Film Carew

When Bram Stoker birthed vampyric folklore anew, with his 1897 novel Dracula, he was, like some fin de siècle Walt Disney, branding his own imprint on a myth, making it modern and making a mint. Tapping into the Victorian era's empiric fear of polyglot cultures, and the growing upper-class interest in genetic science, Stoker turned in what was, essentially, an epistolary literary exercise in racial profiling. In this allegory, the undead Count yearns to leave ethnically diverse greater-Romania and its sullied bloodlines, to travel to that beacon of genetic purity, Mother England, whereby he can suck from blessed virgins sired from unimpeded Anglo-Saxon sovereignty, thereby repurifying his tainted stock. Presaging the Third Reich's fantasies of Eugenecially-bred übermenschen and exterminable Eastern untermenschen by a good few decades – and black-metallers' own remythologies by roughly a century – Stroker wielded a pro-Nordic creed. In the century-or-so since, the vampire has been a persistent storytelling trope, from silent cinema through to its new-millennial explosion and pop-cultural omnipresence. It persists because of how functional its shape: the bloodthirsty interloper ably hammered into whatever allegorical template an author wishes the archetype to serve. Most commonly, Dracula is rendered as some sort of sexual lothario; a randy 'other' out to drag decent citizens into his depraved, diseased realm of erotic decadence and perversion. In Stephenie Meyer's chaste romance series, Twilight, the world was served a conservative variation on that theme: vampirism, here, standing in for pre-marital sex.

The Mormon housewife began her series in high-school, where being a vampire was just another clique. When one of these immortal, eternal adolescents (Robert Pattison, jaw so square, nose so Roman, and eyebrows so commanding he seems – and acts! – as if carved from stone) falls in love with a regular human teenager (Kristen Stewart, an endlessly talented actor who's now spent most of her adult life in a singularly thankless role), he must suppress his natural instinct to ravage the female conquest, learning to tame his sinful urges and make do with becoming her friend. Instead of sucking the cherry blood from our virginal heroine, the vampiric beau contends himself with lying respectfully alongside her, going on parentally-approved and/or chaperoned dates, and, in the kind of stalking behaviour that would usually have one marked as a future wife-beater, breaking into his love's room to silently watch her sleep (a dramatic development that gave rise to a much-circulated internet meme in which this 'romantic' relationship checked almost all the boxes of an abusive one). If our bloodthirsty blade was a lone rogue, perhaps the sexual symbolism would end there, but, direly, he's part of a vampiric tribe, a wealthy family-unit of suitably Aryan siblings who practice a ritualised form of abstinence: drinking only animal blood, never allowing themselves to experience the carnal ecstasy of 'doing' a human. This literally-whitefaced clan are, essentially, Mormon missionaries, out to sell the once-ugly-duckling heroine – whose name is, no shit, Bella Swan – and the book's intended adolescent audience on the virtues of the LDS Law of Chastity.

As this leaden cinematic series has trudged onward, offering ever-diminishing returns as the old high-school halls have been abandoned for the unreal void of the endless green-screen, these kids have done grown up in a way that the Latter-Day Saints would approve: virginal handwringing leading to the sanctities of a consecrated Celestial Marriage, consummating that marriage (fucking to Feist!), and, then siring a mystical chosen-one child (who begins as an unimaginably creepy CGI baby who I thought was going to murder the whole room), before ascending into an Eternal Life together; vampirism – so famously turned into an AIDS allegory by Francis Ford Coppola – here becoming a country-club people should be dying to join. Like some Christian Summer Camp on celluloid, apes a 'fun' form to camouflage its fundamental conservatism, using fast cars, fight-scenes, and flirtation to preach to impressionable youth a dry sermon tinged with racist, classist, hyper-capitalist, regressively-sexist subtext. Plenty of stupid things have been called feminist over the years – sex work, the burlesque revival, the Spice Girls – but seeing a fightin' female character on screen and then calling Twilight a model of empowered womanhood embarrasses anyone making the argument. Stewart's character spent the second movie, New Moon, effectively fainting due to her femininity, being driven home – not once, not twice, but thrice! – in her own goddamn car by some caring masculine figure. “I've never met anyone so prone to life-threatening idiocy,” one of the white-faced WASPs declared – perhaps it was Peter Facinelli in his horrendous wig – and, sure enough, she only had empowerment enough to get herself into situations from which she needed rescuing. Rather than feminist icon, Bella – her name reinforcing that her looks are what wholly defines her – is a pathetic Penelope In Peril who'll spend months fixing a motorbike, fall off it one time, then meekly accept when her controlling boyfriend forbids her to get back on it.

Motorbikes and cars are, of course, objects of class status, and, so our Bella has – like some retarded version of an Austen heroine – long been weighing up twin suitors from either side of the class divide. Though Meyer probably tried to pen her heroine as a strong, opinionated, unwavering woman, wresting with the great power of her sexuality and the responsibilities that come with, our supposed independent-woman-part-two is, with her unreadable mind and dour disposition, somewhere between blank slate and black hole; essentially a cipher in the middle of a love triangle, her value only reflecting whichever man she's with at that moment. Torn between two sides of prime beefcake – Pattison and Taylor Lautner, the latter a shrine to teeth-whitening and stomach crunches – she's really at the fulcrum of class warfare; not weighing up vampire versus werewolf, but upper versus lower, privileged versus working, colonial versus indigene, decadent versus salt-of-the-earth. One – the son of a doctor, living in a piece of opulent modern architecture – has skin sparkles in the sun because it's so fucking white, the other – the son of a mechanic, living in a shack – is actually just named Jacob Black. Eventually, she made her choice – inevitably, of course, going all in on White – but the triangle never fell away (Mormons are down with polygamy); to the point where, by Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 (it hurt to type that title), Black is still hanging around, looking after the power-couple's newborn daughter in a role that lands somewhere between nanny and housedog; the ethnic minority becoming, of course, a glorified domestic servant, equal parts care-giving underling and hired muscle.

In truth, Part 2 does try to undo so much of the gender damage done in prior episodes; going on endlessly about how Bella, newly turned into a vampire after her death by Blood Antonement, is the strongest of them all, able to armwrestle the brawniest bro, break rocks with her bare hands, and run around in that awful whooshing video-game-esque way that the vampires do in this Saga. For a series that's been a license to print shit-tons of money, it's been amazing how little of it they've spent on CGI; how the Twilight movies all have a really cheap, shitty, digital look; and how that makes for a showreel of laughable moments, like when Bella goes running up the side of mountain to maybe bite a bodacious rock-climber, or when she tackles a mountain lion to the ground. Anyway: now that she has the power to kill anyone who crosses her path, her once-abusive boyfriend looks on with an approving smirk; her pathetic, offensive feminine weakness replaced by virtuous, virile masculine strength. In turn, that leads him to apologise for the entire Twilight series, essentially: “I'm sorry I always underestimated you,” Pattinson intones, with the same empty, stilted, wobbly quality he brings to every line reading; seeming less wooden, more plywooden. The ponderous, po-faced films treat their central couple as matinée mannequins, and Edward seems especially animatronic; forever sporting a clenched-bowel look that makes each turn of the cogs inside his mind visible across his alabaster façade. “I can't help but think this is all because I fell in love with a human,” he mumbles, at one point, sounding disinterested even if his entire family may be about to be systematically beheaded due to the fact he couldn't keep it in his leather trousers; the line resounding with added meaning for the viewers he could've saved from suffering through 4 years, 5 films, and 10 interminable hours.

Edward speaks all this aloud before the obligatory battlefield showdown that anyone so plainly aping CS Lewis is inevitably heading towards. Breaking Dawn Part 2's 'plot', using the word loosely, concerns itself with the Mormons going on a mission to convert a rag-tag army of followers; their proselytising taking them to heathen lands – at various points, someone says South America, Brazil, and the Amazon, suggesting the writing of someone who's never left America –  to bring back a collection of wild caricatures written just to be sold as toys. Forget the one-note roles – this one has an electric charge, this one controls the elements, this one is a sceptic, this one is a convenient dramatic device made manifest – it's the racial stereotypes that are most heinous, as the film actually features a pair of Amazonian women in the mood; all loincloths and warpaint and gamine gams. Like lined up dolls on a toy-soldier battlefield – or a sports team awaiting the national anthem – these offensive archetypes are stood side-by-side across the snowy-white battlefield of the picture's climactic Cold War; which echoes some End Times-esque Muslim/Christian standoff, in which they each stare into the face of mutually assured destruction, wondering whether to push the button. It might mean more had their been more thought put into either side of this political stalemate; were the side's beliefs and values articulated with any interest. But the pat parade of reductionist, conversation-killing explanations make Meyer sound like an impatient parent answering a child's questions of 'why?' with terse dismissals. I found myself endlessly wondering why throughout; why these books were ever popular, why these films were ever made, why I was wasting my life sitting there. It's an attendant cliché for every multi-part, Tolkeinified epic to stoke the fires of its own myth-making, but, beyond the enjoyable LDS subtext, most of the mystical waffle herein is utterly meaningless, both within its own world and in the world-at-large. The idea that the Twilight books have to be understood and discussed and known is wearying; you don't have to read a word to be able to start penning your own slashfic (also: Taylor Lautner's visible-nipple-through-shirt ratio is very high; and in one scene he just kits off) after five minutes of this.

Oh, anyway, in non-nipple news: by the blessed end, the final battle is no battle, and uneasy peace is achieved, and Edward and Bella are together foreverever. And, after this Superbowl stand-off, it ends with a highlight-reel of the preceding season; the whole five-flick extravaganza turned into a One Shining Moment montage, afloat on fathomless self-nostalgia. Director Bill Condon – who graduated from making Oscar-bait, old-Hollywood biopics to these CGI wasteland – is particularly awful throughout the picture, but especially on end; which rather resembles a class project made by a graduating high-schooler. There's a bizarre school-yearbook credit roll, where headshots of every actor from the whole series (even those, vale Anna Kendrick, who sadly didn't make the cut here) are brought back as misty water-colour memories, and then pages from the books are animated, for double the nostalgia for fans who read them all first. And the film's final instant is to isolate the word forever, pulled from the final page of the final book and left to linger on the screen; perhaps to symbolise how long these movies felt to sit through. These Sagas, in general, seem eternally tedious – Lord Of The Rings, especially – because there's never any doubt where they're heading; Evil never seriously challenging Good, True Love triumphant as we fade into a final Forever. From midway through its first picture, Twilight has never left a single doubt that its Boy and Girl would be wed together forever in Celestial harmony, even when real life romance has proven a far stickier, more conflicted proposition.

Just before Part 2's final credit-out, there's another instant of sentimental montage, this time within the narrative; this time as apparent symbolic of the greatness of this romance for the ages. As our star-cross'd lovers lay down for a paramour's picnic amidst the purple flowers of their own personal elysian fields, Bella unveils her final gift to her beau: she psychically transmutes to him, through a form of magical clip-show ESP, their relationship turned into a cheeseball montage; there apparently nothing more romantic than seeing your experiences cut-up and sentimentalised like they're bad reality television. Here, making a very-generic-feeling montage is somehow some kind of a special magical power, not merely the realm of, like, iMovie. But the fact that Bella becomes her own mystic editing suite perhaps puts one final unexpected wrinkle on this whole shamozzle; this final flogging of the vampiric horse becoming, in one unintended instant, less about Latter-Day Saints lore and more about the new millennium. Religions have long used eternity as a carrot for its followers, and Meyer, too, knows it's the prescribed opiate to administer her menstruating masses: this yet another insipid, insidious, hetero-normative, all-paired-off fairy-tale of charming princes and pathetic princesses living happily ever after. Yet, it's more interesting to think that, perhaps, the Forever of its finale is not about our undead Mormons settling in for eternal life on their own personal planet, but being digitised onto the online grid; Bella's sentimental montage edited in-mind then stuck on YouTube or something. Like the prophesied afterlife of religion – which sounds awesome but probably plays out more like a nightmare – existing forever online is the ultimate symbol of ironic dystopia; making Twilight, for a flickering second in its achingly-empty 10-hour study of repression and denial and fantasy, actually feel like an actual story of our times.