, ummm, debilitation seems to be due to a gene in the bloodline. Now, I want you all to forget they become werewolves, and substitute the word werewolf with alcoholic. I also find it nauseating that the underage child Lautner was disgustingly ogled in the theater as soon as his shirt was removed. The ten year old face and the long hair weren’t appealing, but as soon as those abdominal muscles were revealed, boy, did some classy ladies decide the need to swoon their fluids all over the carpets of AMC. Meanwhile, every time Stewart’s character gets physically close to Lautner, it looks like she’s smelled a big, nasty fart. But as a friend pointed out, that’s generally how Kristin Stewart looks. Indeed, it is a bit mind boggling that a whole series, now a cinematic empire, has been devoted to this teenage character that’s so dull, lifeless, and pathetic. What’s painfully obvious is that she’s an insecure young girl that’s incapable of being alone---this bitch needs a boyfriend, and she obviously feeds on the drama of having monstrous paramours---I mean, isn’t that the ‘thrill’ of this romance attracting all these women? There’s nothing in this film even remotely resembling chemistry----and the question remains, what human boy/man would fall for a monotonous girl like the Stewart character, much less an immortal over 100 years old?

Michael Sheen (oh why, Michael, are you in this?) pops up as the very British head of the very Euro trash vampire clan that makes all the rules about vampire deaths and other important things you only conveniently find out about at the last minute (as if the author was telling stories to keep herself alive, not unlike Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights), and joyously announces that he, too, is unable to read Stewart’s thoughts. ‘Nothing!’ he cried. Of course. There’s nothing there to read---she’s a void. There isn’t one stilted conversation or gaze that can be held for more than five seconds to be had in the film. Even more offensive is the attempt at social commentary within the film. Playing at the local cineplexes is a zombie film, in which Stewart’s friend attempts to navigate through a one-sided conversation about the self reverential tropes of zombie cinema and consumerism. Bitch, please. Then there’s a romantic film called “Love Spelled Backwards Is Love,” and an action film called “Face Punch.” Oh, I suppose I’ll just lovingly refer to New Moon as “Brain Atrophy.” And then there’s Dakota Please-I-Need-Audiences-To-Love-Me-Again Fanning. What an awkward young wisp of a thing she is, playing an ancient vampire named, errr, Jane. Yes, how chicly European that is. I can see the author, tapping away at her keyboard as she named her European vampires. “Let’s see, Caius, Aro, and oh, what’s a good foreign sounding European named for a female vampire whose special power is inflicting pain, much like myself? Oh, yes, Jane!” And for a girl hell bent on becoming a vampire in order to jump the bones of her vampire boyfriend, just what seems so exciting about the prospect of marriage? I mean, if Stewart is going to be brought into an immortal union with the vampire clan, why the sharp intake of breath that’s supposed to leave us salivating for more when Pattinson asks her to marry him at the film’s conclusion? Isn’t that kind of the point, by turning her into a vampire? Of course, this bitch was only alone for several months before she found a werewolf boyfriend, so I guess I’d need some clarification as well. My initial thought, of course, was that something like the Defense of Marriage Act doesn’t have jack to say about vampires. Ere goes, supernatural Mormon creatures can be officially united in the US. But not the gays. And sadly, this new generation of tweens and Twilight moms forget that horror films and vampire cinema historically was used as an outlet for homosexual themes (sometimes dipping into exploitation, oh well). As a side note, I recently re-watched Kathy Bates’ stupendous performance in Misery (1990). I can’t help but draw comparisons between Annie Wilkes’ obsession with the “Misery” pop-phenom books in the narrative of that tale with the real life injurious devotees of Twilight. Those who wish to call the Twilight series quality cinema are about as simple as the followers of Marshall Applewhite, creator of the Heaven’s Gate cult, that thought they’d be carried away on the comet Hale-Bopp and committed mass suicide. If they handed out little white pills to consume at the entrance to the theater, Twilight fans would gladly swallow them.

A friend of mine, who, sadly, happens to be a Twilight acolyte, asked me what I was trying to prove when I told her I would be seeing the film. As a lover of cinema, it is a bit disheartening to sit in a theater with a throng of insipid humans that either champion this toxic sewage or are simply apathetic bystanders, merely penciled into their seats as they ingest this week’s popular movie. However I firmly believe that people need to speak out. In a world where we are forever in constant danger from the likes of Sarah Palin running for some official office, it’s up to those with standards to stand up and say, “Fuck this bullshit,” for that’s exactly what it is, my friends. Remember how the Nazi party was voted into power in Germany? We all look back and shake our heads at moments in history like that, but it’s exactly these moments in time where we have large amounts of people championing popular garbage like this that regression takes us by the throat and stuffs us into dark nightmares. Perhaps Twilight is simply a self-reflexive title, in reference to the state of cinema today---shrouded in the dark shadows of the mob comprised of the feeble minded masses.