I’ll name its genius straight off: it’s not a parody of the entire burgeoning vampire genre but only of Twilight, which it often mirrors shot for shot. And so its mockery is like the faintest protest against an adoration that approaches plagiarism or stalking, those cousin crimes that flirt with simply replacing oneself with an object so loved that to its superiority must be ceded the space one understands oneself to waste. Or think of Zizek’s explanation of our earnest postmodernity that can’t even realize that the quotes around a word like “love” were, in its coinage, already implied—we needn’t supply them, in the same way that this film is exquisitely redundant: they barely change the character names (but some get the Mad magazine treatment: Cullen becomes Sullen) or sometimes don’t at all. The tweens behind me go cuckoo-bananas with glee.
The leading actress does a pitch-perfect Kristen Stewart: eyes cast down and “twitchy,” she tucks her hair behind her ear and looks like she ate a bug if compelled to speak. She’s pelted and smacked, called frigid and boring, portrayed as dying for the sex the Edward character (“Edward”) withholds. At one point plucks the promise ring from his hand, pops it in her mouth, chews it up, and opens to reveal a new tongue piercing. When that doesn’t work she decides to seduce him by putting on a rubber Obama mask—now what do you make of that?
But they get it wrong when, to puncture her teen angst, they have her whine about unrequited love. Hold it—Bella and Edward are requited, just not consummated. “Requite”: to repay or avenge. Politics are useless but economics is everywhere you look. In case you couldn’t tell, I don’t think money is lifeblood. I think it is the parody of what we’re almost always too weak or afraid to say.
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