Hot Abstinence

In Twilight, Summit Entertainment’s new teen vampire movie based on the first book in Stephenie Meyer’s four-part series, Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, The Nativity Story) rescues a banal romance by stylizing the novel’s overwrought prose as operatic and its clichés as Romantic archetypes. Hardwicke’s prolonged “quoting” of Meyer’s novel in the film thereby both perfectly replicates the original text and thoroughly departs from it, turning a chronologically straightforward story devoted to old-fashioned values like beauty, transcendence and the union of soul-mates into something avant-garde, experimental, even postmodern.

The film is a long quote that forms a new narrative precisely through its pretense of devotion to the original. The new narrative, I’ll argue, is a myth for the subjects of global recession, a theory not only representing but explaining the paradox of lush asceticism that can be found but lacks context in the original novel.

Twilight uses form to explain Twilight, whereas the latter is content merely to exist. Few critics of the film have observed the translation, but almost all of them at least mention their consensus that the story, which was written by a Mormon mother of three, is an “abstinence narrative.” They mean that its chaste lovers, Bella and Edward, can be understood as glamorizing the reactionary culture of abstinence in which girls vow to remain chastely “wed” to their fathers until marriage and boys view sex with their girlfriends as a form of incest, a failure to behave with them the way they’d want their future daughters to be treated.

And in fact, young Bella plays the wife to her divorced father, cooking him dinner, keeping house, and in a last-ditched effort to stun him into permitting a mid-night flight from the state with her vampire boyfriend (not for sex; there is danger), repeats the words her mother said when she left her father. At that moment Bella becomes her father’s wife, and in the film we see her specter in his expression when Bella quotes her mother.

Edward, Bella’s boyfriend, also treats her as a daughter, telling her that his life has become about protecting her life, and saving his metaphorical toddler (Bella is a klutz, perpetually toddling towards accidents) from endless peril. He doesn’t complain about the infantile state of his “mate” (Meyer’s word for vampire’s lovers) because it reflects the nature of his passion for her, not its obstacle. Nor, of course, does he have sex with Bella, an act during which he might forget his paternal function and become a (sexual) predator, fulfilling his impulse to rip into his “daughter” like she’s a luau pig: this is a vampire movie, so naturally the beloved is troped as dinner and it is up to Edward to keep the feast family-style.

This is the primly medieval construction of love that Hardwicke is given to work with, but her film hardly preaches philistinism or virtue. Twilight is anachronistically faithful to beauty: it’s everywhere, in everyone—even those who, like Bella, don’t know that it’s in them (this despite the handy caption of her name). Faith in beauty is part of the novel, which explains that vampires avoid the sun because they sparkle in direct light and describes Bella’s awe when Edward exposes himself to it for her benefit (is this the “engagement” in the abstinence narrative? He glitters like a man-sized diamond, the commodity standing in for his flesh. Bella’s struck breathless, miming orgasm. The spectator of multi-carat loveliness is permitted to appreciate it enthusiastically).

For many readers, the total lack of irony in Meyer’s representations of beauty is unbearable; one blogger, spoofing what a Twilight sex scene might be like, depicts Edward telling Bella confidentially that “[vampires] ejaculate rainbows.” Hardwicke, however, implicates viewers of the film within the book’s devotion to beauty; that is, she makes a pretty picture. Her camera almost never loses its close-up grip on the actors, whose beauty has been heavily marketed. When the camera draws back, it is to reveal an exquisite Northwest panorama. All of the exchanges between the lovers are highly choreographed, and the perpetual fog and drizzle of Forks, Washington (Portland in the film) creates the weatherly equivalent of an eternally soft-focused lens.

Which is to say that Hardwicke’s representation of abstinence doesn’t check what Lacan would call jouissance, meaning that the lovers’ asceticism provides uncontrollable delight so intense that it is experienced as suffering. Nobody understands jouissance better than Edward, who kisses Bella and immediately explodes in a climax that literally propels him away from her, and he hits her bedroom wall hard.

The violence of the moment is a pleasurable separation; to move away is to climax. Meyer explains this concept almost immediately in the book, when on Bella and Edward’s first encounter in biology class Edward covers his nose and looks sick when she sits down next to him. He writhes uncomfortably and glowers during all their brief encounters; there’s clearly something wrong with the boy. He does all he can to get away from her, even asking a high school administrator for a schedule change.

Bella is befuddled, she sniffs her armpit and wonders what could possibly be causing her lab partner to suffer visible pain when he’s around her. Then finally it is revealed: he’s wriggling and grimacing with pleasure, because Bella smells delectable. This notion of the erotic nature of denial is recognized by Susan Squire when in her book, I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage (Bloomsbury Press: NY, 2008), Squire concludes a chapter on the manifold forms of self-punishment engaged in by medieval married couples with precisely the Twilight-paradox: “In some ways it’s a wonder that the paradoxes of Christian wedlock don’t lead to universal celibacy…—but then again, with all that forbidden fruit the Church has defined and described, with so many rules and so many ways to transgress them, from the sublime to the ridiculous, it’s possible that marital relations have never been hotter” (124).

Probably unintentionally, reading Twilight has a similar effect. The plot is compelling, but its rendition is excruciating. Reading becomes jouissance, because you can’t put the book down but you really want to. Hardwicke uses form to provide distance, so her viewers can see the characters as discourse. The tactic allows us to take them seriously, which is precisely what critics who read the film as a relic of social conservatism don’t do. Their approach collapses Hardwicke into Meyer, and is driven, paradoxically, by their adoption of the lack of critical distance within the book.

Its absence only permits them to access the text through its content, by which they are repelled: a pretty young girl meets a handsome boy and instead of “doing it” 90210-style, they promise never to lose control, but instead to tame all sexual energy by projecting it into civilized plaisirs: conversation, family dinners, and art. Edward introduces Bella to Classical music, and she ceases to speak naturally, instead thinking in highly constructed “verses” we might call (bad) poetry—this quote appears in verse on the back cover of the Little, Brown paperback:

About three things I was absolutely positive.

First, Edward was a vampire.

Second, there was a part of him— and I didn’t know how dominant that part might be— that thirsted for my blood.

And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

Occasionally Edward waxes bestial, climbing trees like a puma with Bella on his back, but this always turns out to be a necessary means to achieve a tame aesthetic end: Edward wants to show her the view. In this reading, insofar as abstinence is represented as pleasurable it is a function of the super-ego, which drives the characters to derive a moral satisfaction from punishing themselves. In the film, however, the distance provided by Hardwicke’s highlighting of the story as myth, the characters as discourse, constructs a text that contains its own critical distance.

It’s not, therefore, embarrassing to watch, and what we see there is another take on abstinence as the aesthetics of, to borrow Leo Bersani’s term, self-shattering. This version of abstinence actually proliferates sex, or rather, it increases what Frances Ferguson has called, in another context, “the sexiness of sex.”

Whereas Meyer’s book treats abstinence culturally, and shows us characters who have fully and unconsciously interpolated the moral demand for self-denial, Hardwicke’s film treats abstinence within the Romantic conventions signaled by the movie’s form. Here, asceticism constructs a sublime subject breaking down at the crossroads between—in the twilight of—pleasure and pain. Her Bella and Edward are forbidden one another, like Romeo and Juliet (which Bella is revealed to have memorized in New Moon, the second book in the series), but forbearance is likened to savoring sweets a little at a time, lingering over a meal, putting off the best part for last in a string of events that never can conclude.

Waiting and withholding here construct passive subjects (Edward, appropriately, is dead—and Bella, in her love for him, wants to be), but their passivity is a means of signifying outside the cultural paradigm. The great irony, however, is that Hardwicke’s transformation of Twilight’s prosaic, plodding failure into Twilight’s mythopoetic resonance renders the film a text for a culture in transformation, one still in the twilight of change.

Hardwicke sees in the novel an opportunity to represent a shift, away from the capitalist model of pleasure as utilitarian self-gratification through a sexual act that always has the symbolic potential for reproduction, and toward a post-capitalist model of ascetic jouissance, sex-as-the-surplus of reproductive value. And herein the appeal of the vampire myth: that another kind of subject is born when it dies (Edward), or loses the will to live (Bella), or simply—as Hardwicke invites us to—experiences these negations as enjoyment. The story might be the latest and greatest instance of the notorious American puritan spirit, but as Squire suggests about religious constructions of marital abstinence it’s possible that Puritanism has never been hotter.

Colbey Emmerson Reid is Assistant Professor of Modern Literature Department of English and Humanities York College of Pennsylvania.