When my sister and I were kids, she was always quicker on the draw that I was verbally.  I used to think of the perfect comebacks to whatever she said to me in a fight--three days after it was over. I'm still a bit slow.  So humor me in taking the title of this post from a movie that you're already probably sick of hearing about and that lots of people have already reviewed. This isn't a review of the movie.  It isn't even really much about the movie. Any of you who have read other posts of mine know by now not to expect my title to have much to do with my content.

But the post does start with the movie, at least. The screening of New Moon I attended today, which started at the very non-vampirish hour of 11:30 a.m., was viewed entirely by ladies of my generation, the other demographic presumably being in school.  During the movie, one of the lines that got the loudest chuckles was a reference to cougars.  Afterwards, I noticed that I wasn't the only person practically running to the parking lot; I grinned at the lady jogging hurriedly along beside me, and she said by way of explanation, "I'm on my way to school carpool."  "Me too," I replied.  "Funny," she said.  "I'm going all the way to Dunwoody.  How about you?"  "Roswell."  "Oh, that's not too bad."  "Good luck!" 

From the town where the movie theater was, we were both at least half an hour away from our respective elementary schools; I don't know about her, but my son's school let out about 25 minutes from the time of our conversation.  I came to this particular theater, and she might have too, because it's the only one on the north side of Atlanta that offers showings that start before noon. I felt a fleeting kinship with her, as I assumed her to be another mom who'd taken two hours she didn't have out of a day where she should have been doing a dozen other things to watch a movie aimed at girls 20 years younger.  I felt a much sillier rush, too.  A movie in the middle of the day, when I ought to have been doing anything but: a guilty pleasure, an occasion for very minor defiance, an escape for two hours from duty and responsibility.  Not bad for eight dollars.

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My husband and I have very different feelings about movies, his being by far the more logical: he'll see very few things in the theater, even films he wants to see, because he finds it offensive that movie tickets cost $10-$12 most places.  I'll go see movies in the theater that I sort of like but probably wouldn't even bother renting.  $8 (if you go to a matinee)-$12 doesn't seem that bad for entering another world for two hours, for shutting off the mental treadmill, for Wasting Time and not really feeling guilty about it. Television, even a big one (which we don't have and don't want) can't compare to a movie screen and a dark theater, to the smell of popcorn and the stadium seating. 

Movie theaters are an escape in the present and a reminder of so many memories for me in the past.  My first non-date when I was 11--the movie was Mr. Mom, the boy was one I'd had a crush on for years, his 21 year old sister was our chaperone, and he ate all my popcorn and wouldn't hold my hand.  My last date with my first love, five years later; the movie was Steve Martin's My Blue Heaven, and we both hated it so much we walked out on it. My second movie and first real date five years after that with a great guy with whom a solid friendship had developed into a mutual something-more; he did hold my hand for the entire three hours of Casino.  My hand fell asleep.  And I didn't care. 

There was the first picture I ever took both the kids to (Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium), where I had to bribe my youngest, then 2 1/2, with jellybeans to get her to stay through the entire thing, and in which Jason Bateman's erstwhile rejection of the affectionate sock monkey upset my son so much that I had to go buy him one the next day. There have been independent films with my sister, action flicks with guy friends, chick flicks with girlfriends, all those films my husband and I keep going to where everyone else is twenty years older than us (like Gosford Park and A Prairie Home Companion), any number of blockbusters or romcoms or fantasy films that I've gone to alone.  I love movies.

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I love them a little too much, and with too little discrimination. One of the reasons I love them so much, and one of the reasons I'll go see almost anything, is that a movie inevitably kick-starts my writing when it's been going through a dry spell, usually knocking me out of general writer's block or redirecting my attention away from a difficult scene I've been obsessing over.  What I've been struggling lately with is the framing and time-boxing of what I refer to alternately as The Great American Novel (tongue-in-cheek, of course--isn't every good red-blooded American former English major writing one of those?) and That Godforsaken Pile of Non-Composted Horse Manure (when I'm not feeling more foul-mouthed).  I'm ready to put the damn thing to bed.  I'm ready to let go of it and move on.  But after working on it off and on for over 20 years, I'll be damned if I'm going to do it before I Know It's Ready.  My reviewers for the first complete draft all thought it should be a young adult novel, which since that's not what I set out to write signalled to me that something was desperately wrong. 

And there was.  Not that I have anything against young adult novels; after all, I read them, and I go see movies based on them.  But I didn't set out to write one, even though I was much younger when I started writing it. Even back then, it wanted to be something else; it wanted to be more than it was, more than I was.  Now it can be.  Now I've lived much of what the characters lived, seen much of what I need to see to tell their stories, they who I know so well. Writer's block has rarely been a problem with them.  Knowing where to stop has had me paralyzed for years.  I've rewritten the entire thing at least twice; I have boxes full of developed scenes and more fragmentary notes; I have a head full of sequels.  What I need is to determine where to begin and where to stop for now. I need the frame.

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I really do like the Twilight books, and now the movies; perhaps because I recoil from bloodier fables, I've gotten into them in a way I never did with Anne Rice or anything else in the vampire genre.  Except maybe Dracula--the original, the Bram Stoker book.  It touched on a question that fascinates me in both literature and life: who is the monster and who is the man?  (Even here I reveal my puerile predilections: I borrowed that phrasing from the song the jester sings in Disney's version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.)  Mary Shelley explored the same question in Frankenstein. Victor Hugo did in both Hunchback  and, in a different way, Les Miserables. Herman Melville, in almost everything.  Stephenie Meyer and other fantasy writers.  Me, hopefully, not that I place myself in any of their company.  I don't place Ms. Meyer in their company, either, though if I were teaching literature to the age group at whom her books are ostensibly aimed, I'd not be above bringing Twilight up to get their attention and using that to hook them into talking about classics that touch on some of the same questions.  If I could use a vampire romance to get kids reading Shelley and Hugo and Stoker, I'd owe Ms. Meyer a debt of gratitude.

I owe her a debt now (though I suppose I ought to give just as much credit to the makers of the movie), for what the story she's written reminded me of, for thoughts it sparked.  Often the success of a book or a film has little to do with its originality and much more to do with the universality of the themes it explores--and the appeal of whatever twist it puts on them or the frame it arranges them in.  Tragic love--that just maybe has a chance to succeed. Deep-seated racial hatred--that can find a sort of peace, if an uneasy one.  The hunter becoming the protector. The hated becoming the ally. The monster inside the man, and the man inside the monster, or the monster who is not truly monstrous at all.

As soon as I got in my car after watching New Moon today, I started thinking about my monster, the one in my book, the one who I realized I'd written terribly wrong as soon as I had kids and understood how sleep deprivation in their infancy or button-pushing in the subsequent years can drive even the most sane and loving parent to fear they will end up on the evening news. I drove away from the theater, and a new chapter started writing itself in my head, line after line tumbling out in the voice of the father in the story whose actions, though at times unforgivable, are nevertheless born of frustration, ignorance, and deep feelings of inadequacy rather than malice or cruel intentions. A man, a deeply flawed one, but not a monster.  In my own writing I often take what darkness I've glimpsed, or feared, or imagined, and take it far beyond my actual experience, sometimes as a way of exploring it safely and sometimes as a way of warning, or of guessing at what I haven't seen.  See what could happen, even though it didn't, or what happened to someone else that they don't talk about. So I've done with this character.  And I have to let him speak, even if I'm a little afraid of what he'll say, of what I might find on the dark side of the moon.