Twilight: Eclipse, the third movie in the angsty teen horror saga, is currently breaking box office records around the U.S. The audiences packing cineplexes across the nation are largely made up of teen girls — or teen girls at heart — who were transfixed by Stephanie Meyer's melodramatic series of young adult novels. After finishing the first Twilight book, writes Dana Stevens in Slate, you wouldn't catch me picking up another one "for anything less than a five-figure raise." But I'm hooked on the Twilight movies, she says. It's not because they're particularly good (the best you can say about this one is it's a "competently made bit of Gothic Schlock"), but because they are "terrifying, transfixing, and, yes, moving bulletins from the trenches of contemporary American girlhood." Here's an excerpt:
"The common object of Edward's and Jacob's passion, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), is indeed passive and blank, a transparent proxy for the audience. This episode takes Bella's passivity to new heights, with one plot contrivance requiring her to literally be carried from place to place by Jacob.
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