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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 10, No. 3 |
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"TWILIGHT" |
 KRISTEN STEWART, safe in the arms of a vampire, played by ROBERT PATTINSON. |
Young girls and vampires:
Who woulda believed it?
of TheColumnists.com
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This column contains plot details of both the book and movie versions of "Twilight" and may be a spoiler for those who haven't read the book yet or seen the film. |
In my ongoing effort to learn what goes on in the minds of pretty young women of the 21st century, I recently read a copy of Stephenie Meyer's 2005 best-seller "Twilight," then slipped into a rainy afternoon screening of the current hit movie that's based on the book.
It has been an eye-opening experience. It also has filled my aging head with strange longings. In fact, I wish this had all happened in the 1950s when I was already well-steeped in vampire lore and therefore would not have been considered a "dork" by the teenage girls of my time. Perhaps I could have done something real interesting with my strange longings if the book and movie had been around then.
In case you haven't heard, "Twilight" started a series of novels by Meyer that became an American publishing sensation among teenage girls and slightly older young women in their early 20s. Each new chapter in the saga is eagerly awaited and each has become a best-seller. It's like "Harry Potter" all over again, but with a bit more blood and paler boys.
The movie also was eagerly anticipated and drew huge crowds to midnight premiere screenings all across America two weeks ago. The film raced to No. 1 at the box office and continues to rake in profits. A new movie, "New Moon," with all the principal players returning, is now in pre-production, based on the second novel in Meyer's series, and will be released in 2010. I trust nobody will confuse it with the 1940 Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy musical of the same name nor the Grace Moore-Lawrence Tibbett version of 1930.
Briefly, "Twilight" is about a 17-year-old girl named Bella Swan who travels to a small, remote town called Forks on the heavily-wooded, rainy and fog-shrouded coast of the Olympic Peninula in the state of Washington. Her parents are divorced and she's moving to Forks to live with her father, Charlie, who's the local police chief, while she finishes high school. She has been living with her mom in Phoenix, Ariz., which is the sunny, parched exact opposite of Forks.
Bella hasn't ever been a real popular girl in school and really isn't into the usual high school stuff like proms and such. So, it's perhaps natural that she finds herself drawn to handsome classmate Edward Cullen, who's also a social outcast on campus and mostly hangs out with his family at their isolated home in the country.
What she eventually discovers is that Edward is a vampire. What makes "Twilight" so fascinating to me is that it distances itself from the usual vampire cliches and seems to use the vampirism as a metaphor for other issues that may occupy the minds of most teenage girls today, most notably sexual desire and learning how to keep it in a proper place in one's life.
For Edward Cullen, for instance, his desire for Bella at times becomes so overwelming that he has to get away from her quickly in order to not succumb to the temptation. What's "special" about his situation, though, is that his lust isn't for the hot and heavy sex most teenage boys crave, but for the sharply-scented warm red blood coursing in Bella's veins.
My goal wasn't so much to decide if "Twilight" is a good book and movie, but to determine why it has become such a sensation among teenage girls. It is not a "young adult" novel and isn't "written down" to young readers. It's a regular mainstream novel that girls just happen to have adopted as a special thing in their lives. Likewise, the movie is drawing more than just teen girls, though they're the ones who are pushing it to blockbuster status.
To help me sort a few things out, I approached four very pretty young women that I see on a regular basis because they all have part-time jobs in the resort community where I live in Washington state. I am not related to any of these young ladies, but consider them personal friends. They are 18, 19, 20 and 21 years of age. The 21-year-old has no interest in vampire books or movies and has had no exposure of any kind to "Twilight." The 18-year-old, who hangs out with the 19 and 20 year olds, also has no interest in "Twilight" and thinks the whole craze is stupid.
The 20-year-old loves vampire movies and just about all "dark" forms of entertainment, but doesn't read much and hasn't been caught up in the "Twilight" craze. In sharp contrast, the 19-year-old is a "Twilight" freak, who has read ALL the books and had been dying to see the movie for months in advance of its release. She and the 20-year-old went together to an early screening of the movie on the day it opened and regretted that work and school obligations kept them from making it to the midnight premiere the night before.
The 19-year-old, who I'll call Diane to protect her identity, comes from a family with strong religious beliefs. Her parents do not approve of "satanic" cultural influences and took a stand against even the "Harry Potter" novels about magic, wizardry and the like. Diane acquired all the Potter books and the "Twilight" books, but had friends keep them for her. She still lives at home with her parents, but I don't think she told them she was going to the "Twilight" movie, which I doubt they'd have approved.
After I'd read the book, I asked Diane to listen to my theories about why these stories might have appealed so strongly to her and other girls she knows. She told me she thought I was pretty accurate as far as she's concerned.
First, I believe many young girls are attracted to boys who have a so-called "element of danger" about them. Diane agrees that's a key reason why Bella is attracted to Edward, even though she knows there may come a time when his "danger" may become very real to her if he decides to turn her into a vampire by drinking her blood to the point of her death.
Diane thinks the "element of danger" also is positive for a girl these days because there are so many bad people around that a girl often feels she needs a boy friend who's capable of protecting her. That certainly proves to be the case in "Twilight" in one sequence where some boys seem to be "herding" Bella into a place where they can sexually molest her--until Edward intervenes. At another point, Edward has to defend her from another vampire who wants her for his own.
I also told Diane I thought Bella was afraid she wasn't very attractive, so when Edward begins to pay special attention to her and tells her how lovely she is, she begins to see herself with a new vision. Diane told me most teenage girls go through such a period where they just don't know how boys perceive them until one comes along who puts it into words.
Because there's an age gap of about half a century between Diane and me, I also kidded her that I assumed Bella was attracted to older men and that was one of the appeals to readers her age--that they often dream of being romanced by an older man. Diane wasn't sure that was such a keen observation.
"Hey, Diane," I said. "Don't forget Edward was born in 1901 and he's really going on 110 about now."
"That's true," she laughed, "but don't you forget he still looks like he's 17."
A perfect squelch--and from a teenager
yet!
At the heart of "Twilight," though, is the feeling
of alienation, a common feeling among many teen girls for a variety
of reasons. Bella feels alienated because she's a stranger in
a new school that's radically different from the one she's used
to in sunny Arizona. And Edward, of course, feels alienated because
he's truly a different species of creature that only looks human.
Worse yet, he's part of a family that has vowed to drink only
the blood of animals yet poor Edward has to walk among living
humans every day at school, inhaling the maddening fragrance
of their blood.
Finally, I believe this issue of a vampire who fears what he might do if he gets too close to the girl he loves goes right to the point of the big issue in the lives of many young women: To have sex with your boy friend or not. That can be as frustrating to a teenage girl as the blood issue is with Edward. No wonder so many of them connect with Bella and Edward and long for their romance to advance without any real harm to either of them.
That topic I didn't raise with Diane because I feared it might get too personal
My feeling about "Twilight," the book, is that it's a much better novel than I ever expected it to be. I'm sure it's riding a trend that began with Anne Rice's "Interview with the Vampire" and its many sequels about contemporary vampires. "Buffy the Vampire Killer," the movie and the TV series, and its spinoff TV series "Angel" about a male vampire, certainly paved the way for a series of novels about high schoolers and vampires.
They all have re-defined the vampire legends. Edward and his "family" all can walk about freely in daytime and don't sleep in coffins. They have super strength and enhanced physical agility. Edward can read minds. If you want to kill a modern vampire of his type, you don't need a wooden stake, but would have to work a lot harder dispatching one than Van Helsing had to work to get rid of Count Dracula.
Both Diane and her 20-year-old friend thought the "Twilight" movie was a little slow during the first hour, but Diane was glad it was pretty faithful to the book. They both liked the two lead actors, but the 20-year-old said she was turned on a little more by the villain of the movie, actor Cam Gigandet, who plays "James," the vampire outsider who attempts to take Bella from Edward.
I thought the movie was beautifully done and disappointed me in only a few instances. For example, the scene where Edward reveals his upper body to Bella. Its bizarre reaction to sunlight is much more sensational on the written page than on the screen. The amusing baseball game in which Edward's family races all over an open field at super-speed works very well on screen. I feared it might look ludicrous and mood-destroying after reading about it in the book.
The film is directed by Catherine Hardwicke, a former production designer whose best-known previous film is the 2003 teen drama "Thirteen," which I thought was very good, too. Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg comes mainly from television, where she writes and co-produces one of my favorite shows, Showtime's "Dexter," and was a writer for "The O.C.," the popular teen-oriented show. They combine to give the film a definite female point of view.
Kristen Stewart, who plays Bella, really charmed me. She's 18, just a year older than the character she plays, and has a very wistful beauty that works marvelously for Bella. I have seen her before, most recently in "Into the Wild," but primarily remember her as a juvenile when she played Jodie Foster's daughter in the thriller "Panic Room."
Robert Pattinson, the 22-year-old who plays Edward, is a veteran of the "Harry Potter" films and the role of Harry's rival, Cedric. He's English, but has subdued his accent for "Twilight" and has the gaunt, pale, mysterious look Edward needs.
I liked the film quite a bit and thought the location filming in Washington gave the film a very haunting quality. I'll be anxious to see the sequel, which is teased a bit at the end of "Twilight" when we see the nasty Victoria (Rachel Lefevre), a sidekick of the bad vampire James, lurking around, ready to start some new trouble for the Cullens and their human friend, Bella.
As for the other books, Diane promises she'll bring them out of hiding and lend them to me so I can catch up on the series. Hmmm. Maybe she's trying to corrupt this old fellow and set him up for something really frightening. We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?
©2008 by Ron Miller. This column first posted Dec. 8, 2008.
Ron Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
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