Okay, I admit it. I actually...watched...the first 'Twilight' movie. I haven't read any of the books and only knew the most basic of the plot lines before last night. When the series first shot to its glittery stardom, I was one of those who hated it on principle. Not because of any literary elitism but because of what the books did to the vampire story and then, later, popular teen fiction. However, any phenomenon that huge has to have its merits. So I learned not to knock it and went my own way. Simple curiosity dragged me back.
[By “Twilight” I am referring to the four book saga by Stephenie Meyer and the subsequent films based on the books.]
Now expecting something completely awful, I was pleasantly surprised at the production value. Though this could have something to do with the series of B-films I'd watched the night before. I began to understand the appeal. After all, my high school love of angst ridden bad boys was infamous to anyone who knew me back then. To my horror, I began to understand the guilty love of the series that has so thoroughly struck literary pop culture. Then I remembered myself, stepped back and really looked at what I was watching.
Study any prevalent monster, creature or fairy tale and you will find a metaphor for us. At the most basic Red Riding Hood is about the onset of female sexuality; Hansel and Gretel is a message to children that resilience can overcome fear and hardship; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a warning about life, science and consequences; and Bram Stoker's Dracula is an elaborate backlash against repression. These chords of human truths are why these stories stay with us. They resonate.
The new TV show 'Once Upon a Time,' in which fairy tale characters are trapped in our world without any memories of their past lives, illustrates this beautifully. Even though all of our favorite characters have been brought down to our level, their manifested personalities all reflect the roots of their stories. My hats off to the writers.
What Stephenie Meyer has done with the Twilight Saga is both impressive and bizarre. She has turned the vampire story – and our ways of relating to the paranormal in general – on its head. Instead of the vampire embodying that something dark, wild, evil, terrifying and highly sexual secreted away inside each of us, Meyer's vampire is the one repressed. The one our very human protagonist depends on for stability. This is a catching trend of the genre. Increasingly often I stumble across fictional supernatural bonds usurping both family and marriage in weight, commitment and perceived permanence. What does it say about us that our monsters have become our saviors?
According to current statistics, diagnoses of major clinical depression has increased 10 times since 1945, and the rate of teenage affliction is progressing faster than any other age demographic. Psychologists are finding more and more of their teenage patients feeling lost and hopeless about the state of today's world. It makes sense then that teens are drawn to supernatural companions who will never leave them, never age, are strong enough to weather all adversity and can protect them from whatever the world may throw.
That means vampires are good, right? And all this supernatural companion stuff is just harmless escapist romance. You guessed it, not exactly. Besides setting the standard far beyond what any of us humans can attain, what disturbed me most was the positively reinforced power differential in 'Twilight' between Bella (human girl) and Edward (vampire boy).
The National Domestic Violence hotline uses a certain set of 15 questions designed to determine whether or not a person might be in an abusive relationship. If someone can answer yes to any of them, they should seriously consider getting help. Standing in for Bella, I can answer yes to all 15. And somehow this human-vampire couple has become one of the idealized paradigms of teenage relationships. Somehow, Bella – and all of the girls who identify with her – considers this stable.
'Twilight' and the works like it are fun. Even I can suck it up and admit it. But just as the fairy tales we grew up with reflect real human issues and the urban gothic novels of the late Victorian Era express the turbulence of their time, these modern stories reveal far more about us than we might initially think or want to acknowledge. In an age without constraints, the popularity of the subversively conservative Twilight Saga seems to be a message that we either aren't ready for our freedoms or don't understand what they are.
