Edward vs. Eichmann

Until I read Twilight I never understood the phrase, "I wish I'd written that!" If you'd written a great story you'd never have the joy of reading it for the first time....both reasons I found myself wishing I'd written Stephenie Meyer's novel. A) My version might have been great, and B) I would never have read it for the first time.

Also, there's this: A lot of second-rate lit is clearly the work of professional hacks, writers good at recycling stock characters and plots to appeal to a very specific readership. Twilight was clearly the work of a sub-amateur hack who had a few free weekends. Anyone could have churned it out in a few days, and still made the bazillions Meyer is now enjoying. I wish it had been me.

Although, taking for subject a non-threatening bat boy who accessorizes at Claire's and falls for a nondescript Indigo Girls-listening Goth wannabe wouldn't earn me any kind of props in the masculinity department. Which is why it's probably best a woman wrote these books, and which is why it would definitely be even more bester if no one had written a single word concerning Bella and Clan Cullen.

Okay, but what's really wrong with the books? (And yes, I did read all four, and no, I did not lose any of my prodigious chest hairs in the process.) It's not just a wimpy vampire kid or a conflicted werewolf, either, though for fans of Dark Shadows that's another problem altogether.

To understand the travesty Meyer has perpetrated, we need to go back a few decades, to a war crimes tribunal in Jerusalem. The defendant: Adolf Eichmann, ex-Nazi and SS officer largely responsible for the Final Solution. He was as close to pure evil as humans get. Yet what affected Hannah Arendt most was his banal attitude and placid demeanor. She wrote a book about it called Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

The concept of the banality of evil is one of the most terrifying ever conceived, yet it has profoundly affected modern society. But instead of taking Arendt's observations as they were intended, as profound warnings, modern man has instead accepted that evil is banal, and that surrender to it is the only way to survive. What Arendt meant by the banality of evil is that egregious wrongdoing is often done by perfectly sane people who accept or adopt certain imposed premises that make the wrongdoing seem necessary and normal. What her phrase has come to mean, however, is that evil is normal, and, being normal, ceases to be evil.

Which is what Stephenie Meyer seems to believe. Traditionally, vampires are symbols of evil. They're soulless and demonic and perpetrate bestial acts without remorse or reason. They're chaotic and terrifying, and evil. In Twilight, vampires are simply people like ourselves with slightly more issues to deal with (angst not least among them, apparently). In short, vampires are just as capable as humans of becoming sympathetic characters. For Meyer's purposes, they must be sympathetic.

Edward Cullen, the hero, is the epitome of banality. Urbane, witty, handsome, selfless, yada yada yada, he wins Bella's heart and a bunch of impressionable readers' as well. But he's a vampire. Vampires suck blood, and that's essential to the vampire mythology because for most cultures nothing is more transgressive than drinking blood, especially if the one doing the sipping is himself already dead. The act and the actor makes the trespass doubly unclean.

Twilight is trash fiction of the worst kind. It's not just that Meyer is a terrible writer (she is), but her worldview is such that good and evil are indistinguishable. Some may argue that humans are all fallen, and Meyer's twist simply reflects that predicament. That excuse might work if she hadn't deliberately chosen the most heinous perpetrators of evil in the Western tradition for heroes. At least she failed miserably when she tried to make them cool.