Fiction. Desire. Fantasy. Power. Death. Identity. -- Twilight
March 2, 2024 12:33 PM Subscribe
ContraPoints has a new video essay out, titled simply Twilight [2h53m]. It covers quite a lot. Like a lot more than you think it's going to cover. I enjoyed it and learned things.
Okay, just because this is going to bug and distract me, what's the thing that looks like a stock photo of a family sitting on the couch about? Are they someone I should know?
posted by mittens at 2:16 PM on March 2
posted by mittens at 2:16 PM on March 2
It's covering up genitals with family values, I assume. I don't know more than that.
posted by hippybear at 2:17 PM on March 2 [2 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 2:17 PM on March 2 [2 favorites]
I don’t care about Twilight, and I’m not even sure if this video essay really needs to make me think, because just the first 10 minutes are so funny that’s enough to keep me watching!
posted by rikschell at 2:19 PM on March 2 [1 favorite]
posted by rikschell at 2:19 PM on March 2 [1 favorite]
Missed opportunity to quote Byron's The Age of Bronze at 35:30 or so.
posted by mittens at 2:57 PM on March 2
posted by mittens at 2:57 PM on March 2
Also wholeheartedly endorse never ever quoting Lacan about anything.
posted by mittens at 3:03 PM on March 2
posted by mittens at 3:03 PM on March 2
wisdom is soothing...but it's not exciting
posted by mittens at 3:11 PM on March 2 [1 favorite]
posted by mittens at 3:11 PM on March 2 [1 favorite]
I watched all three hours last night and it was really amazing, so many things to think about. The thing I woke up thinking about was how Contrapoints says that the fantasy of being forced to submit to something forbidden that we yearn for is not the same as being forced in real life to endure something we do not want. Most rational people know this, but it does seem as though it is always something that needs to be pointed out.
posted by maggiemaggie at 3:30 PM on March 2 [8 favorites]
posted by maggiemaggie at 3:30 PM on March 2 [8 favorites]
I haven't finished the video yet; I got 41 minutes in, and although I generally like Contrapoints a lot I found myself really wanting to argue with this video, so I took a break to think.
I don't think she's wrong, but I do think my experience of reading Twilight was really different from her experience of reading Twilight. I can get on board with an asshole love interest. I can get on board with a jealous, controlling, possessive love interest. But for whatever reason - and if I had to speculate, I'd put $10 on "Meyer's control of her own material" and $10 on "my own emotional baggage" - Edward reads more to me as "mundane garden-variety shitty boyfriend" than "dangerous alluring romantic hero."
I am capable of understanding the allure of the Edwards of the world. Too capable! But whether I'm capable of accepting it as fantasy depends on whether I'm able to properly slot it into my brain as a fantasy, rather than having it constantly sloshing out of those boundaries in a way that makes me think "Oh no, Bella, you are in danger!", and... they were not books that worked for me on that level. Which is okay, and doesn't mean that I want to go all moral panicky on people who like the books.
(I did laugh at the point where Contrapoints said that aromantic people would be absolutely perplexed by Bella. Well, maybe that's an explanation. I don't think I'm aromantic but I'm certainly a-something.)
posted by Jeanne at 5:50 PM on March 2 [1 favorite]
I don't think she's wrong, but I do think my experience of reading Twilight was really different from her experience of reading Twilight. I can get on board with an asshole love interest. I can get on board with a jealous, controlling, possessive love interest. But for whatever reason - and if I had to speculate, I'd put $10 on "Meyer's control of her own material" and $10 on "my own emotional baggage" - Edward reads more to me as "mundane garden-variety shitty boyfriend" than "dangerous alluring romantic hero."
I am capable of understanding the allure of the Edwards of the world. Too capable! But whether I'm capable of accepting it as fantasy depends on whether I'm able to properly slot it into my brain as a fantasy, rather than having it constantly sloshing out of those boundaries in a way that makes me think "Oh no, Bella, you are in danger!", and... they were not books that worked for me on that level. Which is okay, and doesn't mean that I want to go all moral panicky on people who like the books.
(I did laugh at the point where Contrapoints said that aromantic people would be absolutely perplexed by Bella. Well, maybe that's an explanation. I don't think I'm aromantic but I'm certainly a-something.)
posted by Jeanne at 5:50 PM on March 2 [1 favorite]
Ha! I sat down for lunch today, looked for something to watch, and saw Contrapoints was back. Started to watch and just watched it all. I have no interest in Twilight but Natalie Wynn can take pop culture and mine it for insights into culture, psychology, and more. It was an enlightening three hours. Once it was over, I popped over to the blue and there it is there! Coincidence? There is so much in this video to digest and think about. And no, I’m not about to either read or watch Twilight. Ms Wynn has done it for me and has given me a lot to consider.
YouTube censorship? Is Nietzsche taboo? She called him Knudson, while showing his picture and quoting him.
posted by njohnson23 at 6:35 PM on March 2 [1 favorite]
YouTube censorship? Is Nietzsche taboo? She called him Knudson, while showing his picture and quoting him.
posted by njohnson23 at 6:35 PM on March 2 [1 favorite]
What's great about this video is also its weakness, I think. There's an enormous breadth here--lots of topics coming together, sometimes unexpectedly (could have anticipated Sade, would not have occurred to me we'd see Bataille)--but maybe because it's a popularization, it never goes deeper than 101. And that's mostly fine. There's a lot to say at that level! Clearly! Three hours of saying things! Enjoyable hours too--I really liked it. (Reconciling male elephants!)
But by the end, it just feels like there should be something deeper to say than, like, "there's unity in duality" or whatever. Using a spinny evolving yin-yang symbol to make the point felt like a subtle message that this was not to be taken seriously.
What we never really hear is, maybe, the truth that we don't know why we like what we like. We're mysteries to ourselves. We try to explain ourselves by taking each other as symbolic, but that's really "everything looks like a nail" territory, and it's not to be trusted. We're not going to understand anything by going back to Freud, because Freud didn't understand anything. Our ability to clump things into categories--our addiction to it--does not suggest reality in itself falls into easy binaries, dualities, or really any category at all. (For instance, sado-masochism as a pair of concepts comes up a lot in the video, but why aren't we interrogating why we are trying to clump together a huge mass of human behavior and desire into...like...these two guys who wrote about the stuff they fantasized about?) Actually, I'll break out of the parentheses there and extend the point a little: The weakness of the video is that it's a hostage to a particular intellectual lineage of analysis and categorization that's actually kind of hostile to any exploration of human nature that won't fit on a chart. There's a reason things keep falling back into binaries, and that's because this whole lineage is basically coming up with two guys and squeezing all of humanity into one of their two heads.
The answer to why people liked Twilight should be refusing the question. We don't know. Our psychology is mostly a failure. Our philosophy has become incomprehensibly obscure, useless for understanding ourselves. People like different things, and sometimes the same person likes one thing one day and something else the next. And it drives us crazy that we don't understand it. Billions, trillions of dollars spent by marketing, some frantic worker at HP praying, please, god, let me understand what will make someone truly desire an inkjet printer. 75% of reddit is guys asking other guys why girls don't like them. Nobody understands anything.
And there's something kind of beautiful about our persistence in the face of that ignorance! Because we keep asking and asking, and producing massive 3-hour videos that took 18 months to write, and we still don't know if we're any closer to the truth. But we should probably be honest about that.
posted by mittens at 7:14 PM on March 2 [10 favorites]
But by the end, it just feels like there should be something deeper to say than, like, "there's unity in duality" or whatever. Using a spinny evolving yin-yang symbol to make the point felt like a subtle message that this was not to be taken seriously.
What we never really hear is, maybe, the truth that we don't know why we like what we like. We're mysteries to ourselves. We try to explain ourselves by taking each other as symbolic, but that's really "everything looks like a nail" territory, and it's not to be trusted. We're not going to understand anything by going back to Freud, because Freud didn't understand anything. Our ability to clump things into categories--our addiction to it--does not suggest reality in itself falls into easy binaries, dualities, or really any category at all. (For instance, sado-masochism as a pair of concepts comes up a lot in the video, but why aren't we interrogating why we are trying to clump together a huge mass of human behavior and desire into...like...these two guys who wrote about the stuff they fantasized about?) Actually, I'll break out of the parentheses there and extend the point a little: The weakness of the video is that it's a hostage to a particular intellectual lineage of analysis and categorization that's actually kind of hostile to any exploration of human nature that won't fit on a chart. There's a reason things keep falling back into binaries, and that's because this whole lineage is basically coming up with two guys and squeezing all of humanity into one of their two heads.
The answer to why people liked Twilight should be refusing the question. We don't know. Our psychology is mostly a failure. Our philosophy has become incomprehensibly obscure, useless for understanding ourselves. People like different things, and sometimes the same person likes one thing one day and something else the next. And it drives us crazy that we don't understand it. Billions, trillions of dollars spent by marketing, some frantic worker at HP praying, please, god, let me understand what will make someone truly desire an inkjet printer. 75% of reddit is guys asking other guys why girls don't like them. Nobody understands anything.
And there's something kind of beautiful about our persistence in the face of that ignorance! Because we keep asking and asking, and producing massive 3-hour videos that took 18 months to write, and we still don't know if we're any closer to the truth. But we should probably be honest about that.
posted by mittens at 7:14 PM on March 2 [10 favorites]
Whoo boy this was my introduction to the concept of Snapewives, and it's knowledge I wish I could forget.
posted by Faintdreams at 1:22 PM on March 3 [3 favorites]
posted by Faintdreams at 1:22 PM on March 3 [3 favorites]
> What's great about this video is also its weakness, I think. There's an enormous breadth here--lots of topics coming together, sometimes unexpectedly (could have anticipated Sade, would not have occurred to me we'd see Bataille)--but maybe because it's a popularization, it never goes deeper than 101.
why does it seem 101-level to you? i thought the piece was remarkably sophisticated/subtle/brilliant, and that part of its sophistication/subtlety/brilliance was that it included exactly enough 101-level context to guide non-specialists to and through the difficult parts.
> But by the end, it just feels like there should be something deeper to say than, like, "there's unity in duality" or whatever. Using a spinny evolving yin-yang symbol to make the point felt like a subtle message that this was not to be taken seriously.
so something you have to know about natalie wynn is that in addition to being a trained philosopher, a goddamned genius, and a professional Internet tiresias, she is also someone who does a tremendous amount of psychedelics. so many shrooms, so much acid. and a lil bit of dmt too.
the psychedelia-flavored portions of her recent pieces can look pretty cringe at first, but she makes it clear that she's aware of that. for my part i think it's worth pushing past the initial cringe reaction and taking those portions seriously. like, she's addressing some fairly serious ontological concerns by the end of this essay, and there's no way to do real serious ontology without getting at least a little bit weird slash cringe.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 3:10 PM on March 3 [3 favorites]
why does it seem 101-level to you? i thought the piece was remarkably sophisticated/subtle/brilliant, and that part of its sophistication/subtlety/brilliance was that it included exactly enough 101-level context to guide non-specialists to and through the difficult parts.
> But by the end, it just feels like there should be something deeper to say than, like, "there's unity in duality" or whatever. Using a spinny evolving yin-yang symbol to make the point felt like a subtle message that this was not to be taken seriously.
so something you have to know about natalie wynn is that in addition to being a trained philosopher, a goddamned genius, and a professional Internet tiresias, she is also someone who does a tremendous amount of psychedelics. so many shrooms, so much acid. and a lil bit of dmt too.
the psychedelia-flavored portions of her recent pieces can look pretty cringe at first, but she makes it clear that she's aware of that. for my part i think it's worth pushing past the initial cringe reaction and taking those portions seriously. like, she's addressing some fairly serious ontological concerns by the end of this essay, and there's no way to do real serious ontology without getting at least a little bit weird slash cringe.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 3:10 PM on March 3 [3 favorites]
bombastic lowercase pronouncements, I'm shaken to my core by your capitalisation of "Internet". Are you sure you're you?
posted by inexorably_forward at 12:51 PM on March 4 [3 favorites]
posted by inexorably_forward at 12:51 PM on March 4 [3 favorites]
I am going to fuck up this explanation so badly--but I'm going to try to balance that by being brief.
So, you know in Foucault's Pendulum, there's the conversation about how all the numbers in ceremonial magic are only magical because they refer back to some quantity of body parts. "There have to be ten commandments because, if there were twelve, when the priest counts one, two, three, holding up his fingers, and comes to the last two, he'd have to borrow a hand from the sancristan." It's a silly conversation (well, it's pillow-talk if I remember correctly but the internet archive will only show me so much of it, and I can't find my copy), but it's true. All our categorizations are limited because they're based on the bits of the world we can see and make sense of. Fingers, toes, knees, nose. But while this rightly makes us suspicious of convenient binaries, what it should do is make us suspicious of analogies in general. We need to scrape all metaphors from the heels of our boots.
And we need to be especially suspicious and scrapeful when it comes to contentious questions that have a long and difficult history, like the question of Why Ladies Always Read The Wrong Books. Of course Natalie knows this, it's the whole first part of the video, and she delivers the joke about Shamela I have been waiting for all my life, so I have to emphasize I'm not complaining or detracting here...it's good stuff!
But I think there's still an error--a numerological/analogical error--one of identification. And it is, I think, the same error made by people who would like to burn Twilight for being so dangerous and abusey. (or...well...does anyone care about this book anymore? This was honestly the first I've heard anyone talking about it for years, and I talk to romance writers, like, every five minutes of my life.)
Why Ladies like Twilight: There are two answers. They identify with Bella (which is either Bad, because Bella is weak and Ladies should not want to identify with weakness (including spiritual weakness--I could have watched the part about Barbara Cartland and Jackie Collins for another seven hours), or Good, because Bella is an empty space where one can project one's own id), or with Edward (which, in the video, is only portrayed as Good). (and presumably no one identifies with Jacob, who, as the symbol of frustrated desire, is kind of a let-down.)
But I want to suggest that the explanation is insufficient because it relies on identification. Because it analogizes one's relationship to the text with the relationship within the book. And in fact because our culture has trouble understanding women outside of their interpersonal relationships.
Natalie briefly touches on Hannibal. Who do we identify with in this relationship? Well, I don't think we can really identify with Hannibal himself. He's a character very carefully designed so that we are not allowed to really understand him. We are not in his head. We are not given anything to identify with. (You could maybe make the argument that the books give you that opportunity--setting aside Hannibal Rising as the misbegotten fanfic it is--but your time spent in Lecter's head in Harris's books is purposefully alienating and strange.) Graham, who is less a character and more a site of torture, a walking trauma-sponge, is also not, I think, exactly able to be identified with. Rather, what is attractive in this work is the relationship itself and not our relationship with either the work or the characters. We are not exactly analogizing or identifying or imagining ourselves in the same dining room. We are simply in the presence of a kind of alien desire, and we are allured by its interest and danger.
So, I should be careful here. It will sound like I am saying that no one identifies with characters, no one sees themselves in relation to the characters, and obviously that's not true. What I'm saying is that we can't find the truth of a book's appeal--a genre's appeal--by a binary identification/analogical analysis--by asking "which of these characters do you feel like, when you read"?
I think this is even true in the less...ah...complex texts she brings up, like the reverse harem books, where I guess it's very easy to say, "the reader likes this because she likes the idea of all these guys fighting for her love, but also all of them taking care of her"--reflected in Natalie's analysis of the Cuck Tent. One of the basic propositions of romance novels is, the hero is not disappointing. In real life...well. You know? There's a youthful energy (euphemistically) with a promise to never let you down, while in real life, people are always letting you down. And it is very easy to analogize the desire that is powered by that energy, to the desire one feels when reading, but again, I want to overlay Hannibal and ask, are we actually watching identification? (Because if we are, if it's that simple, then we don't need a three-hour video about it!) (And why is Hannibal--with its constant threat of death, torture and cannibalism--alluring, when 120 Days of Sodom is not? Why does one attract, and the other repel? I mean, there's a few easy answers there, but--)
Oh god, I promised this was going to be brief and I haven't even gotten to Freud yet. Can I just throw out there, without explanation, that we cannot and must not use Freud to analyze literature? That his complexes are just the most simplistic analogies possible? And in fact that Freud illustrates the whole problem here, with his initial interest in Fleiss's weird obsession with the nose, that wasn't cured by piling a lot of Greek myths and pedestrian observations on top of things? "Babies sure poop a lot, I bet THAT explains a thing or two about people!" There is no id! There is no ego, no superego! There is nothing primal within us, there are no layers beneath layers--there is only consciousness, and everything is up, up at the very top, where we can overthink everything.
We have to develop some other methods of understanding literature, our relation to it, and the pleasures it offers. We know the 17th-century complaints were wrong. We know Freud is baseless. Postmodernism is increasingly illegible the further we get from it.
Maybe I should have just started with a question, and left all this other stuff off. Here's the question: If identifying with Bella is a source of pleasure in Twilight, what is the source of that source of pleasure? Why is identification pleasurable? If it's so pleasurable then why are human beings so awful and evil? Why are we not just sinking into a soft warm ocean of empathy, all the time? Why is analogizing such a pleasure to us?
I think that's where I'm going with my feelings about the video. It's actually kind of where I went when I watched...oh, what was it, was it The Darkness, that kind of felt like a book report on a bunch of Rictor Norton prefaces? There's a simple analogical reason we like things, but there has to be a really interesting reason (I hope) for why there should ever be simple analogical reasons for anything. We have some theories about why we like what we like, but they're all about humans and relationships, and at the level on which these desires are created, there are neither humans nor relationships. So I'm going to need a 6-12 hour video sequel that goes into that.
posted by mittens at 3:57 PM on March 4 [4 favorites]
So, you know in Foucault's Pendulum, there's the conversation about how all the numbers in ceremonial magic are only magical because they refer back to some quantity of body parts. "There have to be ten commandments because, if there were twelve, when the priest counts one, two, three, holding up his fingers, and comes to the last two, he'd have to borrow a hand from the sancristan." It's a silly conversation (well, it's pillow-talk if I remember correctly but the internet archive will only show me so much of it, and I can't find my copy), but it's true. All our categorizations are limited because they're based on the bits of the world we can see and make sense of. Fingers, toes, knees, nose. But while this rightly makes us suspicious of convenient binaries, what it should do is make us suspicious of analogies in general. We need to scrape all metaphors from the heels of our boots.
And we need to be especially suspicious and scrapeful when it comes to contentious questions that have a long and difficult history, like the question of Why Ladies Always Read The Wrong Books. Of course Natalie knows this, it's the whole first part of the video, and she delivers the joke about Shamela I have been waiting for all my life, so I have to emphasize I'm not complaining or detracting here...it's good stuff!
But I think there's still an error--a numerological/analogical error--one of identification. And it is, I think, the same error made by people who would like to burn Twilight for being so dangerous and abusey. (or...well...does anyone care about this book anymore? This was honestly the first I've heard anyone talking about it for years, and I talk to romance writers, like, every five minutes of my life.)
Why Ladies like Twilight: There are two answers. They identify with Bella (which is either Bad, because Bella is weak and Ladies should not want to identify with weakness (including spiritual weakness--I could have watched the part about Barbara Cartland and Jackie Collins for another seven hours), or Good, because Bella is an empty space where one can project one's own id), or with Edward (which, in the video, is only portrayed as Good). (and presumably no one identifies with Jacob, who, as the symbol of frustrated desire, is kind of a let-down.)
But I want to suggest that the explanation is insufficient because it relies on identification. Because it analogizes one's relationship to the text with the relationship within the book. And in fact because our culture has trouble understanding women outside of their interpersonal relationships.
Natalie briefly touches on Hannibal. Who do we identify with in this relationship? Well, I don't think we can really identify with Hannibal himself. He's a character very carefully designed so that we are not allowed to really understand him. We are not in his head. We are not given anything to identify with. (You could maybe make the argument that the books give you that opportunity--setting aside Hannibal Rising as the misbegotten fanfic it is--but your time spent in Lecter's head in Harris's books is purposefully alienating and strange.) Graham, who is less a character and more a site of torture, a walking trauma-sponge, is also not, I think, exactly able to be identified with. Rather, what is attractive in this work is the relationship itself and not our relationship with either the work or the characters. We are not exactly analogizing or identifying or imagining ourselves in the same dining room. We are simply in the presence of a kind of alien desire, and we are allured by its interest and danger.
So, I should be careful here. It will sound like I am saying that no one identifies with characters, no one sees themselves in relation to the characters, and obviously that's not true. What I'm saying is that we can't find the truth of a book's appeal--a genre's appeal--by a binary identification/analogical analysis--by asking "which of these characters do you feel like, when you read"?
I think this is even true in the less...ah...complex texts she brings up, like the reverse harem books, where I guess it's very easy to say, "the reader likes this because she likes the idea of all these guys fighting for her love, but also all of them taking care of her"--reflected in Natalie's analysis of the Cuck Tent. One of the basic propositions of romance novels is, the hero is not disappointing. In real life...well. You know? There's a youthful energy (euphemistically) with a promise to never let you down, while in real life, people are always letting you down. And it is very easy to analogize the desire that is powered by that energy, to the desire one feels when reading, but again, I want to overlay Hannibal and ask, are we actually watching identification? (Because if we are, if it's that simple, then we don't need a three-hour video about it!) (And why is Hannibal--with its constant threat of death, torture and cannibalism--alluring, when 120 Days of Sodom is not? Why does one attract, and the other repel? I mean, there's a few easy answers there, but--)
Oh god, I promised this was going to be brief and I haven't even gotten to Freud yet. Can I just throw out there, without explanation, that we cannot and must not use Freud to analyze literature? That his complexes are just the most simplistic analogies possible? And in fact that Freud illustrates the whole problem here, with his initial interest in Fleiss's weird obsession with the nose, that wasn't cured by piling a lot of Greek myths and pedestrian observations on top of things? "Babies sure poop a lot, I bet THAT explains a thing or two about people!" There is no id! There is no ego, no superego! There is nothing primal within us, there are no layers beneath layers--there is only consciousness, and everything is up, up at the very top, where we can overthink everything.
We have to develop some other methods of understanding literature, our relation to it, and the pleasures it offers. We know the 17th-century complaints were wrong. We know Freud is baseless. Postmodernism is increasingly illegible the further we get from it.
Maybe I should have just started with a question, and left all this other stuff off. Here's the question: If identifying with Bella is a source of pleasure in Twilight, what is the source of that source of pleasure? Why is identification pleasurable? If it's so pleasurable then why are human beings so awful and evil? Why are we not just sinking into a soft warm ocean of empathy, all the time? Why is analogizing such a pleasure to us?
I think that's where I'm going with my feelings about the video. It's actually kind of where I went when I watched...oh, what was it, was it The Darkness, that kind of felt like a book report on a bunch of Rictor Norton prefaces? There's a simple analogical reason we like things, but there has to be a really interesting reason (I hope) for why there should ever be simple analogical reasons for anything. We have some theories about why we like what we like, but they're all about humans and relationships, and at the level on which these desires are created, there are neither humans nor relationships. So I'm going to need a 6-12 hour video sequel that goes into that.
posted by mittens at 3:57 PM on March 4 [4 favorites]
> bombastic lowercase pronouncements, I'm shaken to my core by your capitalisation of "Internet". Are you sure you're you?
i invite you to look closely at all of my comments to date. if you're into efficiency i recommend starting with the ones about search engines.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:10 AM on March 6
i invite you to look closely at all of my comments to date. if you're into efficiency i recommend starting with the ones about search engines.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:10 AM on March 6
More importantly, what does it mean to capitalize the internet? What is your relationship to the internet? Is the capitalization of the internet an expression of your disdain for it? A statement that you are refusing to make a genuine pronouncement on it, bombastic or otherwise? Or perhaps you identify with the internet, it is your only true I. Are you the internet? Or do you yearn for the love of the internet? Maybe both? Or is it something else entirely? If so, what?
posted by Reverend John at 7:24 PM on March 16
posted by Reverend John at 7:24 PM on March 16
I don't think there's too much to read into there. Keep in mind, the Internet is the worldwide "interconnected network" (or "internet"). Like double-spacing after a period, some fingers just do it out of habit.
posted by mikelieman at 3:19 AM on March 17 [1 favorite]
posted by mikelieman at 3:19 AM on March 17 [1 favorite]
So it's nothing to do with that 1993 CBC report about the growing phenomenon... of Internet?
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:51 AM on March 17
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:51 AM on March 17
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posted by SansPoint at 1:33 PM on March 2 [3 favorites]