Sex and Vampires

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…”

He may have written it 150 years ago about a time that was over a hundred years before that, but it seems oddly prescient doesn’t it?  Or maybe it’s just that this opening to A Tale of Two Cities, is always the case, that every epoch is that of the best and the worst.  Even still, with our impending election, and what feels like the impending doom or success of the American experiment, Dickens’ words succeed in doing what every writer dreams of, making us feel.  They wrap us up and show us ourselves in a way that we otherwise might not see.  

It is no secret that I’m on the left side of the culture war that is tearing through this election and ripping at the seams of America.  And in my own opinion there is not much I can do but write and try to make people see themselves in a way they otherwise haven’t seen.  My goal is to show how we are as a society, in my writing (my fiction writing that is) and for the most part, in my life, I try not to judge people. I simply show, how we are, and how we relate, how we communicate, how we express ourselves.  I’m a firm believer in realism in my own work.  However, I don’t discount the need for fantasy as well.  I, myself, have never been one for pure fantasy.  I was loath to start the Harry Potter series (though I ended up loving it), I never have been able to get into Anne Rice (though I don’t discount her talents as an author), and I cannot get through even the first chapter of Lord of the Rings (I’m sorry, I’ve tried).  My personal prejudice toward fantasy (that only being that I’m not really a fan), had deterred me, up till now, from reading the newest of these extremely popular fantastical series: The Twilight Saga.  

I do work at a pretty hip bookstore, so I’ve heard about these books for a few years now, but they never really piqued my interest.  That is they didn’t pique my interest until I went to comic-con.  Yes, that bastion of nerddom has been, in recent years, infiltrated by Hollywood.  Some people hate it because of this, some love it, but I must say, it is nice to see Hollywood stepping up and taking notice of the fact that nerds go to movies, they watch t.v. and they read books.  My big pleasure at Comic-con was seeing all the cool stuff surrounding the Watchmen movie (don’t worry I’ll write about that before the movie comes out), but for many many fans at Comic-con, the excitement mounted around the Twilight movie.  Thanksgiving weekend will see the opening of this movie, and I guarantee you it will be huge.  But that wasn’t what convinced me to read the books.  No, it was the utter fervor with which the young (and old) fans of this series expressed that got me thinking I might need to experience some of this.

So five days ago, after staring at the first book that sat on my coffee table in the two months since Comic-Con, I finally read the first book in the series, and absolutely could not stop.  Four books in five days (and they’re not short).  I haven’t slept, I’ve barely eaten, I dream about them, but mostly I agonize over the meaning behind them.  Like most other books that create a big stir, I wasn’t a big fan of the actual writing.  I’ll admit that the writing wasn’t nearly as excruciatingly awful as the Da Vinci code, but it wasn’t great either.  These books are all about the story.  And the story is fantastic.  

Even still, as I was reading and got deeper and deeper in to the more and more serious and epic story line, it occurred to me that there were some underlying themes that I was not on board with.  Sure enough, looking up the author’s biography, she graduated from Brigham Young University and all that that entails.  Like I said, I’m on the left side of the culture war, and the author of these books is clearly on the right.  And because of that, these four books geared toward fourteen-year-olds brought up more emotion than I was prepared for.  

I’m going to give a few things away now, nothing major, but if anyone doesn’t want to know, I’d stop reading this until you’ve finished the books.  

The main character, a girl named Bella, falls in love with a vampire named Edward.  When they meet they are both seventeen, and Edward will be that age forever.  Now one of the things that people love so much about the book is the sexual tension.  Edward loves Bella, but he craves her blood more than he craves any other human.  Thus, they can’t have sex for fear that he will loose control and kill her.  Seems reasonable enough, until Bella decides she wants to be turned into a vampire (I swear, nothing I’m telling you gives anything away).  The classic vampire tension ensues.  Edward doesn’t want to be responsible for Bella missing out on life.  Bella doesn’t want to grow old and die while Edward stays seventeen.  Edward doesn’t want Bella to grow old and die but he doesn’t want to take her life away.  We all know these stories.  Here’s the twist.  Bella convinces Edward to make her a vampire if she’ll marry him.  Fast forward to Bella realizing that she wants to experience sex as a human…and here’s where I start to have problems.  Edward agrees as long as they can be married first.  

I’ve always sort of had inklings about this (and the election shenanigans going on with Sarah Palin and her stance on sex education and abortion have only served to solidify them), but I truly realized how much I am opposed to the concept of no sex before marriage when I read these books.  I am really avidly opposed to not having sex before marriage, I guess Erica Jong isn’t lost on me.  But let me back track a second.  I wouldn’t have such a problem with it, if it didn’t seem like people who believe in not having sex before marriage were getting married just to have sex.  

There was this show on MTV for a while called Engaged and Underage, about young people (18-21) getting married.  Now I know some of you got married at this age, but times have changed so I’m not judging your decisions.  The vast majority of the stories on these shows revolved around young people who were getting married for sex.  Yes, their beliefs were such that they felt they needed to be married to have sex.  I don’t have a problem with that particular belief, but I do have a problem with sex being a reason for marriage.  First of all, you DO NOT buy the car without test driving it first, REPEATEDLY.  And I, personally, am a firm believer in the premise that you don’t just test drive one car.  Sure, you might think that the BMW is amazing, but it doesn’t compare to the Ferrari.  

Okay, that metaphor got a bit jumbled, but I’m hoping you all followed.  Now, in regards to the books, I would not have such a severe reaction to the whole married at eighteen and not having sex before than if it wasn’t for what follows.  Though I must say, this element of the plot did wear on my stomach seeing as the age group that are the Twilight Saga’s most avid followers is young, like 11-18 kind of young.  And I’m sure many of the staunchest supporters will have a problem with my fiction if it ever gets done and is published, but they can write about my corruption of America when it does come out and they have a blog.  

My biggest problem came after the whole marriage, sex thing.  It was the babies thing.  More specifically, it was the abortion thing.  Now, we’ve got Mrs. Palin shaking up this election and all but saying that she is ready and willing to overturn Roe v. Wade.  She’s willing to take away our right, as women, to choose to get an abortion.  Her plan would make us, as women, go through the pain of giving up a child for adoption, even if we didn’t want to, even if we were against bringing another child into this world.  It’s one thing to have the choice, it’s another to have this be the only option.  And apparently Stephanie Meyer (author of Twilight) agrees.  Though it is killing her, and I won’t give up what happens, Bella does not abort the baby growing inside her.  It is killing her, and still, she doesn’t do it.  

In the context of the story, it might work, and does drive an incredible amount of the plot for the fourth and final novel, but my literature student brain sees the bigger picture, sees the pro-life agenda behind this plot point.  And the combination of no sex before marriage and no abortion, sent my liberal values through the roof.

I’ve never been one for censorship, and I’m certainly not suggesting anything like that, but I thought that the written word was the one place that we liberals held.  We’ve obviously lost the news media, but we have always held the novel, the pamphlet.  I feel like America is having it’s own age of Enlightenment, like little by little, we are being forced out of the cave and into the light, one by one.  The backlash, is of course huge, and those that want to keep things the way they are, dig their heels in to the dry, cracked earth, digging big trenches as they inch forward.  I guess what worries me is the notion that maybe I was wrong.  That maybe this age of Enlightenment is one where we do go back into the cave.  Where we pretend like all the advances made in the sixties and seventies never happened.  Where women don’t have the right to choose, and black men can’t be president.  

I’m not saying that any of this is present in the Twilight book series, but it seems to me that these are ideas we might soon have to face.  Are we willing to give up the war if we loose the battle?  Even if our numbers decrease, are we going to shift to the winning side or are we going to be the rag tag army that fights for social justice?  For true equality and true freedom?  Are we willing to move past the hurt and the hardships that seem so intent on keeping us down, in order to come out victorious?  Or are we going to keep up this contentious battle for government-implemented morality?  

Peace, Love, and Sexy Vampires,

Julia

Leading Ladies

I consider myself a feminist.  I know that term has about a million different meanings and connotations, but to me it’s all about being female and being proud of it.  I own the fact that I like to paint my nails and wear pretty shoes.  I also own the fact that just because I’m female doesn’t mean I’m not smart or worthy of an equal paycheck.  I like the fact that I can be a total bitch sometimes, and completely supportive other times.  I’m not some man-hating chick who shaves her head and refuses to wear heels, though I think those ladies are feminists too.  I’m not a completely cosmo-feminist who adheres to the ‘if you can’t beat them, seduce them’ kind of ideology, though I’m think those ladies are feminists too.  I wouldn’t vote for Hilary Clinton specifically because she was a woman, but I loved the fact that I had the option of voting for her has a viable and credible presidential candidate (woman or not)…and in all honesty I didn’t vote because the DMV lost my voting registration form.  

As a feminist, and a feminist who happens to be a connoisseur of pop culture, I do love the leading ladies.  A good leading lady can make a movie like Legally Blonde into a post-modern feminist triumph.  A blonde girl who is written off by everyone makes it to Harvard Law School and learns that she doesn’t have to get by on just her looks.  Sure she goes to Harvard for a guy, but she quickly figures out that he kind of sucks and she is better off without him.  In less able hands than Reese’s, this movie could have been tired and schlocky, a vapid look at a dumb blonde.  Reese made the character lovable, relatable, and a sort of everywoman who is stereotyped because of the way she looks and overcomes the obstacles that arise because of those stereotypes.  

Now, my interests lie more in television than film.  I’m of the mind that t.v. is much more important to study than film is, even though film is considered the higher, more artistic media.  As a writer, t.v. is where the interesting character development is.  Think about it, you identify more with Rachel Green or Dylan McKay or Jan Brady than with Lester Burnham or The Dude or Ilsa Lund.  They are all fantastic characters, but Rachel Green and Dylan McKay and Jan Brady came into your living room for anywhere from five to ten years.  You watched them grown and change within a relatively realistic time frame.  They didn’t jump years in advance to show the change and you didn’t have to see major character arcs play out over two hours.  For writers, and I would assume for actors, television can be a fantastic exercise in representing real life (albeit a slightly heightened version of real life).  

A few years ago I noticed that there are an uneven amount of shows on T.V. that revolve around a female lead.  I can really only think of two shows on network television right now that revolve directly around one male lead (those would be My Name is Earl and 24) and seeing as I don’t watch either, I can’t comment on how often Jason Lee (Earl) or Kiefer Sutherland (Jack Bauer) are on screen.  But I have watched a whole lot of female led dramas (My So-Called Life, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alias, Veronica Mars, Joan of Arcadia, Ugly Betty, Felicity, etc).  The thing that strikes me about all these shows is how often the leading ladies are on screen.  In Alias, Veronica Mars, Ugly Betty, and Buffy, especially, the actresses are in almost every single scene.  So here’s the deal.  If you are the lead in a series and you are in almost every scene your day would look something like this: get to work between five and seven in the morning, go into hair and make up, go to wardrobe, rehearse with a camera, eat breakfast, start shooting.  Depending on how long the scene is you could spend hours and hours on the actual set, under the lights, being asked to perform again and again and again…if it’s an emotional scene, you get to cry over and over and over again.  Around 12 or 1, depending on when you started, there would be an hour for lunch where you could eat, go to your trailer, relax for a bit before going back to work.  Throughout the day you would have multiple make up and hair changes, multiple wardrobe changes and anywhere between 10 and 20 pages of dialogue to shoot (keep in mind that on a film set you shoot approximately 1 to 2 pages of dialogue a day).  Hopefully, you get out of there within 12 hours of getting to work, but this is always a pipe dream and never happens.  More likely you will be at work for 14 to 18 hours, only to go home, go to sleep and go back to work.  Now, this is thrown out the window on Friday, where often times you will be on set until 2 or 3 am because you won’t be at work tomorrow.  

This is the same formula as all 1 hour shows.  And all the actors on those shows work like hell.  I’ve worked enough t.v. to fully appreciate that.  But for a single female lead, you’re on the whole day every day.  In a big ensemble cast, there are scenes certain actors aren’t in.  Though I would love it, Patrick Dempsey isn’t in every scene of Grey’s Anatomy, so sometimes he doesn’t have to come in until a little later, he might get to leave a little early.  He might even get a day off once in a while (though I doubt it).  With the exception of The Office (everyone has to be in almost every scene because of the way that show is shot), all ensemble shows run like this.  

The question that comes to my mind, and one that I’ve been grappling with for a while is, why women?  Why is it that, for the most part, a single lead character in a show is almost always a woman?  

The interesting unifier between all the shows is that the female lead are usually ultra-strong, superwoman kind of women.  Sidney Bristow (Alias) is a badass spy that kicks a whole lot of ass, much like Buffy Summers who is not a spy so much as a Vampire Slayer, who also kicks quite a lot of ass.  Veronica Mars is uber smart and a total smart ass, Joan Girardi (Joan of Arcadia) talks to God, and Angela Chase is every teenage girl.  But why is it always a woman, do we not care to see men kicking ass and taking names alone?  Have we just seen enough of it?  I mean, Jack Bauer is a spy, but he’s no Sidney Bristow, what with the speaking a million languages and being a double agent.  Philip Marlowe is a fantastic P.I. but he’s no Veronica Mars (though she’s definitely got some of him in her).  

A part of me loves these shows because I like to see strong, realistic female characters on screen.  The feminist inside me likes that there are strong roles for women.  But a third, much smaller, part of me wonders if Hollywood is exacting some kind of torture on these ladies.  

Peace, Love, and Great Acting,

Julia

A Thirst for Knowledge

When I was about 13, I came to the realization that the coolest people walking around on this planet were the ones that knew a lot of stuff.  Maybe it came from watching T.V. shows with endless pop culture references, none of which I got.  Maybe it came from my crippling uncoolness.  Maybe it’s just that I spent a lot of time by myself and was bored, but at some point in my early adolescence I started teaching myself stuff.  Sure, it wasn’t stuff that was necessarily important.  I mean, I still can’t name every president of the U.S. and I have no clue as to what exactly the quadratic formula actually finds, but for some reason, it was important to me to know all the words to Back in Black.  It was of the utmost importance to me to know who Archie Bunker was, even though I wasn’t even born when All in the Family was on.  I just had to understand references to Casablanca, Easy Rider and Pulp Fiction and to me that was as important as being able to quote Shakespeare and Dorothy Parker (of course, these were also important).  I even once got out of detention by reciting the entire prologue to Romeo and Julietby memory.  

I remember once being in P.E. and being able to sing lyrics to at least one song by every band one of my friends mentioned.  It wasn’t until years later that I realized how weird a pursuit this was.  The pursuit of knowledge is not a new thing, but the pursuit of relatively useless knowledge is entirely different.  Knowing history is one thing, but knowing the history of the WB is entirely different.  Knowing Dickens is one thing, but catching the line in Juno where Juno refers to a drummer named ‘Tino’ and knowing that ‘Tino’ comes from My So-Called Life is entirely different.  

I often argue, when faced with the criticism that I watch too much T.V. or too many movies or I have too many books and too many CDs, that I am simply an expert at communicating in our post-modern age.  That in an age when everything seems to refer to something else, that every character name in fiction, every band’s sound, every movie has some reference to some other book or character or band’s sound, I became a sort of rosetta stone.  I’ve always taken pride in the fact that I know what’s referred to.  

But I’ve been thinking about it lately, and besides the fact that I’m practically unbeatable at Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit (in fact, I’ve only met one worthy opponent and she’s got a tattoo on her ass that matches mine), what good does all this useless knowledge do?  I’ve become so adept at deciphering pop culture reference that I have actually passed the point of being able to communicate with most normal people and become one of those people who makes random obscure references that no one gets.  Perhaps this means I should write for television (watchGilmore Girls for confirmation that people like me exist on T.V. writing staff), or perhaps it means that I should compete on Jeopardy (except for the fact that I know little about things like Gerald Ford’s presidency and the U.S.S.R.).  Should I write one of those David Foster Wallace-style novels that no one understands but earns praise from the New York Times Book Review, or should I simply resign myself to a fate of unending communication problems.  

I guess the real question is, does pop culture knowledge matter?  And if so, how much is too much?

Peace, Love, and Useless Knowledge,

Julia