Eat Your Heart Out Laura Mulvey: A New Moon Reading

Rating: 3/10 (12 January 2010)

Like millions of other people, I flocked a screening of New Moon in its first week of release. I knew that I wouldn't enjoy it after what the first movie offered me, so saying that I did not enjoy it is like saying I went to a funeral and found it sad. Despite this, I still chose to be a sheep and follow along with the crowd to help break box office records.
The only way to experience this movie (in my humble opinion) is in an audience filled with swooning girls, just to really soak up the atmosphere that the film projects. That was my intention, and luckily I succeed by going to a screening early enough after the films release. I could tick the audible sighs and swooning sounds box on my expectations list, and soon to follow was the obligatory chest shots.
Without going into boring synopsis of the film, which would be as simple as a bus full of Miss America contestants, I can put forth a much easier description. Perhaps only students of film, scholars, academics and cultural critics and theorists will understand it, but regardless, here's my synopsis: Laura Mulvey, eat your heart out.
Mulvey's seminal theory (Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema) discussed the idea of the triple male gaze in the mid 1970s. This triple male gaze is the projection of a woman through a male characters eyes, put forth by a male author (director/writer) for a male audience. In New Moon we see this turned around. It is not the female that is the object of desire anymore, and instead it is the men who are subjected to the "to-be-looked-at-ness" aspect of Mulvey's claims. Her theories have been subverted, and not for the first time (let us not forget Casino Royale with Daniel Craig coming out of the water, like an Adonis, a la Ursula Andress style.) As we see this idea the idea of the triple maze gaze being turned on its head as at least a double female gaze now, if not even triple with Stephenie Meyer's book, the character of Bella and her male contemporaries (or should I say pieces of meat/eye candy.) But despite this, the Bella is still a dull girl who relies on the comfort of vampires and werewolves to stay amused and happy.
Consensus among female teenage (or tweenage) viewers finds the film "hot" and "steamy". Edward is "dreamy", Jacob is "ripped, but 12" and there is an instant divide between Team Edward and Team Jacob (one that could result in heads being ripped off and a ritualistic sacrifice in the name of the Twilight.) Perhaps it's because I've been watching too much True Blood, but the Twilight films leave something to be desired for me. I require that big bite that Twilight and New Moon lack in their "nothing much happens" plot lines. I don't consider myself an action chasing adrenaline junkie, but in I needed some proverbial action and I needed it desperately. Luckily New Moon offered me more than the previous instalment, but I was still not as satisfied as the tweens and "twi-hards", who seem to be feeding on some kind of unexplainable and unquenchable supernatural level.