Ana liked it.* I thought it was bordering on the absurd. A wish fulfillment scenario made for viewers with a very different set of concerns can feel like a fugue state. Interesting but alien. I got the same feeling of otherness from watching a Neon Genesis Evangelion movie and suspect the experience is not uncommon.
However, fairy tales can be made meaningful across life stages. Not just by inserting parallel storylines and/or peppering the dialogue with allusions but rather through a protagonist who is unsure, insecure, challenged, in flux. (Think Spirited Away along with every other Bildungsroman, no matter the gender, racial or class barriers to be overcome.)
In Twilight, the movie, Bella is a closed set of possibilities. Even her needs and anxieties are seamless: she desires to be desired and nothing else. If anything, she is the monster. (And I hoped at some point it would be revealed she was the true vampire.)
Rather than portraying a coming of age and thus challenging its viewers, Twilight presents an early adolescent’s fantasy of adulthood, allowing its viewers to postpone the most difficult question of all: who am I? what am I?
(A counterfactual: what if Twilight had been an X-Men spin-off? Instead of the awful Wolverine, we might have spent some time with a young woman who tames the supernatural. Instead of “Will I meet Mr. Right?” the hero could have wondered: “If I’m the superior being, why don’t they like me?”)
As for the wish being fulfilled: Ana points out, “Who doesn’t want to marry up?” Cool family, cool house, cool cars. But where Sense and Sensibility exploits class mobility to lay bare the cruelty of Victorian-era patriarchy, Twilight happily submits its hero to gendered norms as the price for her fulfillment.
In a scene where Bella runs away from home, her boyfriend, a considerably older gentleman, helpfully suggests: “Let me drive.” It would be a fitting alternate title.
*Ana likes it because it inverts the traditional vampire narrative, making the bad guys into the good guys. I think other recent vampire stories like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Let The Right One In do that inversion much better without coddling their teen audiences.
Ana retorts that it’s not coddling but a necessary sexual education tool to teach young girls that rape is not the only possible outcome of heterosexual congress. I think we’re in check on that one.
Devórame Otra Vez (Devour me again)