Farihah Zaman: Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Or, How Even Marital Sex Is a …

SPOILER ALERT:

I could never get into the whole Twilight thing, and not because I’m impervious to the charms of youth-oriented fantasy and sci-fi. Harry Potter? Magical. Hunger Games? I’m ravenous for more. Twilight? A glorified dime store novel with low stakes (pun intended), murky morals, and unfortunate implications when it comes to gender politics. This may not be a particularly original take on the material but an accurate one; Bella and Edward’s relationship is framed as epic romance but is at worst offensive and condescending to women, and at best ickily co-dependent. It is a 12-year-old girl’s uncomplicated idea of romance, and while wish fulfillment literature is not a crime, the author of the books and the screenwriter and directors of the films haven’t done the work of unpacking the more incendiary aspects of the story.

In the latest installment, the hundred-something year-old Edward (Robert Pattinson) marries his teenage girlfriend (Kristen Stewart) and whisks her away to a private island in Brazil, where he finally agrees to boink her in a highly anticipated and thoroughly disappointing sex scene. I mean sure, he breaks the bed with his “passion,” but both players seem oddly sedate, with expressions more perplexed than enraptured and nary a hair out of place. After only one session of love-making and afraid of further hurting the bruised, still-human Bella, Edward withholds, prompting a ridiculous and, for Bella, humiliating montage in which she exudes sexual frustration while playing chess on the beach and awkwardly trying to entice him with lingerie. He finally gives in, but his fears are validated when Bella finds she is pregnant with a fast-growing, blood-sucking fetus, the birth of which could have terrible, unforeseen consequences, if she even survives long enough to deliver, that is.

Stephanie Meyers claims that the Twilight series is not a pretext for some Mormon parable, but Breaking Dawn continues her terrifying march against female sexuality. In the first three books if Stella, a bashful tomboy-ish virgin, has sex with Edward, she risks being killed by his blood-lust; depicted in the films with much panting and the occasional kiss, followed by Edward ruefully flinging the girl away for her own good. In the fourth book, married Bella is finally able to have sex (a curious coincidence), but the poor milquetoast has to deal with the consequences in the form of their hybrid spawn, which slowly eats her alive from within. A severe punishment indeed.

Twilight: Breaking Dawn is about the horrors of marriage and childbirth more than those of being a mewling vegetarian vampire, and throughout the series, Meyers makes a woman’s life seem like a torturous trial at nearly every stage, from the pain of mediocrity and pulsing hormones in the earlier books to the persistent specter of death hanging over perfectly common life choices in the later ones. No wonder a girl needs the protection of an agonized vampire and a rage-filled werewolf (not to mention a singular blandness) in order to make it out alive. As a 20-something woman who recently married and struggles with the idea of having children, I found watching the latest chapter to be honestly frightening and engaging in a womb-aching, worst-fears-come-true sort of way, one that references pregnancy as a classic body-horror mainstay. However, despite stumbling onto such a universal gem of a phobia, the story is kept from being meaningful by emotional politics that are confounding and puerile, divorced from the implications of the narrative, a fact the film was unable to mitigate.

I’d hoped that Bill Condon (Dream Girls and Gods and Monsters) might be able to inject some life into this morally questionable but enjoyably salacious material. Thankfully, he does manage to bring some horror back to the toothless vampire series; Bella’s birth scene commences with an exaggerated breaking of bones reminiscent of the best of the hallucinations in Black Swan and continues with much bloody snipping and contorted-faced screaming. When Edward injects her with his vamp-juice in order to save her life, we see her writhing in agony in her mind only, before realizing she is physically paralyzed in by morphine.

However, Condon inexplicably offsets the welcome infusion of blood with jarring pop touches; if this is the installment in which Bella is forced to grow up and face the adult consequences of marriage and sex, why is this film drowning in indie pop and weepy emo? Why is sucked-dry pregnant Bella surrounded by vibrant movie color, why does she get magical makeup when she turns into a vampire? Aesthetically, the best Twilight offering is still the first, when Catherine Hardwicke kept the more unassuming, less bloated but, yes, ultimately less ambitious film to a chilly Washington-state palette of grays and harsh whites. There are other missteps, like the hilarious CGI werewolf-conference that made me feel like I was on peyote, or the handling of Jacob falling in love with an infant child, still creepy despite Condon’s focus on Renesmee all grown up and trying to distract us with the word “protector.”

As far as I can tell this moral of this film is that getting pregnant is like being inhabited by a bottomless pit of a parasite that will eat you alive, and if you happen to survive the birth of this hungry little fucker, you must die just a little bit in order to be reborn into Mother, prepared for the sacrifices ahead. Maybe the director who brought this conceit so vividly to life should start going by Bill Condom.

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Charm not enough to carry Old Love

Old Love by Norm Foster, a Presentation House Theatre production at Presentation House to Dec. 18. Box office: 6049903474.

MOST of us have someone in our pasts that “had things been different” we might have connected with more fully.

Some nurse that ember of an old flame through the rest of their lives. Such a man is Bud. He and his wife are divorced and his late50s/early-60s mind is obsessed with Molly, the wife of his former boss.

We learn pretty quickly that Bud’s competition is completely out of the picture when Bud turns up at the funeral to romance the widow! The rest of Old Love moves backwards and forwards across three decades as Bud and Molly offer us different perspectives on their handful of meetings over the years as well as on their respective marriages. The play’s title works on two levels: reconnecting with old feelings for someone special, and old people experiencing or re-experiencing romance – or even passion. The first concept drives Bud forward, while the second pulls Molly back.

The theme of an old love has inspired a heap of songwriters and poets, but despite the universality of the truth he touches on, prolific Canadian playwright Norm Foster mines the material for cubic zirconia rather than gemstone. Once you figure out what is going on, nothing changes thematically. The first act is extended exposition and the more interesting second just repeats Molly’s basic tenet: old people aren’t supposed to be in love or make love, and what will people think of her if she carries on like that.

Oh, please, Mr. Foster. I hate to admit it, but I’m Bud’s age – and I felt like I was too young to invest in the paper tiger of propriety that Molly manufactures just so Bud can tilt at it. While Bud is an unusual modern-day romantic, nicely played by Vince Metcalfe, Foster’s premise for Molly just feels dated.

That North Vancouver’s Suzanne Ristic almost succeeds in creating a Molly that Bud might care about – and a contrasting and more interesting Kitty, Bud’s former wife – is a credit to her talent as an actor. But the only way I can conceive of Old Love ever ringing true would be for director Jay Brazeau to toss playwright Foster’s conceit that this is a romantic comedy out the window and play it for the tragedy that is Molly’s lost life with her former husband. I’d rather have a true story that hurts than a thoughtless laugh any night in the theatre.

I suspect, however, many people will be charmed by the very inoffensiveness that bored me and I have no doubt that Old Love will play in cottage-country dinner theatre for years. Lines like “It was so hot I saw a dog chasing a cat . . . they were both walking” probably kill in Muskoka. If it works for you, ignore my desire for stronger fare and go enjoy some inoffensive entertainment.

Brazeau’s production benefits from Pam Johnson’s simple yet striking design that evokes time passing: an oversized alarm clock with a clock face that incorporates a variety of projections and Eugene Mendelev’s excellent lighting.

mmillerchip@nsnews.com

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