Screen Machine

Review: The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

Bob Dylan could write a damn good love song when he had a mind to. The single word that absolutely kills me from “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”, the fifth track on Blood on the Tracks, is how he uses the word “slow” to describe his love for Sara.

I’ve seen love go by my door
It’s never been this close before
Never been so easy or so slow

“Slow”, an unusual word to use when Love as constructed by the culture industry is usually “rushing”, “hitting” or “falling”. If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it indeed. Slowness is a precious thing in a relationship, where the velocity of desire is always being worked upon by the forces of family, education, commerce, religion.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is a film all about velocity. Its most powerful images are of two teenagers (one, a perpetual teenager) lazing around in a field of flowers or hanging around on a bed in the afternoon. Slowness.

We’ve been here before. Gus Van Sant is a director obsessed with adolescent velocities. The meandering wander of the blonde-haired boy through the high school corridors in Elephant, the dreamlike traversal of the skate-park terrain in Paranoid Park, the solemn dirge of grunge music in Last Days.

The tensions of Eclipse are between such slow velocities and opposing vectors: The aggressive sunshine of Florida (“Aren’t you going to miss this? Can’t you just feel the vitamin D soaking out through yours pores?” asks Bella’s mum during a visit) versus the dull grey of Alaska. The intensive labor of Taylor Lautner’s muscled physique versus the indifferent frame of Robert Pattinson. Earnest drawn-out deliberations (Team Edward or Team Jacob) versus mandatory acquiescence (Dakota Fanning’s Darth Vader-like powers of subjugation).

Halfway through the film, Bella attends her graduation and hears this speech on how the graduating class should answer their parents’ questions of career paths:

Who the hell knows? This isn’t the time to make hard and fast decisions. This is the time to make mistakes. Take the wrong train and get stuck somewhere. Fall in love… a lot! Major in philosophy because there’s no way to make a career out of that. Change your mind and change it again because nothing’s permanent.

But this tension between fast and slow doesn’t just play out on the thematic level but extends to the generic structure of the film. Eclipse is one part aimless romance full of wonderful dead time, hanging around, endless talking, back and forth, brokering the terms of Bella’s sexual awakening. But this element wants to be swallowed by an inane fantasy epic narrative involving vampire armies, ancient rivalries etcetera. (I hear some people complain about the low quality of action in Eclipse but I honestly don’t understand why you would go to a Twilight film for the action scenes.) It’s a tension that will sadly and inevitably play out throughout the rest of the series as the Twilight series is now a major profit earner for Summit Entertainment. But as we follow this series to its conclusion, let us hold onto whatever is useful from these movies: the slow versus the fast, the aimless versus the directional.

Bob Dylan – You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (MP3)

Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and has written for Senses of Cinema.

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