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Don't Take It Seriously
The latest Twilight movie isn’t just some silly love story. It strays uncomfortably close to a morality tale that teaches all the wrong lessons.
By Emily Rutherford
November 23, 2009
Bell and Edward contemplate the evils of lust. (Summit Entertainment)
I have a confession to make: I was pleasantly surprised by the cinematic adaptation of New Moon, the second volume in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga. Don't get too concerned—this is not to say that I thought the movie was any good. Rather, instead of being just purely bad, as I'd expected, it was the sort of movie that's so bad it's wonderful. For example, what else can a person do but giggle when Bella, the story’s protagonist, is so depressed over her true vampire love's departure that she doesn't move or change her clothes for three months.
I'm not trying to make light of depression. But the idea that an 18-year-old girl has nothing to get her out of her desk chair and into some fresh clothes but her passionate love for her pale, contact-lensed boyfriend? That's just pathetic.
Of course, New Moon’s ridiculously over-the-top nature is what keeps it entertaining. When you've got Robert Pattinson (a.k.a. vampire boyfriend Edward Cullen) enunciating his lines with all the deliberate sluggishness of a William Shatner parody, you're set. I, for one, was so enamored of the sheer absurdity of the ostensible rule that every male character must take off his shirt before delivering any remotely dramatic line that I only checked my watch once throughout the movie's two-and-a-half hours.
And yet the layer of camp hilarity that pervades New Moon isn't quite enough to obscure the fact that there are messages in this movie that, as a good progressive, I really don't want to see taken seriously by the teenagers who are swooning instead of laughing at a human-vampire-werewolf love triangle. (Warning: spoilers ahead.)
For instance, when Bella and her werewolf friend-cum-crush, Jacob, stroll on a beach while arguing about whether Jacob's werewolf identity is the way he was born or a "lifestyle choice"—words which, when the heroine of this saga delivers them verbatim, stray uncomfortably close to the rhetoric espoused by homophobic right-wingers—it's hard to write off as another piece of absurdity. What's more, the scene is particularly awkward in the context of a universe which is eager to highlight several types of diversity, from race and ethnicity to gender to disability, but in which every character and every romantic pairing is resolutely heterosexual.
And then, with Bella’s potentially suicidal leap off a cliff in what appears to be a cry for the attention of the two men with whom she's infatuated, and the disturbingly explicit anti-premarital sex message which ends the movie, one leaves the theater convinced New Moon isn’t just some silly love story. Even despite knowing the Mormon background of Meyer, I couldn't believe that the director and screenwriter would have let the end credits roll without undertaking some sort of criticism of the ideas espoused by the main characters in the final scene.
As a jaded, nearly-20-year-old college student, I could laugh at the terrible acting and the utterly ridiculous plotline. I could watch New Moon ironically, as a way to fulfill my desire for camp. But, I'm concerned for the preteen and teenage girls who are the series’ main demographic, and who may not take a critical attitude to Twilight’s themes.
As of Sunday, New Moon had the third-highest opening weekend box office sales in cinema history, and I find myself desperately hoping that this statistic doesn't indicate a trend in what the next generation of young women want out of their romance films. I hope this doesn't mean middle- and high-school girls are thinking that becoming catatonic for three months and then trying to kill yourself over a sudden breakup is an indicator of a healthy attitude towards relationships, or that having sex before marriage could turn you into a vampire.
I'm willing to admit that I may be wrong, and that most teenage girls are viewing the movie as non-seriously as I am. Maybe they're just interested in the admittedly decent production values, from the CGI werewolves to the indie soundtrack to the beautiful Pacific Northwest scenery (the movie was filmed in and around Vancouver). But somehow, I doubt it. Chalk up my skepticism to the audible gasps from the audience whenever any male member of the cast appeared shirtless (which happened roughly once every two minutes).
I have to wonder with apprehension about where this emerging teen culture, which fetishizes abstinence at the expense of mental health, is headed. For the sake of young women (and men), I maintain hope that it’s toward the realization that there are viable life choices besides marriage, deep depression after a breakup, and suicide attempts.
Emily is a staff writer for Campus Progress and a sophomore at Princeton University. Follow her on Twitter.
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Robert Pattinson kicks ass.
impishidea.com/criti…
www.spunk
— cult of skaro 24 - Nov 24, 10:09 PM - #Let me Anna-Marie Cox this first and say I haven’t seen the movie… BUT
The author’s criticism of the final scene which is apparently anti-pre-marital sex is even more laughable than the rampant shirtlessness (which I got plenty of from the ads). If Meyer wants the message in the book, why wouldn’t she insist on it being in the movie? It is absurd to be upset that someone in production didn’t see it fit to ruin her vision. That’s the sort of preservation is something you should WANT to see, no matter what your politics are.
— Joe L-E - Nov 25, 03:54 PM - #I haven’t seen the movies but I have read the first two books, so I’ll just respond from those:
-Girls will not act the way Bella did when Edward left. They would only do that for their vampire boyfriends, not human boyfriends. Hopefully girls know that Bella and Edward’s relationship is different than normal relationships since he’s not human, and that they should not act like Bella if their boyfriends leave.
— Lyz - Dec 31, 01:40 AM - #-Although I would love to see more homosexual relationships in movies, they are rarely, if ever, shown in children/teen movies. Showing diversity except in this circumstance is only typical and nothing to question about.
-I don’t think that Edward’s marriage proposal to Bella at the end of the book is an anti-premarital sex message. Edward was born in 1903 and grew up in a time period when it was normal for people to get married at extremely young ages.
-I think the book is a terrible model for girls in the fact that she’s planning on giving up college and has no interests except for Edward. As long as we don’t think of Edward as just any boy, but a non-human vampire, her lack of college plans and interests seem to be justified. But still, she’s a bad role model for forgetting about her education.
Nice article.
I agree with a lot of this, and I’m glad you don’t delude yourself into thinking that the legions of teenage girls (and their mothers) view this movie with a progressive, critical eye.
At the same time, I don’t fully fault the filmmakers, since the source material is already explicitly anti-premarital sex; in Breaking Dawn (spoiler alert), Meyer doubly highlights this by ensuring that Bella and Edward don’t have sex until a) they marry, and b) Edward turns Bella into a vampire. In the sex scene, Bella narrates something along the lines of, “I just could never imagine being that intimate with someone I didn’t love as much as Edward.” Which, no doubt, is a wholesome message, but also not superbly realistic, given that Bella has a horribly obsessive love for Edward that no girl should try to emulate.
More discomforting for me than the anti-premarital sex message is the idea that Bella cannot function independently. She was “lost” until she found Edward, and then when he dumps her, she nearly withers away in the forest and then her room. She must be saved by a man from the forest, of course, and then the only thing that makes her feel better and lulls her out of this deep depression is her intimate friendship with Jacob. When he tries to shut her out of his life, she’s crippled again.
It’s bizarre to me that only a few years ago, we were trumpeting Sarah Jessica Parker and the Sex and the City girls as heroines for being trailblazing feminists. Now, it seems, the most popular supposed “heroine” of pop culture is Bella, a pathetic, anti-feminist dependent.
— Adam Polaski - Jan 7, 02:47 PM - #Nice article.
I agree with a lot of this, and I’m glad you don’t delude yourself into thinking that the legions of teenage girls (and their mothers) view this movie with a progressive, critical eye.
At the same time, I don’t fully fault the filmmakers, since the source material is already explicitly anti-premarital sex; in Breaking Dawn (spoiler alert), Meyer doubly highlights this by ensuring that Bella and Edward don’t have sex until a) they marry, and b) Edward turns Bella into a vampire. In the sex scene, Bella narrates something along the lines of, “I just could never imagine being that intimate with someone I didn’t love as much as Edward.” Which, no doubt, is a wholesome message, but also not superbly realistic, given that Bella has a horribly obsessive love for Edward that no girl should try to emulate.
More discomforting for me than the anti-premarital sex message is the idea that Bella cannot function independently. She was “lost” until she found Edward, and then when he dumps her, she nearly withers away in the forest and then her room. She must be saved by a man, of course, and then the only thing that makes her feel better and lulls her out of this deep depression is her intimate friendship with Jacob. When he tries to shut her out of his life, she’s crippled again.
It’s bizarre to me that only a few years ago, we were trumpeting Sarah Jessica Parker and the Sex and the City girls as heroines for being trailblazing feminists. Now, it seems, the most popular supposed “heroine” of pop culture is Bella, a pathetic, anti-feminist dependent.
— Adam Polaski - Jan 7, 02:48 PM - #