The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
Romantic love is a paradox, a mixture of joy and pain, gift and curse. Finding a mate is one of the most important decisions we make, yet falling in love shreds our intellectual sobriety, turning us into a mass of poet-quoting, passion-addled reflexes. It’s hard to think clearly when we first fall in love—a time when a little clear thinking would seem most beneficial.
Bella is in love. We all know this by now. She has a thing for brooding Edward Cullen, a vampire who shimmers in the sun. “He moves, you move,” her mother told her. “Like magnets.” She thirsts for him like water, craves him like Turkish delight. She spends every minute she can with him and would sacrifice everything she knows to be with him forever—her friends, her family, her very life.
And because Edward is a vampire and all, it looks as if she’ll have to make just such a sacrifice.
Nearly everyone thinks Bella is making the wrong choice—even Edward. He knows better than she does what she’ll be giving up. He pleads with her to turn from this path, begs her to find a more reasonable course for her life. To change Bella into a vampire, Edward tells her, “just for the sake of never having to lose you, that’s the most selfish thing I’ll ever do.”
But Jacob, Bella’s shape-shifting werewolf friend and Edward’s rival for her affections, believes he’s her ideal mate. He, after all, lives and breathes. To be with him would mean giving up immortality but keeping her friends, her family and possibly her soul. “I’m going to fight for you until your heart stops beating,” he told her.
Meanwhile, an army of newly minted vampires is gathering strength in Seattle, hoping to put the kibosh on Bella’s decision-making … permanently.
Some might scoff at the idea of conscientious vampires and werewolves, but The Twilight Saga is filled with well-meaning creatures of the night.
Edward loves Bella just as deeply as she does him. But he is a more mature, selfless lover. He’s positively chivalrous when it comes to courtship, always looking out for Bella’s wellbeing and insisting that the two of them not sleep together unless and until she marries him. In this respect, Edward is a study in abstention. He’s also willing to let Bella go, if she so chooses.
And speaking of choice, the film repeatedly emphasizes how important our choices are. specifically, Jacob challenges Bella to grapple with the reality that our choices have consequences.
Jacob, long one of Bella’s closest friends, struggles mightily with his feelings for her, even crossing a big line when he kisses her without her permission. Apart from that self-serving mistake, though, he understands that it’s Bella’s choice to make, and he’s still willing to risk his life for her safety—even if it means teaming up with those dastardly Cullen vampires to protect her.
A number of other ancillary vampires and werewolves strive to protect Bella too. Likewise, her parents try to care for her as best they can, albeit in their own, rather ineffectively.
For a film loaded with vampires, werewolves, telepathy and superhuman strength, overt spirituality in Eclipse is limited to a couple of scenes. Bella is the first outsider ever to sit in on a council meeting involving Jacob’s Quieute tribe (most of whom are, or will become, werewolves). The clan’s leader mentions magic and an ancestor who was a “great spirit warrior.” Alice Cullen continues to have visions in which she gets glimpses of enemy activities. And Edward still frets that his eternal soul may be lost, though the subject is rarely discussed. (It’s a subject explored with more intensity in the books and the previous two movies.)
“Doesn’t he own a shirt?” Edward asks Bella, referring to Jacob after they see him loitering near his motorcycle while flexing his pecs. Truth is, Jacob does own a shirt. He just doesn’t wear it much. One of Jacob’s shirtless scenes even takes place in a driving snowstorm. And he’s not the only one with this proclivity: Jacob’s hot-blooded werewolf packmates also shun shirts much of the time.
If Edward represents a purer, more idealized form of love in Eclipse, then Jacob personifies a more animalistic passion. “Let’s face it,” Jacob tells Edward as he snuggles next to Bella (again shirtless) in order to keep her from freezing to death, “I am hotter than you.” He jokingly suggests that she take off her clothes (so she can warm up faster) and forces a kiss on her—for which he receives a punch in the face. Bella later asked him to kiss her, and he did.
The drawn-out lip-lock that follows leaves Bella momentarily conflicted. But Edward ultimately remains Bella’s main squeeze. The two smooch often and, once, engage in some foreplay—complete with the beginning of clothes removal—before Edward puts a stop to it (much to Bella’s chagrin).
