The opening shot of Twilight: a doe’s flank, her tail flicking as Bella—breathing heavy & pre-orgasmic—soliloquizes on self-sacrifice, giving her life up for someone she loves. Then a predator lunges from the bushes.

Twilight came to Stephanie Meyer in a dream, and its dancing projections play out all the half-conscious and archetypal dyads of her habitus. Bella starts in the sterile dry heat and compulsory sunshine of a big city in the western sunbelt; migrates to small-town Pacific Northwest—gray-skied, rainy, heavily forested, and haunted (compare Twin Peaks, or Crater Lake legends). The town is fringed in by forest, which surround and threaten to swallow it. Her father is the Law in this town, a town named Forks—forks as in crossroads, or a garden of forking paths—and he is an impotent representative of the Law: always out of the loop, always a step behind the monstrous and mysterious forces which really govern happenings, always drinking heavily (to impair his judgment, and to cope). “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”

*

G—

A few weeks back we chatted Twilight at Fort Greene under the Prison Ship Martyrs column. The idea now is to try to recite (re-summon, as in a resurrection) those themes in text here, as a step towards some publishable piece.

To review… We are interested in applying the Bourdieu’s anthropological lens in Outline of a Theory of Practice onto Twilight, as a “symptomatic” work which encodes thematic meaning through American culture’s matrix of oppositions. Arguably, all texts can be read this way—but Twilight is special insofar as (1) it is not a product of autonomous literary subcultures, which impose their own structures of oppositions (2) between the books and films, Twilight is arguably the most successful American cultural product of the ‘00s, i.e. it uniquely resonates with the cultural psyche of its time. It is the Marvel Cinematic Universe of its decade (and is written for / resonates uniquely with women). We could do a similar analysis of MCU films for male 2010s culture—but that’s a project for another day.

These oppositions are also particularly clear and foregrounded in Twilight because they are embodied by Bella’s two love interest, who compete for her heart. Her choice is not just a choice between sexual and romantic partners; her choice is between philosophies, metastrategies, ways of moving through the world. So what are the primary axes or oppositions?

EDWARD	JACOB
Ice	Fire
Feminine	Masculine
Control	Vitality
European	American
Nomadic	Rooted
Progress	Tradition
Stasis	Change
Ideal	Animal
Foreign	Familiar
Bad Boy	Boy Next Door

And each of these can be expanded with reference to particulars, or other symbolic resonances, e.g.:

	ICE	FIRE
Color	Silver, blue, white	Red (incl. pejorative ‘redskin’)
Temperature	Cold-blooded	Warm-blooded
Vehicle	Silver (Swedish) Volvo S60R, C30	Barn-red Chevy pickup truck, dirt bikes
Diet	Vegetarian	Carnivore
Class	Aristocracy, Nobility	Working class

	EUROPEAN	AMERICAN
Home	Scandinavian modernism; steel and glass	Barn-red, wood
History	Colonizer	Colonized
Vehicle	Silver (Swedish) Volvo S60R, C30	Barn-red Chevy pickup truck, dirt bikes
Diet	Vegetarian	Carnivore
Class	Aristocracy, Nobility	Working class

IDEAL	ANIMAL
Renaissance Humanism	“Primitive Authenticity”
Sign of the Eagle	Sign of the Snake
Abstraction	Embodiment
Culture	Nature

An early scene sets up the structure of everything to come: Bella, in white Apple earbuds, is nearly caught and killed a collision between her red truck and a blue van driven by a classmate. A collision between fire & ice, Jacob & Edward—between her truck (her human world) and the strange land-logic offered by a stranger. That barn-red truck is a gift from the Blacks, who owned it; Jacob is the boy next door, a childhood friend—the familiar.

The two men and their tribes are diametrically opposed coherent structural conglomerates. Bella’s love triangle is a choice not merely between individuals, but between worlds, between hierarchies to participate in, between styles of being. Hence Forks. One is mortal, the other immortal; one runs hot the other cold. One is firmly rooted to its land and history; the other is exiled, cosmopolitan, nomadic, listens to Debussy. One is tanned (vitality, outside labor, common), the other pale (unhealthy, anemic, aristocratic). One lives humbly and traditionally; the other in a Scandinavian modernist mansion decorated with primitivist masks. (The Cullens—blonde-haired Nordic eugenecists—are likeways opposed, in the first part of the saga, with a hippy-gypsy, ethnically diverse chosen family.)

And when we consider their historical roles, the colonizer-colonized axis is the most prominent. The Cullens might be good modern Eurolibs: progressive, “vegetarians,” educated, politically correct, with a doctor for a patriarch. But their kind (symbolically, white Europeans; literally, vampires) are historically outsiders to the Pacific Northwest. They co-exist through a treaty with the Blacks (as European Americans treatied with American Indians) which is always at risk of being broken. 

And this brings us to the greater meaning of the vampire in modern Western mythology. The vampire is frequently aristocratic, noble—a Count. They are often beautiful or seductive (perhaps through supernatural powers); they are often wealthy and glamorous. But this glamour is built on exploitation, as their immortality requires nonconsensual and fatal blood transfusions from plebs. 

And as you’ve pointed out, the quintessential American vampire trope is the Confederate vampire (see e.g. Bill in True Blood). In Twilight, Jasper Cullen is our representative of this trope, which epitomizes this savior-parasite, transcendence-death dualism, being a metaphor for the dual nature of the Antebellum South: both its glamour/wealth/beauty, and the parasitic system of violent extraction that underlies the glamour. There is, in this way, something both masculine and effete about the vampire, in their playing and excelling at social games, and their lustful flesh-hungry hedonism (picture Denethor, the blood of a tomato dribbling down his lip, or Roaring Twenties oyster-shucking). Edward is the urbane European visiting Bella’s small town, having seen times and places Bella will never know—but which she could perhaps access if he turns her, converts her to a being such as himself. But it’s precisely her otherness and her innocence, her non-complicity in systems of extraction, that draws him to her.

*

The structure of oppositions we’re sketching out gets messy fast. The Cullens are icy in contrast to the fiery blacks, sure, but within the Cullen clan, Edward is the fiery one. The vampires are European-coded, sure, but the Cullen clan is the American side of vampires, opposed to the Roman Vulturi. Both Jacob and Edward find themselves united in their moon- and night-thematization, whereas Bella—though pale-faced—loves and dreams of the day. Bella and Edward seem aligned as ethical vegetarians (Bella eats garden burgers and orders books from indie retailers). But Bella is also opposed to Jacob and Edward who are both literally carnivores and predators—and specifically are predators to her prey, to her whitetailed doe. “And so the lion fell in love with the lamb.”

These opposites aren’t “absolute” or global coordinates. Rather, they are local and relational, as Bourdieu stresses in Outline. There is a dark aspect of light, and a light aspect of darkness. Edward may be “female” in relation to Jacob, but he and Jacob are both male in relation to Bella. Individuals and objects take on their meaning in relation to one another, in relation to a categorizing or meaning-making observer. It is a triadic, T-shaped relation. And there are nested structures (e.g. Edward as the fiery Cullen). 

*

Bella (literally “beautiful swan”) herself is characterized in opposition to her normie classmates. She’s unnaturally pale, despite growing up in Arizona (this, her white, swan aspect aligns her with Edward). She’s different, she’s not a girly girl, she drives an old pickup and doesn’t care about dresses. She’s cynical, has seen the darkness, has not been able to shake the darkness, doubles down on darkness even as it destroys her. In her outsideness, she seeks (and finds in Edward) an inside. 

She is self-sacrificing by nature, always giving herself up to others’ desires, in part because her own desires seem so vague and mute and unknowable. In this she is opposed to—and attracted to—the simultaneous selfishness and self-restraint of Edward, of a vampire, who feels unbelievably strong desire, but must also keep those desires in check. 

What attracts Edward and Bella to each other, so strongly, so immediately? Sure, “pheremones,” but more than that. He’s different; she gets obsessed with finding out how. He seemed, at first, to so thoroughly reject her, to be disgusted by her, that his reversal of opinion is glamorizing. Hers is the only mind he can’t read—too blank, goes the joke—but there’s a trope here, cf True Blood’s Sukie Stackhouse. He’s also compelled by the way she sacrificed her own happiness for her mother’s, left Phoenix and switched schools so mom could travel with her second husband. He shows her his “true self” in sunlight, full of shame—“This is what I am” as if a confession to a murder—but she sees diamond and beauty. It is precisely her valuation of him which breeds his valuation of her, the exponential takeoff of positive feedback. It is precisely her faithful idealization of which him leads him to faithfully idealize her. 

Edward is an outsider who at once rejects the standards of Bella’s society, while simultaneously (and this is critical) being more powerful than any member of that society. Austen’s Mr. Darcy serves precedent in this gender tradition. It is Edward’s power which both justifies and enables his rejection of social normativity, and of the usual limits taken as part of reasonable realism—offering to Bella instead a less limited world, a picture of freedom without the usual costs accrued by disdain. “This isn’t real, this kinda stuff doesn’t exist,” she protests. “It does in my world,” he answers.

Edward is a symbol of antistructure, of “the real,” a representative of the woods; he is nature to man, and the supernatural to nature. “Wild animals” is how Charlie and everyone else refers (unknowingly) to the non-humans forces terrorizing their town, keeping the carpenter busy. (They are like Enkidu to Stewart’s Gilgamesh.) And he is the most powerful force in a thousand-mile radius. He can rip trees from the ground, travel at superspeeds, practically fly. He’s killed people. “Doesn’t matter,” she says. “I wanted to kill you. I’ve never wanted a human’s blood so much in my life.” “I trust you,” she says.  (He’s worked for a century to get himself under control, but she makes him lose control. There are recurrent motifs of delayed orgasm, edging, and abstinence.)

This outsider is often, at once, a savior and a parasite, offering both transcendence and death (self-transformation, self-transcendence). Every escape is a leaving behind; every attainment is a sacrifice. There is a mutualism to the Bella-Edward romance: each party sees in the other an opportunity to attain a larger world (sees an escape from their own world’s constricting confines).

There is persistent scar tissue on her wrist, from a vampire bite (one could also say, “from cutting”), and that is because Edward and his venom are death itself, are the cold and pale, the bloodless bloodletters, suicide by cutting and pills. His immortality is an undeath, a lifelessness, a soullessness; it is suicidal. Even Satanic. One wonders that Meyer, a Mormon, pairs such a Satanic figure with her protagonist (Bella being very much an authorial stand-in). His is the path of immortality—which, as wisdom from time immortal unanimously tells us, is an evil and self-destructive path, the path of Satan—hence why, when you’re bit, you lose your soul. To choose Edward is to renounce life, to choose a static and unchanging existence forever. Whereas Jacob stands exactly for life, in all his firey aspect: energy, warmth, change, renewal. Edward doesn’t even stand for death, since death is a part of life. What he stands for is undeath, something terrible and unnatural, an enemy of life (like a paperclip maximizer, or a zombie).

Ice is crystallized, preservative. A body can be kept on ice; R. Falcon Scott’s Cadbury chocolate bar (or a fruitcake, from the Terra Nova expedition) can be left in Antarctic ice for a century without still spoiling. (But though edible, does taste good? And a catch kept weeks on ice in the fish market is not the same as fresh-caught.) To freeze—to calcify and ossify—; ice and bone are our primary metaphors for the way living systems approach the condition of stone.

Fire, meanwhile, includes the energetic spark with which all living systems begin. It is the process of life itself, the burning of kcals to fuel movement, and create new structure. It is the release of energy and heat which comes from the breaking down of old bonds.

More concretely, the vampires are adults stuck in a Sisyphean high school time-loop trap, which, if that’s the immortality you’re offering, I’m declining. I’d prefer not to spend eternity in fluroescent-lit cafeterias with food-fighting mental midgets. 

*

To close this out, and move the conversation forward, I’ll recap our the second part of our conversation, which is about applying the “00s young girl American pop cultural habitus” of Twilight to American 00s pop culture more broadly.

For instance, we can think about the 00s political imagination, the conceptual niches each party has occupied—the Bush family versus the Clintons:

DEMOCRATIC PARTY	REPUBLICAN PARTY
Ice	Fire
Blue	Red
Progress & Science	Tradition
Technocracy	Theocracy
European Globalism	Heartland Patriotism
Elite	“Common”
Individual	Family
Nomadic & Urban	Rooted & Rural
Urban	Rural

Looking toward pop culture, we can contrast the icy artifice of pop with the embodied rootedness of rock. Within pop, nested oppositions between the icy, disembodied boybands of the oughts with the embodied, all-hips female popstars (paradigms of release, paradigms of control). 

Ice-coded fashion included frosted tips, blue jeans, black leather, fast fashion and Forever 21 (more immortality). Versus the Red State flames of Nascar and Guy Fieri (himself a frosted-tips, silver sunglasses man). We can contrast disembodied cyberspace with embodied meatspace. 

Gilmore Girls is a warm hearth and Gossip Girl is icy glamour. And we can look at a show like Girls where the boys tend to be fiery, and the girls tend to be icy; but among the girls, there are icy and fiery characters. Jess takes the form of fire (she performs wild vitality) while having an “inner” substance of ice (tense control). Shoshanna has an inner fire but a paralyzed exterior. Marnie is probably all ice. It would be nice to have a word for these form-substance combinations. A comet is ice which catches on fire as it enters the atmosphere. A “rush” (you pointed out Troye Sivan’s “Rush” as an example) is all about the injection of heat in icy veins. (Obama you similarly called the form of warmth and the substance of ice.)

Another possible direction is tying this in with Hito’s “fire autist” versus “ice autist” dichotomy. (Autism itself being ice to normie’s fire, in this nesting structure.) Elon is a fire autist, Grimes is an ice autist. When I saw Hito last, we expanded this dichotomy to the four elements: earth autists are all about dwelling in space, about home and garden, learning to cook elaborate meals; wind autists are nomadic and monk-like ascetics, barely owning any objects, living out of a packpack and sleeping on the floor.

We could talk about the way that fire is potential, substance, energy—the spark of Weberian charisma that begins an institution—whereas ice is form, structure, plateau, the maintenance of an institution in crystallized form. (And this tying in with cargocult, LARPing, spirit versus letter.) We could talk about how Bella brings the fire out of ice, life force out of undead structure, literally gives birth to a hybrid child who is potentially world-destroying and apocalyptic—like the fire of an atom split (a structure cleaved, releasing energy). We could talk about how the Cold War was begot by the hottest of fires. 

But this is what I’ve got for now,

—S

*

This letter was written after a long conversation with Gianni de Falco; both of our ideas come to bear in it.