I remember when I came back to America and asking my sister what the big deal about Twilight was. I had spent a year in Japan at this point, and managed to avoid just about everything about it except that it had vampires, it was meant for 12 year old girls, and that it was terrible. My sis answered that it basically is a fantasy romance targeted to tween girls that focuses on that certain fantasy that some girls have about a pretty man obsessing about them. I thought this was a reasonable explanation, and didn`t really need any other explanation. That is, until New Moon came out this year. Twilight has become a craze, a giant monolith in pop culture. It has come to the point where even in my isolated Japan apartment, I can not avoid it any longer. It is on the news, it is plastered all over the internet, and it is getting harder and harder to find people who don`t know about the tribulations of Bella and Edward. When I saw that Rifftrax (the same guys who did MST3K making fun of modern movies, find them at http://www.rifftrax.com/) had done a parody commentary track for the original Twilight movie, I decided to watch the movie for myself and see what the big deal was. I was ready for just a terrible movie made fun by the Rifftrax people, but what I got was so much more than just a terrible movie.
When the movie starts, we see the protagonist, Bella, moving from her home to the east coast to live with her dad. She enters a new life, and has to make entirely new friends. Now, in a normal situation, this would mean that the protagonist would find herself in a "fish out of water" situation, and the audience would understand the character and see her develop as the she struggles with a new environment. This doesn`t happen in Twilight. I was amazed. Bella instantly makes friends with a seemingly interesting group of people and is very popular. She also has all the boys of the group fawning over her and all the girls remarking how pretty and clever she is. Then, she meets Edward, a pasty white guy who seems to be actually physically disgusted at the sight of her. Normally, if someone finds me disgusting enough to the point of physically gagging, I might find myself utterly confused, and probably annoyed at this person. Bella, on the other hand, finds herself obsessively attracted to this behavior.
At this early point in the movie, it had already lost me. I couldn`t understand for the life of me why in a romantic story that any type of character development seemed to be tossed away so the vampire and the lady can do their best to look sexy while they stare at each other. I was ready to turn it off, when came the scene where it is revealed that Edward had been stalking her and watches her in her sleep, so they decide to make out. There is all this action and whatnot, and then they have a montage of Bella and Edward having conversation throughout the night. Twilight had gone so long with bizarre two dimensional characters, and their one chance to develop character, to make this romance make sense to people other than the author, and they purposefully flub it. Then it struck me (as my coffee cup was falling down in slow motion), of course they didn`t want to develop the characters, of course the plot of the movie makes no real sense, of course they use vampires and werewolves and use them without really considering the myth behind them or what would even make sense in the real world, because Twilight was never meant to be a movie to be analyzed on its own merits. Twilight is all about the story the audience is making in their own heads. Twilight is fan fiction, just add imagination.
The story, characters, and events of the movie are all just set pieces for the viewer to make their own stories. Why does Bella and Edward love each other? You decide! Why does the evil vampires want to hunt and kill Bella? Who knows! Why do vampires like to play baseball? Why not! Oh sure, all these actions probably have explanations in the fiction, but the movie never presents them this way. Twilight just likes to show you things, and then let the audience fill in the plot holes. That is why Bella and Edward just stare at each other, why make dialog when the audience already has their dialog right in their head, perfect just for them. Twilight is a terrible modern film, but as a post-modern film, it is a perfect cipher for imaginations of those 12 year old girls.
So what does it all mean? It means that in this age of youtube, blogs, and other user-created content on the internet, Twilight is a perfect storm. It gives something fans can obsess about, and gives haters something to complain about. The scariest thing is I am not sure if it is necessarily a bad thing. Mediocre films will come and go, but something this terrible on this many levels brings a smile to my face that I can`t deny. Ed Wood would be proud.
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