Edward Cullen might be sparkly, but he's just as dangerous and predatory as classical vampires. http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/07/the_twilight_movie_review_your.html
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This was a question posed to the screenwriter, Max Landis, by his own father.
And the young Landis responded, why, you put a stake through its heart.
And the senior said, no, no, you are a writer.
You kill the vampire any damn way that you choose.
This is a story that Mr. Landis likes to recount.
And I know it because I am quite the fan of Max Landis, even if I'm not a huge fan of the movies he's written.
Really like that guy.
But on this note, he is dead wrong.
He couldn't be more wrong, even while being right in a certain sort of topical surface sense.
To ask, what is the vampire and conclude it's the thing that you kill with the stake through a heart?
Well that really kind of completely misses what a vampire really is.
And by the end of this video, by talking about the nature of the vampire on this Halloween of 2016, I hope to show you that Twilight is one of the best vampire movies out there.
So what is the vampire?
What is its nature, Clarice?
This man that you seek.
What is the nature of the vampire that makes it what it is?
Why this archetype?
Well first off, the vampire is a monster.
Monster, this is a word that's tossed around quite a bit, but very few people know its meaning.
Goes all the way back to ancient Greece.
Monsters are those things that are unnatural, that are abominations, that do not obey natural law.
Animals obey natural law.
They might be vicious.
They might hunt you.
They might desire your blood.
But they're not monsters.
They are merely animals.
Humans.
Humans might be sinful.
They might be fallen.
They might be broken.
But humans, they as well.
They as well have the natural law That part of them is compelled to follow.
But the true monster is neither.
It is not human, it is not animal.
And in some ways, it is both.
The vampire is not an animal.
It has one soul drive to drain you of your life essence, your blood.
That's all the vampire wants or desires.
An animal has many desires.
It wants to mate, it wants to stay warm, it wants to stay safe.
The vampire has only one, one compulsion, your blood.
And it has the intellect of a man to accomplish this.
It has the intellect, the reasoning ability, and yet no higher law, no love of truth or of beauty.
All the vampire has is affectation.
It affects the behavior of a human being.
But it doesn't know why.
It has no reason why.
Its only raison d'être is to drain and destroy you.
The vampire is a heartless monster.
And that is why you kill it by piercing that blackness in its chest, that blackness it has in place of a human heart.
The vampire is sexual in nature, from its earliest iterations on film, with its goblin-like ears.
sunken eyes and bald head, some sort of sexual predator wandering about, sneaking into the damsel's apartment.
To the later examples, Bella Lagozi, the seducer, say Duquere, to lead astray, the tall, dark, and handsome predator who is also a parasite.
Both predator and parasite for the sake of predation and parasitism.
Not for survival, not for reproduction.
It takes all of those natural urges, all those urges that obey natural law and perverts them.
It twists them.
It drains your blood for the sake of draining your blood, so that it might drain more.
The vampire is ancient.
It is of the earth, of the grave.
It needs the earth from its own grave to follow it wherever it goes.
And yet, it is repelled by the living earth.
It is repelled by the wooden stake, by the clove of garlic.
The living earth repels it.
It is ancient.
It predates life on this planet.
The earth of death, of the tomb, of cold.
This ancient frozen path past that seeks to drag you down with it.
And the vampire, it requires your permission to enter into your life.
The armor of God protects you on the front and to the sides, but the armor of God does not protect you from betrayal.
It does not protect your back.
The vampire requires your permission to enter, to join you in this brotherhood so that it might betray you.
It is a predator, but it does not confront you to your face.
Hold up a cross and it flees.
Confront it face to face and it is terrified.
Hold up a mirror and it sees nothing because it is nothing.
It is no one.
It is an ancient primordial force of ruin, of death, of sucking the life essence out of the living.
It uses passion to drain you.
It takes your passion and turns it into dry dust, the dust of the tomb.
The vampire is ancient death.
It is that primordial force, that darkness that came before, utterly unnatural, a perversion unto itself.
That is always its nature, in all appearances.
And any attempt to deviate from this, any attempt to recreate the vampire, whether it be some sort of science fiction virus or some sort of teen fantasy, will on the one hand undermine what the vampire truly is, but at the same time it will affirm it tenfold.
And this is what we see when we consider the film Twilight.
Now Twilight.
Supposedly some ridiculous teen-angst romance about sparkly vampires.
Well let's take a page from The Last Psychiatrist.
Let's take a page from there and point out that if you want to see the real Twilight movie, cut out every scene where Edward demonstrates magical powers.
Because all of these powers, all of these magical strengths that Edward claims to have, these are all the result of an unreliable narrator of a teenage girl desperately looking to be abused.
When he stops the car that's going to hit her, when he shows his ability to climb trees, none of this is something that your average man couldn't do.
And through the eyes of a willingly gullible teenage girl, through her eyes, become magical.
Ignore all of that.
And pay attention to what he says.
Pay attention to his claims, to what sort of being he says he is.
I can't resist you.
I need you.
I'm going to hurt you.
That is the truth of his character.
And as much as the movie tries to say, he's not like those other vampires, he most certainly is.
Edward drags Bella from her family, throws her life into chaos.
There's an unwanted pregnancy, this hot, cold push-pull, manipulation, cruelty, and sadism.
And none of it could have happened if Bella hadn't let him inside.
Edward is the worst vampire of them all.
Because he's the sort of vampire you just might meet in real life.
The affectations of mystery.
The lack of identity that has no reflection when he looks at himself.
the need to feed off of the pain of others, and his fear and terror of living morality, of acts which affirm life.
of the trees that grow out of healthy soil.
Edward is unnatural.
Death and misery and the grave sustaining himself off of the hopes and dreams of others,
sustaining himself, sucking them dry, and then leaving their wrecked bodies and souls for others to deal with.
Edward is an unnatural monster.
And so many people went to see that movie, and they were eager to let that monster in, to throw away their hope.
their dreams, their life, to throw all of that to the monster, to leave them as bitter, shriveled wrecks of human beings.
And isn't that exactly what they did?
40-year-old women, 40-year-old women fantasizing about a high school boy as their lives turn to rot and failure and death all around them.
Twilight, in some ways, isn't just a vampire movie.
It is the vampire movie.
But it's best to watch it from the sidelines.
Happy Halloween, folks.
Try not to let that darkness inside yourself overcome you.
