That said, even if Eclipse was full of wit and charm, featured actors who could actually act, CGI that didn’t look like it came straight out of 1997 and a villain that was truly menacing, it would still be focused on perhaps the worst central character in the history of franchise movies. Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart, admirably refraining from biting her lip but still playing with her hair an awful lot) is a cipher defined exclusively by her relationships with men, from her father to her two potential lovers Edward (Robert Pattinson, bad but bearable) and Jacob (Taylor Lautner, unwatchably bad). Bella has no personality, no goals other than to have sex with Edward, no skills of any kind, no interests other than hanging out with cute boys and certainly no sexual agency. She’s just a scared little girl who needs to be protected and taken care of and who really really wants to be turned into a vampire (Twilight code for having sex). The only thing she seems to want or care about in any of these movies is to be penetrated by Edward.
Stephenie Meyer, the author of the books these films are based on, has said in more than one interview that she wanted Bella to be devoid of personality so that the readers could identify with her. Well, congratulations, I guess. But by centering the story on a cipher who’s also more or less the only prominent female in the whole series, Meyer reveals just how little she thinks of women. In Twilight as in The Old Testament, women are the root of all evil and cannot be trusted to do what’s right. If not for Edward forcibly restraining her, for instance, Bella would long ago have lost her virginity. It’s the men, you see, who are the heroes and protectors and champions and providers. The women are just trophies, something to be won and cherished and occasionally taken down off the shelf and polished.
I know it’s not exactly breaking news that Twilight is all about the guys, but with Edward and Jacob and their respective ‘teams’ getting so much attention, it’s easy to miss just how hateful this series is towards women. (That these movies and books are some of the most anti-feminist stuff out there despite the fact that both the novels and the films were written by women and that the series’ fanbase is almost exclusively women makes the whole thing that much more depressing.) Just the fact that there are almost no major women characters in the films speaks volumes. And the women who are present, from Bella’s absentee mother to the big bad villain Victoria, tell you everything you need to know about Meyer’s opinion of ‘the fairer sex’. Women in Twilight cannot be trusted under any circumstances, either with their own sexual agency, to raise their own children or even to tell the truth in any given situation. They’re just a bunch of Eves waiting, with the forbidden fruit behind their backs, to ensnare an unsuspecting man.
(If it seems like I’m conflating the books and the films and judging them all together, well, that’s because I am. I haven’t read the books myself (thank god) but by all accounts, the filmmakers behind Eclipse have remained slavishly faithful to the source material so as not to risk the ire of millions of tween girls and their moms. So I think it’s safe to assume that, if anything, the film’s transgressions are only magnified in the books.)
Aside from the rampant misogyny of The Twilight Saga, what most annoys me personally is the series’ (and presumably Meyer’s) complete misunderstanding of the mythology of vampires and werewolves. The vamps and weres of Twilight are so far removed from what we normally think of as vampires and werewolves that defining them as such is more distracting than anything. I’ve written about this in my reviews of the first two films so I won’t go into more detail here except to note that Eclipse alters yet another fundamental rule of vampire mythology. One of the evil vampire newborns (oh, yeah, that newborn thing is nonsense too) that Victoria is grooming to find and kill Bella, enters her house uninvited, proceeds to poke around for a while and then leaves. Since when are vampires allowed in uninvited? That’s been one of the cardinal rules of the vampire mythology since day one. And if you’re going to break that rule, it should be for something more interesting than some ‘newborn’ sniffing around the house for a few minutes.
So now Meyer’s vampires don’t have fangs, don’t need human blood, don’t burn up in sunshine, shatter like glass when decapitated, have superpowers such as mind-reading and the ability to see the future and don’t need to be invited to enter a human dwelling. How, exactly, are these creatures vampires? And why the hell wouldn't everyone want to be a vampire?
But, of course, the fans of this series don’t care about that. They just want to see Taylor Lautner with his shirt off. I hope the sight of his abs is enough to satisfy because the kid’s a flat out terrible actor. Watching him profess Jacob’s undying love for Bella is just embarrassing. I couldn’t even bear to look at the guy half the time. The painfully bad script doesn’t help, of course, but even if Shakespeare had written the dialogue, this kid would be lost at sea.
The film ends with Edward and Bella setting their wedding date and talking about who they should get to plan it. Leaving aside the fact that I can’t imagine a person who’s been around more than a century finding anything even remotely interesting about a teenage girl, I don’t see any evidence that these two characters are in love. And even they admit that their primary reason for wanting to get married is so that they can have sex.
Bella and Edward clearly lust for each other and there’s nothing wrong with that. Bella is still a teenager and Edward, even though he’s much much older, still has the body and hormones of a teenager. But I see in their relationship no evidence of the trust and honesty that a successful marriage requires. Edward has lied to and misled Bella in every one of these films. He’s never been completely truthful with her to the point where even she, clueless though she is, can tell he’s hiding something. For a series whose primary theme is the benefit of abstinence, having the central relationship built on such shaky ground seems like a pretty terrible argument for the cause. God forbid they don’t mesh well as lovers. Then they’ll really be in trouble. And I hate to spoil it for you, Bella, but the first time really isn’t all that great (though I’m sure, as depicted in the fourth film, it will be, sending these films even further into the realm of nonsensical fantasy).
Further undercutting the abstinence theme is Edward’s failure, when pressed, to offer a good reason for waiting. He makes some noise about how he wants one pure thing in his life or something but even as he says it he seems to realize how silly it sounds. The truth is, without the god-says-wait reason, there’s no logical argument to be made for abstinence, especially when the people involved are ‘in love.’ So there’s really nothing Edward can say other than some vague obfuscations. In the real world, and if Bella actually had a functioning cerebral cortex, she might start to wonder if maybe this Cullen kid might swing the other way. I mean, no real eighteen-year-old has the patience to wait a year so if a 109-year-old is pushing to wait, there might be something a little off about him.
And so, another year another Twilight film, and I’m no closer to understanding the popularity of this anti-feminist nonsense than I was at the outset. Eclipse is overlong, dreadfully paced, has no real plot and no climax to speak of. It continues the misogyny of the previous films and further distorts the mythology of the supernatural creatures at its center. Bella remains a dead weight dragging everything down and, even as she finally chooses between Edward and Jacob, is denied the sexual agency to follow through on that choice. Everything about this series and this film in particular should be offensive to women everywhere no matter their age. And yet people were camped out for a week before the film opened. I hope it’s just that they’re incurious and have never given it much thought. I hope that if they thought about what they were watching they’d realize just how insulting it is to them. It’s depressing enough as it is without having to consider that these fans might really buy into the bullshit this movie spews forth. But that’s probably just my fantasy, as delusional in its way as these films are in theirs.
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