From my grave to yours: PENNY DREADFUL (Showtime), FROM DUSK TIL DAWN (El Rey)

Two new horror series are worth checking out, presuming you have the patience, the cajones, and the channels on your cable. The Robert Rodriguez-backed new cable channle El Rey (read my shuddering praise here) launched a month or so ago with the From Dusk Til Dawn series, a 10 episode-long retelling/elaboration of the RR-QT 1999 film, adding the full measure of hallucinations and replacing Tarantino in the part of psycho brother Richie Gecko with a much more mesmerizing lad named Zane Holz. As Richie's brother and fellow bank robber Seth, D.J. Cotrana diffuses Clooney's terminal charm with hothead overreactions, so now the two feel like real brothers who actually grew up together, rather than the charismatically mismatched Quentin and Clooney. And the queen Mayan reptilian hottie Santanica Pandimonium (Selma Hayek in the original) has a much more integral part with lots of dialogue and empowering femme fatale inscrutability, embodied by Mexican TV actress/pop singing star and staggering beauty Eiza Gonzalez (above, below). And there's Robert Patrick as the disillusioned preacher, and Don Johnson in the Michael Parks part, and a cast of handsome well-spoken Mexican-Americans with either admirable swagger or furrowed brow intensity. The ten part series all occurs over the course of one 24-hour period, from dusk to dawn more or less, which slows things way down with that old tick-tockality and a novelistic attention to detail.

Eiza on the street! 

It all works because it's not that the performances are all that great, but that they are all of a piece, as is so essential for a good horror to work (i.e. John Carpenter's best), they play it deadpan straight while never overdoing it and driving the ordeals into bummer territory. I mention all that because in Showtime's new horror series, Penny Dreadful that level of solid team player dynamics vanishes to be replaced with a bunch of breathing exercise-prepared actors all fighting over every syllable like it's their last chance at an Emmy, only dimly aware there's other actors across the dark expanses.

I'll confess I desperately wanted to like Penny Dreadful, being a huge fan of American Horror Story, this is certainly the British version (and a chronic disciple of Eva Green, especially in Dark Shadows), but the show simultaneously tries too hard and not hard enough. Cramming in all the famous literary characters from the Victorian era's (and earlier) literary mythology it never seems to know what to do with them, other then send them walking in ornate garments through gloomy cavernous sets, or into bed for joylessly graphic sex scenes. One missed opp I'm hoping they rectify is the absence of any characters or monsters actually from the real penny dreadfuls, as seen above in my hand-made collage. Instead of the same old Dracula (here a Drac-mummy hybrid) or Jack the Ripper (and no doubt Burke and Hare also soon to shamble forth), or Frankenstein, where's Spring-Heeled Jack? Varney the Vampire? Just because Dorian Gray's an immortal bunburying Sadean doesn't make him a monster, just an aesthete. On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned this young fellow playing him, Reeve Carney, has the whole show sowed up in his pocket. While the other characters rant and rave and underplay, Carney's Gray seems genuinely entranced, not in any effusive way but in a delicate, eerily jaded without malice way, and graced with an in-the-moment openness that makes him seem to me one of the few young actors around who seems to understand the importance of seeing as much as being seen and who seems to fully inhale the atmosphere. (the only other one I can think of offhand is, believe it or not, Kristen Stewart).

Meanwhile the murky dim brown Victorian London craftsmaship often runs the risk of choking any life out of things (though the darkness can be very very dark, almost 3-D and it seems thrillingly real, like life before electricity was one long SILENCE OF THE LAMBS climax) and the writers are so busy paraphrasing the eloquent flights of 19th century authors, that the British thesps run unsupervised over actorly monologues until every syllable sings with overly spellbinding oratory. In other words, it's very gay, in its way, especially with Frankenstein and his moist-eyed perfect specimen, though not in a giddy, delightful Tim Curry or Udo Kier way, more a Sal from Mad Men kind of way. And the handful of character must play many parts: Eva Green is a vampire hunter who is also a trance medium, easily possessed by demons and departed angry daughters; Timothy Dalton is the Qatermain / Dr. Ven Helsing / Seward who just wants his daughter back;  Mina, the daughter who's already gone to vamp in presumably Dracula arms; Josh Harntett a Wild Bill Hicock who may also be Jack the Ripper; a brilliant young Frankenstein who is probably going to be Jekyll and Hyde later on (his monster doubles as the Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, and The Crow); the vampires also seem to be mummies. I have no doubt Drac will turn out to be another hunky British monologuist impeccably attired in elegantly distressed Victorian fashion who says things like "the burden of eternal life wears me down like a slow watch, like the taste of withered dying opium addicts, their narcotic blood crawling time to a standstill...." Penny, you can use that if you want. That's a-free.

Second Episode is a big improvement - it gets more down to a set of reversals and twists and seems less about getting its lighting as painterly and haunted - the purplish blue mist of London coal fog in gorgeous compositions of ships in harbor and snug waterfronts is impressive, but the centerpiece Eva Green possession monologue, while a brilliant showcase for a brilliant, nervy performer (Green's voice sails up and down octaves while her body writhes and contorts and eyes glare with unholy fire) goes on for like twenty minutes, long past our patience or its own effectiveness, until one forgets even where they are or what's going on. AMERICAN HORROR STORY might pick up and abandon story threads like an impatient schoolkid with a box full of monster toys, but it understands momentum as key, and transgression as a locomotive, and above all it doesn't take itself a tenth as seriously. It even introduces a second female character (Billie Piper), a kind of de facto heroine streetwalker in that she's coughing up blood like a Poe heroine but doesn't complain and not only that, has large measures of bar whiskey for breakfast with Josh Hartnett, who lounges with ease in the saloon window like he's Eugene Goddamned O'Neill waiting for Hickey.

These kind of character-based critiques don't concern FROM DUSK TIL DAWN, though as Santinico, Eiza Gonzalez is no Eva Green she's got a certain cold allure, even naked but for a golden bronze tan, brown bikini and Aztec shaman blood queen headdress she's always holding her own, in charge, using her body to seduce and ensnare men, to believably conjure ancient Mayan deities, to pit brothers against each other, and she's no ham. Even big tearful farewells or life and death anxieties are nicely underplayed in the American Carpenter-Hawks tradition, rather than being underplayed in the British style of PENNY. I wish to god PENNY's writers were up to the challenge, rather than confusing graphic sex and death with what being truly dreadful entails.

POST SCRIPT (6/2/14) - Just saw the fourth Penny Dreadful episode and things are picking up, with a detailed evening at La Grand Guignol that managed to weave together nearly all the disparate characters, as well as a climactic absinthe scene that allows the series' hitherto locked closet door to finally burst open. Can't spoil it of course... but I'm in. 

Read More

Choose Death: Revisiting TWILIGHT's Junky Delirium.

"Young girl with fire / something said she understood /
I wanted to fly / she made me feel like I could...." 

- Neil Diamond  ("Shilo" - song about his childhood anima playmate)

"but we can fly... with these!" -  John Lennon 

(showing heroin pills [?] to Yoko  - John and Yoko: A Love Story TVM- 1985)

"You're like my own private brand of heroin"
--Edward Cullen (to Bella)

"When you're on junk you don't drink" - W.S. Burroughs (Junky)

"I never drink... wine." - Dracula

"My name is Bela Lugosi... I've been a morphine addict for twenty years."

-- (Martin Landau) - Ed Wood

Bella, flanked by cumbersome breathers

Vampirism is every girl's dream if she be faire and smart enough to see when a hottie in the mirror looketh back and to know, if she's ever to bid surcease time's incessant pawing, it's now or never. Small price, killing off your inner Snow White soul via a lugubrious huntsman, to keep that hottie smiling back. And if there's no such thing as vampirism or eternal youth, well, some drugs come close. Slowing things down, killing the appetite and sleep cycle, drugs, love, and vampirism replace glazed-eyed homogenous breather-eater lockstep with an unending thirst.

For the first four films of the Twilight saga, Bella wisely wants to get undead while she's still got that pale flawless skin (her mothers' already shows the results of age and prolonged sun). And that is just one reason why I believe the series so subversive. Bella chooses death. She subverts the fairy tale maturity myth, jamming a crowbar into the wheel of time, making the saga a kind of alcoholic-addict fantasia wherein the enchanted bower is returned to out of clear conscience. She's hip to the banality of 'the right choice.' You can argue she merely chooses Edward (Robert Pattinson) and death goes with the deal. You can argue he's a pretty creepy specimen (old enough to be her great-great grandfather, stalking her and watching her sleep all night after climbing in the window) but he's not a real person. He's a daemon lover / arrested animus projection! The Twilight saga doesn't reflect the move from bleak Cinderella attic to magic pumpkin coach to married princess -- which would mirror a girl's transition from child to adulthood-- but the reverse. Bella moves from sunny Florida girl to the eternally cloudy Forks like its some castle tower prison. In that sense the series is more a Greek tragedy, wherein unresolved past issues come burbling up to drag our heroine back down into the mucky-muck. But there's also a conscious decision on her part, the Campbell mantra of "when falling, dive." She's a Snow White who makes the conscious decision to go back to sleep because she can't be bothered with an awake Prince Charming with all the cumbersome breathing, snoring, bathroom issues, and boring functions one must endure with such a dubious prize.

And the idea that Edward has nothing else in his life to do other than stalk her is creepy sure, but also relevant to the daemonic animus, being the half of us in shadow while our daily waking egoic consciousness goes about its day, the one who literally has no life without us, and is most active while we're asleep (and vice versa). There is no sun or blue sky for the animus. It can only run loose when our conscious is asleep (or, if we're artists and writers, performers or mystics or schizophrenics, truly awake). Edward's daemon lover archetype ancestry stretches back to grim roots, down deep to Eros and Psyche and up through the Romantic poetry of Keats and Shelley, the daemon undead druggy lovers of Coleridge, Poe and La Fanu finally up to the Anne Rice 90s before climbing up to the ultimate teenage Gothic flowering, Edward.

I recently re-watched the entire series as it was all playing on one cable channel or other last month, and after the entirety of around 12 hours of film it definitely holds up, especially if you really like dark purples, which I do. And lastly, it's great because, for me at least, it's guilt-free, there's no objectification of the females, rather we have a rare example of the 'female gaze' and the sole sex appeal comes from the boys, which does nothing for me turn-on wise, hence no guilt. Rather it compels me to realize that maybe my vague discomfort is how most women go through their movie watching life, enduring vast stretches of their boyfriend's chosen strippers and bloody gunfights. In Twilight: New Moon Bella goes to the local cinema with her mortal, age-appropriate friend Jessica (Anna Kendrick) and coming out laments how crappy the film was, mainly as there's "No hot guys kissing anybody." Imagine, a film daring to lament such a shallow thing. Then I remember Dracula again, Bela Lugosi commenting on the film's appeal to women:

 "It is women who bear the race in bloody agony. Suffering is a kind of horror. Blood is a kind of horror. Women are born with horror in their very bloodstream... It is women who love horror. Gloat over it. Feed on it..." 

And also, in a way, it is the woman in me, my own dream lover anima, my ego's dark unconscious shadow, who loves Bella as a projector screen for herself, as it allows her in turn to look out through my eyes and then through Bella's eyes, for each anima and animus has their own inner daemons to work through, and so it goes, in fractals either direction. My anima rewards me with dreams of paradise (which for some reason is a cavernous sub basement under my suburban childhood/teenager neighbor's house hot springs with concrete floors and strange books on benches and vague memories of having a fling with the mother, who is not the same mother who actually lived there. Her husband's always away, and if I can find my way down there, she meets me if so inclined. I've never gotten even to first with her (it's not that kind of dream) but I wake up thrilled, longing to recapture my memories of this hidden underground sanctuary. It looks like a cross between some secret room in a Vincent Price movie, the basement lair of Hammer's THE REPTILE, and Carfax Abbey's ruined Gothic basement and Bellevue's old hydrotherapy room.

And maybe I am prejudiced; Dracula is my favorite horror character. Bela Lugosi is my favorite horror actor, and next to William S. Burroughs, also my favorite junky. And even Bella's name conjures him, so it's sad that so many critics I normally respect tow the party line with the Twilight series, never seeing past the 'teen phenomenon' hooplah. Meanwhile these critics respect, some even revere, the more boy-friendly Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings/Hobbit, and Star Wars sagas, which have twenty films between them (so far) and about that same number of  lines spoken by women. Unless they're princesses to be admired from afar, to be kissed before they turn out to be your own sister, and so forth, women seem to be unwelcome in these franchises, yet these films get way more respect in general critical consensus. I can only guess Twilight's detractors are nerds who've never done drugs, or had more than one girl or boy interested in them at the same time.

If you're like me, with a loud, bothersome anima who withholds great sentence structure and inspiration from your writing on a whim, then you know she loves movies that feature crazy women she can project onto; and so you know she will reward thee with vast acres of flowing prose when she gets to lock onto an Angelina Jolie in Girl Interrupted or a Natalie Portman in Black Swan, or a Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, or even Anthony Perkins in Psycho. (Right at the moment I wrote his name, Bogie says "You're a good man, sister" behind me - synchronicitous!)  Twilight's rife with such crazy feminine. My anima loves that it is not life-affirming but a solid romantic mood poem-- tortured as Edward Burne-Jones trying to score laudanum at the strip mall-- and an exoneration of the death wish underwriting everything from self-cutting and anorexia to just partying like there's no tomorrow or even just sleeping late and missing school, going from rainy day Gloomy Sunday blues to hooking up with a pallid junky and getting involved in 'the life,' understanding what that means, fully cognizant of all that will be lost, yet nonetheless daring to answer 'not to be' when Hamlet asks his mortal question.

Only rubes would think such a choice false next to the demands of the 'paternal' life-choosing next-stage animus, i.e. the result when woman's daemonic lover turns to inner critic and lecturer, who endorses sanctified institutions without question, trusting doctors, school principals, fathers, husbands, and politicians over her own better judgment. This new animus argues over SUV parking spots at the kids' soccer practice, feels the need to remodel the kitchen, honor PTA appointments, hire babysitters, monitor their children's friend choices, and even approves her own gradual arrival at an assisted living domicile. We can see women dominated by this stage of the animus in the Tea Party -- Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, and Ann Coulter -- they let their animus possess them at the expense of their own gender's liberty. It's only near the final 'second childishness' stage of Shakespeare's seven ages the "mere oblivion,"  sans taste, sans eyes, that the younger daemon lover animus returns, to shepherd these 'healthy' choice-making woman into the void. This is even pictured in New Moon, wherein Bella dreams of being all super old and Edward as young as ever, waiting patiently all this time for her to be done with the 'living' he so wishes for her. 

To understand the beauty of Bella's rejection of this fate takes perhaps the mindset of the addict, the sort of girl who stays upstairs reading fantasy novels when the sun's out or the one who's depressed and in misery (and in school) until a hot older drug dealer sweeps her off her feet. Some girls just can't wait for the gradual fade-to-black. Some girls are too enamored of the daemon lover to let him go for the duration of her adult life on the vague promise he'll be back at the end. Sure the choice to stick with him is not healthy but who cares? The women who choose to keep their daemon as their animus are our romantic heroines in the truest sense -- for don't forget that forsaking the daemon may allow her to exit the fantasy and enter the social order (to upgrade animus projections to, say, her shrink), but who needs another normal well-adjusted girl? Not the readers and seers and livers-in of fantasy. 

"Many myths and fairy tales tell of a prince, who has been turned into an animal or a monster by sorcery, being saved by a woman. This is a symbolic representation of the development of the animus toward consciousness. Often the heroine may ask no questions of her mysterious lover, or she is only allowed to meet him in darkness..." - Marie-Louise von Franz

Consider Bella and Edward's break-up early on in New Moon: his 'heroic' attempt to rescue her from himself, to usher her from the faerie bower and into the next stage of her development: the camera wobbles when it shows Bella, we feel her knees getting weak and the stars going around, the drop of anguish cutting through her voice, but the camera is straight and calm cutting over to him, accenting his total emotional coldness. She staggers off, disoriented, winds up sleeping in the forest, a kind of refusal to go back to normal. Rather than following his advice she courts death actively, all but daring him not to come to her rescue.

 Reality is seldom operating anywhere close to a teenager's inner state. Myths are truer in that sense; they are not at all sentimental, for as Jung notes: "Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality" (ala John Ford); they are terrifying because they unveil that which was hidden for a reason. They are beguiling, addictive; once the light is shown over that shadowed corner of the psyche, the grateful prisoner chained in that corner rewards you with hordes of little treasures its stolen from you on the sly ever since you repressed him into that dark corner (usually around your first day of school): bottles of endorphins and dopas and artistic inspiration its fermenting for just such an illumination. Gradually he gives out less and less for more and more liberty to run rampant in your psyche. There's a thin line between being rewarded with one's own treasures and being held hostage in the zone between a daemonic dream lover's ardent wooing and drug addiction, and crossing that line has its own delirious Stockholm syndrome high if you know how to treat the agonies and despair of withdrawal as just another kind of masochistic kick, the muscle ache and burning skin just love 'not given lightly' by your inner whiplash girl child in the dark.

"The pain was my only evidence he was real." - Bella 

Enlightenment doesn't occur from sitting around visualizing images of light, but from integrating the darker aspects of the self into the conscious personality. -- Jung

Blood, the life, love: over the course of five films Bella never has a single real hobby other than desire for Edward, anything else engaged in just a distraction; bringing junked motorcycles onto the reservation for Jake (the werewolf) to fix isn't because she likes him romantically but because the image of Edward shows up whenever she does 'something stupid' - i.e. crashing into a tree. Her various suicide attempts conjure the spirit of Edward saying "Bella, don't" - trying to wrap her in his overprotective shroud, playing the latter stage animus in place of the dream lover (as above, the promise to return at her death bed). But Bella's misery wobble framing steadies around Jake and Stewart shows she's a far better actress than given credit for, as she modulates brilliantly from pale, shocked jiltee, to anguished grieving misery, to playful and sharp-witted, as often happens when one can see and tell the person they're hanging with is in love with them, a captive audience. Bella's using him, really, as exploitative in her way as the first poison-brained white trader to swap furs and bear skins for two-cent trinkets. And using someone to get over someone else is not cool, yet how else are you going to do it?

And that's why Bella is so great both as a character and as Stewart's performance: she is not just one person, she has many facets and not all of them are admirable but Stewart plays the less admirable as if they were admirable --she doesn't know the difference but we do. When geeky mouth breathing classmate Mike (Michael Welch) finds out she's been dumped, he awkwardly asks her to the movies and she snaps, "How about 'Face Punch' have you seen that?" I love that line! The kind of thing that one would say in a cafeteria as a reworking of "how about I punch you in your stupid face?" That Face Punch turns out to be a real movie hardly matters to the brilliance of the line--its refreshing savagery. It probably wasn't even a real movie before she mentioned it. She creates the future before her like a reverse wake, like a zipper uniting the conscious and unconscious halves of psychic jacket, Edward and Jacob zipped together into androgyne Bela.

I can really only think of one or two heroines in film who measure up to that level of realistic fuckerwithery: Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind and Cathy in Wuthering Heights. Out of touch critics in the house can't rear back like startled horses over those ladies' behaviors as they do with Bella's, because they're old established classics, written by, not surprisingly, female authors. Each has a character smart enough to act like she doesn't know it, who slouches and mopes and takes advantage of seeming obtainable but is really quite grandiose and fierce, who plays coy and clueless about how much various boys are crazy over her, a total of traits that, in the rom-com world, would be the purview of bitchy villains, not protagonists. Each has two boys mad for her -- one wild and one anemic -- the twist in Twilight is that the wan, pale anemic one is the true love choice -- the vibrant anima mundi-reflection of the Jake / Rhett / Heathcliff is relegated to the lesser mortal bin; Edward's name even sounds like Edgar, who marries Cathy and becomes as subjected to her as Jake is at the mercy of Bella in Twilight. 

It's this reversal I most resonate with, because Bella is more than just one of a series of female-penned ball-busting manipulating wantons daring to reappropriate the gaze, she is also one of the 'hurrah for the next who dies'-style lost generation, the modernist woman 'who chooses death,' realizing in it an honest choice truer than the one of life and health and mortality because among other things it's a choice that gives her a chance to stare down her fears, to embrace the demon and daemon, to ride over the cliff and into legend. Such women include Evelyn Venable in Death Takes a Holiday, Kate Winslet in Titanic, Assumpta Serna in Matador, both chicks in Thelma and Louise, Ava Gardner in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Dietrich in Morocco and Dishonored, Sherri Moon Zombie in The Devil's Rejects.  Only by deliberately choosing to act against their own 'best' interests--with gaggles of men and authority figures trying to talk them out of--can these romantic feminine characters be free. Whether that freedom lasts another week or a few hours is irrelevant, except the sooner death comes the sweeter the terrifying narcotic immediacy of the remaining life. (see: Twilight's Cinematic Ancestors). The movie ends either way, why not go out before the credits so you can at least pretend the movie never ends?

As relevant as Twilight's reversal-of-logical-maturation metaphor to death or addiction is the solitary life--spent largely with the unconscious, getting to know, as it were, one's second self through allowing it free reign at the typewriter. All good free-flowing inspired poetic 'flights of fancy' come from the writer's daemonic, the animus or anima. this end my favorite of the five Twilight films has been New Moon, mainly because the brilliant intertextual use of Bella's birthday to invoke a range of age-related fears and longings (including the dream where she's super old, perhaps the most honest and strangely honest metaphysical rendering of birthdays since 2001), and a high school English class assignment, Romeo and Juliet, which contextualizes both Bella's various adrenalin-rush seeking self-destructive behavior (she becomes, as her human friend says, disapprovingly, an adrenalin junky) as well as the more obvious (and fascinating) 'rescue' of said animus, preventing it from dissolving and reforming as the next phase of adult maturity takes over and the buzzkill 'always right' tea party drip, the safety-first counselor moves in: "Bela, stop."

Addicts surely relate, but even more cogently than Romeo and Juliet, Twilight's arc of Bella's pitiless insistence on becoming a vampire reminds me of Antigone, wherein she chooses to disobey the law to not bury her brother, knowing full well it ensures her death. This loyalty to the dead to the point of a conscious, clear-eyed choice results in a prime illustration of the way feminine contrary fearlessness conquers even fate and you get to tell all the smarmy idiots who 'just want what's best for you' to fuck off:

"I shall lie down
With him in death, and I shall be as dear
To him as he to me.
It is the dead
Not the living, who make the longest demands:
We die for ever… "  -- Antigone 

For Romeo there's more grief at work fueled by brashness, rather than Antigone's (or Bella's) cool detached insistence on being 'changed.' Consider Romeo's speech:

"... I still will stay with thee,
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again. Here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber maids. Oh, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last.
Arms, take your last embrace. And, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death."

He's seeing death as a negative; he's waaay off. He's a hothead. World-weary flesh? He ain't never been anywhere. His act is one of youthful grandstanding, a poseur rather than Antigone's or Bella's cold, logical insistence, their refusal to judge death as negative. Sure she's annoyingly obsessive, sure she needs a hobby other than pining or mourning, but neither heroine (nor the ones in Wuthering Heights and Gone with the Wind) are in a 'reality' - they are in a story, a myth. That's the fundamental mistake of so many movies: they must somehow reflect 'reality' and set a 'good example.' Just look at the roster of Oscar nominations and you see it -- the moralizing, the historical heft, the inspiration. Who needs it? Shakespeare and the Greeks never cared for reality or setting good examples, rather they cared for myth, which is a deeper truth of the psyche, by which I mean the sum total of the unconscious and waking selves, the dream of night and the reality of day merged in the titular time, through symbol and archetypes and and performance, the only language the unconscious understands. Twilight cares only for sleep, for chasing the phantom shadows of the romantic animus and kicking the rescuing woodsmen to the curb, even diving after your merman to drown in the briny thrashing deep. Bella fixes herself to Thanatos like a lamprey, she stays true to her animus' original projection. And Stephanie Meyer's series is a success because there's no truth left in waking reality anyway ("Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens" - Jung), recognizing in their airbrushed pale-skinned phantom Edward the same thing that once hypnotized legions of Garbo lovers in the death dream silent theater of the 20s. They called them "Garbo widows."

 

... the animus is also sometimes represented as a demon of death. A gypsy tale, for example, tells of a woman living alone who takes in an unknown handsome wanderer and lives with him in spite of the fact that a fearful dream has warned her that he is the king of the dead. Again and again she presses him to say who he is. At first he refuses to tell her, because he knows that she will then die, but she persists in her demand. Then suddenly he tells her he is death. The young woman is so frightened that she dies. Looked at from the point of view of mythology, the unknown wanderer here is clearly a pagan father and god figure, who manifests as the leader of the dead (like Hades, who carried off Persephone). He embodies a form of the animus that lures a woman away from all human relationships and especially holds her back from love with a real man. A dreamy web of thoughts, remote from life..." - Marie-Louise von Franz

The mistake most Hollywood films make is to misinterpret Franz's "dreamy web of thoughts" as a condemnation, and to make sure their films have no such mistakes on the part of their heroines. But kids need to see their dark daemon webs onscreen --they don't need to see their lives, they see enough of them already, too much even. They don't need the visibly uncomfortable gym teacher creeping even into their most private reveries to caution them about protection. The unconscious is aggressively contemptuous of goodness and safety. The more one tries to eliminate all danger from their lives the farther away death becomes in their field of vision and the staler and duller real life becomes.

And so it is that Twilight draws hostility from critics who perhaps lack enough self awareness to realize their vision has grown dull and stale, too blind to their own opposite-gendered unconscious archetypes to question their initial hostility. I admit I'm prejudiced. When I first starting drinking, for example, I was progressively warned never to drink alone, or to drink in the morning, lest I become alcoholic. But I couldn't just find people to hang with at any hour of the day, and drinking in the morning was a miraculous way to alleviate hangovers and make the whole day rosy. Of course they were right and I almost killed myself a dozen times over and had to stop drinking altogether after a paltry 14 year-run. But I regret nothing! And if heroin had been offered to me, or speed, I probably would have gone for that, too. Now it's cigarettes. Everytime I see some woman on TV with no fingers or throat or hair croaking her warnings about smoking through her tubes I just mute the sound like I'm sure Poe's Prospero wishes he could have done that striking clock chime at his Masque of the Red Death. But these are the choices we make. And if more people made conscious choices to destroy themselves in these slow brilliant ways maybe our world wouldn't be so gruesomely overpopulated, or our country wouldn't be going bankrupt from too many old people still alive and draining Social Security, Medicare, and union pensions for all future generations, as doctors spend our children's future to keep these viejos alive for one more grueling month. It's only when we're no longer afraid of death that we can truly be free, and take our crowbar out of the spokes of the circle of life. In this sense, Twilight is like a lone dark spot in the unending light, or a light in the darkness - what's the difference.

We see a bit of western civilization's knee-jerk pro-life need for consideration in New Moon, wherein Edward dumps Bella, and flees with family in tow but she can get him to appear by risking her safety foolishly, forcing him to move from  demon lover to paternal but neglectful lecturer, telling her to turn around and so forth. It's great because we hate Edward for causing her so much pain, we relish with her the chance to bother him through such disregard for personal safety, forcing him to reveal a stern buzzkill authoritarianism that is utterly without effect or genuine authority.

It's so bitterly fitting as a counter to that that even after director of the first film Catherine Hardwicke scored big, she's replaced by a guy, Chris Weitz, for subsequent films, the guy borrowing a lot of her aesthetic sense but quietly draining it of at least half Hardwicke's fairy tale Jungian archetypal contexts, animal and color symbolism (not for nothing Edward is first met sitting next to a stuffed white owl, wings outstretched and claws preparing to clutch its unwary prey, in science class) but the first thing a film company does when they see a woman has made a hit film is to take over the sequel and kick her to the curb so she doesn't queer up this hit 'they've' lucked onto, so here I'll just quote a woman, from one of the few mainstream sites worth a damn, The Guardian:

"Twilight the film has been a massive success, but its audience is dismissed as fangirls, groupies, teenyboppers, airheads. It is sneered at by the same critics who misogynistically savaged Sex and the City and Mamma Mia, two other films made for women, with such blatant transparency. Strange that the belittling should be so vociferous; we women are the biggest group in the world, yet our viewpoint is ridiculed and denied, our testimony ignored. But that's the way it goes. The studios will use Twilight's profits to fund more films in which there are no decent roles for women, no women in major positions behind the scenes, no women directors. That's happened with Twilight's sequel: Hardwicke has been sacked and replaced by the guy who made The Golden Compass. The female gaze has been blinded yet again." -Bidisha, Guardian 2009."

I wouldn't go that far, Chris Weitz does an amazing job of preserving the female gaze -- he must be in tight with his anima - but there's also a sense of really picking up on what made the book and first film work - whereas to me the weakest of the series is Eclipse, which is directed by a different dude - this one made 30 Days of Night - which makes sense as Eclipse is almost a sequel (I even lumped them together before I knew they had the same director in a post on the Nordic Circle rom-hor genre).  It's fine but I find Eclipse to be rather washed out color-wise, and focusing too much on action and flashbacks as opposed to grand archetypal coming-of-age myth junky metaphor soap subversion and brilliant purple and mist scenery. I should point out too that The Golden Compass has a young capable girl in the lead, boys to the side, wicked stepmother and a Catholic stand-in bad guy contingent similar to the Volturi in New Moon. Bad box office killed the chance for sequels, alas, and the Christians backlashed both for the anti-religion angle and, no doubt, the capable girl with powers angle. A case again perhaps of deep-seated castration anxiety undercutting a lot of parents and unconscious male's good sense, or maybe enhancing it. But since when have fairy tales and myths had anything to do with good sense? If they did, Red Riding Hood wouldn't even talk to the wolf in the first place, and all kids would be bored sick, and then probably have to go talk to wolves for real and get eaten and it would be your fault!

There was a time when women screenwriters ruled in Hollywood, before the code came into effect, and talking to wolves was all the rage. But with the arrival of the code in 1934 came the feeling that, like now, telling women's stories is too important to be left to women. So stories of grandiose emotion and feeling were replaced by smug sermonizing where childish women are brought to heel, weened of their immature desire to be independent by endured humiliations at the hands of twits. Twilight dares to undo all of that, to go back farther than even the pre-code box office tallies can reach, down into the murky recesses of the Brothers Grimm and pre-Inquisition alchemical magick, straight like a hot shot into the archetypal vein, the pulsing warm narcotic rush of the eternal feminine distilled and uncut, so primal it invokes knee-jerk revulsion from most men, a revulsion so deep they don't even recognize it.

If, as Bidisha says above, the profits will be used to fund more male-centric films, well, we can only hope more films about women ruling the dark abysses of true myth will succeed at the box office. Snow White and the Huntsman and Black Swan did well by their women, even if directed by men, and even Disney has dared, for the first time ever, perhaps, to make an evil queen the star of a film, Maleficent (a very interesting name, as her own 'male-efficient' animus is already running the show). Starring Angelina Jolie with Art Deco cheekbones, it could be a bust of CGI 3-D boondoggle like that James Franco Oz, or it could rock. One can only hope it doesn't end with her falling in love with some doe-eyed dork prince and abandoning her witchy black magick ways so she can dote on him hand and foot, as is done, say, in post-code films like I Married a Witch and Bell, Book, and Candle.

I still remember when Jolie sparked bonfires with her Gia-Foxfire-Girl Interrupted power. We'll have to see if there's any of that blood left in her, or if her legions of biological and adopted kids have drained her dry. I'm happy she saved the world and all, but some of just want to watch that world burn.

What's tragic isn't that we want it to watch the world burn, but that we have to clarify the 'watch' aspect to placate nervous censors, the NSA, common 'decency', Batman, and so forth. When we let life-affirming paternalistic morals even in our dreams our dark shadow hearts may have no choice to but to act out into the real, or worse, retreat --until all that's left are church socials, Lassie, freckled children, chaperones, white picket fences, and enough treacly strings to drive even a good girl straight to the devil. Isn't that why he set it up? Why he put the morals in and took himself out? The devil can't corrupt your soul when he's busy on the screen. His biggest triumph is convincing us not to put him there, not to project him out at all, just let him smolder unseen in his buried celluloid coffin like a sulky genie, until even the tiniest spark blows the whole thing off. 

Read More

Monster Capsules: BIG ASS SPIDER, WAKE WOOD, WOMAN IN BLACK, DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, VALLEY OF GWANGI

BIG ASS SPIDER

2013 - ***

A sometimes not wince-inducing monster film, Big Ass Spider shows director Mike Mendez knows how to keep a low budget giant monster flick fleet-footed. Greg Grunberg (Alias, Heroes) shoots for a Seth Rogen vibe as the semi-dopey exterminator who "thinks likes a spider" and really wants a girlfriend, a combination that eventually proves even to the military he's the best man for the job of tracking and wrangling the titular amok experiment. First it gets loose inside a hospital, then grows to titanic proportions, grabs the hottie lieutenant Grunberg likes and climbs a downtown L.A. office building. Playing a kind of PG version of Seth's unforgettable psychopath in 2009's Observe and Report, Grunberg walks against the tide of fleeing extras in slow-mo to a haunting cover of the Pixies' "Where is My Mind" and even if the film defies regulations by showing full monster too early, and even though the thundering orchestral library military leitmotif quickly wearies the nerves, low-key bemusement endures throughout. Ray Wise (Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks) is the head of the military clean-up squad that at first wants nothing to do with Grunberg; Clare Kramer is the hottie lieutenant who winds up all webbed up and waiting. Lombardo Boyar is a kind of less funny Michael Peña from Observe and Report (my review here). That's not a dis on Boyar, he's great, but Peña is hilarious because he's genuinely dangerous, Boyar is merely genial. If Pauline Kael had been alive to praise Observe and Report in 2009 she would, and maybe it wouldn't have bombed. She'd probably also enjoy, to a point, Big Ass Spider, because she liked bad bug movies. She was a great, great lady, man.

WAKE WOOD

2010 - ***

Hammer is back, with this keen medley of Monkey's Paw-ish family grief, Wicker Man pagan rural secrets, and the terrifying child who kills for no apparent reason motifs. When a veterinarian (Aidan Gillen) moves his family to the small rural England town of the title and his daughter has her throat torn out by a guard dog, the townsfolk (led by Mike Leigh-regular Timothy Spall) spill their secret: the town is cursed/blessed with the ability to restore the suddenly dead to life for three days so loved ones can say their proper good-bye. But the grief-stricken mother (Eva Barthistle - who was in the similar The Children two years earlier) doesn't want to let her go when time's up. Ungrateful woman! Soon the child's using telekinesis in combination with a crowbar to off the protesting locals and her dull yellow raincoat in the dark woods conjures vaguely Don't Look Now-ish unease. What do the dead locals care, though, when they can always come back for a visit? Aside from a heart being ripped out, some gory deaths, and dying farm animals, there's not much gore. Ahhahah that's a joke. It's Hammer!

WOMAN IN BLACK

2012 - ***1/2

Hammer does it again! They are really on a second roll, and despite the immense attention to Edwardian period detail, Woman in Black is never stuffy and really rather ripping, with a surprisingly solid Daniel Radcliffe as a London lawyer sent, Harker-style, to inventory a dark decaying mansion. There's a great metaphysical shocker ending involving a speeding train, and the woman in black turns out to be a vindictive wraith like Eva Graps and her ghost daughter rolled into one malevolent spirit. If the story follows a too familiar pattern (Dark Water / Ringu meets some Innocents), hey, Hammer practically invented this shit. The ample presence of tight-lipped, suspicious locals at the inn harkens back to the days when a crisply attired Peter Cushing would get a similar cold shoulder and the sense of pacing is superb, even with lots of Radcliffe running around the dark mansion with his drippy candle --the sort of thing I generally find tedious but here is done briskly with the dark always a breath away from swallowing Radcliffe whole. Director James Watkins shows that the chilling power of his Eden Lake (2008) was no fluke, that he is not afraid of bleak but compelling endings, and that he is a force on the scene poised to become the next Terence Fisher.

 DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS

1966 - **1/2

Then again, even Terence Fisher isn't always Terence Fisher, such as in this 2nd entry in Hammer's Dracula series, which I'd been struggling to see for a long time, there having been only a terribly washed out non-anamorphic old Anchor Bay disc which I could never get into, thanks to my allergy to washed-out colors and non-anamorphic framing. Well, this new blu-ray version is gorgeous proof it wasn't just the non-anamorphic washed-out aspects that stopped my enjoyment. Even pristine and robustly colored it's a bit of a dull, silly mess. Most of this movie consists of posh Brits leisurely debating whether to spend the night at Dracula's castle. Once Christopher Lee is revived he seems to resent having to wear fangs again and the script thinks one can make a cross out of just about anything (stopping just short of the old crossed fingers trick scared kids are so fond of -see also: my piece on the confusion of symbols and reality in horror films over on Divinorum Psychonauticus), and here's another thing I never understood: if you want to keep vamps away, just eat garlic! Don't hang it in garlands so some hypnotized maid can come remove it. It makes no sense when you can just poison the food supply directly to just put a bottle of poison in the kitchen and think that will do the trick.

Oh well, the blu-ray is delicious with rich sickly gold yellows and a 3-D-ish feeling of the dimensions and spaces of the castle. That's fortunate, as there's not much else to do in this film aside from watching idiots leaving each other behind to go investigate sounds, saying they'll be right back and never returning. While Darwin chuckles from on high we're forced to count the minutes as we're shown every last real-time moment involved in stringing a person up by his feet and slitting their throat over a big stone trough full of Drac ashes. I remembered that scene from my childhood (swirling it up with Horror Express), but not the cracked ice finale. I must have blocked it out. Good lord, it's not even cold out and here's this convenient 'frozen pond' so close to the castle it makes no architectural sense. If that sort of thing doesn't bother you, and you don't mind watching actors feeling uncomfortably under-directed, as if their marks had been drawn in wind, well enjoy. At least Drac's got good taste in brides. When he punks out hottie Barbara Shelley we all benefit since she finally lowers her beautiful red hair and neckline.

VALLEY OF GWANGI

1969- **

Here's a bizarre mix of devotional Harryhausen animation and unconscious cowboy brutality that feels why too dated for 1969. The tedious story involves a posse of rodeo cowboys led by James Franciscus stumbling onto a desert paradise hidden from man. It looks almost the exact same as the depressing lifeless desert they just were traversing, with no sort of ecosystem on evidence remotely close to being able to realistically nourish apex predators like the Allosaurus (colored purple here, for reasons which I'm sure exist). I haven't read up on anything dinosaur-related since third or fourth grade but I still knew more than the alleged paleontologist riding with the cowboys. At one point he even calls a dinosaur a "styranosaurus!" which I presume is his shorthand for tyrannosaurus and styracosaurus, since his mutton chops and teeth are so bogus it must be hard for him to enunciate two such Latin syllable-enriched names in one sentence. At least he knows to get out of the sun when it's time for the Allopsaureuys / Styrackosauss smack-down!

And no disrespect meant to the great Harryhausen but there's only so many times you can watch creatures who could never survive in their depicted ecosystem mix it up in a flat ugly middle shot diorama desert (these films always imagine dinosaurs as being in the desert since that's where the bones are found, which is rawther ridiculous) and here their monochrome purple colors and lack of close-up inserts make them look like plastic kid's toys. So even if those toys come to brilliant slithering life under Harryhausen's patient hand, it never really adds up to anything anyone other than a very indulgent dinosaur fan kid would like. Harryausen's no slouch; he even animates the eohippus when a movie this cheap and meant for kids would usually have regular pony footage shrunk and overlaid, but it's not even as interesting as a typical arc in Land of the Lost.

So yeah, I tried to love it as long as I can remember, but I can't dig Gwangi and I finally figured out why: it's not just that I hate children in monster movies, especially the burdensome cliche'd Mexican kid, one peso senor, that all monster movies seem to think settings in Mexico, Italy, or Spain, Brazil or Portugal require; it's not just that all that sun-bleached scenery makes me depressed and thirsty, it's because there's this unconscious brutality on the part of these cowboys. They never doubt their right to hunt this poor little horse down for the public's amusement, and to grab the still surviving beasts of Gwangi's valley for public display thus proving the point that man destroys everything he touches all in the name of a measly profit. Harryhausen's famous for getting us to care about his monsters, but that can backfire, such as Twenty Million Miles to Earth which also has the tiresome one peso senor kid. And like that film, our abused creature here even has to battle another abused creature, in this case a circus elephant, also Harryhausen-animated. I have the same problem with Hatari! My top ten favorite movies of all time are at least 60% Hawks, but I can't abide that film's obliviously callous approach to abducting animals and the icky triumph of Red Buttons in getting the girl through methods most boys wisely abandon before they even get a first date. Hawks, you're sending the wrong message to the children... in this one film.

Big Ass Spider/s and deadly mantises however never manage to earn my sympathy, and for that I am truly grateful, a realization that prompts me to stop trying to love Gwangi and instead look over towards my disc of Jack Arnold's classic Tarantula (1955--above) like a man who finally realizes what matters in life, and who thinks like a spider in love... with Mara Corday.

(See also: I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie)

Read More

"These Bad Boys Mean Business" - TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN Vs. FACING EVIL with Candice DeLong

 The real life Clarice Starling, Candice DeLong (above) was a high profile FBI profiler for 20 years. Seeing her on Investigative Discovery's Deadly Women and Facing Evil (Friday nights!) is to see a still button-cute but steely-eyed brunette whose brittle but compassionate demeanor is tried and tested in the forge of evil, poring over testimony and evidence and motives of specifically (for the shows) homicidal women. Interviewing them on Facing Evil in a style as intimate as a Barbara Walters, Delong guides their story from childhood to the moment the trigger is pulled or knife inserted; the moment sanity is left behind. Before that moment they were just normal people  but once the first shot is fired or cut is made, their whole world--and that of their victim--has now forever changed. So here they are, in jail for life. And it's all because they let a man (almost always) blur their own private line between good and evil.

Facing Evil

Their stories follow a general similarity of a vulnerable woman and a predatory, usually older schemer. On the surface, this undeniable facet of our modern mediated life validates some of the feminist concerns about the Twilight series --that it glamorizes abusive relationships, encourages dependence on older men and encourages leaving conventional reality behind for the fascist bubble that love and submission create.

In this fourth in the series, Breaking Dawn, Edward tells a story of his days hunting and drinking the blood of 'molesters.' A flashback to a screening of Bride of Frankenstein (1933) cements him to a lineage that dates back to the first Universal horror films, the dawn of dread in cinema, implying that his kind are in a sense, truly evil in that they are predatory. Whether they curb their habits, only drink bad guys (like Dexter), or only hunt deer, they're still evil -- maybe that's the true difference between staying out of jail in civilization and survival in the wilderness. Predatory instincts ensure the latter, but the sharper they are the harder it must be not to kill everyone around you, sooner or later, just because you do it so well.

A romantic fantasy demon lover like Edward in the Twilight series and a real life murderer are, based on this tenet, indistinguishable. Like sending love letters to Richard Ramirez or Ted Bundy--the thrill of bad boy danger tempered by the impossibility of their release--the saga of Bella and Edward is similarly based on thrills and danger welded to 'safety' and denial: there's no nagging wife to dispose of first, but there are... other things... that make their story conflate with the prison nurse who shot a guard to help her bad boy escape, over which comes DeLong's memorable words (approx.) about the nurse's love for hot prison guys: "You liked the bad boys. But these bad boys mean business."

I love the first three Twilight films (well, let's just say, I'm 'fascinated' by them) but Breaking Dawn is a huge let-down, like what might happen if Ramirez finally got out of jail to marry one of his pen pals, and he turned out to be old and bald and fat and safe. The problems with Breaking Dawn aren't those, but herewith are summed up in the three M's: Maturity, Martyrdom, and Music, and the one saving grace, Disillusionment:

1. Music: Instead of the nearly nonstop flow of emotional sadcore songs that ran like a nightmare chorus through the first three films we get a lot of listless minor key piano that occasionally breaks for tired croons from Christina Perri and Bruno Mars. Blechh. Part of what drew me to the first three films was, in fact, the sad music which actually seemed to be what Bella Swan the character would actually listen to while moping around in her bedroom. When the pop songs finally sneak into this fourth installment they all sound the same--lots of flat male neo-folk harmonies-- and lack any kind of legitimate sadness, except in the most perfunctory of Urban Outfitters Americana hipster harmony kind of way.

 2. Maturity: Whenever a teen series moves into a big marriage or out of high school you know you're headed for trouble and that's why I maybe forgive Dawn a little bit more than I forgave, say, season four of Buffy. The theater I saw Dawn in was freezing cold (broken heater) and that made the extended, strange marriage ceremony both better and worse: time slowed, half the ceiling was dripping and exposed, presumably from a burst pipe; the cherry blossoms onscreen seemed made of ice, and the dream of the 'death-size' wedding cake froze my blood, literally. For a second I had a sense of overwhelming fear that Bella was already dead and marrying Edward be like the scary climax of Psychomania!

The intervening year/s since the last film have been kind to Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner: posture and facial feature definition and a sense of gravitas are theirs by right. Pattinson meanwhile just seems extra bleached and CGI washed out until he looks a bit like he's being airbrushed, like Courtney Cox in Scream IV.

Still, in general they have all avoided the pasty hungover look that dogged the aging Harry Potter gang, and I loved the awesome selection of fully sketched-out 'relatives' of the Cullen clan, all gorgeous and interesting and probably worthy of spin-off films. Checking out those glowing eyes and Goth-but not too Goth- dresses made me desperately want to be at that wedding, and made me think I already had in weird teenage dreams I still remember fondly. PS - My favorite Cullen is the nurturing but still badass 'older sister/advisor' psychic vampire, Alice, played by Ashley Greene. But of course, I'm not alone in that.

Break: If you're still unclear why/how this series is so popular, let's examine the still below:

Note the purple and violet color coordination that's been the key luscious art design since the first film, and the way these two cute vampires fuss, with their centuries of beauty tip expertise, over this 18 year-old slacker with her hunched over posture and vaguely mannish profile. As a viewer you're identification locus moves in three directions if you study the picture, mirroring the three components of consciousness:

   1) Bella: cute but frail and human, easily-led (ego)
   2) Vampire helpers: examining our human weakness from their superior position (super ego)
   3) The Gaze / mirroring / metatextual subjective position : the unborn child's free-floating ghost, eying Bela's womb like a tired wanderer eyes a warm, toasty Motel 6 (id)

In a sense, it's perfect just as it is, this preparations for the wedding. There's nowhere to go but down. After a certain point no amount of stalling and pretty baubles and nice scenery will help when it's down to you, it all comes down / to you / in your nakedness; facing the end point of desire's long trip down the river Niagara, when the three aspects of consciousness are forced to face the three unconscious aspects, the sides of self you never even knew were there, the ones hiding at the bottom of the lake, evil sea wolves!

3. Disillusionment: That said, Jacob (Taylor Lautner) shows up and steals the film halfway through the wedding reception, bursting with lycanthropic life, sweeping Bella off her feet and right away from the paler-than-the-wedding-cake groom. Jacob's derisive scoffing that her and Edward's honeymoon will be a sad sick joke-- his incredulity that Edward 'hasn't told her yet,' --implies some massive sterile impotence on the part of all vampires that makes the 'waiting til they're married to have sex' aspect suddenly seem like a sad con job. Once that ring is on her finger, the fact that this Ken doll has only a plastic absence in his pants will no longer be something she can protest about.


Sure enough, after this long beautiful wedding scene and lengthy travelogue to this exotic secret honeymoon location we in the audience are as as jet-lagged as Bella (and frozen to death in an unheated cineplex). We'd been expecting some serious fireworks, and instead Edward drags her down to the middle of nowhere, just to be by the beach, and feebly tries to humiliate her because she's not mad enough at him for leaving her bruised up from the roughness of his, how you say? lovemaking? Ah yesss. In the film's best scene she looks down at him while he sits on the smashed up marital bed, not a gentlemen of vamping anymore but a self-sabotaging undead toad, a loser with weird teeth who's spent three films postponing this inevitable de-pantsing because he is, 'ow you say? A fraud, like all Kens!

 Thus we come to the realization that those people who wait to get married before fucking are perhaps either terrified they'll be terrible at it or else completely oblivious to the tenets of Lacanian psychoanalysis and/or Buddhism. Having sex before marriage is like getting your head out of the clouds and into the dust and grime of who's turn it is to do the dishes; the longer you stay in the virgin white clouds the more you're sink fills up until the dishes are so dirty and so numerous that you can't even find the sink, or the soap... and you run from that sink, don't you, Bella? But now you're chained to it!

So while Bella and Edward's flatline honeymoon is not what we want to see it's what needs to be seen for the film to have a larger meaning than just button-nosed girl promise ring erotica. Rather than giving us the trite softcore displays of conspicuous enjoyment we only think we want to see and which would, in the Lacanian sense, collapse both Bella's and our own identification construct, they give us the truth, the awareness, the realization that the whole grand mythic aspect of their love would be lost if a happy-ever-after truly arrived. As long as she's miserable we can still safely identify with Bella and enjoy her squirming from our hidden masochistic perspective. Once she's 'well laid' as it were, she becomes no longer our misery-loving company but a threat to our enjoyment.

 A key moment is at the Rio airport where Edward makes arrangements with a Brazilian pilot for a private jet home because she's pregnant... with a demon baby! The impression Edward creates as such a hip, rich, happenin' dude in his cargo shorts (he can speak fluent Portuguese!) is denuded by the nonplussed way Bella regards the whole thing from her passenger window in the nearby cab. By now, Edward's brand of 'I'll take care of everything' is recognized by her, finally, as mollycoddling. His Victorian/compulsive need to keep her co-dependent is based more on his own insecurity and self-loathing than on any truly chivalrous impulse. So, like the women interviewed by Candice DeLong in Facing Evil, Bella is waking up out of a brainwash by a bad boy.

The thing is, the real time-serving inmates interviewed by Candice are 'made' into killers through this same brainwashing technique. And Bella technically will let Edward make her into a killer (a vampire) but she has chosen it in advance of all his brainwashing; she is drawn to the darkness, and her bad boy actually tries to keep her out of it. It's not the sex of the honeymoon she really wants, for without death, what do you have? Sans petite mort? Vous n'avez rien!

4) Martyrdom - Bela indirectly uses martyrdom--the oppressed feminine's ultimate trump card-- to force Edward into finally letting her become the undead wraith she's always longed to be; like Steel Magnolias in reverse! The only way to get Edward to finally turn her, to 'kill her,' is via the pretext of a pro-life sacrifice, rather than a personal and morbid self interest. Of course it's annoying that this all has to be in service of a pro-life subtext, but, if you follow the 3rd wave feminism all the way down to the twisted roots you'll see it drinking heavily from the abject underground stream of pregnancy and rough sex--the twin magnets of darkness no amount of feminist rationale can brighten.

So let me ask you this: If a woman starts out independent and chooses to be overwhelmed by the male other  is she betraying her gender, even if its by her own choice? Is she allowed to examine the paradox of being free through surrender? Is she allowed to choose a deeper darkness than even death or prison can contain?

Steel survivor: Won't get fooled again.

Accusations of Twilight being pro-life as a whole are evaded by Edward being so pro-abortion, hating his own semi-dead child (as opposed to the doofus husband from Steel Magnolias for whom his wife seems little more than a baby wrapper). Meanwhile Bela's refusal to give up her half-vamp infant even as it's killing her is seen as foolhardy by everyone but herself... and part of it isn't just her connection with the child but her wish to die and be reborn as a vampire, which Edward would clearly postpone indefinitely (naturally since once she's turned he will lose his power over her). In other words, her choice is based on her own desire to die, and her connection to her baby, sans any desire to please or obey her man's selfish edicts. So in the end, feminists and pro-choice types alike go snarling back to the Exit of this film, both ill-served by the myth they cautiously hoped to adopt. And those of us who seek genuine subversion recognize it in this very sly Antigone-like renouncement.

It is, after all, only a myth...

But... that's not quite right. Something can be 'only' life, but never 'only' a myth. The danger of ignoring the true nature of the mythic archetypal unconscious--of presuming the mythic dimension has no power other than cheap entertainment--is that you leave your unconscious with  no avenue of conscious expression, so it festers in your pressure cooker subconscious until it explodes in sudden violence or bad boy brainwash submission.

 This is a sad, Freudian truth seen all too well through the steel blue eyes of Candice DeLong on Facing Evil. Without an archetypal context by which to recognize the big bad wolf when it came pawing up at her basket, the Red Riding Hoods DeLong interviews were easy prey. Maybe they never learned to read, or their dads were fundamentalist zealots who refused to let them hear the story (Red Riding Hood shouldn't be allowed out without a male escort, and the hood should cover her whole face like a burkah!), and now they've paid the price. Haters can sneer at it, feminists can rear back and bare fangs, but girls currently immersed in the Twilight world will all grow up knowing how to recognize wolves when they see them. The bad boys they meet will just seem 'sooo fifth grade', only slightly less outre than ponies, or those phallus-free Ken dolls.

But those who don't have a wolf to chase them in their youth can never grow out of the need for one, the wild-eyed deer in  the headlights longing the bad boy wolves can spot from a mile off at any bus depot. Instead of knowing a devil when they see one they are instead themselves are only seen, and sucked... first through lupine head trips, then into murder, then through Candice DeLong's steely blue vampire eyes and back out into the hell paved by Christendom's good intentions.

Read More