Too much slo-mo: Stewart and Pattinson in New Moon
Dear Robert Pattinson
I just saw The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the second film adapted from US author Stephenie Meyer’s quartet, which seems to be on every teenage girl’s bookshelf. In these movies, your role is the 108-year-old vampire love object of the 18-year-old Bella, played by Kristen Stewart. The passionate intensity of the series’ young fanbase has raised a deafening media storm, placing you somewhere near the centre of popular culture in the western world at the moment. You’ll have no time to read this letter from there, of course, or think much, but New Moon made me think, and why not tell you those thoughts?
We met briefly in May, at a swanky party. You were drunk. Since the first Twilight movie had recently quickened the popular pulse, and because of the contours of your face, everyone was looking at you. I was reminded of Lauren Bacall, whose facial slopes were even more architectural than yours. In 1944, at the age of 20, she appeared in her first film, To Have and Have Not, and became the new girl in cinema—a moment that she now looks back on with bewilderment. As you know, you are the real girl in the Twilight movies. You are there to be looked at. You wear more make-up than Bella. You do less than Bacall had to do with Humphrey Bogart. You stand there, drop your chin and speak slowly—key points in the Bacall handbook.
Despite advice from Bogie, Bacall was pushed around by people who knew the public were keen to see what she would do next. Unfortunately, those people didn’t have a clue what that should be. In the end, she made Confidential Agent (1945). Watch it from behind your hands—it’s that bad—and take note. Because it looks like the people behind the Twilight movies don’t have a clue what they, or you, should do next.
The first Twilight film, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, has its own drowsy poetry. Meyer’s theme of the teenage discovery of the id, the rainy weather in Forks, Washington and the foresty, kingdom-of-the-moon setting fed off each other. The result had a lovely grisaille, girly, emo languor. The sequel has the same setting and female point of view, but it is more cocky. It knows that teenage girls are going to see it twice and buy the DVD and soundtrack, and it is spoilt by this knowledge.
Chris Weitz took over as director for this second film, and it seems to me that its core—the internal triangle of teenage love; the claustrophobia of trees and rain—has been gatecrashed by people with dollar signs in their eyes and sales on their breath. The film has turned outwards, into the world.
Such turning makes bad art, Robert. You must have noticed that the close-ups where you and Bella whisper breathless romance to each other are now slo-mo, not emo. They’re like pressing pause on the DVD and staring for as long as your heart desires. I’m not against gazing up at the screen, and I like it when the story cedes to other things, but those close-ups were a marketer’s dream, not a filmmaker’s. Their shape and length were made by concerns outside art or fun.
If the ending of New Moon hadn’t made me so angry, I wouldn’t have troubled you with my thoughts. This is a fault of the page as well as the screen, given how faithfully the films follow the novels. But where the first made a virtue of it, the second film’s faithfulness feels to me like a failure. New Moon finishes with you asking Bella to marry you—and this is a betrayal of the first film’s needling, rebellious energy. The marriage proposal is more reactionary than Disney, more conservative than, say, Gone with the Wind, which was made 70 years ago when the Catholic National League of Decency had its hand on the movie rudder.
It is always harder for a saga to continue than to begin, just as it is easier for a star to be born than continue shining. But tell me that you threw the script across the room when you read your last lines; that you noticed an ending like this could ruin your career. Why? Because it makes it look like you’d betray the young confidence of the first film to retell teenage girls that the most exciting thing that could happen to them is to be proposed to by a man with cheekbones.
Bacall didn’t quite realise that she had power in Hollywood. You have power, Robert, not only over fees and contracts, but ideas. Use it to make each of your films more thought provoking, not less. New Moon is a gloss on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, as you well know but, compared to the play, it’s sappy and supine. You shouldn’t let yourself be happy with that.
Yours Mark
Dear Robert Pattinson
I just saw The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the second film adapted from US author Stephenie Meyer’s quartet, which seems to be on every teenage girl’s bookshelf. In these movies, your role is the 108-year-old vampire love object of the 18-year-old Bella, played by Kristen Stewart. The passionate intensity of the series’ young fanbase has raised a deafening media storm, placing you somewhere near the centre of popular culture in the western world at the moment. You’ll have no time to read this letter from there, of course, or think much, but New Moon made me think, and why not tell you those thoughts?
We met briefly in May, at a swanky party. You were drunk. Since the first Twilight movie had recently quickened the popular pulse, and because of the contours of your face, everyone was looking at you. I was reminded of Lauren Bacall, whose facial slopes were even more architectural than yours. In 1944, at the age of 20, she appeared in her first film, To Have and Have Not, and became the new girl in cinema—a moment that she now looks back on with bewilderment. As you know, you are the real girl in the Twilight movies. You are there to be looked at. You wear more make-up than Bella. You do less than Bacall had to do with Humphrey Bogart. You stand there, drop your chin and speak slowly—key points in the Bacall handbook.
Despite advice from Bogie, Bacall was pushed around by people who knew the public were keen to see what she would do next. Unfortunately, those people didn’t have a clue what that should be. In the end, she made Confidential Agent (1945). Watch it from behind your hands—it’s that bad—and take note. Because it looks like the people behind the Twilight movies don’t have a clue what they, or you, should do next.
The first Twilight film, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, has its own drowsy poetry. Meyer’s theme of the teenage discovery of the id, the rainy weather in Forks, Washington and the foresty, kingdom-of-the-moon setting fed off each other. The result had a lovely grisaille, girly, emo languor. The sequel has the same setting and female point of view, but it is more cocky. It knows that teenage girls are going to see it twice and buy the DVD and soundtrack, and it is spoilt by this knowledge.
Chris Weitz took over as director for this second film, and it seems to me that its core—the internal triangle of teenage love; the claustrophobia of trees and rain—has been gatecrashed by people with dollar signs in their eyes and sales on their breath. The film has turned outwards, into the world.
Such turning makes bad art, Robert. You must have noticed that the close-ups where you and Bella whisper breathless romance to each other are now slo-mo, not emo. They’re like pressing pause on the DVD and staring for as long as your heart desires. I’m not against gazing up at the screen, and I like it when the story cedes to other things, but those close-ups were a marketer’s dream, not a filmmaker’s. Their shape and length were made by concerns outside art or fun.
If the ending of New Moon hadn’t made me so angry, I wouldn’t have troubled you with my thoughts. This is a fault of the page as well as the screen, given how faithfully the films follow the novels. But where the first made a virtue of it, the second film’s faithfulness feels to me like a failure. New Moon finishes with you asking Bella to marry you—and this is a betrayal of the first film’s needling, rebellious energy. The marriage proposal is more reactionary than Disney, more conservative than, say, Gone with the Wind, which was made 70 years ago when the Catholic National League of Decency had its hand on the movie rudder.
It is always harder for a saga to continue than to begin, just as it is easier for a star to be born than continue shining. But tell me that you threw the script across the room when you read your last lines; that you noticed an ending like this could ruin your career. Why? Because it makes it look like you’d betray the young confidence of the first film to retell teenage girls that the most exciting thing that could happen to them is to be proposed to by a man with cheekbones.
Bacall didn’t quite realise that she had power in Hollywood. You have power, Robert, not only over fees and contracts, but ideas. Use it to make each of your films more thought provoking, not less. New Moon is a gloss on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, as you well know but, compared to the play, it’s sappy and supine. You shouldn’t let yourself be happy with that.
Yours Mark
