For those of you who are unfamiliar – and for those of you who are and want to see me get the plot not exactly quite right because I didn’t pay all that much attention – the basic story of the first two of four installments of the Twilight saga is this: Bella, a seventeen-year-old, beautiful chronic depressive falls in love with Edward Cullen, a stylish, pale, brooding type who looks not unlike a young Stephen Morrissey. But – twist! – Edward is hiding a dark secret. The secret is this: he’s a vampire! Not only that, but he lives with a group of vampire couples who go around town claiming to be a bunch of regular Joe's but are really more like a cuddlier-than-average vampire cult.
Now, the main difficulty of the Edward/Bella pairing is that lest we forget, Edward is a vampire who desperately wants to suck human blood; however, he and his family have trained themselves to only eat the blood of animals. They call themselves “vegetarians,” which is dumb because they’re EATING ANIMALS. If it were up to me, they would call themselves “carnivores” instead of “undead cannibals.” But I don’t make the rules, Stephanie Meyer does. Either way, Edward and Bella are in love so hard you wouldn’t believe it. The movie goes to great pains to prove this by having Edward and Bella stare at each other for about a half an hour.
After playing baseball (yeah, I know) with Edward’s family, Bella gets chased and then kidnapped by a bunch of “bad” vampires and then the good vampires fight the bad vampires and Edward takes Bella to prom. That’s pretty much what happens in the first Twilight.
The next movie, New Moon, begins with Edward unceremoniously dumping Bella in the middle of the forest because Bella got a paper-cut and Edward’s “brother” lost his shit and tried to eat her. In order to save Bella from himself and his way of life, Edward gets the hell out of Dodge (in this case, Dodge is actually Forks, Washington) and goes to Europe to brood for a while. Meanwhile, Bella is depressed to a soundtrack of edgy indie-rock tunes that only the audience can hear, because Bella claims she’s “not into music anymore.” Wait, I thought depressed people listened to indie rock to provide a fitting soundtrack to their unhappiness that nobody can understand? Whatever.
Edward’s vacuum of dreaminess is filled by Jacob, a minor character from the first installment who’s gone from being a cute, scrawny longhair to a muscle-bound jorts enthusiast who seems to be single-handedly waging a war against shirts. Bella, depressed at Edward’s absence and now intent on becoming a thrill-seeker so she can have hallucinations of Edward telling her not to do whatever stupid thing she’s about to do, gets tight with the mechanically adept Jacob and together they build a couple of motorcycles.
It seems that the “motorcycles” function as a metaphor for “friendship,” because Bella and Jacob quickly become best friends. Problem is, Jacob, in a twist absolutely nobody saw coming, is actually a werewolf as well as a pretty decent mechanic. Not only that, he’s nursing a wolf-sized crush on Bella, which introduces this whole love triangle element to the series.
Anyway, Jacob and his fellow shirtless werewolf friends are fighting off the “bad” vampires (as opposed to the Cullens, who have an uneasy peace with the werewolves because they’re “good” vampires). The “bad” vampire is some lady who’s hunting Bella because Edward killed her boyfriend or something like that, and so in order to protect Bella one of the Cullen girls comes back and takes Bella to Italy to find Edward who’s about to expose himself to the world, i.e. commit suicide. When he sees Bella he changes his mind, then he gets in an argument with The Vampires In Charge Of The Other Vampires, which gets solved by Bella promising to become a vampire one day. Then Edward asks Bella to marry him and the movie ends. In the theater when that happened, people were seriously pissed off that they didn’t show Bella’s reaction, though I’ll go out on a limb here and theorize that she responds positively to his proposal.
That’s as far in the series as I’ve gotten. I’ll probably see the next movie (I’m pretty sure it’s called Eclipse?) when it comes out, just because it’s one of those cultural juggernauts like American Idol or Lady Gaga that seem unstoppable so you might as well hitch yourself along for the ride to see what the fuss is all about.
Honestly, I can see Twilight’s appeal. It provides readers with a universe in which they can get caught up in much the same manner that the Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings book series did, with its own lexicon and special social classes that suck you in with their little whirlpools of minutiae. I’m not gonna lie, I found myself perking up whenever the movies would pause the progression of the plot to dangle another hint of its self-made vampire mythology in front of me; I probably would have been hella more interested in a two-hour long faux-documentary on Meyer’s version of vampire/werewolf mythology. But I got what I got, so let’s move on.
The other reason for Twilight’s runaway popularity, methinks, is that despite the fact that the series is clearly rooted in the fantastical, it takes great pains to present to the viewer with a set of universals that we can all relate to. For example, take the scene where Bella goes to meet the Cullens for the first time and finds them making Italian food because they assume that because of her name, Bella must be Italian which is all good and well, except Bella ate before she came over because she figured that if the Cullens were vampires they probably weren’t going to be serving food of the non-blood variety. While this scenario is clearly outside the realm of possibility, it perfectly captures the awkwardness and blind exploration of familial faux pas that is meeting a significant other’s family for the first time. And while probably very few people have ever been dating a mesmerizingly beautiful vampire while having their super-buff werewolf best friend be in love with them, tons of people have been in situations where they’re in love with their platonic best friend or have found themselves achingly in love with their platonic best friend. See what I’m getting at here?
A lot has been said about Twilight’s treatment of sex. As we at this point all know, vampire stories are all secretly about sex – the while business with the neck-biting and blood-sucking is a stand-in for gettin’ busy with somebody. Hence the purportedly excellent True Blood, which though I haven’t seen it I’m pretty sure is just about modern-day vampires having lots and lots of sex. Twilight takes this vampirism-as-sex conceit and (pardon the pun) sucks it dry. Bella and Edward can’t get too hot and heavy because if they do, Edward is liable to lose control of himself and bite her neck, either turning her into a vampire or straight-up eating her. Edward doesn’t want to turn Bella into a vampire just yet, because he wants to wait until Bella is perfectly sure she’s ready to make a decision that will affect her entire life. This, in the completely non-heavy-handed world of Twilight, represents abstinence.
Twilight is subtle about this in the way a Tyrannosaurus Rex is subtle or the band KISS is subtle – that is to say, it isn’t. At the end of the first movie, Bella says via voiceover that she doesn’t know when she’ll be ready but one day she will be, and it’s not exactly clear whether she’s talking about being a vampire or having sex with Edward, though it’s probably both. I don’t have any problems with media preaching the virtues of abstinence; I just wish they’d do it without beating everybody in the theater over the head with it.
On the other hand, you’ve got to admire how sexual Twilight manages to be without anybody coming even close to actually having sex. Robert Pattinson’s Edward seems to have mastered the art of staring sensually off into space that can inspire swooning in even the most jaded of thirteen-year-old girls, and in New Moon, Taylor Laughtner’s Jacob spends fairly substantial chunks of his screen time shirtless, giving his diamond-cutter abs ample room to breathe. The first time homeboy took his shirt off, it seemed like somebody had set a bomb filled with gasps and screams off in the theater. This is not unlike when Disney crams the Jonas Brothers into the tightest pants they can possibly fit into and then makes a big to-do about how they wear abstinence rings. The anachronism is remarkable.
From a more technical/story-based standpoint, Twilight is just plain not very good. I can’t say anything about the books because I haven’t read them, but from the vantage point of a media studies and production major, the movies are not structured well at all. I understand the first movie in the saga (God I hate using that word) has a lot of back-story to cover, so I can forgive it for taking an entire hour to get into the central conflict. But there is absolutely no reason that New Moon should commit the same crime.
New Moon tries waaaaay too hard to present itself as a re-hash of Romeo and Juliet. If you couldn’t pick up on this the movie helps you out by including a shot of the book Romeo and Juliet next to Bella on her bed in like the first minute of the movie, and then has Edward say some dialogue from the play about three minutes later. The problem is that New Moon also wants to be a movie about Taylor Laughtner’s abs, which throws a monkey wrench into the entire situation. So New Moon then becomes a movie about star-crossed loves who misunderstand each other and try to see each other and then when they can’t decide to commit suicide interspliced with gratuitous shots of shirtless werewolf bros. Needless to say, this hurts the film.
Additionally, these movies could just be called Longing Gaze: The Movie, because Bella staring at Edward and/or Jacob (BTW I’M TOTES TEAM EDWARD ENOUGH OF THAT INTERLOPER BULLSHIT JACOB!) in silence is what a solid portion of this is about. I realize that the filmmakers had to insert these shots to displace in the substantial dollop of sensuality that goes missing when you can’t show the two principals getting hot and heavy, but while these shots are supposed to play up the romance and drama, they really made Russell and I laugh our asses off. The main offender would have to be the scene after Edward takes Bella to the restaurant and he’s driving her home and instead of making small talk about the weather or the Seahawks or I don’t know HOW EDWARD IS A FUCKING VAMPIRE, they just stare each other down with incredibly intense, pained looks on their faces, which probably isn’t very safe seeing as Edward is driving in the dark and all.
Another beef I had with this movie is how when you hear the term “werewolf” thrown around, you assume you’re going to be getting a certain image – that of a wolf-man. Instead, New Moon features werewolves that just look like regular wolves. I’m still pretty upset about this. I’ve shown my distaste for Twilight’s particular brand of werewolf through the following graphic:
Classic bait and switch.
Having said all that, this is the part of the essay where I become kind of a Twilight apologist. I understand that these movies are not made for me; they are made for The Cult Of Twilight, a very sizable demographic who collectively could probably beat me up if I didn’t take the time to say some nice things.
While both the original Twilight and New Moon are directed like two-hour music videos meant to distract the MTV Generation from the fact that there’s not a lot going on in these movies, there is one sequence in New Moon that worked absolutely perfectly. I’m talking about the scene where (SPOILER ALERT but honestly if you’ve made it this far you probably have either seen the movie or have no plans to or are my teacher. Ali – sorry about completely ignoring the word limit on these blog assignments.) Bella runs through the woods to a cliff and then jumps off of it, although this sequence works mostly because of the fact that it’s tracked by a killer original cut by Thom Yorke of Radiohead, which just furthers my point that the movies are directed like music videos. Still, credit where credit is due.
Another thing to like about these movies is that the teenagers are given room to breathe; when they talk, they sound like actual teenagers instead of the lifeless amalgamations of slang and fashion trends that usually populate movies like this. So whoever wrote this puppy should get a pat on the back.
Even though Bella is obviously beautiful, she isn’t so unimpeachably gorgeous that it’s completely inconceivable that a regular teenage girl could ever hope to look like her – for example, Bella isn’t Britney Spears in her “Hit Me Baby One More Time” prime where she was so ridiculously good-looking that she shouldn’t have logically existed. Instead, Bella looks like the second-hottest girl at your high school if she were really into Death Cab for Cutie, which for a thirteen-year-old girl is a perfectly reachable goal to aspire to. Having OMG ROBERT PATTINSON SO DREAMY court the brunette Bella helps deconstruct the notion that a girl has to be blonde in order to bag herself a hottie. Not to say that we should still be letting our media determine society’s standards of beauty, but if I had a daughter, I’d much rather her want to look like Bella Swan than Britney Spears.
(Many thanks to Kristy for being my guide to the wonderful world of Twilight, as well as Russell, for sitting through both of the movies with me. Also thanks to you if you slogged through this entire thing.)
Oh also here's a picture for the Noshemblog:
Say it! Beard!
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