The Germans have a word for being disappointed at not being disappointed enough. It has no direct English translation and I also can’t remember the word, but it is one of those words that seems uniquely German. It also perfectly describes the feeling that I had when I read this section of Twilight, Bella is in the lunch hall feeling morose at the fact that no one sees her as the delicate snowflake that she obviously thinks that she is while at the same time ignoring all of the other people that so far seem to be attempting to make nice with the new girl. She looks over and sees a table full of people that are apart from everyone else, naturally it makes her curious.
It makes her curious because she wants to be at that table. She knows that everyone knows who they are, they are the subject of gossip and inquiry, and most importantly they are not mingling with everyone else. In college I used to sit by myself in the lunch hall too, but not because I had no friends but because my schedule was odd. I wasn’t the type of person, like Bella, who sat alone wondering who noticed that they were sitting alone. This, however, isn’t what failed to disappoint me. It’s her description of them, “The tall one was statuesque. She had a beautiful figure, the kind you saw on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, the kind that made every girl around her take a hit on her self-esteem just by being in the same room.”
Followed by: “But all this is not why I couldn’t look away. I stare [sic] because their faces, so different, so similar were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine or painted by an old master as the face of an angel. It was hard decide who was the most beautiful–maybe the perfect blonde girl, or the bronze haired boy.”
There is an X-Files episode from way back in season 5, “Bad Blood,” which had Agent Mulder kill a teenage boy whom he thought was a Vampire. In the Twilight Zone-esque ending, typical of the “Monster of the Week” episodes it turns out that not only was he a vampire but the whole town was as well. While the episode was an entertaining one, the relevance here is that the vampire itself was not attractive nor debonair nor aristocratic. He was a misfit that the others disdained for his ways. Part of me wants this in Vampire fiction, the vampire who is just a jerk, not evil, but what we would call a douchebag. I would also like to see the Vampires who are not drop dead gorgeous (Blade for example) nor the complete monster (the Nosferatu clan of the little known “Kindred: The Embraced” show) since pop-culture has since dropped all actual reference to Stoker’s book.
Vampires were never attractive nor sexy in appearance until Bela Lugosi donned the cape and medallion attempting to seduce Helen Chandler in 1931. Before that the physical deformities were omnipresent. They had to be because since the Elizabethan era (and probably before but I wasn’t a literature major) evil had to be represented physically. Look at Shakespeare, Richard III had a hump back; Professor Moriarty had an over pronounced forehead (but not too overpronounced as Holmes observes) even the Vampyre of Polidori wasn’t portrayed as being beautiful, but merely an aristocrat, although he was sexually effective.*
We can blame Polidori/Byron (since the story was falsely attributed to Byron when it was first published) for the alluring Vampire, but more accurately we must drop it on Lugosi since his film portrayal was so iconic that over seventy years later you can still buy his costume around Halloween. In this book, do we have an excuse?
Well, I don’t want to read about ugly people do you? Aristotle said that in order to be happy one must be on the better end of the attractiveness spectrum. It sounds superficial, but we are wired this way. The more attractive the easier a person is going to have of it. Plus, we have already seen Bella shun aside the greasy overweight guy in her class so she needs some other group of loners that she must be drawn to. That is why I am probably not disappointed enough, I understand Bella’s character to be superficial and since in the long run we know she’s going to be drawn to one of the Vampires then I don’t really want the story to be about how she falls in love with the ugly kid who happens to also be a Vampire.
One final note: I love this, “…from somewhere in Alaska.” I asked for it last entry and I got it. The Vampire clan, it is explained came from Alaska originally. It was pointed out to me that one of the problems with living in Alaska is that for every month of night, you do get that much time of day as well. The cloud cover of Washington state makes more and more sense.
*And this probably has more to do with Polidori being jealous of Lord Byron’s way with women viewing him more as a predator than anyone of true worth.
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