In which…. Sigh. And murmur. Lots of murmur.
Twilight borrows (steals) heavily from lots of classic sources, including most of Shakespeare, Emily Bronte, and Jane Austen. Yes, Steph, we get that your shelves are admirably stocked. Anyway, thinking about antecedents make me wonder whether there's really any precedent, both commercially and artistically, for this book. It's a difficult question. Shitty books and movies break big on a depressingly regular basis. But something this shitty, this juvenile and insipid? Rare, right? But I eventually found something while browsing Amazon Prime. I'm talking, of course, about Romeo + Juliet (to be clear, the late 90's Leo DiCaprio / Clare Danes film).
I'll say first that the movie is vastly superior to the book in every conceivable way. This is not a perfect comparison. But the parallels are intriguing. It's become clear as I've slogged through Twilight that the book is going for a kind of fever-dream, breathless intensity. It fails, but one can see the headlong rush of adrenalized young love lurking in the space between murmurs and whispers. Thing is, Romeo and Juliet (original), pretty much patented that tone. The play has much on its mind besides, but ultimately the story is one of young idiots who get too fucking besotted to think straight. I actually tend to think that the Luhrmann movie is an even better embodiment of those storytelling bones than was its progenitor.
The film is simpler, shallower, all surface (on first watching, the second gets better). What surfaces they are, though. It's a deeply beautiful movie, lush, everything shining like sin. Colors pop, voices sing, raw emotion sparks through every scene. At first I wasn't sure if the film has much to offer beyond that, that and the simple pleasure of hearing Shakespeare spoken well, but any work able to accomplish visual wizardry while letting talented actors rip is one worth admiring. It's a feverish, wildly propulsive movie, moving at the speed of its' young heroes' hormones. Everything is exaggerated, every emotion the depest and most powerful ever felt by man. The movie certainly isn't perfect; I'm still not sure if the words and pretty pictures are serving the same tone and story. But, it's exactly the kind of intelligently lurid storytelling Twilight can only hope to be when it grows up.
Much of this intelligence comes down to self-awareness. Romeo and Juliet are morons. Passionate, cute, deeply sympathetic, but their love is all-powerful and blinding and they know deep down that that either they're together or the world ends. So, basically, they're pretty standard hormonal teenagers. The movie gets it. We're meant to weep for these two, not want to be them. It's a tragedy, not a romance. If one looks past the shimmering beauty of the world (and Clare Danes' eyes), one might see that Luhrmann is after something elegaic, haunting, and mournful. He loves the characters deeply, but he doesn't admire them. It's a stunningly immersive film, but there's a layer of intellectual remove, especially in showing the clockwork mechanics of missed chances and wrong turns, that keeps it at least a little outside their perspective. I missed all of this on the first viewing. It's too easy to simply get lost and drink in the words and pictures. On a second viewing, I started to notice the depth of Luhrmann's thematic concern. This is really a mature film, thoughtful, commenting on the MTV generation without being of it.
So what does this have to do with Twilight? Well, maybe not much. But it's instructive, to see the book's goals so deftly accomplished by another work. Luhrmann earns his emotions, because we believe that Romeo and Juliet truly love each other, and so we weep even as we shake our heads at their folly. I do not believe, for a single second, that Bella and Edward love each other. They don't even know what the word means. How could they? Chart their interactions over the course of the novel. Where the fuck did it happen? When Romeo declares his love, it's lovely and hot-blooded and sad all at once. When Edward asks if Bella could possibly believe that she cares more than he does, it's just gross and fake and rotten to the core. Food for thought. And yes, much more apple imagery to come.
