Another little snit

It is not my fault that Twilight will not die.

And yeah, yeah—that can be considered irony—which would take the book into realms of literary complexity heretofore uncharted by it.

So the subject came up in my little Facebook group, and I wrote something in response, and now I’m sticking it here because I found it what I came up with interesting.   I’m allowed to find my own writing interesting because I don’t know what I think until the words come out of my hands, so in the reading, it’s all new to me. Anyway, some further thoughts:

“But you know, Kamis, I think you might been on to something here. I wonder if all of these women are droving themselves witless over this partiuclar “””hero””” because we are all so scared underneath. I don’t even think we realize on the outside of our brains how shatteringly frightening our times are – and have been for decades—starting maybe even with the atrocities of the Nazis (did we know how sub-human and evil men could actually be – and that they could institutionalize it to the point where they almost took over the governments of all the world?) and the dropping of an atom bomb (one strike could poison a good segment of the planet and make people sick for generations to come – and that strike could come out of your home skies with virtually no warning).

In the fifties, we had bomb drills in school – all of us huddled by the wall under the windows so we wouldn’t be sliced by flying glass or burned to death by the initial blast – assuming we weren’t vaporized. We lived every day with that fear. And some people began digging fancy bomb shelters into their back yards. I saw adds for them on TV. We expected it any time, from any direction – because this was something that had actually happened – only seven years before I was born. And every country was racing to build its own deadly, horrid bombs.

The terror we began feeling then has since been over layered, geologically added upon over the last half century. If peace was ever at our core, you have to drill for it now. You can never be sure when you get on an airplane – or go to a mall – that someone won’t suddenly show up with a gun – or several someones – or drive a car full of explosives right through the doorway.

Ours is a very personal, intimate terror distilled from a global one. Kids’ school busses have been hit in Israel – there are monsters out there, medieval minded men equipped with the most modern and effective technology.

They live to hate you, personally.

Add to that the media screaming about the possible collapse of the financial systems all over the world, and the realization that our entire civilization is built around a resource we don’t want to supply for ourselves.  Houses lost.  Jobs lost.  Banks crashing.  Insurance companies belly up.  Retirements dried up. Not even sewer lines are for sure.

oops, oops, oops – I feel a blog essay coming on.

The Media, media, media: the way to sell papers is to scare people to death – or scandalize them, which – in a way – is the same thing, since we’re programmed to be scandalized by behavior that could, if unchecked, eat away the hope and health that underpins “our world.”  The media never lets us forget we’re gonna die.  And it’s probably going to be horrible.  If not today, probably tomorrow.  If not in a car or a bathtub, in our beds—and at the same time media loves talk of diversity and tolerance, it practically assembles enemies for us, you know—in case we shouldn’t have built any for ourselves.

 Thanks to them, a simple, healthy, joyful life has become the fairy tale.

And yesterday—here’s a government task force flash: chemical or bio chemical or nuclear attack is imminent—some time over the next five years.

Well, duh. Like we haven’t pretty much expected one every day since 9-11 happened.

Okay, where am I going with this?  Well, some years ago I was really ticked off when a friend of ours, sitting a session in our studio, confidently announced this:  All Women Secretly Wish to be Dominated. He meant it, and he was a little slack-mouthed when I went up in flames right in his face as he said it.

But what he meant was – women want men who are the warrior/deliverer/protector/provider – smarter than the women are, faster, more durable, and thus able to stand between a rape-able, vulnerable (because of muscle mass – but also because of the innate complications of a woman’s inborn sense of loyalty, fidelity, love, obligation, nurturing—motherhood, sisterhood and partnership) woman and the fierce unpredictability of the world around her.

(Sorry about the parentheses.  They get away from me sometimes.)

After decades now of grown-up experience, I know have to admit: he had a point. Even the fiercest of us will not run fast enough with a baby and a toddler in our arms. And I will add this: even without the obligation of children, never fast enough in six in stiletto heels and a power suit.

But he also was wrong about some of us. Threaten my children and you will find a burning demon in my place, all claws and fire shooting out of my eye sockets. Still, that manifestation is hard on a system—scratch me slightly and you’ll find that I’d rather skip the histrionics and have my man step in to club you. (The problem comes in when that man is, instead of facing the world with that calm club, facing his own family – but that’s another discussion.)

So here is this book, now a movie—not particularly well written. Okay syntax, but repetitive and vapid and way, way too long and turgidly paced. It’s about a vampire (yawn), but not really, because this vampire has little in common with the classic variety. This one is really superman, covered in glitter with a strong, helpless streak of evil. The helpless streak is one of the strong selling points, because any invincible protector has to have a handle that the woman can use to wield him with. And her pity for his misery and her mothering (playing the nurse) can ignite all those tender, yearning instincts that are built into the fair heart.

Summation: it strikes me that, in these particular times, women are terribly frightened of the mass of what might be coming at them. And seeing that this little inconsistent, paper thin vampire-hero can run like the wind, read the minds of evil people, drive like a bat out of hell and NEVER make a mistake, jump miles into the air and do battle with super human enemies that he can smell a mile away, never, never losing?  And that he seems to live to love only this girl, this weak, boring, stupid girl (shoot, he’d even like ME better than her)?  Well, isn’t he her own personal, pitiful, fully stocked bomb shelter?  And by extension, doesn’t he become the hope of weak, boring, stupid women (i.e. human women) everywhere?  And won’t that just sell books, though?

I don’t believe that the author of this book was in any way skillful enough to have pulled these things together deliberately. This book is not art. I remember years ago when a wry and very well read friend of mine announced that a certain wildly successful writer in a certain schlocky market was not successful because he knew how to write FOR that market, but because he WAS that market himself. And that’s what I suspect has happened here.

What does that say about the men in our lives?  Women, grown women who I saw on the news (I am not making this up), standing in line for hours at theaters all over the country to get into the midnight first showing of this story.  And why?  Aren’t they that satisfied and comforted and inspired enough by their own flesh and blood husbands?  Brothers?  Friends?  Fathers?

I have to ask this question again, too: and if their husbands, brothers, friends and fathers were to get together in herds to line up at midnight just to see some movie featuring the woman who epitomizes THEIR hopes—big chest, little clothes and all (because I’m almost sure Joan of Ark wouldn’t have fit this bill)—how would the Twilight women feel about that?

Interesting.

So maybe we can see the wild success of this ephemeral piece of morbid balladiering as a symptom of the depth or our current deep cultural, political, financial and – dare I say it?  spiritual distress.  Maybe this book is telling us that our men aren’t doing their jobs.   Maybe, in our seething, underlying, subconscious fear, we are like human time bombs, and what will happen if we ever do actually go completely off?  What stories will we believe when that happens?  What people will we be willing to trample in our mad rush for the very last cookie, the last can of tomato soup on the shelves, the last bag of wheat? What gods will we follow then, I wonder?

End of snit.