So, I went to the midnight last night. Wasn't my idea, but I enjoy midnight showings (except for the tight-asses that want everybody to be quiet so they don't miss a line in the oh so majestic movie). And here's the thing about the Twilight movies: I don't dislike them.
I know that's scandalous. This doesn't apply to the books, I should add. Never read them, don't want to try. I suspect what I like about the movies would not be present in the books. But I went to the first one as a joke, just to laugh at it, and I actually ended up enjoying it somewhat. I wonder if I would like it more if I was still in high school (or better yet, middle school).
A. New Moon: Demographics
Most of the people at the midnight showing fit a certain type: the tween-girl Hot Topic shopper (when I was a tween-girl, I should add, I found Hot Topic too scary and edgy, though appealing). They're not cheerleaders. They're too "intense." They dye their hair. They under-achieve. They all showed up to New Moon wearing horrific overstretched Twilight shirts, and they sit with a couple friends, probably the only friends they have, and drown in the wish fulfillment of this movie. People make fun of them, but people have probably been making fun of them their whole lives, so they're used to it. Twilight is a franchise for them, and part of me wants to say that that's great, because everybody else ignores them. They don't have any other franchises. Gossip Girl is not for them. Harry Potter has too wide of an appeal, and Harry Potter is pretty damn hegemonic anyway. A lot of movies pander to outcast boys (Zombieland being the latest I've seen), because outcast boys can grow up to be smart or secretly cool, but outcast girls have no value in society, and they don't get movie-candy. Except for Twilight. Both of my friends who unabashedly like Twilight were loser-outcasts in high school. So was I.
B. New Moon: Aesthetics
Gloomy and angsty is the vibe Twilight goes for. It's the only teen franchise that does, really. And I'm all about that shit. Bella, the heroine, mopes 24/7. She also screams in her sleep and drives a beat-up truck and slouches. She walks awkwardly, arms crossed over her stomach. She doesn't do a lot of smiling - laughs are even rarer. Her eyes never quite seem to be totally open. And because she's played by Kristen Stewart and this is a movie about wish fulfillment, she's pretty, but not jaw-droppingly so. She isn't sunny, that's for sure. Her make-up's done to make her eyes look sunken in and her face unhealthily pallid.
The landscape - a gorgeous, misty, rustic town in the Northwest U.S. - is equally morose. The sea thrashes violently, the beach consists of hard pebbles. The roads are all hair-pin curves surrounded by dense woods filled with monsters. Honestly, I would go to these movies just to see Forks, because it's one of the richest movie landscapes I've ever seen, and definitely somewhere I wouldn't mind living.
Then of course there's all the brooding. Vampire boy broods, Bella broods, werewolf boy broods. The only one that doesn't brood is my favorite character, Bella's long-suffering, clueless cop father, Charlie. Charlie (played by Billy Burke) is just a great character - essentially, a single dad who doesn't know what to do with a moody teenaged girl, but he sure tries his damn best. Back to the teenagers: there's a lot of dramatic talk about not being able to live without so-and-so, and suicide, and not talking and not eating, and running away. But teenagers - especially this subset of teenagers - are dramatic and they do talk that way. The franchise becomes laughable when it actually takes this teenaged angst seriously - but let me make a distinction here.
1. Bella's vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen, decides that he's a danger to her and moves away. Bella goes into a very deep depression. This part of the movie is pitch-perfect. I've read a lot of complaints that Bella is pathetic and a "bad role model" for going into this depression, but seriously, I've had friends react to break-ups like this. It's not unrealistic and quite frankly it's a very honest portrayal of something that a lot of teen movies ignore. And as someone who was clinically depressed for a few of my tween-years, I found it encouraging that a movie can be honest about depression in teens. Then Bella starts hanging out with werewolf boy, Jacob, and things look up, sort of. But Jacob wants to be more than friends and Bella is just using him as a crutch; when Jacob pulls away to join the werewolf brotherhood, Bella freaks out. Is it selfish of her? Sure. Is it realistic? Absolutely. So this isn't what I mean by the movie taking teenaged angst too seriously.
2. What I mean is the ultimate plot of New Moon, which is a slipshod version of Romeo and Juliet: Edward jumps to the conclusion that Bella is dead, and then goes off to Italy to kill himself in dramatic fashion. Bella has to go and stop him. This leads to a confrontation with the vampire aristocracy and basically, the teenaged doldrums turn into something much larger and more consequential than they really are. Thankfully they don't involve saving the world, but it's still far too extreme. Edward (who is 109) tells Bella that leaving her is the hardest thing he's done in a hundred years. Seriously? Geez. The only good part about this plot line is that you get to see Dakota Fanning as an evil preteen vampire, a la Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire. Hopefully they won't share a career trajectory, because Fanning makes a good baddie.
On a couple other basic movie-review notes, the acting is shit except for Dakota Fanning and Billy Burke and to some extent (when the material gives her something to actually do), Kristen Stewart. The non-romantic dialogue is passable, but the romantic dialogue is total tripe. The pacing is poor. The narrative arc is non-existent, as is the tension. The only things the movie succeeds at are song choice (but not musical score), and landscape. But we all knew these weren't going to win any Oscars.
C. New Moon: Social Implications
The biggest problem that I have with the Twilight series: Edward and his vampire family. Bella is believable as a human girl, and Jacob is believable as a werewolf boy - by which I mean, their actions and reactions ring true. But the Cullens are these opaque monoliths. They literally look corpse-white, all have extremely vacant, stony expressions, and when they say cheerful words to Bella it's just creepy as all fuck. They certainly don't act like hundreds-of-years-old, wise-but-jaded vampires (I'll give it to Anne Rice that she makes a convincing vampire of this type). Edward is totally unreadable, and the things he says are unbelievable. I hate the Cullens. They're unattractive and snobbish. Edward looks like a cross between Edward Scissorhands and The Crow, except in chest-revealing, expensive clothes. The werewolves, by contrast, are clannish but relaxed and homey. They're clearly flesh and blood, vivacious, adventurous. Bella's healthier with Jacob than she is with Edward. I could believe that all of this is done consciously, because vampires are supposed to be undead and icy and soulless. Except the movies make it obvious from the get-go that we (the audience of Bellas) are all supposed to swoon over Edward. We're supposed to want to become a vampire, like Bella does. And I'm like, why?
The worst part of the entire franchise, in my opinion, is what it contributes to race and class issues. Here's what I haven't said: the werewolves are all Indians. The Cullens, and 99% of the other vampires (there's one evil black vampire) are white. The werewolves are, as follows, also poor. They do things like drop out of school and fall in with "bad crowds." The only example of domestic violence here is attributed to the werewolf clan. The vampires, by contrast, are extremely fucking loaded, zipping around in expensive sports cars - Bella knows that one of them is at her house because she recognizes the fancy straight-from-a-car-commercial car - and living in a huge glass mansion, something out of the special Aspen edition of Home & Garden. They're also, you know, wise beyond belief and have refined, classical European tastes. They can do a bunch of fancy tricks like flying and Matrix acrobats and memorizing Shakespeare, while the werewolves are pretty much just very strong, as Bella remarks over and over. Like they're "on steroids." All this is made painfully obvious when Jacob and Alice, Edward's sister, confront each other at Bella's house. There's Jacob, in his (sort of) ratty clothes, and then there's Alice, in her very expensive-looking white coat and professionally-rendered hair and make-up. She tells Bella that she'll come back to talk, "once you put the dog out."
Yet we're all supposed to conclude, at movie's end, that the werewolves are well-meaning but crass (and perhaps violent?), while the vampires are cool and sexy and everything-you'd-ever-want-to-be-and-more. Incidentally, Bella's awesome dad fits right in withe the werewolves, personality-wise and socio-economically, meaning to join the vampires Bella also has to cut off her own family. This is where Twilight becomes shameful and nasty. The vampires are the plasticized, photo-shopped, megamillionaire celebrities - or, if you'd like, the cold carcass of capitalism - that we as the masses are all supposed to fellate, while the werewolves and humans are all the real, normal people (like friends and neighbors and family) that we're all supposed to trample in our hurry to dote upon the vampires.
And that's shitty and stupid and has nothing at all to do with being an angsty teenager.
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