"Breaking Dawn: Part 1"

SPOILERS BELOW, for anyone who has been in a pop-culture hamster ball and doesn't know what happens in this train wreck.

***




In a telling scene in Breaking Dawn, a skeletal Bella stands in front a mirror, running her hands over the bairnsketball that she's been told is going to rupture her heart before it comes out. Various in-laws argue about what this means for her (spoiler: broken back and shattered ribs, among other things).

And Bella cringes beatifically into the mirror, and a plucky folk song plays.

This is perhaps the worst thing about Breaking Dawn: it has all the content of a horror movie with none of the context. (Second-worst thing: having to sit through the wedding in what feels like real time.)

It's almost remarkable how much the movie presents female-gaze psychological horror, made somehow even more monstrous by the romantic lens through which it's filtered. From the very first moments of the movie, in which Bella is walking around in a pair of shoes that have been purchased for her over her protests, but are nevertheless the shoes we know she'll be wearing, because of course. On her honeymoon, her husband withholds affection, because he claims he can't keep from hurting her and this is better for her; he reduces her to tears as she begs him to have sex with her. (His reason for withholding: the first time they had sex, he bruised her in the throes of passion. The movie downplays this into a few fingerprints here or there, which both dilutes the subtext of spousal abuse and makes it somehow even worse than he's stonewalling her romantically. The following silence, in which they play chess for several minutes in a Pottery Barn catalog, would be a tense portrayal of a marriage falling apart if it weren't for the comforting soundtrack assuring us that he knows what's best, and the little wifey will come around.)

When she finds herself pregnant, he withholds all support for her when she decides not to make the decision he would have made about the fetus. (Additional consequence of being pregnant: she's visually and contextually infantilized for the rest of the film, unequal even to stand up on her own). She lies about her situation and whereabouts to her father (from whom she has been effectively cut off by marriage); her friend in the know belittles and berates her. As the baby drains her life, her in-laws face off to decide what's best for her and/or the fetus (a term baby-crazy Rosalie repeatedly amends to, "BABY," in all caps). Near the point of birth, her husband blames her for having decided to keep the baby, and guilt trips her about how he will hate the child, because it is reflective of she decision she made. The baby itself snaps her spine, breaks both her knees, and causes heart failure.

It's a domestic-horror situation that seems a natural cinematic offspring of Rosemary's Baby, but somehow the film (and, to some degree, the source text) manages to put the viewer in an even more horrific situation: in order to support any kind of autonomy for Bella, the viewer has to support her series of truly boneheaded decisions in the face of people who are trying to dictate what to do and are, in fact, making more sense than she ever does. (Argument by the anti-fetus contingent: "It will kill you, there is absolutely no doubt, if you want to live you need to get it out." Argument by Bella: "Well, if it kills me it kills me, and you'll have the baby to remember me by." Help us help you, Bella!)

Perhaps the half-hour wedding scene was an attempt to frame as romantic the subsequent events of the film, which are not romantic whatsoever. Even the honeymoon scenes (in which Bella discovers that her bags, packed by someone else, contain nothing but lingerie) take on a strange purgatory quality; when she deploys peignoirs in an attempt to seduce him into having sex with her after the first bruise-inducing time, he laughs and turns away from her. (Bella's miserable face is one that appears repeatedly throughout the film, as she suffers one indignity after another.) But the movie seems determined to avoid the subtext it continually presents, and uses its succession of plinky folk songs in the background as an attempt to bring the romance back to a movie that otherwise would have us all rooting for Bella to take that speedboat back to shore and get the hell out. (The songs all have lyrics about the joy of subsuming one's entire identity, just in case you had missed the message.)

In the past, there has been enough of the absurd to help balance the creepy subtext; this movie has its moments of that as well, though they don't do much to overcome the feeling of wanting to grab a teenage girl by the shoulders and say, "You're not taking any of this seriously, right? RIGHT?" Jacob, when he reads his wedding invite, gets so angry he rips off his shirt (never not funny); the awkward wedding speeches are true to life in a way that makes you want to gently claw your own face; there's an almost-endearing montage of Bella trying to prepare for The Big Moment by brushing her teeth and shaving.

But otherwise, only the werewolves offer any relief from the A-plot horror, and that's not saying much. The pack has vague politics, and one girl-wolf whose primary personality trait is that she's unwanted by the man of her choice, and its usual limitless supply of cut-off pants stored in the hollow trees of the Pacific Northwest. However, other than trying to manufacture an outward threat for the Cullens, there's really nothing doing.

(ETA: I can't refrain from mentioning imprinting, which is presented so matter-of-factly that it somehow surpasses the surrealist comedy of a man looking into the eyes of an infant, seeing the hottie teen she'll become, and falling to his knees, mostly because the first time it's discussed is during a beach visit where it goes largely unmentioned that one of them is babysitting the toddler who will one day grow into the woman who better love him back, dammit, and the combination of the image and its apparent acceptance by everyone is a blow from which that little leitmotif never recovers.)

Having covered the body-horror in the first installment, the sequel is freed up to give Bella a chance to be the Mary Sue-est vampire who ever sparkled through the forest. That might be for the best; this movie has enough mixed messages to deal with all on its own.

(By the by, when Bella is healed and made beautiful by vampire venom in the movie's closing moments, her haggard face is smoothed over and made up; her anorexic limbs are not filled in. Even in the details, this movie really nails it, you know?)