i write to you after devoting ten hours of the past weekend to the twilight saga, and, as you might expect, i have so many thoughts.
a few weeks ago, i read lindy west’s new book, shit, actually, which is a lovely collection of hilarious essays. each piece focuses on a movie, ranging from forrest gump to garden state, and, thank god, there’s also an essay on twilight.
lindy’s writing fills me with unbridled joy and is punishingly hilarious. she wrote shrill, which was later adapted to the screen for hulu, and published the witches are coming last year, a collection of cultural criticism that explores misogyny and feminism. i became familiar with her via the stranger, a seattle alt weekly, for which she wrote reviews—including this piece on eclipse, the third movie in the saga.
in the first paragraph of her twilight essay, she writes:
“twilight feels like it was written by an AI that almost gets it. something is just 2 percent off about every line and every interaction, which, taken cumulatively, is like a window into one of those dimensions where everything is identical to ours except cats and turtles are switched and Prince never died. twilight took me out of my body in a way that did not give me pleasure but did give me fascination, and when it was over, i couldn’t believe it, but i felt compelled to watch the next one just to continue the satisfying, itchy glitch of it all.”
i have to start by saying that what really threw me for a loop during my weekend-long foray into the female teen psyche is the complete dissonance i experienced in watching these movies and trying to recall the initial feelings i had when i first saw them 12 years ago. i was 14 when the first movie came out and had just started my freshman year of college when breaking dawn - part 2 was released, four years later. needless to say, quite an impressionable time for me to be watching movies about vampires saving themselves for marriage or deciding whether or not to terminate a pregnancy that might result in the birth of an immortal child.
as i made my way through the movies, i texted a friend from high school and we began to chat about the franchise and its wild popularity. in the late 2000s, it felt as though twilight was everywhere—something that is so confusing in hindsight. it’s easy to dismiss the story until you realize that there’s still an annual festival that takes place—just like the books—in forks, washington. in august (yes, as in two months ago and more than a decade after the saga’s heyday) stephenie meyer published midnight sun, which retells the story of the first book in the series, but from edward’s perspective. it sold one million copies in its first week.
i remember devouring the books when i was in middle school and being eager to see the movies as they came out. admittedly, this is not surprising—they were the first and only romance novels i had ever read. looking back to see if i had written about the franchise at all in my journals, i was alarmed to discover that i actually liked new moon—the second installment of the saga and arguably the most boring, objectively—and was somehow taken by some of its dialogue (?????????).
after writing about breaking dawn - part 1, roger ebert wrote an essay about the heteronormativity on display in the saga, explaining that the entire franchise is built on the “deliciousness of temptation.” it’s true that, after bella meets edward, most of their conversations consist of her asking him to turn her into a vampire. when those conversations come to a dead end, she begs him to have sex with her while she’s still human.
it might also be worth noting that i saw these movies in the months after attending a private christian school that expelled typical conservative beliefs rooted in evangelical christianity. of course i didn’t have a way to parse any feelings i might have had after watching the saga. if anything, i bet i was perplexed by seeing a 17-year-old girl be so forward about her wants and desires because i had been taught, for years, to be the opposite.
it feels strange to know that i saw these movies without having any strong opinions shaping my worldview. but then again, that’s probably why i liked them—i hadn’t yet developed reasons or a framework to criticize them. after all, when you strip away the talking wolves and a ruling council of italian vampires, twilight is really just a boon of traditional values made a little more tantalizing by an impossible love triangle.
a handful of women told me that they were also watching, or had recently watched, the saga in quarantine, which made me think about why we’re attracted to these outrageous movies at this point in time. there’s something about the calming, oversaturated blue hue that permeates the first movie in the series. they all have better than average soundtracks. but that’s not why we watch them. i would guess that a lot of it has to do with having something mercilessly inane to focus on, or even hate. my coworker recently told me, “i enjoyed these movies. i couldn’t even get through one when they came out, which says a whole lot about my current state of mind.”
i didn’t spend ten hours watching the twilight saga because i knew i would enjoy it—i did it because i could numb my senses by escaping into scenes of horribly rendered cgi. twilight, as lindy says, takes you out of your body.
part of me wishes i had a stronger desire to really examine these movies, but the other part knows how nauseating that would be. it’s one thing to love a movie as a kid, revisit it a decade later, and experience a reassurance of the person you once were. but it is entirely different to rewatch something you remember loving and feel completely at odds with your former self. did watching twilight for the first time in ten years throw me into an identity crisis? maybe.
tiny morsels
MUSIC: ‘tis the season for movie scores! i love this and this. in the spirit of today’s newsletter, why not this?
MOVIES: if you feel so moved, please watch the twilight saga tell me how it makes you feel. now streaming on amazon prime video. if you’re looking for something more sophisticated, how about some antonioni?
INTERNET: because if you don’t have anything new to say, what’s the point in saying anything? and “books don’t change but they can measure the ways in which you have.”