Certainly, the premiere of Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part II provides me with the opportunity to once again mock its bastardization of vampire mythology, its silly story, its terrible acting, or its incredibly cheesy lines (“Now we’re the same temperature.” [teenagers and lonely housewives swoon for this?])
However, this is a time for rejoicing.
The saga of a brooding, stiff, cold-to-the-touch bloodsucker and Robert Pattinson has come to an end. There will be no more mocking their disparate cum matching temperatures, no more poking fun at the impossible conception of a child between an undead man with no sperm and his betrothed, no more jokes about sparkly vampires, no more mocking the third wheel of their virginal triumvirate and his tendency to a) take off his shirt b) produce movies that steadily rank at 0% on the Tomatometer. If he were at all amusing, he would be the next Happy Madison star. But, he’s not, so he’ll be the next Dane Cook.
Ripping on the cast aside, we really need to hand it to Stephanie Meyer. She has (with the help of Twihard, tweenagers, and mis-labled “young adults”) moved us from a well-thought-out series in Harry Potter (though, admittedly, I have issues with the narrative, it’s still a fine epic) to a pedestrianly written allegory of virginity / purity / crap to inspiring a lonely housewife to pen (though I think it would be more appropriate to suggest “crayon”) an ignorantly misogynistic trilogy of trash. I say this not out of prudishness – if anything, I mock prudishness and American squeamishness – but because people read this smut and feel it’s taboo and groundbreaking when it is in fact, neither. You want sadomasochism and misogyny, read The Story of O, read American Psycho, read Narcessian’s Suicide Casanova, or Chuck Palhaniuk’s Snuff. Hell, if you must, read Rabelais or the Canterbury Tales – both replete with sex, rape, anal sex, shit, and piss. But please, don’t tout the virtues of 50 Shades, or the sweetness of Twilight.
The former is schlock, and the latter is a pedestrian love story with a popular gimmick.
All this aside, Twilight is coming to an end, and we are left to wait and wonder whether this cast can transcend the characters they’ve come to play over the past few years. It’s possible that Lautner will become an action star; conceivable that Pattinson becomes a brooding leading man eventually, and it’s believable that Kristen Stewart will eventually shed her role as Bella when she plays Marylou in an upcoming adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
