What is it with Twilight? I got a couple friends who want to understand what the big deal is. The world doesn’t need another blogpost about it, but I’ve read the saga and have arrived at my own theories so what the heck.
It’s about teeny-bopper infatuation.
When I was 14 or 15, I was obsessed with INXS and believed with a fair amount of certainty that Michael Hutchence and I belonged together. He was, at the time, 24. Nine years older than me. That seemed like an eternity back then, an uncrossable chasm of wisdom and experience that would separate us forever. I was just a girl. He was a man. Any man worth his weight in salt would want to be with a woman. It was unfathomable to me that with any choice in the matter he would elect to date somebody so much less knowledgeable, less complex, less evolved than himself. Wouldn’t he get bored with a fifteen-year-old? And if he didn’t–how interesting could he be? If he wasn’t bored with me, then I’d probably be bored by him.
So it seems to me that Twilight is a love story written for teenage girls (although read by girls of all ages) who have ever wondered what on earth their favorite rock stars would see in them. Because (see an earlier blog), vampires are, after all, rock stars. In this novel, the teenage girl is Bella Swann, a 17-year-old heroine with whom Edward Cullen, a vampire, falls desperately in love.
The problem is, Edward Cullen is old. Really old. At 15, I would’ve felt weird dating a 24 year old . . . so it strikes me as a little, ahem, odd that one of the most beloved heroines in current pop fiction, a teenage girl, is dating a man who, for all intents and purposes, is 104. It’s like a man falling in love with a girl the age of his great-, great-grandaughter, at least. Do you have any tiny nieces? Small children of your own? Imagine them just finishing puberty when suddenly they find themselves inextricably attracted to somebody the age of George Bush, senior, for example. Weird, right? Or is it just me?
If you haven’t lived under a rock for the last two years, you probably already know that Twilight overcomes this potential age weirdness by freezing Edward’s biological age at 17. I’m prepared to accept that being 104 years old in a 17-year-old’s body makes it easier to ignore chronological age than if Edward were a shrunken, pruney thing, but still . . . .it requires a certain sleight of hand to make this work. First of all, you have to be an exceedingly cool 104 years old–none of that social awkwardness that usually besets senior citizens when they sit around with a gaggle of teenagers and try to be one of the gang. It also helps if you’re a spectacularly attractive 17-year-old boy with a great body, a good haircut, and a knack for clever, adolescent repartee. None of that “Kids these days! What are you complaining about? When I was a kid, I had to walk uphlll in both directions, in the snow, to a damn outhouse to relieve myself.”
So that’s what Twilight reveals about the benefits of aging and the virtues of wisdom. In the world of Twilight, there are none. Aging is something your body maybe does, but hopefully not your mind. And if your body doesn’t make you look older, than you get to live an age that exists beyond the reach of time. And that age is 17, apparently. Look at it this way: on the outside Edward is 17, but on the inside he could be aged anywhere from 17 to 104. He comes across as a perfect 17 years old. The implication is that a mature, wise, kind, strong and loving man of a mature age should and does behave & feel like a 17-year-old boy. The 17-year-old masculine pysche, with a couple adjustments and tweaks complements of a tortured soul, is the psyche that the ideal man matures into.
Well, that explains a lot of male behavior I’ve observed in my short lifetime.
But I digress. There are two types of vampire plots. In the first type, most recently evident in 29 Days of Night (or in Buffy, for every vampire but Angel), being changed into a vampire empties you of all humanity, compassion, and reverence for life. You become something akin to an intelligent zombie, frenzied for blood and utterly disdainful of humans. In the second type of vampire plot, being changed into a vampire changes only one thing: your body. Your body will not age or die, and you crave blood like a junkie craves heroine. The smell of it can drive you mad with desire, but your feelings don’t change, nor your spiritual perspective, nor your capacity for connection with others (remember Louis and Claudia?). The only thing that really changes is your biology. And, if you’re a sensitive poetic type, your angst levels.
And one of the things that’s always fascinated me about this second type of vampire plot is how it divides a person into two. The vampire is defined as such by his physical body, aspect #1. Aspect #2 is his soul (which is also his mind and his heart). Nothing splits the essence of personhood into immaterial subjectivity and the physical container for that subjecitvity so neatly as this type of vampirism, which turns its victims into bodies at odds with the souls who inhabit them. Desires, urges, hungers, outbursts are all triggered by the biological need for blood; our higher selves, our feelings, thoughts, and hopes, are represented as the vestiges of humanity that must be nurtured by abstinence from human blood. For this reason, Twilight is a very religious text that presents the body as corrupted by an original sin that can only be redeemed by the control, punishment, and suffering of the soul in defiance of the desires of the flesh. That’s the deal with the Cullens, anyhow–it’s not easy disciplining your desire, but you gotta do it or you’ll go to hell. Or alienate cute little 17-year-old girls.
It’s funny, though, how for all its religious conservatism Twilight ends up giving the body (not the soul) the highest significance in love. The body may be corrupt, but it defines you. Bella doesn’t fall in love with Edward because he’s a nice guy, or a good guy, or has a sense of humor . . . au contraire . . . she is completely, utterly and head-over-heels in love with his physical beauty. One blog catalogued all of Bella’s descriptions of Edward in “Twilight,” and here’s how it broke down:
Face: 24
Voice: 20
Eyes: 17
Movement: 11
Smile: 10
Teeth: 8
Muscles: 7
Skin: 7 (Note: This only contains accounts of Edward’s skin being beautiful. I didn’t count references to it as “pale,” “cold,” or “white.” If I had, this number would be about ten times large
r.)
Iron Strength or Limbs: 5
Breath: 4
Scent: 4
Laughter: 3
Chest: 2
Voice: 20
Eyes: 17
Movement: 11
Smile: 10
Teeth: 8
Muscles: 7
Skin: 7 (Note: This only contains accounts of Edward’s skin being beautiful. I didn’t count references to it as “pale,” “cold,” or “white.” If I had, this number would be about ten times large
r.)
Iron Strength or Limbs: 5
Breath: 4
Scent: 4
Laughter: 3
Chest: 2
Note the paucity of commentary about his, ahem, personality. Again, in Twilight, biology is destiny. You are your body. If your body is 17, then your subjectivity is 17. If your body is beautiful, then you are a beautiful person.
The other thing I remember from being 14 or 15 is wondering what the hell an experienced, attractive rock star who could have any woman he wanted would find compelling in me, a small-town fifteen-year-old bookworm with braces and eyeglasses. What I fantasized is that, when I went to Philadelphia to see INXS at the Tower Theater, that the Hutch would look out in the crowd, our eyes would meet for a second, and SHAZAAM! He’d know instantly and irrevocably that I was his destiny.
Which brings me to the other rock-star-fantasy element of Twilight. Sure enough, the moment Edward walks into the high-school cafeteria and catches a whiff of Bella, it’s a done deal. Why is that? Well, in the film, she’s Kristen Stewart, who is awfully attractive. But setting that detail aside, what makes Bella into Edward’s destiny is . . . the smell of her blood. It’s not her intelligence, or her innocence, or her personality on any level, or the fact that she wears bootcut jeans or isn’t a snob that attracts Edward . . . She was just fortunate enough to be born with blood that smells a certain, special way to Edward Cullen.
Lucky bitch!
But that’s adolescence . . . we’re supposed to outgrow these fantasies, right?
Well, that’s where I get stuck. I’m not sure I know a lot about love, but there are certain things that I need to believe about it. First and foremost among these is that this life is what John Keats called “The Veil of Soul-Making,” and that–to the degree that love is one of the most powerful experiences in this life–you are most connected by love to those who help to grow your soul and whose soul you help to grow. Growth is not easy, and therefore neither should be intimacy. If love were easy and automatic and physical–like it is in Twilight–then it wouldn’t be worth much. It’d be about as virtuous as shooting heroine. No, love is a struggle, an adventure.
Why are so many people averse to this idea? Why do thousands upon thousands of us–if Twilight’s success is any indication–prefer to think of love as a fated addiction to another person? What’s the fun in that?
Against my expectations given the author’s Mormon background, the Twilight saga forwards a despiritualized myth of love as that which reinforces our idealized versions of ourselves. In Forks, romantic and erotic love function pretty much to affirm the ego as it is. I’m perfect, you’re perfect just as you are, say the two lovers. Edward lies to Bella and abandons her. Bella lies to her parents and her friends all the time to cover for Edward. Edward is (arguably) a pedophile. Bella loves being dominated by an indestructible, mind-reading, life-threatening alpha male, to the point where she happily wakes up the day after her wedding covered from head to toe in bruises. But Edward and Bella never ague about ethics, never get on each other’s nerves, never (in spite of the dishonesty) doubt the other and learn to overcome that doubt. Above all, they never teach each other anything, other than how to have sex and how to hunt deer. If you ask me, they stagnate. No wonder Edward is stuck at 17.
