Druggie Vampire Women of B&W City: A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT, THE ADDICTION, NADJA

Like so many broken down NYC artists and writers before me, I've submissively followed my vampire anima--my creative muse-- like a doting Renfield, scooping up any fly turns of phrase or spider ideas she cares to drop behind her, protected from direct harm (her rabid fangs of madness) only by some half-remembered Hegel quote kept around my ravaged neck. Lonely in the throng of my fellow lonesome vampire secretaries--all of us aging and dying as we're drug from one Annexia to the next while our vampire muses stay young and lush and flush in their coffin pages and occasionally celluloid--I simultaneously crave and fear the isolation she needs to emerge from her hairy coffin. 

The East Village where I used to live now can only be afforded by the rich or older-than-me bastards with rent controlled apartments. But back in the 80s-90s you could live in downtown NYC for only $500 a month, and there was a sudden outbreak of female druggie downtown vampire artists onscreen, serving well as metaphors for the city itself, and AIDs, drug addiction, and art's constant struggle for fresh blood. Anonymous thirsty youth prowling a city that never sleeps just waiting for a bite = ideal vamp habitat. Now we live in squalor in Park Slope and make double what we used to but can't afford to go to a bar and buy $15 drinks, so everyone's in bed by midnight; we can barely afford a gallon of Coke Zero, 2 packs of cigarettes, fifth of bourbon, and gram of weed a day habit. No vamp can find us now - and our anima slumbers out of reach, deep in the Demeter's rat-infested hold.

But there's always the 90s to revisit, and now, thanks to a genius female Iranian director, there's an indication some element of the 90s black-and-white druggy urban vampire dream lives on, in a sub-section--west side-- where it's always balmy, where it's forever the past, and LPs and cassette mix tapes are still the hard currency of connection. Iran's Bad City (aka Bakersfield, CA) a town located between the grime of Bleeker Street and the clankety-clank of Eraserhead. 

THE ADDICTION

1995- Dir Abel Ferrara 

****

"Dependency is a marvelous thing," whispers Lili Taylor to her NYU thesis advisor as they shoot up together. "It does more for the soul than any formulation of doctorate material." Of course she's going to give him more than just dissertations and heroin, she's going to give him eternal hunger in exchange for his opiated blood --basking in the satisfaction of two cravings being satisfied in one suck. She rules her space, this guy may be a teacher but he's at her feet. Yet before long she's trapped in the loft of a pompous male vampire who drinks her blood and leaves her to contort the day away in agonizing anemic double-withdrawal, giving her the gift of a copy of Burroughs/ Naked Lunch to help her learn to control her junky cravings. Ferrara leans in on Taylor's prolonged, agonized day --maybe the most extended, harrowing depiction of drug withdrawal I've ever seen, or felt (though mine were from alcohol-- probably only about 1/10 as agonizing but very similar movements and breathing). She finally makes it into the service elevator and down to the street, as we all do, to get her fix, the city barely noticing how messed up she is, which is both its best and worst habit.

Naturally someone helps, giving more than the Red Cross would ever ask and she's fine again. 

The Addiction, in other words, in a 90s black-and-white horror movie that's about a lot more than just stakes and exsanguination, it's got interesting things to say--both out loud and in the coolest voiceover narration in all of cinema, a veritable doctoral thesis on evil-cum-advocacy for drug addiction, whispered by Lili Taylor, so glassy-eyed perfect for the part it's like you're overhearing while nosing around some downtown NYC bookstore. 

This is no bullshit vamp psychobabble or empty LA posturing, It's real NYC, real philosophy in action, courtesy a script by Ferrara's long-time "more Catholic-junkie synergy than a dozen Jim Carrols" screenwriter Nicholas St. John. And Taylor brings just the right mix of whispery conviction to the words--a sublime mix between the idealistic and jaded, the philosophy-mad young Ritalin prescription-owning liberal arts NYU sophomore, made instantly seasoned cool by a few semesters of literary salons under Washington Square's ever-popping space needle. Cognizant of language's inadequacy even when stretched to the limit, yet unable to stop talking, she's the ideal doctoral candidate, i.e. she's annotated. She's able to back up being full of herself with memorized quotes. Following her thesis to its "the horror, the horror" nadir/pinnacle, she embraces madness, and physical decomposition (i.e. the rotting teeth so common to heroin addicts) as par for the course when transcending the dichotomy of life and death, pleasure and pain, being and nothing. 

It all starts when--just a normal grad student heading home-- she's accosted on the street by sexy vampire Annabelle Sciorra, who leads her into an alley (back when NYC had those) and says "tell me to go away" (the equivalent of "you don't want any part of this, kid" or "just say no") before throwing her against the wall and giving her the reverse fix that sets it off. Scared but turned on, Taylor just can't say no to Sciorra's hot, exotic promise. Who could? We've all seen her in Jungle Fever. Therefore, it's all the victim's fault, but is that rationalization on the vamp's part--a way rapists take advantage of fear-paralysis-- or one of those lore things, like they have to be invited in or can't cross your threshold?

Taylor's subsequent journey from shame to rapture includes an expanding wealth of widened perception--brain opening up to encompass all the horrors our conscious minds usually suppresses. As her brain opens, her body decomposes. Like Jeff Goldblum's Brundle in Cronenberg's Fly, she notes her corporeal changes a dispassionate theorist's eye, succinctly elaborating on the strange joy involved with divesting oneself from ones' own fate. They let their known parameters of self be outmoded. If the pursuit of knowledge means they morph into some unknown creature, what else is life for? Only emotion makes it all bad or tragic.

Well I remember, around the same mid-90s period, scaring girlfriends and co-workers with my own drugged-out wild-eyed rants about how I could see through time, and how space was an illusion. I saw their concern and silence as if from a distance. Taylor's fellow doctoral candidate and study buddy Edie Falco, for example, is similarly horrified by how far off the deep-end diving board her once-sober and similarly timid friend has fallen/risen. Taylor, in terse retort sneers: "Your obtuseness is disheartening as a doctoral candidate." Hot damn! She said obtuseness! From then on, it's clear just who's gonna ace their thesis dissertation, who's just going to 'pass'. Falco hurries along the dotted lines of the known, buried in books, made sexless as a side effect of proximity to the fumes from old library glue. But Taylor's huffing the solvents of the opiated beyond--seen beyond the veil--waltzed past all the old dead men still wrestling with phony differentiations between past and present, free will and destiny--and she still has the finely-etched hyper-perspicacity to succinctly elaborate--well within the parameters of dead philosopher quotations--these new paradigms to the thesis committee. The addiction has organized her life, broadened her perspective, cinched her doctorate, and made her as full of moral decay and intellectual flourish as New York City itself.

With its Weegee-style black and white photography, The Addiction manages on a flop house budget what Coppola's Dracula couldn't with all its smoke and mirrors, which is to harken all the way back to the vampire film's mythopoetic Murnau roots. Nosferatu's dissertation on the hydra polyp finds parallel with Taylor's My Lai massacre microfiche montage. The invasion of disease-carrying rats in Mina's hometown finds parallel in The Holocaust exhibit, visited by Falco and Taylor at a local museum--mass Europen death happening in the moment-- the 3-D space of 2D photos from the camps like an intrusion of the past, of death divorced from history and time, made current through the seeing of it.

No one actually dies in this vamp universe, there's no time and they were never living anyway, for one doesn't live below 14th Street. They just drag themselves around Artists and academics alone are smart enough to know that, unless they say yes to dangerous experiences (unprotected anonymous sex, heroin, vampire biting) they'll have nothing interesting to say in their art or thesis and they'll wind up just another flyover college part-time faculty hack. Receiving the disease was their decision, like a "welcome to the disease which there is no cure for" bathroom mirror urban myth. For some that's a death sentence, for others, it's a diploma. 

Throughout the film, Taylor is so sublimely low-key, sexy and very convincing in the lead she seems to become almost legitimately supernatural. She owns the role, the film, the city--she conquers with nothing but her low height and a purring whisper that seems born to say Nicolas St. John's clear-eyed lines. Abel must have lost his shit when he saw how good she was, how great this film was gonna be. Too bad more people can't get behind it, perhaps from their own lack of experience with STDs, drugs, philosophy. history, pretentious salons, or New York and its flea-bitten artsy undertow, its stolen shot seediness, which Abel captures better than anyone else. 

Also, it's hard to find. Not even legal in the US anymore, no region one to be found. Though I'd love to see it delivered in deep Criterion blacks, the fact that my copy is a semi-legal all-region non-anamorphic version (from Romania!) makes perfect meta commentary sense, as the film itself seems semi-legal, capturing a pre-ordinance-choked mid-90s Greenwich Village NYC, a Bleeker Street that's still wild and woolly; every storefront a decaying mass of failed punk band stickers, air pumping with ghetto blaster hip hop blaring from broken speakers. (PS 6/22- it's since come out on Blu-ray! Yay!)

Look, it's not perfect. Some of the dialogue about persecuting war crimes and living according to one's own blah blah is pretty naive (on the other hand, they are in college). Russell Simmons was a producer, which might explain the music not always being perfect (i.e. the tacky, soulful Temptations title theme song). Often the guerilla-style stolen street shots can get pretty shaky/woozy, and the whispering is sometimes hard to hear. But how often does a film about NYC college life really have such an authentic grasp on both grad school babble and heroin culture, so much that it swims in decadent drugginess and high-falutin' concepts rather than merely dipping a toe in and then skittering away, giggling or screaming? Even Roger Avary's heroin users comes off looking anemic by comparison. The Addiciton is in fact the only film of its kind, the only one to blend philosophical theory with folklore/vampirism, AIDs, addictive drugs and draws such a clear line between the four their differences vanish and they align like three identical transparency overlays. Kids need to learn --it's no longer enough to make out with your thesis advisor to be 'radical'. Shoot up for the first time, and drink his blood! Do the reading and then you can pass judgment on it (likening the smell of the NYU library with the rot of a charnel house) on your way out. 

You could fold images of Taylor in her shades (below) right in with Warhol's
black and white Edie Sedgwick,Velvet Underground, and 'moving portraits'
 factory footage and not miss a mink-lined "beat." That's good, as
 their music that's this film's only real precedent (just the Hold Steady is their only real antecedent).

Re-watching Addiction lately for purposes of this post, I started writing down relevant quotes and found myself wanting to write down the whole script, each line like manna to any starving/thirsty liberal arts graduate alcoholic or autodidact drug addict wandering the wilderness: "Existence is the search for relief from our habit, and our habit is the only relief we can find." --I lived by those words while drinking myself into oblivion all through the mid-to-late 90s. Watching Taylor convulse on the street in withdrawal reminded me of when I was so far gone it would take hours for me to get myself together enough to get downstairs to the liquor store--which was, literally, right next door. With a twenty dollar bill taped to my shaking hand, I'd try to be too fast to stumble, trying to get my bourbon and make it back up to safety of my apartment without falling, vomiting or convulsing on the street and winding up at Bellevue in the care of old Bim. It being important too that I go and come back soon- before the real shakes and DTs start.

"... little turkeys in straw hats."

So yeah, this is right up there with The Lost Weekend for the authentic NYC 90s addict-alcoholic experience, all the better for being, as is traditional for Ferrara, void of preachy sober resolutions. Instead, it's a call to luxuriate inside your sickness. "Self realization is annihilation of self." Its a way to excuse, rationalize, and forgive the self-destructive tendencies clotting human history's arteries with war crimes so vile they crash time's mainframe, and to forgive, forgive, and rationalize our own self-poisoning.

Oh yeah, Skooly D, a longtime Ferrara collaborator, appears and scores. Christopher Walken shows up for a few killer moments as already mentioned; Onyx, Cypress Hill beatboxes the soundtrack with druggy raps pitch-shifted through blunt smoke: "I want to get high / so high" while Ferrara's camera prowls the graffiti-caked turf, and if you were a big partier in NYC in the 90s, then damn, this be like a muhfuggin' scrapbook.

Today, well, junkies, your city is gone (from downtown anyway; the Safdie Brothers can still find the pulse in the back alleys of the outer boroughs). Luckily, the buzzy flashback of that first ecstasy and cocaine highball stroll at dawn after an all-night sesh lingers---just ask the drug-dealer alien in Dark Angel [1990] AKA I Come in Peace == that's the best shit there is.

NADJA 

1994 - Dir Michael Almereyda 

***1/2

Like Taylor in The Addiction, Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) talks incessantly, albeit far less philosophically, with much less contentment with eternity. "I want to simplify my life," she blathers at a downtown bar to some future victim, "even on a superficial level."  The dude buys her another drink, as if hearing nothing she's saying, and she's barely saying anything, except that compared to NYC, all Europe is a rural village, and that the city actually gets more alive and exciting after midnight (no shit). Born "in the shadow of the Carpathian mountains," she's East Village Eurotrash from old Transylvanian money, currently grieving her father, Dracula (Bela Lugosi, seen via ingeniously overlapped and incorporated images from [the public domain] White Zombie), even though she hated him because he made her "eat butter." Van Helsing (Peter Fonda) has finally staked him, only after finding him strung out on drugs (like the real Bela), "old, confused, surrounded by zombies," notes Helsing, "he was like Elvis in the end."  Van Helsing's nephew (Marin Donovan)--the most fey boxer ever--is married to Nadja's new love interest (Galaxy Craze). They meet when Galaxy asks her for a cigarette at a nameless coffee house and we fall in love too, right off, with Craze's strung out 'love child of Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy' look. We can tell she would make a great vampire --her speech already half-forgotten, vaguely slurred but very open, like she's talking to a therapist while trying to hide that she's bleeped on Oxycodone courtesy the chick from Liquid Sky. David Lynch is the morgue attendant in charge of Drac/Bela's body. He helped produce the film --he's playing Mel Brooks to Michael Almereyda's version of himself forThe Elephant Man. Lots of video art with Pixelvision cameras making snow look Atari; Nadja walks down the street at night, digging the flakes, smoking and gliding, and then Portishead starts, "How can it feel / this moment?"  That's when Craze, looking super androgyne sexy in her lumberjack coat, asks for a light; the water starts to whistle in the kettle. She tells her his brother wants to destroy her."Does he live in Carpathia," Craze asks, concerned. Nadja looks at her coldly, "no - Brooklyn." The sound in these dialogue scenes is crisp, you wish like hell barroom chat could be this writerly with concrete details and deep analytical acuity. "The pain of life is the pain of fleeting joy." with the only music that which you put on the jukebox yourself, trippy 90s Lynch style post-noir trip-sludge, over which you might slide the words of your forceful Euro-style assertions of fleeting joy monologue like slotted spoons. 

Crazy keeps a tarantula as a pet, "he scares most people." The dialogue is pretty great; Nadja is impressed when Craze runs to grab the tarantula so she doesn't crush it in her freaking out over a Dracula puppet going off on their Christmas tree. You realize you would hang out with these people intensely for days after you met them, unable to tear yourself away, if you banged into them. As you wonder if the whole cast is matching Craze's zonked disaffect out of a kind of filial love (ala the men with Mina Harker in the novel of Dracula, or Helen "Mina Harker" Chandler in The Last Flight.)

Galaxy Craze

Nadja's writer-director Michael Almeyreda displays a clear love of the good things in life/death: cigarettes, Universal horror (particularly Dracula's Daughter), Jean Cocteau, and the lesbian vampire movies of the 70s, and cool, wry black and white art films like Lynch's, Madin's, and Kern's. He wondrously fuses the downtown grit of NYC with the Universal pre-code Expressionism of Karl Freund within a narrative structured like a loose remake of the 1935 Universal horror classic, Dracula's Daughter, (the 'first' lesbian vampire movie) crossed with the more overtly sapphic Vampire Lovers and Daughters of Darkness. The occasional lapses into pixelated imagery, culled from a then-the-rage Fisher Price Pixelvision movie camera, create a feeling of dreamy disconnect, reflecting perhaps the Nadja eye view (especially when she disappears into parallel dimensions, becoming in a sense one of the unseen audience) and making the rest of the film's grainy video-ish look seem like high grade nitrate by comparison. It's under the Pixelvision we're treated to one of the hottest lesbian bite scenes ever. It's subtle, beautiful, strange, and it outclasses Jean Rollin at his own game in one button (though Rollin would never throw away the hottest parts for such low pixel rates, and maybe that's the problem.) Even if heterosexuality triumphs in the end, it's hard to hate Martin Donovan for--like even Jared Harris here, all young and ravishing, as Nadja's doom-slinging twin brother--he's truly man-crushable, and he does have a pretty good reason, by then we're so far beyond either the hypocritical prudishness that undoes most vampiric/sapphic trysts. (See also: Almereyda's classy and underrated The Eternal.) And stick around to the end credits music cuz it's Spacehogg! Remember them? How a movie made in Manhattan in 1994 could know in advance how to make itself a perfect time and coolness-level capsule baffled the imagination of everyone but those of us who know the answer: Almereyda.... Almereyda. 

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

2014 Dir Anna Lily Amirpour
****

At last! An Iranian vampire love story, told in resonant black and white and set in the 80s (at least music-wise) in the fictional but familiar "Bad City," (actually Bakerfield, CA), run-down and littered with ever-pumping skeletal oil derricks (pumping up "blood" as Daniel Plainview would say). There's nowhere to run but out in the depressed Bad City, the only people on the street are hustlers and drug-dealers; the only thing worth having is a car; the days are marked by a junkie father's itchy paranoia. First-time director/skateboard star Amirpour makes a big entrance with this film--positing herself somewhere between Sofia Coppola and Abel Ferrara--as does star Sheila Vand, as strange and cool a specter of feminist vengeance for oppressed Middle-Eastern women as you could ask for. Wrapped in her black hijab like Dracula's cape (or Nadja's hood), she preys mainly on male predators, usually waiting until they've shot up heroin or done some lines of coke before making her move--all the better to get high off the blood (though this is never spelled out, it will be clear to any one of a drug-using nature). Her hunting pattern is to silently stalking her and mirror her (male) quarry, gauging whether to kill them based on their response. The wrong responses get killed, some just get passed by, the glass slipper right response comes from the young, insecure but semi-cool Arash (Arash Marandi), a go-getter forced to give up his prize car to dad's evil drug dealer, a giant, buff, coked-up, abusive tattooed pimp with a habit of sticking fingers in girls' mouths (big mistake). Even though Arash's blood is rich in MDMA (after a costume rave where he dresses as Dracula), our heroine holds off indulging, instead bringing him up to her room and engaging with him in an extended slow-motion shared moment below a madly whirling disco ball, with White Lies' "Death"-- playing on her record player. A perfect song to bring them together, as it builds slowly to an emotional grandeur all the more special for seeming to be coming so guilelessly true to their shared moment ("I love the quiet of the nighttime / the sun is drowned in deathly seas") Amirpour lets the moment completely land and for that moment the film becomes the Let the Right One In-verse of Sixteen Candles,

A lot of movies use pop songs, but how many 'get' the heady deep tissue impression pop music makes on the young, how the right songs come pouring from radios like poems conjured from their own unconscious, there to linger and associate this moment, this now, which has completely stopped, or at least slowed way down, with this song?  Dazed and Confused, Perks of Being a Wallflower, Rushmore, The Big Chill, Lost in Translation i.e. not very many. Most just try to force new songs from sister corporation labels down the synergy pipe--they don't get it. Kids dazzled by surging hormones are way better at feeling then analyzing or conveying their desires, so music fills the gap like a translator-cum-DJ wedding planner, and each song that does this hangs in the person's history like a combination scrapbook photo and emotional high replay. A Girl Walks Home Alone might be the first where pages of unspoken dialogue beams out between two quiet characters who barely move as the music plays.

Slight as it is, Amirpour's film sits nicely inside the druggie black and white vampire girl genre, it's the Tom Waits graveyard at the edge of the 'down and out' black and white 16mm post-neorealist movement between Jarmusch's early work and the early 00s Argentine new wave (as in Bolivia and Suddenly). I would have dug it if the film slowly turned to color during the ecstasy scene, then slowly back down to black and white for the come-down. I'm always hoping more films will try that kind of thing. So few do, besides Coffin Joe's Awakening of the Beast (1969) and Wizard of Oz. God damn it.

Either way, the film does nail exactly what ecstasy is like, capturing the rush of blood in the ear and the way a teasing hottie will surround you with auric tentacles of come-hither, leading you on, only to brush you off the instant you bust a move, sending you reeling with the double kick of heady intoxication and sudden, short-shock shame. And in its own way, Amirpour's White Lies moment does all that one better, the slow motion really reflects the temerity of the moment, and so it does later as well, while we wait for Anash's hand to come out of a glove compartment--wondering if a gun will come out-- and the slow drone music drives us onwards into the oil-black future, tapping our typewriter train ride way to Annexia, Zentropa, and on and on, loyal as Oskar, doomed as Håkan before him, ready for our William Tell routine, one goddamned Seward asylum fly at a time... but no drug so sweet as to turn the city again to color...

From my grave to yours: PENNY DREADFUL (Showtime), FROM DUSK TIL DAWN (El Rey)

Two new horror series are worth checking out, presuming you have the patience, the cajones, and the channels on your cable. The Robert Rodriguez-backed channel El Rey (read my shuddering praise here) launched a month or so ago with the From Dusk til Dawn series, a ten episode-long elaboration of the RR-QT 1999 film, adding the full measure of hallucinations and Tex-Mex flavor and replacing Tarantino in the part of psycho brother Richie Gecko with a much more mesmerizing low key lad named Zane Holz. As Richie's brother and fellow bank robber Seth, D.J. Cotrana diffuses Clooney's terminal charm with hothead overreactions, so now the two feel like real brothers who actually grew up together, rather than the charismatically mismatched Quentin and Clooney, and each has problems the other helps correct, like real siblings. And the queen Mayan reptilian hottie Santanico Pandimonium (Selma Hayek in the original) has a much more integral part with lots of dialogue and empowering femme fatale inscrutability, embodied by Mexican TV actress/pop singing star (and staggering beauty) Eiza Gonzalez. Robert Patrick is the disillusioned preacher, Don Johnson the sheriff, and a cast of handsome Mexican-Americans with either admirable swagger or furrowed brow intensity. The ten part series all occurs over the course of one 24-hour period, from dusk to dawn more or less, which slows things way down with that old tick-tockality and a novelistic attention to detail.

Eiza on the street! 

It all works because it's not that the performances are great, but that they are all of a piece; as is so essential for a good horror, they play it deadpan straight while never overdoing it and driving their ordeals into bummer territory (I mean, there's a way to act pained and ennui-ridden without causing viewers to get depressed or upset). I mention all that because, in Showtime's new horror series Penny Dreadful, that level of solid team player dynamics vanishes to be replaced with a bunch of breathing exercise-prepared actors all fighting over every syllable like it's their last chance at an Emmy. Only dimly aware there's other actors across the dark expanses of the cavernous Victorian era sets, they rant and rave and hope... hope....

I'll confess I desperately wanted to love Penny Dreadful. I am a chronic disciple of Eva Green. But the show simultaneously tries too hard and not hard enough, cramming in all the famous literary characters from the Victorian era's (and earlier) literary mythology it can remember from its year at Cambridge. It never seems to know what to do with all these public domain easily-recognized monsters, though, other then send them walking in ornately-stressed Victorian garments through long tracking shots or into bed for joylessly graphic sex scenes. I'm hoping they rectify the absence of any characters or monsters actually from the real penny dreadfuls (such as seen above in my hand-made collage), instead of the same old Dracula (here a Drac-mummy hybrid) or Jack the Ripper (and no doubt Burke and Hare are soon to follow), or Frankenstein. Where's Spring-Heeled Jack? Wither Varney the Vampire? Just because Dorian Gray's an immortal bunburying Sadean doesn't make him a monster, just an aesthete.


On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned this young fellow playing him, Reeve Carney (left), has the whole show sowed up in his pocket. While the other characters rant and rave and underplay, Carney's Gray seems genuinely entranced, not in any effusive way but in a delicate, eerily jaded way, and graced with an in-the-moment openness that makes him seem to me one of the few young actors around who seems to understand the importance of seeing as much as being seen and who seems to fully inhale the atmosphere. (the only other one I can think of offhand is Kristen Stewart). Trying to figure out who Carney reminds me of, then it hits me --he could be the son of old Brian Deacon, the young man in the trailer outside the castle in VAMPYRES (1974).

Meanwhile the murky dim brown Victorian London craftsmaship often runs the risk of choking the life out of things (though the darkness can be very very dark, almost 3-D and it seems thrillingly real, like life before electricity was one long SILENCE OF THE LAMBS climax) and the writers are so busy paraphrasing the eloquent flights of 19th century authors that the British thesps run unsupervised over actorly monologues until every line sings with resonant oratory. In other words, it's very gay, in its way, though not in a giddy, delightful Tim Curry or Udo Kier way, more a Sal from Mad Men kind of humorless straight burlesque. And each of these unsmiling characters must play many parts: Eva Green is a vampire hunter who is also a trance medium easily possessed by demons and departed angry daughters; Timothy Dalton is the Qatermain / Dr. Ven Helsing / Seward who just wants his daughter back (Mina, the daughter who's already gone to Dracula arms); Josh Harntett is a Wild Bill Hicocky dead shot who may also be Jack the Ripper; a brilliant young Frankenstein is probably going to have to be Jekyll and Hyde later on (his monster doubles as the Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, and The Crow). I have no doubt Drac will turn out to be another hunky British monologuist impeccably attired in elegantly distressed Victorian fashion who says things like "the burden of eternal life wears me down like a slow watch, like the taste of withered dying opium addicts, their narcotic blood crawling time to a standstill...."

Second Episode is a big improvement - it gets more down to a set of reversals and twists and seems less about getting its lighting as painterly and haunted. The purplish blue mist of London coal fog in gorgeous compositions of ships in harbor and snug waterfronts is impressive, but the centerpiece Eva Green possession monologue, while a brilliant showcase for a brilliant, nervy performer (her voice sails up and down octaves while her body writhes and contorts and eyes glare with unholy fire) goes on long past our patience or its own effectiveness. By contrast, FX's AMERICAN HORROR STORY might pick up and abandon story threads like an impatient schoolkid but it understands momentum as key, and transgression as a locomotive, and above all it doesn't take itself a tenth as seriously. PENNY is so busy covering the period and its famous characters that it doesn't notice a real person squeezed through. Played by Billie Piper as a de facto heroine streetwalker, she's coughing up blood like a Poe heroine or Doc Holiday, but doesn't complain and not only that, has large measures of bar whiskey for breakfast (Doc, is it you?) with Josh Hartnett's Earp, whose staying at her same inn? They lounge with ease in the saloon window they're written by Eugene Goddamned O'Neill waiting for Hickey and for just a minute there, the show is awesome. It's not trying to be eight ways of macabre at once and winding up paralyzed, waiting on the x while the art director fiddles with the sun-dappled coal dust streaks. These two are in a real scene and it's lovely and vivid and not overwrought or trembling with import.

These kind of character-based critiques don't concern FROM DUSK TIL DAWN.  As Santinico, Eiza Gonzalez is no Eva Green she's got a certain cold allure, even naked but for a golden bronze tan, brown bikini and Aztec shaman blood queen headdress she's always capably holding her own, in charge, using her body to seduce and ensnare men, to believably conjure ancient Mayan deities, to pit brothers against each other, not to be objectified but worshipped, and she's no ham. In DAWN, even big tearful farewells or life and death anxieties are--in the American Carpenter-Hawks tradition-- nicely underplayed (rather than being overly underplayed in the British style of PENNY). If only PENNY's writers were up to the challenge. DAWN goes for the jugular with a laid-back shrug, while DREADFUL, like so many other pieces of 'mature audience' horror hackwork, confuse graphic sex and violence with what being truly dreadful really entails.

POST SCRIPT (6/2/14) - Just saw the fourth Penny Dreadful episode and things are picking up, with a detailed evening at La Grand Guignol that managed to weave together nearly all the disparate threads, as well as a climactic absinthe scene that allows the series' hitherto locked closet door to finally burst open. Can't spoil it of course... 

Choose Death: Revisiting TWILIGHT's Junky Delirium.

"I wanted to fly / she made me feel like I could...." 

- Neil Diamond  ("Shilo" - song about his imaginary friend /childhood anima])

"But we can fly... with these!" -  John Lennon

(showing heroin pills [?] to Yoko  - John and Yoko: A Love Story - TVM- 1985)

"You're like my own private brand of heroin"
--Edward Cullen (to Bella) 

"When you're on junk you don't drink" - W.S. Burroughs (Junky)

"I never drink... wine." - Dracula (Bela Lugosi)

"My name is Bela Lugosi... I've been a morphine addict for twenty years."

-- (Martin Landau) - Ed Wood

Bella, flanked by sober, aging air-breathers

Vampirism is every young girl's dream, presuming, that is, that she's smart enough to realize her 'fairest of them all' Snow Whiteness will wither to mirror-mirror aging diva tantrums before she even knows what hit her. If she be fair of feature--and self-confident enough to see that there is, indeed, a lovely young woman in the mirror looking back at her--and if she be wise enough to know that if she's ever to bid surcease time's incessant wrinkly pawing, she cannot help but crave any drug or face cream that might slow mortality's downward spiral.

Small price to pay, killing off your inner Snow White via the junky huntsman, if it means no wrinkles, or baggy eyes, or weight gain, ever. The writing on the mirror-mirror - 'sic transit venustas'.

And if there's no such thing as vampirism or eternal youth, well, some drugs come a close second.

Slowing time to a crawl, killing the appetite and sleep cycle, certain addictive drugs give one the feeling of invincible confidence. Slipping off the leaden coat of teenage insecurity with ease, we slide beyond the mortal concerns of human body maintenance; drugs, love, and vampirism replace glazed-eyed homogenous breather-eater lockstep with an unending thirst, but it's worth it... for some of us. Some of us never feel comfortable in our own skin until we puncture it. If we have to keep puncturing until we're track-marked to open sore ribbons, well, the alternative is worse. For some of us, the thought of living an extra ten years as a senior citizen is a fate literally worse than death. To watch one's Twitter following stagnate, one's zeitgeist fade, the glint of desire going out of the eye of passers-by on the street, surely this is what they mean by 'the living dead.' 

And even more ironic: by the time we know how to use what we've got, it's gone. We realize only when it's absent that something was, once, present. Whether that's an illusion ("happiness is never experienced, only remembered" - old AA proverb) is immaterial. Our minds tell us it would have been possible to hold onto that feeling if only we'd looked harder for the right soul collecting crossroads-dwelling devil.

For the first four films of the Twilight saga, despite her moral boy coterie's protestations, Bella wisely wants to get undead while she's still got that pale flawless skin (her mothers' already shows the results of age and prolonged sun), and that is just one reason why I believe the series so subversive. Bella chooses death. She subverts the fairy tale maturity myth; she jams a crowbar into the wheel of her own maturity. Her saga dually functions, not as  coming-of-age story, but a kind of alcoholic-addict flash-froze fantasia wherein the enchanted bower is returned to with a clear conscience. She's hip to the banality of 'the right choice' as are we, through her eyes. You can argue she merely chooses Edward (Robert Pattinson) and death goes with the deal. 

You can argue Edward is a pretty creepy specimen (old enough to be her great-great grandfather, stalking her and watching her sleep all night after climbing in the window) but he's not really meant as a real person: he's a Jungian archetype, a daemon lover / arrested animus projection --her unconscious mind's ego. Their wedding in film IV represents a union of Self akin to the weddings at the end of fairy tales, i.e. a unification of conscious and unconscious drives into one full awakened human being ready to bring themselves fully into the larger social order as a genuine asset. BUT in Twilight, this unified soul is deliberately stunted, warped, turned carnivorous and threatening to the larger social order. The Twilight saga doesn't reflect the move from bleak Cinderella attic to magic pumpkin coach to married princess -- which would mirror a girl's transition from child to adulthood (the beast becoming the prince)-- but the reverse. Bella moves from sunny Phoenix AZ to the ever-cloudy Forks, WA, like Cinderella choosing to move out of the sunny castle and back to her cozy attic. 

In that sense the series is more a tragedy, wherein unresolved past issues come burbling up to drag our heroine back down, like Antigone, she chooses certain death as a kind of inflexible protest/affirmation of power. She's an embodiment of Joseph Campbell mantra: "When falling, dive." Bella is a Snow White who makes the conscious decision to go back to sleep because she can't be bothered with an awake Prince Charming's cumbersome breathing, snoring, bathroom issues, and beastly eating habits, not to mention all the boring functions one must smile through when one is royalty. Her demon lover demands no attendance at such things; plus he never plays X-Box with his loud buddies all day, or whine when he doesn't get his own way. He doesn't even have a TV. He reads books!

And the idea that Edward has nothing else in his life to do other than read, and to stalk her, protecting her always, is creepy sure, but also relevant to the daemonic animus. The ego to the dark half of our minds, the animus/anima slumbers while our daily waking egoic consciousness goes about its day; it then arises at night to take the ego's place, forcing 'us', the ego, to watch its little plays and dramas i.e. dreams. The anima/animus is the one who literally has no life without us. There is no sun or blue sky for the anima/animus. It can only run loose when we're asleep (or, if we're artists and writers, performers or mystics or schizophrenics, i.e. truly awake). 

Edward's daemon lover archetype ancestry stretches back to the grim roots of myth itself; the roots reach down deep to Eros and Psyche and up through the Romantic poetry of Keats and Shelley, the daemon undead druggy lovers of Coleridge, the Bronte sisters, Poe, La Fanu, and Stoker finally up to the Anne Rice 90s before climbing up to the ultimate teenage Gothic animus, and a vivid portrait of a junky or alcoholic in the early stages of withdrawal, Edward. His reactions to her when they're first paired together in science class are the most accurate depiction of early stage withdrawal I've ever seen. And I should know. He reacts to her like I react to sitting next to a whiskey highball when I'm cranky and irritated and everyone around me is laughing and drinking and I know that just one big sip from that person's glass and I'd be laughing and no longer miserable, and since the glass is right there, offered to me, each minute of not downing it is hell + compounded interest. 

I recently re-watched the entire 5 film Twilight series as it was all playing on one cable channel or other last month, and after the entirety of around 12 hours of film it definitely holds up, especially if you really like dark purples and sad chick music. And lastly, it's great because, for me at least, it's guilt-free, there's no objectification of the female body; rather, we have a rare example of the 'female gaze' sd ythr the sole sex appeal on display comes from the shirtless boys. The fact that the sex appeal of these young men does nothing for me compels me to realize that maybe my vague discomfort is how most women go through their movie watching life, enduring vast stretches of unconscious sexism and objectification, not to mentions gunfights. In Twilight: New Moon Bella goes to the local cinema with her mortal, age-appropriate friend Jessica (Anna Kendrick) and coming out laments how crappy the film was, mainly as there's "No hot guys kissing anybody." Imagine, a film daring to lament such a shallow thing! Then I remember Dracula again. I remembered Bela Lugosi commenting on how Dracula appealed mainly to women:

 "It is women who bear the race in bloody agony. Suffering is a kind of horror. Blood is a kind of horror. Women are born with horror in their very bloodstream... It is women who love horror. Gloat over it. Feed on it..." 

And also, in a way, it is the woman in me, my own dream lover anima, my ego's dark unconscious shadow, who loves Bella as a projector screen for herself, for each anima and animus has their own inner daemons to work through, and so it goes, in fractals either direction. My anima rewards me with dreams of paradise (which for some reason is a cavernous basement with concrete floors and VHS tapes on benches and vague memories of having a fling with my friend's hot young mom, who is not the same mother who actually lived there. Her husband's always away--if I can find my way down there and pick a romantic shallow pool, she meets me. I wake up thrilled, longing to recapture my memories of this hidden underground sanctuary. Other times, this basement looks like a cross between some secret room in a Vincent Price movie, the basement lair of Hammer's THE REPTILE, the presidential bomb shelter at the end of TERMINATOR 3 and Bellevue's old hydrotherapy room. Either way, it is my happy place.

Maybe I am prejudiced; Dracula is my favorite horror character. Bela Lugosi is my favorite horror actor, and next to William S. Burroughs, also my favorite junky. And even Bella's name conjures his memory. So it's sad that so many critics I normally respect tow the sexist party line when discussing the Twilight series, never seeing past the 'teen phenomenon' hooplah. Meanwhile these critics respect, some even revere, the more boy-friendly Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings/Hobbit, and Star Wars sagas, which have twenty films between them (so far) and about that same number of  lines spoken by women. Unless they're princesses to be admired from afar, to be kissed before they turn out to be your own sister, and so forth, women seem to be unwelcome in these franchises, yet these films get way more respect in general critical consensus. I can only guess Twilight's detractors are nerds who've never done drugs, or had more than one girl or boy interested in them at the same time, if ever. Don't blame Bella for that, dipshit!

If you're like me, with a loud, bothersome anima who withholds great sentence structure and inspiration from your writing on a whim, then you know she loves movies that feature crazy women she can project onto; and so you know she will reward thee with vast acres of flowing prose when she gets to lock onto an Angelina Jolie in Girl Interrupted or a Natalie Portman in Black Swan, or a Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, or even Anthony Perkins in Psycho. (Right at the moment I wrote his name, Bogie says "You're a good man, sister" on TCM behind me - synchronicitous!)  Twilight's rife with such crazy feminine energy. My anima loves that it is not life-affirming but a solid romantic mood poem-- tortured as Edward Burne-Jones trying to score laudanum at the strip mall-- and an exoneration of the death wish underwriting everything from self-cutting and anorexia to just partying like there's no tomorrow or even just sleeping late and missing school, going from rainy day "Gloomy Sunday" blues to hooking up with a pallid junky and getting involved in 'the life,' understanding what that means, fully cognizant of all that will be lost, yet nonetheless daring to answer 'not to be' when Hamlet asks his mortal question. To not only dive but to choose to fall, that is the only way we can prove to ourself we're actually free not to.

Only rubes would think such a choice is evil, and that one should dutifully bow to the demands of the life-choosing next-stage animus, the mature woman's bossy inner-father. The woman's demonic lover turns to paternal inner critic and lecturer. Under his rule, she endorses sanctified institutions without question, trusts doctors, school principals, fathers, husbands, and politicians over her own better judgment or her child's tearful tales of abuse. Belittling her husband, mistaking the vehemence of her emotional response to a stimuli for its importance, this new animus argues over SUV parking spots at the kids' soccer practice, feels the need to remodel the kitchen, run for PTA appointments, hire babysitters scrupulously, monitor her children's friend choices, and even approve her own gradual arrival at an assisted living domicile. Tradition and boredom are championed as worthy in themselves as her staid animus gives her a feeling of total belief in her pro-patriarchal stance. We can see women dominated by this stage of the animus in the Tea Party: Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, and Ann Coulter let their animus possess them even at the expense of their own gender's liberty. It's just as much about being 'captured' by the animus now as it was at the Edward stage, only now its not interesting. It's only near the final 'second childishness' stage of Shakespeare's seven ages that the younger daemon lover animus returns, to shepherd these 'healthy' choice-making woman into the void. This is even pictured in New Moon, wherein Bella dreams of being all super old and Edward as young as ever, waiting patiently all this time for her to be done with the 'living' he so wishes for her. 

To understand the beauty of Bella's rejection of this fate requires perhaps the mindset of the addict, living in a world of fantasy and altered perceptions, the sort of girl who stays upstairs reading fantasy novels when the sun's out or the one who's depressed and in misery until a hot older drug dealer and his drugs combine to sweep her off her feet. They commit to their daemon lover, refuse to let him go, to consign him to dreams barely had anymore. Sure the choice to stick with this demonic animus is not healthy but who cares? The women who choose to keep their daemon as their animus are our romantic heroines in the truest sense; forsaking the daemon may allow them to exit the fantasy and enter the social order (to upgrade animus projections), but who needs another normal well-adjusted girl? Not the readers and seers and livers-in of fantasy. 

"Many myths and fairy tales tell of a prince, who has been turned into an animal or a monster by sorcery, being saved by a woman. This is a symbolic representation of the development of the animus toward consciousness. Often the heroine may ask no questions of her mysterious lover, or she is only allowed to meet him in darkness..." - Marie-Louise von Franz

 Reality is seldom operating anywhere close to a teenager's inner state. Myths are truer than reality in that sense; they are not at all sentimental, for as Jung notes: "Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality" (i.e. John Ford). Myths are terrifying because they unveil that which was hidden for a reason. They are beguiling, addictive; once the light is shown over that shadowed corner of the psyche, the grateful prisoner chained in that corner rewards you with hordes of little treasures its stolen from you on the sly ever since you chained him there (usually around your first day of school): bottles of endorphins and dopas and artistic inspiration its fermenting for just such an illumination. Gradually he gives out less and less for more and more liberty to run rampant in your psyche, doing more damage, costing you jobs, friends, and lovers. There's no line between being rewarded with one's own stolen treasures and mistaking them for gifts and being held hostage in the zone between a daemonic dream lover's ardent wooing and crippling drug addiction, the result either way is a delirious Stockholm syndrome high if you know how to treat the agonies and despair of withdrawal as just another kind of masochistic kick, the muscle ache and burning skin just love 'not given lightly' by your inner whiplash girl child in the dark. Similarly, alcoholism, self-cutting, eating disorders, drug addiction all carry a similar loss of control. In the first film especially human blood is the ultimate narcotic for vampires, the 'vegetarian' diet of animals just barely keeps the Cullen clans satisfied. Being around Bella, for Edward, and not killing her, is as hard as it would be for me to have just one drink. The impossibility of moderate drinking for me (I'd consider keeping it down to seven drinks a night a triumph of self control).

"The pain was my only evidence he was real." - Bella 

Enlightenment doesn't occur from sitting around visualizing images of light, but from integrating the darker aspects of the self into the conscious personality. -- Jung

Blood, the life, love: over the course of five films Bella never has a single real hobby other than desire for Edward, anything else engaged in just a distraction; bringing junked motorcycles onto the reservation for Jake (the werewolf) to fix isn't because she likes him romantically but because the image of Edward shows up whenever she does 'something stupid' - i.e. crashing into a tree. Her various death-defying attempts conjure the spirit of Edward saying "Bella, don't" - trying to wrap her in his overprotective shroud, playing the latter stage animus in place of the dream lover (as above, the promise to return at her death bed). But Bella's misery wobble framing steadies around Jake and Stewart shows she's a far better actress than given credit for, as she modulates brilliantly from pale, shocked jiltee, to anguished grieving misery, to playful and sharp-witted, as often happens when one can tell the person they're hanging with is in love with them, and is therefore a captive audience. Bella's using Jake, really, as exploitative in her way as the first poison-brained white trader to swap furs and bear skins for two-cent trinkets. And using someone to get over someone else is not cool, yet how else are you going to do it?

And that's why Bella is so great both as a character and as Stewart's performance: she is not just one person, she has many facets and not all of them are admirable but Stewart plays the less admirable as if they were admirable, which is admirable in itself. When geeky mouth breathing classmate Mike (Michael Welch) finds out she's been dumped, he awkwardly asks her out to a movie with a romantic title like 'first kiss' or something and she snaps, "How about 'Face Punch' have you seen that?" as if she just made it up to send him a clear signal she's not into him.  That Face Punch turns out to be a real movie hardly matters to the brilliance of the scene--its refreshing savagery, it's code of small talk revealing the elaborate complexities of trying to keep clueless guys from hating you while spurning their advances. It probably wasn't even a real movie before she mentioned it. She creates the future before her like a reverse wake, like a zipper uniting the conscious and unconscious halves of psychic jacket, Edward and Jacob zipped together into androgyne Bela.

I can really only think of one or two heroines in film who measure up to that level of realistic fuckerwithery: Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind and Cathy in Wuthering Heights. Out of touch critics in the house can't rear back like startled horses over those ladies' behaviors as they do with Bella's, because they're old established literary classics, written by, not surprisingly, female authors. Each has a character smart enough to act like she doesn't know how smart she is, who slouches and mopes and takes advantage of seeming obtainable but is really quite grandiose and fierce, who plays coy and clueless about how much various boys are crazy over her: a total of traits that, in the rom-com world, would be the purview of bitchy villains, not protagonists. They each have two boys madly in love with them, one wild and dangerous and one anemic but reliable. The twist in Twilight is that the wan, pale anemic one is the unreliable love choice -- the vibrant anima mundi-reflection of the Jake / Rhett / Heathcliff is relegated to the lesser mortal bin, the wolf boy; Edward's name even sounds like Edgar, who marries Cathy and becomes as subjected to her capriciousness just as Jake is at the mercy of Bella's in Twilight. 

It's this reversal I most resonate with, because Bella is more than just one of a series of female-penned wantons daring to reappropriate the gaze, she is also one of the 'hurrah for the next who dies'-style lost generation, the Lucy Westerna rather than the Mia Harker. She is the modernist woman 'who chooses death,' realizing in it a truer choice (as in free will) than the one of life and health and mortality because among other things it's a choice that gives her a chance to stare down her fears, to embrace the demon and daemon, to ride over the cliff and into legend rather than get old and fat. Such women include Evelyn Venable in Death Takes a Holiday, Kate Winslet in Titanic, Assumpta Serna in Matador, both chicks in Thelma and Louise, Ava Gardner in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Dietrich in Morocco and Dishonored, Sherri Moon Zombie in The Devil's Rejects.  Only by deliberately choosing to act against their own 'best' interests---with gaggles of men and authority figures trying to talk them out of what they're planning--can these romantic feminine characters be free. Whether that freedom lasts another week or a few seconds is irrelevant. Freedom is beyond such things as time. Sooner death comes, the sweeter the terrifying narcotic immediacy of the remaining life (see: Twilight's Cinematic Ancestors). The movie ends either way, so why not go for broke?

Twilight's reversal-of-logical-maturation metaphor is emblematic of death and addiction but also to the solitary life--that of the writer, a life spent largely with the unconscious, getting to know, as it were, one's second undiscovered second psyche through allowing it as free a reign as possible at the typewriter. The risks are many: madness, depression, and spirals of self-destruction. The animus might not even come to see you. It might disappear for months, absent from all dreams, writer's block. All good free-flowing inspired poetic 'flights of fancy' come from this daemonic other. That's why my favorite of the five Twilight films has been New Moon, mainly because the brilliant intertextual use of Bella's birthday to invoke a range of age-related fears and longings (including the dream where she's super old, perhaps the most honest and strangely honest metaphysical rendering of birthdays since 2001), and a high school English class assignment, Romeo and Juliet, which contextualizes both Bella's various adrenalin-rush seeking self-destructive behavior (she becomes, as her human friend says, disapprovingly, an adrenalin junky) as well as the more obvious (and fascinating) 'rescue' of said animus, preventing it from dissolving and reforming as the next phase of adult maturity takes over and the buzzkill 'always right' tea party drip, the safety-first counselor moves in: "Bela, stop."

Addicts surely relate, but even more cogently than Romeo and Juliet, Twilight's arc of Bella's pitiless insistence on becoming a vampire reminds me of Antigone, wherein she chooses to disobey the king's order and bury her slain brother, knowing full well his burial ensures her death. This loyalty to the dead to the point of a conscious, clear-eyed choice against one's own life, reflects the way feminine contrary fearlessness conquers even fate. You get to tell all the smarmy idiots who 'just want what's best for you' to fuck off; you can place your head in the lion's jaws with no fear:

"I shall lie down
With him in death, and I shall be as dear
To him as he to me.
It is the dead
Not the living, who make the longest demands:
We die for ever… "  -- Antigone 

For Romeo on the other hand, there's just grief fueled by brashness. Rather than Antigone's (or Bella's) cool detached insistence on 'forever' with her love, consider Romeo's coffin-side sonnet:

"... I still will stay with thee,
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again. Here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber maids. Oh, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last.
Arms, take your last embrace. And, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death."

Bella meanwhile finds herself the target of a tracker dirtbag vampire in the first film, and must face him but yet "can't begin to regret the choices that brought me face to face with death, they also brought me closer to Edward."

Romeo is seeing death as a negative, of value only to make life's fleeting moments extra sweet, like Edward he finds life precious only via absence. He's a hothead. World-weary flesh? Unlike Edward, Romeo's never been anywhere; his flesh isn't weary from anything but navel-gazing. His act is merely one of youthful grandstanding, a poseur. If he'd just suffered a few beats more he'd be there when she awoke. Rather than Antigone's or Bella's cold, logical insistence, their refusal to judge death as negative, to back down even with death's teeth at their throat, their measured, carefully-thought-out resolve, he acts purely from cowardice (afraid of the continued pain of loss) and impulse.

Sure Bella needs a hobby, or interest in something, other than Edward, but neither she nor Antigone are living in 'reality.' They are in a story, a myth, they're only one aspect of unified whole. That's the fundamental mistake of so many movies: they think they must somehow reflect 'reality' and set a 'good example.' Just look at the roster of Oscar nominations and you see it -- the moralizing, the historical heft, the inspiration. Who needs it? Only the bourgeoisie, who love to hear their New York Times-instilled opinions validated in a way they hope will elevate the under-educated.

Shakespeare and the Greeks are lionized by the Academy largely for being so long dead. They never cared for setting good examples or reflecting reality, rather they cared for myth, which is a deeper truth of the psyche, a recognition of the impossibility of a fully known Self. The bourgeoisie let these subversive messages pass since they carry the patina of the museum and the text book. And for all their grants and memberships, the bourgeoisie are not ones to scratch below the surface to the subversive undertow of myth. Reflecting the sum total of the unconscious and waking selves, the dream of night and the reality of day merged in the titular time, through symbol and archetypes and and performance, myth is the only language the unconscious speaks. In dreams and in narratives woven from shadows on the cave wall, myth guides us towards fuller consciousness, acceptance and incorporation of dark energies as well as light.

Like the best myths, Twilight cares only for sleep, for chasing the phantom shadows of the romantic animus into the forest depths, and kicking the dull rescuing woodsmen to the curb. Bella fixes herself to Thanatos like a lamprey. She stays true to her animus' original projection. Stephanie Meyer's series is a success because it understands the dimensions and limitations of the anima/animus persona so keenly, and understands as well that there's no truth left in waking reality unless the unconscious depths of the ego are nourished, and listened to.

"Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens" - Jung

In recognizing themselves in their airbrushed pale-skinned phantom Edward animuses, Twilight fans find the same thing that once hypnotized legions of Garbo lovers in the death dream silent theater of the 20s. Their desire for Garbo was so perfectly transmuted onto the screen their love wasn't the male proprietary gaze but something both pre and post-sexual, even pre and post-maternal. The image of her projected face awoke something in their unconsciousness, leaving the rest of their waking reality and relationships seem like vague shadows by comparison (the wives of these smitten men were known as "Garbo widows").

 

... the animus is also sometimes represented as a demon of death. A gypsy tale, for example, tells of a woman living alone who takes in an unknown handsome wanderer and lives with him in spite of the fact that a fearful dream has warned her that he is the king of the dead. Again and again she presses him to say who he is. At first he refuses to tell her, because he knows that she will then die, but she persists in her demand. Then suddenly he tells her he is death. The young woman is so frightened that she dies. Looked at from the point of view of mythology, the unknown wanderer here is clearly a pagan father and god figure, who manifests as the leader of the dead (like Hades, who carried off Persephone). He embodies a form of the animus that lures a woman away from all human relationships and especially holds her back from love with a real man. A dreamy web of thoughts, remote from life..." - Marie-Louise von Franz

The mistake most Hollywood films make is to misinterpret Franz's "dreamy web of thoughts" as a condemnation, and to make sure their films have no such permanent mistakes on the part of their heroines. But kids need to see their dreamy webs onscreen. They don't need to see a realistic depiction of the maturation process, they see enough of it already. They don't need the visibly uncomfortable gym teacher creeping even into their most private reveries to caution them about protection. Before it shifts gears, the anima unconscious is aggressively contemptuous of goodness and safety, and even sexual gratification, and all the other mundane biological and sociological aspects of becoming an adult. The more one tries to eliminate all danger from their lives, to replace the perfection of the dream lover with some drab human orgasm grabber and baby haver, the farther away death becomes in their field of vision and the staler and duller real life grows. Their animus takes charge, gets bossy, obsesses about the letter of the rules and regulations, pointing out with glee the sinners and rule-breakers, sparking the pyre and laughing in paroxysms of self-righteous sadism.

And so it is not surprising that Twilight draws such rabid hostility from critics, their own mature animas pouring on the venom to convince them going back to the ex-animus, the daemonic lover as opposed to the scolding moralist. If they'd had a good therapist they might know enough to question their initial hostility, as I do in the opposite camp. I know my love of the series comes partly from rueful experience as an alcoholic, an experience seldom satisfied by contemporary myths. In the beginning I loved alcohol so much, I worried my friends, who'd been drinking long before me. I never even picked up a drink at all until high school graduation. It was such a perfect match it scared them. I almost killed myself a dozen times over and had to stop drinking altogether after a paltry 13 year-run. But I regret nothing! And if heroin had been offered to me, or speed, I probably would have gone for that, too. Now it's cigarettes. Every time I see some woman on TV with no fingers or throat or hair croaking her warnings about smoking through her tubes I just mute the sound like I'm sure Poe's Prospero wishes he could have done that striking clock chime in Masque of the Red Death. But these are the choices we make. And if more people made conscious choices to destroy themselves in these slow and pointless ways maybe our world wouldn't be so gruesomely overpopulated, or our country wouldn't be going bankrupt from too many old people draining Social Security. It's only when we're no longer afraid of death that we collectively can truly be free, and take the crowbar out of the spokes of the circle of life. In this sense, Twilight is like a lone dark spot in the unending light, or a light in the darkness --there is, after all, no difference in the end, a Yin/Yang split only works in conjunction with the other.

We see a bit of Western Civilization's knee-jerk pro-life jingoism in New Moon, wherein Edward dumps Bella, and flees with family in tow, hoping she moves, grows up (turning her essentially into an 'Edward widow'). But Bella learns she can get him to appear in a vision by risking her safety through typical teenage bad choices, forcing him to move from  demon lover to paternal but neglectful lecturer, telling her to turn around, to not get on the motorcycle, to not jump off a cliff, etc. He's not meant to be the stern authoritarian, that's supposed to be her next animus. It's great because we hate Edward for causing her so much pain. We relish with her the chance to bother him by remote control through such disregard for personal safety, forcing him to reveal a stern buzzkill authoritarianism that is utterly without effect or genuine authority, i.e. she recognizes that authority as a voice in her head rather than gospel. The adult animus turns so many women into dour nags, mistaking their dream lover's stern authority as gospel truth. Bella rejects that animus out of hand, forcing Edward into the role.

It's so bitterly fitting that even after the female director of the first film, Catherine Hardwicke, scored a hit both artistic and commercial and the film made zillions, she would be  replaced by a guy, Chris Weitz, for subsequent film, him borrowing a lot of her aesthetic sense  as well as all the animal and color symbolism. The first thing a film company does when they see a woman has made a hit film is to take over the sequel and kick her to the curb so she doesn't queer up this hit 'they've' lucked onto. I'll quote at this time a woman, from one of the few mainstream sites worth a damn, The Guardian:

"Twilight the film has been a massive success, but its audience is dismissed as fangirls, groupies, teenyboppers, airheads. It is sneered at by the same critics who misogynistically savaged Sex and the City and Mamma Mia, two other films made for women, with such blatant transparency. Strange that the belittling should be so vociferous; we women are the biggest group in the world, yet our viewpoint is ridiculed and denied, our testimony ignored. But that's the way it goes. The studios will use Twilight's profits to fund more films in which there are no decent roles for women, no women in major positions behind the scenes, no women directors. That's happened with Twilight's sequel: Hardwicke has been sacked and replaced by the guy who made The Golden Compass. The female gaze has been blinded yet again." -Bidisha, Guardian 2009."

I wouldn't go that far, Chris Weitz does an amazing job of preserving the female gaze, and there's still tons of mythic resonance on all sorts of levels, but there's also a sense of really picking up on what made the book and first film work - whereas to me the weakest of the series is Eclipse, which is directed by the dude who made 30 Days of Night - which makes sense as Eclipse is almost a sequel to that film as well as New Moon (I even lumped them together before I knew they had the same director in a post on the Nordic Circle rom-hor genre).  It's a fine enough film, with more action and flashbacks, as opposed to grand archetypal coming-of-age myth junky metaphor soap subversion and brilliant purple and mist scenery of the first two films. I should point out too that The Golden Compass has a young capable girl in the lead, boys to the side, wicked stepmother and a Catholic stand-in bad guy contingent similar to the Volturi in New Moon. Bad box office killed the chance for any sequels, alas, and the Christians backlashed it both for the anti-religion angle and, no doubt, the capable girl with powers angle.

It's a case again perhaps of deep-seated castration anxiety undercutting a lot of parents' good sense. But since when have fairy tales and myths had anything to do with sense? If they did, Red Riding Hood wouldn't even talk to the wolf in the first place, and all kids would be bored sick, and then probably have to go talk to wolves for real and get eaten and it would be your fault, mom!

There was a time when women screenwriters ruled in Hollywood, before the code came into effect, and talking to wolves was all the rage. But with the arrival of the code in 1934 came the feeling that, as now, telling women's stories is too important to be left to women. So stories of grandiose emotion and feeling were replaced by smug sermonizing where childish women are brought to heel, weened of their immature desire to be independent by endured humiliations at the hands of twits. Twilight dares to undo all of that, to go back farther than even the pre-code box office tallies can reach, down into the murky recesses of the Brothers Grimm, Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, and pre-Inquisition alchemical magick, straight like a hot shot into the archetypal vein, the pulsing warm narcotic rush of the eternal feminine distilled and uncut, so primal it invokes knee-jerk revulsion from most men, a revulsion so deep they don't even recognize it, merely sense it as their chained-up anima kicking the floorboards, trying desperately to be heard among the macho ego din.

If, as Bidisha says above, the profits will be used to fund more male-centric films, well, we can only hope more films about women ruling the dark abysses of true myth will succeed at the box office. Snow White and the Huntsman and Black Swan did well by their women, even if directed by men, and even Disney has dared, for the first time ever, perhaps, to make an evil queen the star of a film, Maleficent (a very interesting name, as her own 'male-efficient' animus is already running the show). Starring Angelina Jolie with Art Deco cheekbones, it could be a bust of CGI 3-D boondoggle like that James Franco Oz, or it could rock. One can only hope it doesn't end with her falling in love with some doe-eyed dork prince and abandoning her witchy black magick ways so she can dote on him hand and foot, as is done, say, in post-code films like I Married a Witch and Bell, Book, and Candle.

I still remember when Jolie sparked bonfires with her Gia-Foxfire-Girl Interrupted power. We'll have to see if there's any of that blood left in her, or if her legions of biological and adopted kids have drained her dry. I'm happy she saved the world and all, but some of us just want to watch that world burn.

What's tragic isn't that we want it to watch the world burn, but that we have to clarify the 'watch' aspect to placate nervous censors, the NSA, common 'decency', and Batman. When we let life-affirming paternalistic morals rule even our dreams then our dark shadow hearts may have no choice to but to act out into the real, or worse, retreat --until all that's left are church socials, Lassie, freckled children, chaperones, white picket fences, and enough treacly strings to drive even a good girl straight to the devil. Isn't that why he set it up? Why he put the morals in and took himself out? The devil can't corrupt your soul when he's busy on the screen. His biggest triumph is convincing us not to put him there, not to project him out at all, just let him smolder unseen in his buried celluloid coffin like a sulky genie, until even the tiniest spark...

My alternative mix for the last two TWILIGHT movies.