The Atlantic has the story of Brian McGreevy, screenwriter and author of a Vulture piece from last year (which we somehow missed) which decried (as usual) the sparkly, effete vampires of the 21st century. The closest thing we had to a real vampire, McGreevy argued, was Don Draper. Fair enough! I can't believe that mashup hasn't been posted on YouTube yet.
McGreevy took it further, though, and applied his principles to his own vampire novel. That novel is called Hemlock Grove (gah!) and it was published last month. The Atlantic's review is not particularly enthusiastic (and McGreevy himself seems kind of awful, bragging about the emails he gets from women who want him to come over and "eat" them and also discussing his supposedly earnest belief in the occult (sure)), though one could imagine they wouldn't be very kind to Twilight, either, if they looked at it as a work of literature instead of as a phenomenon.
Speaking of "Twilight as a phenomenon," is all of that over? McGreevy wrote an actual whole BOOK as a rejoinder to Twilight (he cites True Blood, too, but that's fucking nonsense). At the other end of the spectrum is E.L. James and her book 50 Shades Of Grey (gah again!), which started as Twilight fan-fiction. Twilight has grandchildren, in other words. How relevant can it still be?
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Meanwhile: Robert Pattinson is in a movie full of self-mutilation and weird sex, and Kristen Stewart is (fingers crossed!) naked in On The Road. Not that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart weren't grownups before, but now they have "grown up" (and expect several articles to that effect in three months' time). Oh, and 50 Shades Of Grey was recently purchased by Universal for five million. So somehow that shit is going to be like, a movie.
If McGreevy's book represents a concrete pushback against Twilight in general and Meyer's vampires specifically, I think the rest of this stuff represents something a little more interesting and meaningful about this post-Twilight era we seem to be entering. Bear with me here.
Twilight is not a sexy book series, right? The repression and the weird morals kill any titillation one could potentially derive from reading it. The movie adaptations straddle a weird line, sexed up by hot actors and actresses vamping in every frame, but still tied to the source material. So you can watch the honeymoon scene in Breaking Dawn pt. 1 and find it sexy, because it is, but ten seconds later you're thinking about Bella's bruises, wondering why the film was so restrained in its depiction thereof, and whether or not that was a good thing... and then you're not in sexy mode anymore.
I've long felt that the abundance of Twilight fanfiction represents a desire to correct this fundamental flaw in the property. Sometimes it seems like even Stephenie Meyer is begging us to save her from her own whacked, repressive head (See Cullen, Alice).
And it took a long time, but I'm starting to feel like the forces of good (good being, in this case, sex-positive) have overwhelmed the forces of evil.
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Which means the era of Big Twilight is over. And the era of The Hunger Games appears ready to step in and allow for a smooth transition (That's a mixed bag of a property too, but real rebellions are always mixed bags. Right, President Coin?). Or, to put it more optimistically for the Twi-hards among us, it means that Twilight as mass-marketed faux-"phenomenon" is over, and its time as a phenomenon with no quotation marks has finally come. Because Stephenie Meyer and Summit/Lionsgate have clearly lost control of the reigns: Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart are out in public as a couple and having weird sex in movies, fanfiction and angry blog posts are becoming books (um, AHEM, publishers). The inmates are running the asylum. It feels pretty good.
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So, after reading a few hilariously scathing reviews of Fifty Shades of Grey I decided to check it out myself. It really is just crazypants. Plus, isn't it supposed to be all scandalous with the sex? I kept reading it expecting something shocking to happen, but for a BDSM story the sex is pretty tame. There's one part where a blow job is the big surprising thing. Like, seriously, a fucking blow job. If 14 year olds are doing it on a regular basis, I'm pretty sure it doesn't qualify as kink. I found the fact that she thought using his toothbrush was hot rather than gross to be more weird than any of the sex stuff.
Plus, their relationship is really disturbing. I get that the whole domination thing can be a turn on, but I'm sorry, when he tells her he wants to hurt her and then hits her until she's a sobbing, terrified mess I don't really find that all that sexy. In a good author's hands it could have turned into a nicely fucked up psychological twister, but this one really does just read like some sad housewife's weird Twilight fantasy. Which, of course, it is.
There are two more after this. I'm guessing she figures out what his childhood damage is and then her love fixes him and they get married and have babies and then, I don't know, he turns her into a sparkly vampire? And the worst part of all of this is now I kind of want to read them.
Kim, here's my favorite pan of Fifty Shades Of Grey yet. Maybe you've already read it, but it's Julieanne Smolinski at Vulture: http://www.vulture.com/2012/04/fifty-shades-of-grey-the-thinking-womans-guide.html
A couple of choice lines: " That dry, skittering sound you heard is your fallopian tubes curling like party ribbon." " I get that this is supposed to be BDSM Lite for people with Aztec-pattern Kindle Fire covers..." ETC. SO GOOD!
Nice! I had not read that one yet. It's pretty dead on, too. Also, I am baffled how they're going to turn this into a movie. There's no story there. A kind of boring porn, sure, but a movie by a major production company? It's going to need some, uh, creative adapting.
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