Adapting a book for screen must be a tricky thing to do. I’m intrigued by the choices and changes that a screenwriter makes. My question is always “why?” and often it’s said in a moan whilst holding my head – “whyyyyy???” Haha ;-D
Breaking Dawn is an impressive adaptation that follows the book pretty faithfully. The key omission that really stuck out and disappointed me though was in the process of Bella’s transformation.
The whole fascination with vampires encouraged by the Twilight series has concerned many parents and youth workers the world over. The Cullens and certain aspects of being a vampire – immortality, perfect beauty, amazing athleticism, being virtually indestructible, etc. – are very enticing. How many young people are seduced by the idea of this way of life and either become obsessed by it or try to find ways to explore the possibility of its reality (however crazy that seems)?
Stephenie Meyer tackles these concerns well by providing the graphic account of Bella’s trauma during her “conversion” from human to vampire. After hearing about the effect of the venom as it works through her body, who would want to follow that path?
“I wanted to raise my arms and claw my chest open and rip the heart from it – anything to get rid of this torture…The fire blazed hotter and I wanted to scream. To beg for someone to kill me now, before I lived one more second in this pain. But I couldn’t move my lips…Why couldn’t I move? Why couldn’t I scream?….for a never-ending space, that was all there was. Just the fiery torture and my soundless shrieks, pleading for death to come. Nothing else, not even time…one infinite moment of pain…the endless burn raged on…I had just enough strength to lie there unmoving while I was charred alive.” [Breaking Dawn]
In the film, however, we only get a couple of seconds’ insight into this trauma and if you hadn’t read the books then you’d have no idea what those brief seconds were even about. I expected more later in the process, giving a better insight into what was happening, but that one was it.
So why? I think Stephenie Meyer wants to make it clear that becoming a vampire is far from fun and that as much as we love the Cullens, no one should try to become like them (if that were possible!). However, I think the film-makers are more interested in continuing to present their heroes and their way of life as desirable and attractive. A traumatic transformation makes it much less desirable! It’s not as though they are shy of trauma having just completed a horrendous makeshift Caesarean, followed by a massive hypodermic of vampire venom straight to the heart!!
Immortality IS a fascinating thing though!
Humans try to fight death and the aging process in so many different ways from creams to plastic surgery and even as far as cryogenics!
It’s not really surprising because eternity has been set in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11). It’s what we were created for! We weren’t supposed to decay and die – that’s the consequence of sin in the world. God originally designed us to live forever.
To be honest with you, for quite a while I didn’t much fancy the idea of heaven and living forever. The problem came through a popular Christmas carol containing the lines - “when like stars, his children crowned, all in white will wait around” – which conjured up an image of a sterile dentist waiting room :-( Now I don’t do white and I definitely don’t do waiting around! Life is too short. Even in eternity, life would be too short for just sitting around, twiddling my thumbs :-D
(To be fair to the carol, I don’t think that’s the meaning of “wait” it’s referring to, but you can see why as a teenager I got the wrong idea.)
Now that I have a more Biblical idea about heaven, I can’t wait!! I love travelling and in heaven there will be a new heaven and earth to explore and a whole eternity to do it! Woohoo :-) I’ll be able to go and see all those amazing places on my bucket list and they’ll actually be even more amazing than they are now coz they’ll be perfect, as they were meant to be. I’ll have work to do that will never give me a “Monday morning” feeling and will have an infinite amount of time to spend hanging out with amazing people!
This isn’t the immortality offered in Twilight though, which is about living forever in a messed up world. The eternal life Jesus offers is about living forever in a glorious place free from suffering, sickness and death, with an awesome God who loves us even more than it’s possible to imagine.
There’s only one real way to satisfy our desire to live forever and that’s by getting the gift of eternal life from the only One who’s able to give such a gift! And thankfully we don’t have to go through anything like a cinematically deleted traumatic transformation to get there either ;-)
No comments:
Post a Comment