Surprisingly, Twilight Doesn't Actually Suck As Much As I Thought it Would... But it Still Sucks

The idea of using supernatural themes as an allegory is quite common, and dates back to the earliest religious mythologies, so it comes as little surprise that Meyer should use a supernatural motif to disguise her Christian message, especially after the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter series. In the quintessential vampire novel, Dracula, author Bram Stoker uses the vampire as a warning to Victorian men about the dangers of foreigners, the seductive powers of women, and the growing conflict between religion and science. C.S. Lewis created an elaborate fantasy world in his Narnia books to instill children with a sense of religious faith and impart upon them the values of honesty and bravery. However, in Lewis’ case he made fairly direct and obvious references throughout his books to Biblical prophecies and Christian motifs.

Meyer does the opposite by giving her books an occult edge, adding vampires and werewolves into the mix in lieu of the more traditional mythological beasts, as well as telling a story that is very heavy on gothic romanticism. Unfortunately, her attempts at luring in emo and goth kids into the world of conservative religious fervor has been successful beyond what would normally be expected from a novel.

 

Meyer employs the idea of vampires abstaining from drinking human blood and denying their animalistic and predatory natures as a metaphor for teenagers abstaining from alcohol/drug use and pre-marital sex. To keep this message from seeming old-fashioned she uses the vampire to give the whole concept an edgy, dangerous, and sexy quality… because there’s nothing sexier than not having sex (sarcasm).

Meyer also changes established the vampire mythos to better suit her romantic melodrama. They seem to have very different strengths and weaknesses than what would normally be expected in a vampire story. Her vampires don’t burn in the sunlight, but rather their skin sparkles. Her vampires also enjoy playing baseball during thunderstorms. All-American vampires? Yeah, go figure.

 

 

When seventeen-year-old Bella Swan’s mother decides to go on a tour with her stepfather, Bella chooses to live with her estranged father, Charlie, in the small town of Forks, Washington; a far cry from the world she’s known in Phoenix, Arizona. Bella and her father get along all right, though he’s somewhat quiet and introverted.

Despite being somewhat awkward and not really fitting in, Bella quickly befriends many students, but fails to befriend the sulky and attractive Edward Cullen. The Cullen family is something of an oddity in Forks as they’re all very pale, attractive, brooding, and they generally keep to themselves. The family consists of Carlisle Cullen and his wife Esme and their adopted children Rosalie, Emmett, Alice, Jasper, and Edward. Though, Bella is immediately smitten with Edward, he only gives her the cold shoulder. But one cold day when Bella’s about to get into the dilapidated truck her father gave her as a homecoming present, she’s almost hit by a van that spun out of control on the icy pavement, but Edward saves her by pushing the oncoming truck back with his bare hands. Bella is shocked and immediately realizes that Edward has inhuman strength, but when she confronts him about it, he denies it adamantly. But after hearing an old legend about the Cullen family’s origins almost two centuries earlier, Bella realizes that the entire Cullen family is much, much more than they seem. They’re vampires. When Bella confronts Edward with her startling discovering he confirms it with a startling display of his great speed, strength, agility, and his unique ability to read minds, though he’s unable to read Bella’s. The two immediately fall in love, though Edward senses that theirs will be a tragic relationship since he’s an immortal who craves her blood and she is a “fragile human” who will one day grow old and die. But Bella’s feelings are too strong and she knowingly accepts the consequences of loving Edward.

Edward explains that his family doesn’t feed off of humans like most vampires, that they’re “vegetarians” who only kill animals to survive, and that most other vampires despise them for this. When Edward decides that Bella should meet the family, she is warmly met by most of the Cullens, though Rosalie and Emmett are worried that bringing a human into their midst will only cause trouble. And they’re right.

During a baseball game, Bella and the Cullens are approached by a trio of violent nomadic vampires, intent on joining in. One of them, the savage James, is a tracker and he smells Bella’s human blood and makes it his mission to kill her and then to kill Edward. So, Edward, Emmett, and Rosalie go on the run trying to divert James while Alice, Jasper, and Bella go in the opposite direction. When Bella receives a panicked phone call from her mother, she races back to Phoenix to find that it was a trick by James, who’s waiting for her. Just as James is about to bite Bella, Edward heroically shows up, but can he defeat the ultimate vampire enemy and still repress the animal within himself?

 

 

The cast includes Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan, Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen, Peter Facinelli as Carlisle Cullen, Elizabeth Reaser as Esme Cullen, Ashley Greene as Alice Cullen, Jackson Rathbone as Jasper, Nikki Reed as Rosalie, Kellan Lutz as Emmett Cullen, Billy Burke as Charlie Swan, and Cam Gigante as James.

The film’s cast is quite a mixed bag. Though some of the actors are fairly good in their roles, others fail to give the impression that they know anything about vampires, either in literature or in films, and make the mistake of constantly posing like cats ready to pounce on their prey while hissing and making clawing gestures with their hands. In fact, the best performances come from the actors in the supporting roles playing the human inhabitants of Forks.

The film suffers from an excess of style and a lack of substance or genuine characterization. Most of the problems can be attributed to the poorly-written source material, but there’s also a lot to be said of the director, Catherine Hardwicke, who previously directed the film Thirteen about a girl’s descent into alcohol, drugs, sex, and self mutilation, and the Christian film, The Nativity Story.  Hardwicke seems like an obvious choice for director with her ability to present conservative Christian messages in a hip and edgy way. In my mind this is only annoying as the entire film and her entire career feel like one great attempt to proselytize to the viewer. Ultimately, her ability to tell a deep and meaningful story is lacking because she’s too focused on manipulating the audience into seeing things from her perspective. This is also true of Stephenie Meyer and her novels, which present any form of rebellion or dissent against the Christian Right as being conformist while abstinence and real conformity are presented as being morally superior. Apparently, you can’t be moral if you’re not a white, conservative, Christian.

So what we ultimately have here is a misguided morality tale disguised as trendy pop culture. Whether the thousands of adolescent Twilight fans realize it or not, their beloved series is nothing more than an attempt to dissuade and control them… and the story is written much like the melodramatic soap operas that their parents watch, though they’d be loathe to admit it.

 

So is Twilight the worst film of the year? Far from it. The film’s as silly and emotionally stunted as a twelve-year-old’s romantic fantasies, but it does have a strange, nostalgic, adolescent quality and a sense of fun that is often missing in an adult’s romantic film, so it does have something to offer. Just not much.

 

 

First of all, vampires do not sparkle in the sunlight. Depending on which mythology you’ve adopted as the basis for your books, they should either avoid daylight because during these hours their malevolent powers are dampened by the presence of God’s holy light, as in the novel Dracula, or they should be incinerated by sunlight due to a severe biological sensitivity to ultraviolet rays.

 

Secondly, vampires do not play baseball. Just take my word on this one.

 

And finally, anyone or anything that feeds off of a sentient life form is not a vegetarian. The fact that these vampires choose not to drink the blood of humans might be admirable, but in reality would mean their own demise since vampires have a biological need for human blood due to a genetic iron deficiency, and only human blood will do. These vampires are not vegetarians since they don’t live on vegetation, but rather animals. This only makes them selective carnivores and not vegetarians. If you were trying to make your vampires seem kindlier and of greater moral responsibility, perhaps having them feed off of a cloned blood supply or a synthetic plasma would have been better. All you’ve succeeded in doing by having them kill animals for their survival is perpetuate the hierarchal food chain that places humans and humanoids alike as superior beings. If anything, vampires with their immortality and heightened powers of observation would have realized that all life forms are sacred in that they form a symbiotic cycle of which only humans are conscious of and, as such, it would be more logical for vampires to kill humans since humans possess a greater potential for destruction than any other species on the planet.