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Twilight (Sorry for cursing)

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Eris:
well I mean, I write stuff (or at least I used to), and I put a fair amount of effort into it. I thought about what I wanted the characters to look like, how they should sound, and what was going to happen. If someone came in and said something along the lines of "The main character is blonde and has blue eyes, an obvious callback to hitler's ideal, coupled with their manipulative actions indicates that [blahblahblah nazis]" or someshit they are putting words in my mouth. I might have made the character blonde and manipulative as a reference to Barbie and how that doll affects how young girls think. She might be blonde because it is seen as an indication of dumbness, and put the manipulation in there to counter that. Maybe I just wrote about a manipulative character and happened to want her blonde. The people making these analyses don't know what was going on in my head unless they or someone else has talked to me about it, so why should they just assume that I meant a certain thing?

The thing about Twilight is that we know where the basis of the story came from. Meyer had a dream that she was laying in a field with a beautiful, sparkly vampire-man and wrote 5 books about it. This guy's interpretation of the story is really interesting, but the book isn't marketed that way, it is marketed as a coming-of-age love story, so you have to at least take that into consideration, because that affects who reads it and why. Sometimes it is really easy to come up with bullshit about  a narrative, and it is just as easy to be way off the mark. I remember a friend studying a poet in English at high school, and her teacher talking about what the author meant when he used certain phrases or imagery or whatever. They were able to get the poet in for a talk, and the teacher asked him about some of the stuff that had been talked about, and the guy basically contradicted all that they were taught.


 I am not saying that people can't read things differently and that you should only read stuff a certain way, I just think that disregarding all readings but one is stupid.

a pack of wolves:
With the whole concept of the death of the author if someone were to take a text you had written as an allegory of National Socialism they aren't putting words into your mouth. They're building something from the text that they're reading, a text you can no longer control (the degree to which anyone's reading of a text, even their own unsullied by publication, can be truly said to be entirely under their control is highly debatable). Once it's out there what you were intending at the time of writing doesn't necessarily become irrelevant, but it does become just another part of the meta-text along with how the book was marketed, historical context, its jacket and typeface, the other texts it draws upon and the ones it may have influenced etc.

I generally think of criticism as just another form of art, one that uses other art as its material. Artworks are just toolkits, and just like a toolkit they vary in quality. Twilight being, say, a shoddy penknife and Moby Dick being a bit more like the Large Hadron Collider. They mean nothing without the intervention of the reader, reading is an act of construction rather than absorption. For me, a reading is only bullshit if it's uninteresting (like saying something is about Nazis just because there's someone with blond hair and blue eyes), regardless of how far it deviates from the author's intentions.

So Meyer's dream doesn't need to be attended to, and even if it were "it came from a dream" is more than a little questionable. Authors don't necessarily tell the truth about their intentions (as I remember Bunuel claimed the bear in The Exterminating Angel was nothing more than a bear, which is pretty much impossible given the film), and attempting to psychoanalyse them based on their work is dicey at best although sometimes possible (it's safe to say Birth Of A Nation was made by a massive racist based on the film alone). I've only read about one page of that guy's posts about Twilight but he actually does seem to spend a fair bit of time discussing the film's audience and reception so he's not ignoring context to preserve his reading, he just has a different reading of those aspects to most people.

Eris:
ok so, I was really quite angry last night at that thread, but after taking a break to sleep and calm down and then go back to reading the thread, I can see what I was getting so mad at. One lady was saying that SMG's reading was the only reading that she was going to consider, because she didn't think that viewers of the movie were going to take it at face value (despite the evidence to the contrary). Her saying things like that the story of Bella being the manipulative evil monster was a progressive story was all good and fine, but calling anyone who disagreed a misogynist made me think of a little kid arguing with"yeah? well... you smell!". She was taking her feminist views to the extreme, and ignoring a lot of people's opinions because they were filthy men.


I will probably reply to the post above me later, but this thread is like a soap opera, it's great!

scarred:
I nominate this entire thread for post of the year.

Alex C:

--- Quote from: Eris on 09 Feb 2010, 17:07 ---I will probably reply to the post above me later, but this thread is like a soap opera, it's great!

--- End quote ---

I'm not sure I know what you mean here. It doesn't really seem like anyone is very cranky here. This isn't even our oldest, longest or snarkiest twilight thread.

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