Twilight’s “Where The Hell Have You Been Loca?” Meme Explained
There were many memeworthy moments in Twilight, but one of the most unintentionally hilarious was Jacob’s bizarre line from 2009’s New Moon, when he incredulously asked Kristen Stewart’s heroine “Bellawhere the Hell have you been, loca?” Released in 2008, Twilight was a melodramatic fantasy romance based on the bestselling novels by Stephenie Meyers. While viewers may have loved the movies despite their corniness, critics were not kind to Twilight, and 2009’s New Moon, in particular, received a veritable mauling from reviewers.
To be fair to the critics, New Moon was the weakest movie of the series and featured an infamously pointless plot, making the mockery all but inevitable. One moment was brought back into relevancy when a clip from New Moon went viral, and the hilarious out-of-context line reading reminded many fans why it was seen as the worst Twilight sequel movie. When Taylor Lautner’s secondary love interest Jacob Black encounters Bella at his reservation home, he grins and asks “Bella, where the Hell have you been, loca?” and the bizarre question has prompted countless memes.
Why “Bella, Where The Hell Have You Been, Loca?” Is So Funny
The Almost Cringeworthy Line Is Perfect Meme Fodder
The “Bellawhere the Hell have you been, loca?” line didn’t stand out when New Moon first released in 2009, and it wasn’t until the 2020s that it gained a resurgence in notoriety thanks to the Twilight fandom pouncing on it and turning it into dozens of memes. It’s an awkward moment of dialogue in a movie that’s full of them, and there are several reasons why it’s so funny.
Firstly, it’s a bizarrely out-of-character line from the usually stoic and almost comically self-serious Jacob, and one that underlines just how awkwardly teenage the main characters of the series are with its believably cringeworthy delivery. As a result, the quote went viral as viewers revisited the series when its arrival on Netflix in 2021, with most of the unintentional comedy coming from Taylor Lautner’s delivery and how surreally out-of-place the moment is in an otherwise overly serious sequel.
The sequel to Twilight has scenes of completely self-serious melodrama, including suicide attempts by both main characters, but also features broad, out-of-place humor that seriously messes with the movie’s pacing.
The character of Twilight’s Jacob Black earned more serious criticism thanks to the questionable stereotypes involved in his anger issues and animalistic side, but most of the critique leveled at this moment has been more from laughter than anger. All memes aside, “Bella, where the Hell have you been, loca?” is a pretty effective encapsulation of what most viewers and reviewers alike disliked about New Moon, despite its unintentional hilarity. The sequel to Twilight has scenes of completely self-serious melodrama, including suicide attempts by both main characters, but also features broad, out-of-place humor that seriously messes with the movie’s pacing.
Seemingly added to lighten the tone, this too-goofy humor (Bella and Jacob view a violent action movie entitled “Face Punch,” whose gore prompts love triangle third wheel Mike to vomit in the theater) left New Moon’s tone disastrously inconsistent and resulted in the movie’s moments of pathos flatlining. That said, viewers can only be so annoyed about the Twilight sequel’s failure when New Moon also provided fans with the immortal “Bella, where the Hell have you been, loca?”.
Twilight Is Filled With Meme Moments Like This
“Bella, Where The Hell Have You Been, Loca?” Isn’t The Only Dialogue To Become Internet Humor Ammo
The Twilight movies aren’t comedy films, even though they do have some moments that are trying to be funny. However, there are many unintentionally hilarious scenes and lines of dialogue, and the moment Jacob says “Bella, where the Hell have you been, loca?” is just one of dozens that’s since become the target of memes online. Almost every movie in the Twilight franchise has similar instances that have since been picked apart and gained new life for completely different reasons than the original script intended.
One of the most infamous is the CGI baby in Twilight: Breaking Dawn. Baby Renesmee was created using CGI rather than featuring an actual baby, and the creative decision backfired spectacularly. Even at the time Breaking Dawn released, viewers, whether critics or fans, were calling out the appearance of CGI Renesemee, but in the decades since she’s become the target of many memes. Another that wasn’t intended to be funny was the baseball sequence in Twilight, with “vampire baseball” now being a concept that has become synonymous with bizarre attempts to make horror concepts more family-friendly in many online circles.
As far as providing material for memes and online humor goes, Twilight is a tough franchise to beat.
Then of course there are the many, many cringey lines of dialogue in Twilight that have since become memes or the butt of online joke. The franchise is rife with them from the first movie onward, with several that are repeatedly brought up as examples of terrible romance scriptwriting. For example, there’s the moment in Twilight when Edward decided to give Bella an awkward pet name and said “you better hold on tight, spider monkey.” In the same movie, he drops the both creepy and unintentionally hilarious remark “you’re like my own personal brand of heroin” when explaining why her scent was addictive.
However, perhaps the line that most rivals “Bella, where the Hell have you been, loca?” in terms of being so awkward to watch that it became a meme came in Breaking Dawn: Part 2. After Renesmee is born, Jacob takes to referring to her as Nessie. For some reason, Bella takes an incredible amount of chagrin to this, furiously asking “you nicknamed my daughter after The Loch Ness Monster?!” What makes this line so funny isn’t so much the words, but the way Kristen Stewart delivers them, as Bella comes across as genuinely enraged for no discernible reason whatsoever. All in all, as far as providing material for memes and online humor goes, Twilight is a tough franchise to beat.
