NEW MOON: What I Saw At The Vampire Revolution (Spoilers)

Posted by: John Marks on 11/22/2009 @ 10:19 am

I knew virtually nothing about the plot, except that the story involved vampires, werewolves, abs and abstinence, but yesterday afternoon, after reading of the astonishing box office grosses for the vampire romance New Moon—a projected $140 million weekend—I decided to join the throng. I had to find out what was happening, though I hadn’t read the novels by Stephenie Myer and hadn’t seen the first movie in the series, last year’s hit Twilight.

I  bought my Raisinets and diet Pepsi and took my seat in an auditorium brimming with girl power. Later, when I told my wife and son that I had been the only grown man seated by himself in that theater, they cringed for me. The other males were few and far between, but at least they’d had the wisdom to go in the company of  females.

In New Moon, a native American teenager named Jacob, played by Taylor Lautner, is vying for the heart of the heroine Bella, played by Kristin Stewart, with a seriously caucasian teenager named Edward, played by Robert Pattinson, who looks like he stayed a semester too long in high school, but who is actually a one-hundred-year-old vampire.

How to convey the power of this record-breaking smash?

In one scene, Jacob and Bella are riding motorcycles. She crashes her bike. Jacob goes to help. He sees that she’s cut her head and strips off his t-shirt  to make a poultice (maybe).

When the shirt came off, something remarkable occurred in the theater—what can only be called an airborne romantic event. All around me, like a gust of summer surging through the seats, women audibly and collectively exfoliated. Someone clapped. I heard laughter and felt behind me a burp of desire as big as the screen.

I tried to understand. The character was buff, yes. He had six-pack abs. It’s a turn-on for women of all ages, but still. Such an intoxicated response?  In the era of Internet pornography, in an age when we’re told teenagers are exposed to all manner of sexuality, when a blow job is supposedly de rigeuer on a first hook-up, the spectacle of a kid taking off a t-shirt  elicits a mass swoon?

That strikes me as important information.  A part of our female population is not wholly jaded about romance, perhaps.

Or was the swoon about something else? A result of the rare encouragement by a major Hollywood blockbuster to lust after a boy? Our cinema, going at least as far back as Louise Brooks, has steadfastly promoted fascination with gorgeous women, throwing bombshells onto the screen with heedless abandon, but I can’t remember a box office smash that so shamelessly pimped out its male star to the ladies. Sure, we had Harrison Ford in the Indiana Jones movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator flicks and Bruce Willis in the Die Hard era. They all catered to some extent, not to mention Viggo Mortenson in Lord Of The Rings, and the lads in the Harry Potter movies, but this was different.

This was an actor served up as steaming hot beef on a platter, brandished by a knowing chef. The stunned response of the actress playing Bella to the spectacle of the bared flesh made clear the intention of the filmmakers. We were meant to reach for our smelling salts.

The end of the movie enhanced the effect: A tight close-up on the pale blue vampire Edward as he says to Bella, “Marry Me”. The reverse shot is another close-up, Bella giving a small gasp. At my screening, her exhalation lit up  the audience. The screen went black, the applause began.

Again, I’ve never seen a major Hollywood blockbuster that so completely catered to a woman’s sense of drama. I was happy for the couple, but an ovation? I ran  to beat the traffic. Everyone else stayed in the seats, the better to savor the earthquake of that final utterance. Marry me.

One other scene helped me to get my bearings, the only genuinely frightening moment in the movie, the single instant when I felt like I was actually watching a vampire flick.

Bella has jumped off a cliff into the water when off in the distance, she sees a shape coming towards her. It’s a vicious, red-haired vampire named Victoria, and she’s zooming in for the kill. We can barely see the creature, but she’s there, and she’s getting closer, a bad dream in liquid. That one scene had the dream-like feel of the best of modern Gothic, the ethereal malevolence of last year’s masterpiece Let The Right One In, but it was over before it started.

Nothing else, not the CGI werewolves or the hackneyed fey bloodsuckers in Italy, suggested anything more than boilerplate nods to an increasingly exhausted genre.

The gripping stuff in this movie comes in the close-ups of the three young leads. That’s where the terror and the beauty lies for those with eyes to see, and as I watched, the revelation hit me.

This wasn’t a vampire movie at all. This was a completely different genre, a kind of flick that hasn’t done huge box office in forty years, not since The Sound Of Music. New Moon is a woman’s picture, the sort of film that used to be directed by people like Douglas Sirk, Jean Negulescu and George Cukor. Think of Doris Day caught between Rock Hudson and Tony Randall, subtract the wit and sophistication, then replace all three people with teenagers, vampires and werewolves, and you get the picture.

I didn’t, actually, but that’s a good thing. That’s exactly why it will turn  out to be one of the most popular movies of all time. New Moon is, in fact, a sort of dawn  of a  new age at the movies. Women  have a reason to celebrate, even if this movie isn’t to their taste. Fanboys, on the  other hand? The young and old geeks who  have determined what we see at the movies for the last thirty years?

They’re about to get staked.