SPOILERS BELOW, for anyone who has been in a pop-culture hamster ball and doesn’t know what happens in this train wreck.

***

In a telling scene in Breaking Dawn, a skeletal Bella stands in front a mirror, running her hands over the bairnsketball that she’s been told is going to rupture her heart before it comes out. Various in-laws argue about what this means for her (spoiler: broken back and shattered ribs, among other things).

And Bella cringes beatifically into the mirror, and a plucky folk song plays.

This is perhaps the worst thing about Breaking Dawn: it has all the content of a horror movie with none of the context. (Second-worst thing: having to sit through the wedding in what feels like real time.)

It’s almost remarkable how much the movie presents female-gaze psychological horror, made somehow even more monstrous by the romantic lens through which it’s filtered. From the very first moments of the movie, in which Bella is walking around in a pair of shoes that have been purchased for her over her protests, but are nevertheless the shoes we know she’ll be wearing, because of course. On her honeymoon, her husband withholds affection, because he claims he can’t keep from hurting her and this is better for her; he reduces her to tears as she begs him to have sex with her. (His reason for withholding: the first time they had sex, he bruised her in the throes of passion. The movie downplays this into a few fingerprints here or there, which both dilutes the subtext of spousal abuse and makes it somehow even worse than he’s stonewalling her romantically. The following silence, in which they play chess for several minutes in a Pottery Barn catalog, would be a tense portrayal of a marriage falling apart if it weren’t for the comforting soundtrack assuring us that he knows what’s best, and the little wifey will come around.)

When she finds herself pregnant, he withholds all support for her when she decides not to make the decision he would have made about the fetus. (Additional consequence of being pregnant: she’s visually and contextually infantilized for the rest of the film, unequal even to stand up on her own). She lies about her situation and whereabouts to her father (from whom she has been effectively cut off by marriage); her friend in the know belittles and berates her. As the baby drains her life, her in-laws face off to decide what’s best for her and/or the fetus (a term baby-crazy Rosalie repeatedly amends to, “BABY,” in all caps). Near the point of birth, her husband blames her for having decided to keep the baby, and guilt trips her about how he will hate the child, because it is reflective of she decision she made. The baby itself snaps her spine, breaks both her knees, and causes heart failure.

It’s a domestic-horror situation that seems a natural cinematic offspring of Rosemary’s Baby, but somehow the film (and, to some degree, the source text) manages to put the viewer in an even more horrific situation: in order to support any kind of autonomy for Bella, the viewer has to support her series of truly boneheaded decisions in the face of people who are trying to dictate what to do and are, in fact, making more sense than she ever does. (Argument by the anti-fetus contingent: “It will kill you, there is absolutely no doubt, if you want to live you need to get it out.” Argument by Bella: “Well, if it kills me it kills me, and you’ll have the baby to remember me by.” Help us help you, Bella!)

Perhaps the half-hour wedding scene was an attempt to frame as romantic the subsequent events of the film, which are not romantic whatsoever. Even the honeymoon scenes (in which Bella discovers that her bags, packed by someone else, contain nothing but lingerie) take on a strange purgatory quality; when she deploys peignoirs in an attempt to seduce him into having sex with her after the first bruise-inducing time, he laughs and turns away from her. (Bella’s miserable face is one that appears repeatedly throughout the film, as she suffers one indignity after another.) But the movie seems determined to avoid the subtext it continually presents, and uses its succession of plinky folk songs in the background as an attempt to bring the romance back to a movie that otherwise would have us all rooting for Bella to take that speedboat back to shore and get the hell out. (The songs all have lyrics about the joy of subsuming one’s entire identity, just in case you had missed the message.)

In the past, there has been enough of the absurd to help balance the creepy subtext; this movie has its moments of that as well, though they don’t do much to overcome the feeling of wanting to grab a teenage girl by the shoulders and say, “You’re not taking any of this seriously, right? RIGHT?” Jacob, when he reads his wedding invite, gets so angry he rips off his shirt (never not funny); the awkward wedding speeches are true to life in a way that makes you want to gently claw your own face; there’s an almost-endearing montage of Bella trying to prepare for The Big Moment by brushing her teeth and shaving.

But otherwise, only the werewolves offer any relief from the A-plot horror, and that’s not saying much. The pack has vague politics, and one girl-wolf whose primary personality trait is that she’s unwanted by the man of her choice, and its usual limitless supply of cut-off pants stored in the hollow trees of the Pacific Northwest. However, other than trying to manufacture an outward threat for the Cullens, there’s really nothing doing.

(ETA: I can’t refrain from mentioning imprinting, which is presented so matter-of-factly that it somehow surpasses the surrealist comedy of a man looking into the eyes of an infant, seeing the hottie teen she’ll become, and falling to his knees, mostly because the first time it’s discussed is during a beach visit where it goes largely unmentioned that one of them is babysitting the toddler who will one day grow into the woman who better love him back, dammit, and the combination of the image and its apparent acceptance by everyone is a blow from which that little leitmotif never recovers.)

Having covered the body-horror in the first installment, the sequel is freed up to give Bella a chance to be the Mary Sue-est vampire who ever sparkled through the forest. That might be for the best; this movie has enough mixed messages to deal with all on its own.

(By the by, when Bella is healed and made beautiful by vampire venom in the movie’s closing moments, her haggard face is smoothed over and made up; her anorexic limbs are not filled in. Even in the details, this movie really nails it, you know?)

I went into this with a lot of appreciation for Tarsem Singh. I love The Fall, as previously documented, and I appreciate The Cell, and even though I didn’t expect the plot of Immortals to be more than cheeseball hero fare, I thought that he’d put his stamp on it, and there would be stunning imagery and the occasional interesting performance.

Instead, it sort of felt like Tarsem Singh baked me a batch of snickerdoodles with thumbtacks inside.

Let’s talk about Immortals.

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(Actual promo photo. Take heed.)

As a fan of fairy tales, and someone who is more than willing to watch Robert Carlyle masticate some scenery one night a week, I went into Once Upon a Time thinking it might be able to overcome its two leads (the sometimes-interesting Gennifer Goodwin and the always-mediocre Jennifer Morrison) and present enough worldbuilding to keep me interested. It was not a particularly uphill battle, until the show actually started.

What the show says it’s about: fairy tales, and families, and an epic mystery between two worlds, and the power of story, and how to live in a world without happy endings (this is stressed a LOT, to the point that villains say things like, “This IS my happy ending!” about their dastardly deeds, as awkwardly-costumed fairy tale denizens sob and wail “Noooo!” and cradle the bodies of their dead husbands who were killed by guards because even though they were in danger there were only two easily-defeatable men-at-arms on duty, which sort of makes you think the Evil Queen is not so much Evil as she is Better-Staffed).

What the show is actually about: mommy issues. And not the delightful, twisted mommy issues that make up the backbone of so many of our classic fairy tales, and which I would absolutely be down for some nice chewing over, but instead the sort of mommy issues that make your eyebrows disappear into your hairline.

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A quick nonfiction update, featuring a series of bad ideas!

First, The Downsides of Dating a God is up at Fantasy!

Despite the supernatural nature of the deistic pantheon (and their intramural dating scene), there’s a remarkable amount of god/human canoodling in the mythological tradition. Dating a deity has a certain ineffable appeal—the carefree demeanor, the kinky shapeshifting, the supernatural transportation options, the lure of immortality. However, it’s also one of the most dangerous extracurricular activities in which any legend-dwelling young person can engage, mythologically speaking.

Things to consider include how to handle unrequited love (goner), how to handle the family tree (goner), and how to handle breakups (goner).

Second, From the Desk Of… details the in-office horror of some of the movies’ most awkwardly employed, including the Premiere Hairdresser of Rohan and the incredibly unfortunate box-office intern from Phantom of the Opera:

“Yes, good afternoon, madam, happy to serve you and your husband, whose patronage we value greatly. We’re staging Hannibal this fall, would you like tickets?”

“I’m so sorry, we’re no longer doing Hannibal due to a change of management, but the Paris Opera would be happy to offer you tickets to Il Muto! It’s starring Carlotta, and is sure to be a smash hit.”

“My apologies, this is the Paris Opera – we’ve just had notice of a casting change for the Countess…”

The third awkward pursuit is the Avengers trailer, but either you’re into the Avengers movie or you’re not; I’m in the latter camp for several reasons, so the trailer was really just a reminder that I didn’t have to worry about double-booking my cinema trips that weekend.

We kind of need to talk about this.

This is the poster for the Footloose remake. The tagline they have chosen to accompany this epic story? CUT LOOSE.

The sad thing is that, in the sea of completely baffling remakes and other surrounding creative decisions, I guess I understand how this movie happened more than I can understand, say, the Smurfs movie (ever). On paper, this is a story about liberal youth culture rebelling against increasingly conservative and despotic exercises of power, and about the dangers of suppression or repression of self-expression (every -ession!), and about rejecting small-town theocracy in order to get into some PG-rated big-city shenanigans.

However, that stuff didn’t work in practice even in the original Footloose (tagline “One town. One kid. One chance.”), which tried to balance scenes of John Lithgow tightening his despotic grip on the town as a way to deal with his grief over his son and scenes of Kevin Bacon’s dance double Fosse-ing his way through warehouses. To no one’s surprise, the balance was way off, and Lithgow’s character goes from foil for the two-dimensional teens into complete plotcakes. At the end of the movie, he’s interrupted in mid-tirade about how no one can dance or express dissent or disobey by someone announcing a nearby book-burning. Now, he’s outlawed drinking and dancing and all other kinds of young-person fun, and has held his iron fist over the town for years, and hates the kid trying to make prom happen, and uses God as a weapon to instill fear in people, but book-burning? That is just a WILD idea he couldn’t have anticipated WHATSOEVER! So he runs to the book-burning and tells them that books are great, and dancing is ALSO great, and he can’t WAIT for prom, can you? Yay, prom! The end for no reason!

It’s to Lithgow’s credit how much you end up buying this in the moment, because he’s such a phenomenal actor that you can actually see him suppressing his grief and struggling with the edicts he’s put in place as they’re challenged by the new kid and his collection of Bible quotes about dancing that he reads to City Hall as reasons dancing should be allowed, because separation of church and state something something. However, this movie is most famous for its dance sequences (Opening Credits, teaching Chris Penn to dance, Angry Warehouse Dance, and Worst Prom Imaginable), and not for any of the underlying themes that the movie addresses (poorly) at random intervals, and reverses on a dime.

Given that we’re actually in a political climate that’s welcoming exactly this sort of counter-intuitive theocratic lawmaking, and dismissing the expression of dissent by having cops mace them all and arrest them for daring to protest, I’m very curious to see how this movie tries to stick it to The Man while still getting flyover-state butts in the seats. Early signs are mixed: the current leading man is their fourth choice, which sounds a little awkward, but Dancing with the Stars alum Julianne Hough is in it, so the corporate synergy is all lined up!

However, I might be entirely shortchanging the deep artistic goals of this remake, and need to keep an open mind, lest I become the John Lithgow Preacher of today. So I, for one, look forward to this movie’s hard-hitting small-town politics and attack on neo-conservative despotism, viewed through its well-rounded characters and honed through its keen dialogue. I can only hope it lives up to its predecessor in the revolution, whose powerful and emotional conclusion can teach all of us something about what it means to live life, fight for your freedoms, and most importantly, cut loose:

(So, watching this musical number, I realize that the part of Footloose where everyone was suddenly a professional dancer has never bothered me, because musicals live in their own universe where that is just something that happens, and also because just being caught on celluloid in this scene forever must have been punishment enough.)