It’s a dick move, but every tenth movie or so I force the bored girl selling tickets to make eye contact—it’s easy, you just hold onto your cash for a beat through the moment you’d normally hand it over. She looks up, you meet her eyes, she smiles and thinks, in spite of herself, this twelve dollars standing before me is full of surprises.
I saw the last one, maybe with the same twenty-five women here tonight. Who collectively gasp twice: when vampire Pattinson proposes to human Kristen Stewart, and when she later kisses werewolf Lautner. The latter’s a puppy-dog, kind but baffled because she can’t be reached. He doesn’t understand: she’s a phantom, half-made of the possessiveness Pattinson lavishes on her virgin form. “How do we learn to covet, Clarice?” Hannibal, you old film critic, we don’t even need to wear the mouth-jail anymore, we’re as frozen stiff as this tall, awkward kid. Every metaphor for static looking—mesmerized, riveted, fixed—to him, and therefore us, obtains.
The face of Stewart, who trained—in Panic Room—at coveted Clarice’s knee. Her eyes set a hair’s breadth to the wide around that slightly-sloping nose. Ingenuously emphasized front teeth peeping out between full lips that never deign to overflow (Madeleine: “The lesbian mouth”). A trace of the hardness, in mouth and chin, she either will or won’t someday avoid. If quick flashes of pleading cross the whole, they’re extinguished so fast it’s just impossible to be sure. The entire Pacific Northwest, tinted mist-gray and fir-tree aquamarine, surrounds her glowing skin. And we sense the very thing we’re asked to imagine: how that unblemished dish of cream is a function of deep tributaries running hot blood.
How fantastically here we are, says that face, while we are all so busy being resigned, the day after tomorrow, to disappear.
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