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Sexy Monsters 04/24/2010
 
EN1004 is the module that keeps me the busiest; as I approached the end of “Frankenstein”, already I was relishing in the idea of reading a silly paperback during spring break, rather than some deeply intense novel, like I’ve been doing for the last five months. As I was skim-reading the last few pages of Mary Shelley’s gothic nightmare, my mind wandered towards what I would read under the balmy shadows of Mexican palm trees. I had already bought “Eat, Pray, Love” the previous week, and surely I would take that in my beach bag. But the trashier side of me was tempted to buy the third “Twilight” book...and judge me all you want, but I know I am not alone in feeling guilty for reading that crap and, let’s face it: we are only human and easily tempted.

This is when an extremely comical idea came to me. “Twilight” is, after all, nothing but a pastiche of the great “Dracula”. “Twilight” fans are in fact swooning for a (bad) copy of one of the most dreaded villains of literary history. I then wondered if a teenage series starring a hot version of Frankenstein’s monster would be equally successful. Just imagine it; girl meets a benevolent and fatally attractive guy made out of spare morgue limbs, they fall in love and next thing you know the heroine wants to be killed, sown up with some other dead person’s parts and live the dream with the love of her life, the corpse boy. For all I know, necrophilia would become fashionable (don’t get me started on the twisted logic that goes behind wanting to sleep with a vampire―he’s dead after all isn’t he?!). It sounds incredibly stupid, but if the vampire thing worked, why not this?

I then wondered about this poor creature, so disfigured and despised. I could already see the first problem with my idea; Frankenstein’s monster has no glamorous background (Brad Pitt never played its part, as far as I know).  He’s a bit like the loser of monsters, depicted as too slow and too brutish, regardless of the fact that the being in Shelley’s story was so well-read that a geek like me would have easily fallen in love with him. I can’t deny I haven’t asked myself, looking at all possible reasons, why “Twilight” has had so much success, and I kept asking myself this same question as I thought of all this. In a world where we all know that sex sells, a badly written book on platonic love, with a badly acted film version full of good-looking protagonists, is all we need to fulfil our hormonal anxieties.

I finally gave up on my fantasy of a best-selling series starring an idiotic, needy girl in search for the unconditional love of a non-human (sorry Stephanie Meyer, your story is just so catchy I had to try imagining a similar one myself!). I’m proud to say that in the end I was faithful to my purchase of “Eat, Pray, Love” (not the greatest of alternatives, you might think, but at least gives some food for thought) and was half dreading, half anticipating, reading “Northanger Abbey” for EN1004. As for the third “Twilight” book...I think I realized that after all, and, at least for me, what is dead isn’t that sexy after all.

 
 


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