Hypocrisy Now (Pg. 12-17)

Lionel Hutz once said that there was the truth and then there was the truth. I would like to add to his truths a third “truth.” The accidental truth, and while shaking the head and nodding the head accompanied the previous two, my truth would be given with a shrug of the shoulders. My truth is the one that isn’t meant to be the truth, it’s entirely accidental revealing more than the speaker intended. In today’s section, our narrator/author has revealed something about herself that maybe she didn’t intend. She’s a hypocrite.

Or she’s really, really insightful into the mind of a 16-18 year old girl without actually having been this girl. In our previous entry I discussed the self-deprecation of young Isabella as she felt insecure in her own pale skin even though she lived in the sunshine state.* Nothing really different or revealing here, show me ten 16 year old girls and I’ll show you ten people who think everyone else is the most attractive person in the room.

For the most part this second part of chapter 1, is still about setting the stage. While the school and the location get most of the words the whole thing is about Bella’s difficulty fitting in. Here’s where the hypocrisy sets in: it’s not that she doesn’t fit in it’s that she doesn’t want to fit in. Purposely she sets herself apart and then blames everything but herself for not being able to do it. And no, this isn’t the type of complaint akin to saying that depressed people should just “get over it and be happy.”

Most of the description is bland, not in the writing but in the actual description. Forks is a bland place full of grey and rain. Bella’s worry over her complexion becomes a moot point. Her pale face only stands out because she thinks it ought to, probably why she has it in the first place. What does stand out though is her supreme intellect: “I kept my eyes down on the reading list the teacher had given me. It was fairl basic: Bronte, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Faulkner. I’d already read everything.”

The only thing missing from the end of that sentence is the phrase, “on my own time.” Or perhaps even some literary commentary from our academic intellectual, “I’d doubt we would read Chaucer in the original English as the modern language doesn’t suffice for his nuance, though I would keep my mouth shut about that I didn’t want to alienate myself more.” I’ve dealt with this type of student before and they are always infuriating because you simply don’t know what do with them.

Not because they are so smart, like an actual talented writer/philosopher/historian, but because they think they are. They think they are smarter than everyone else, which is probably true, but they also think they are smarter than the teacher, which is not true. One of these individuals actually asked me if I thought I was smarter than they, I replied “no, I didn’t think that.” This individual was flabbergasted because no one ever dared question them. Bella is that student and most of the time I was happy to have someone who actually had an opinion, did the reading, and participated. So you have to walk a line with her and dealing with intellectual snobbery is tough, especially when the student is just wrong. Since when is Shakespeare and Chaucer considered “basic?”

Then comes the aesthetic discrimination, “When the bell rang, a nasal buzzing sound, a gangly boy with skin problems and hair black as an oil slick leaned across the aisle to talk to me.” Bella is real good at making friends isn’t she? I feel like I should cut her some slack, I know this type of person and all the description is missing is a remark about his tee-shirt either contains a large dragon image or Japanese writing on it. The thing is that the guy is already a stalker, he just doesn’t know it yet, perhaps Bella is reading this into the guy and millions of years of evolutionary memory are just screaming at her, “Don’t touch.” Still the attitude in the writing doesn’t need her snideness.

It’s not like Bella is even trying anymore, so it’s hard for me to feel sympathy, “We sat at the end of a full table with several of her friends, who she introduced to me. I forgot all of their names as soon as she spoke them. They seemed impressed by her bravery in speaking to me.” Ever notice how prison movies and high school movies have certain things in common? In prison movies the cafeteria is always the place where status is determined, if you have a place to sit and a gang to sit with it meant that everything couldn’t be all bad. Now think about the first time you walked alone into the lunch room in high school? See what I mean. Bella has her gang, she isn’t a super alien but she makes no effort. The other girls at the table are meaningless to her as she omits even the slightest hint of what they look like. Are they attractive? Are they fat? How are they dressed? These superficial details matter because if our character is going to be an outcast, the look of the first table she sits at determines how much of an outcast.

The sweaty greasy guy will wave at her from across the hall. That’s the only clue we have, she’s not at the bottom of the ladder. She’s somewhere in the middle, the forgotten middle–a little above where I was. Without Vampires, she would probably end up as a theater major spiraling into the pit of despair that will either lead her to Rocky Horror Picture Show or, even worse, getting into arguments about Buffy at Denny’s around 3am. She is, though, making the mistake of dissing her newest friends in the lunchroom and if Oz taught me anything it’s that she’s got a shank headed her way.

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*Well not really, but compared to Washington Arizona might as well be. Technorati Tags: twilight readthrough