In Which I Read Twilight: Chapter 22 -- Hide-and-Seek · 2:37pm Feb 15th, 2018
Bella, Alice, and Jasper head the airport to meet with the rest of the Cullens. Bella keeps going on about how difficult it’ll be to lose them, and I’m still wondering why she doesn’t tell them what’s up (especially since Alice has just had a vision that Bella doesn’t know the contents of but she guesses is showing her meeting James). However, she has a spot of luck: she knows the airport terminal better than any of the Cullens. Before Edward’s plane arrives, she goes to a bathroom with two exits and leaves out of sight of Alice and Jasper. In a scene that probably would’ve been tense in the hands of a better author, she leaves the airport and takes a taxi to her mother’s house, all while panicking that Alice and Jasper have realized what’s up and are following her at the moment.
Bella reaches her house and calls the number James left for her. Sure enough, he wants her to go to the ballet studio. She heads there and finds out that James doesn’t have her mother at all; the voice she heard on the phone was from one of their old home movies. Which conveniently had exactly the words James needed. And James decided to sit and watch their home movies for some reason.
In perhaps the most egregious example of monologuing ever, James tells Bella how he found her. When he heard Bella scream that she was going to Phoenix, he thought that since Bella was so obvious about wanting to go to Phoenix, the logical course of action would be to not go to Phoenix, and so the “clever” course of action would be to go to Phoenix. Short version: he saw through her bluff. He admits that it was still possible that Bella wasn’t in Phoenix, but Victoria (why isn’t she here, now?) was watching the Cullens still in Forks. When she confirmed that they were going to Phoenix, he called Bella and lied about holding her mother.
Then James wants to make the hunt sweeter by getting Edward to chase him, so he sets up a video camera to record himself killing Bella. Then he reveals that he was the one who killed Alice’s progenitor; she was at an insane asylum in the 1920s, receiving shock treatments for her visions, and he was hunting her down at the time (oh, the thrill of hunting someone locked up and incapacitated!). A vampire turned her to protect her, so in revenge, James killed the older vampire. This reveal might’ve been interesting if the mystery of Alice’s past had mattered to anyone beyond, “Strange, isn’t it?” Oh, and James keeps going on about how Alice was the only one of his prey to ever escape him. When she was locked in an asylum. James sucks as a hunter.
With that settled, James gets right to the murdering, right? Of course not, this is Twilight. James walks around her, gloats that she’s helpless, throws her around a bit, talks about how dramatic the setting is- no, really:
“That’s a very nice effect,” he said, examining the mess of glass, his voice friendly again. “I thought this room would be visually dramatic for my little film. That’s why I picked this place to meet you. It’s perfect, isn’t it?”
-he does that, and generally fails to be intimidating in any way, shape, or form.
You know, I’m not actually against villainous gloating or monologuing. Syndrome has some pretty good gloating in The Incredibles. But gloating and monologuing is something a villain needs to earn. Syndrome does most of his monologuing after curbstomping his opponents and putting them in a genuinely helpless position. He does some proper villain-y things, in short. Gloating and monologuing is all James has done. And in this particular instance, it goes on for five whole pages nonstop. And “nonstop” is pretty close to being literal: Bella only gets three or four words in throughout the whole thing. James just walks around, doing his darndest to be So Evil™ without needing to do anything evil. It. Is so. Boring.
Anyway, after throwing Bella around a bit and breaking her leg, James finally chucks Bella into a mirror, a shard of which cuts open her scalp. Driven mad by the smell of her blood, James finally attacks her for good as Bella begins to pass out. Oh no. There’s two chapters and an epilogue left. I wonder if she’ll survive.
Is this a story?
So not only did a movie have the exact words James needed, but also the exact inflection needed to work in the context of being held hostage by a crazed vampire.
... Do the Swans normally record snuff films as a family activity? Because that might actually explain something about how Bella treats romantic relationships.
Also, Stephanie Meyer has clearly heard of dramatic tension, but has no idea how to actually make any.
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The words used were actually Renee calling out to Bella in the context of a much younger Bella going out on a dock. Just, "Bella? Bella?" It's not completely terrible, but it's pretty bad.
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That kinda reminds me of something else that was supposed to be dramatic but crossed over into Narm territory.
He lied? D: The dastard! Why, it's almost like he's a villain or something!
Man. If I were cocking my head any harder at this nonsense, I'd be reading it upside-down.
But paradoxically, in the hands of another author, this scene wouldn't have had a reason to exist.