Thrice bitten

Twilight came out on DVD yesterday.

I’m going to be straight with you — I bought it.

Also, I saw it in theaters. Purely for scholarly purposes.

Twice.

(Really, the second time doesn’t count ’cause it was at the dollar and I was having a wonky kind of day.)

(Right?)

Here’s the thing: The day I was first invited to go see it, I had just gotten a fantastic New Year’s deal on Underworld — terrific contemporary B-movie vampire fare if I ever saw some — at Half Price Books and I wasn’t about to go and act like I was too good for Twilight. No matter how much I wanted to.

I don’t blame the gents who would rather get run over by a car than watch this film — and I digitally applaud all the others who selflessly accompanied girlfriends, moms, sisters, and so on, to the theater — because Twilight is probably the most undiluted hetero female fantasy I’ve seen in my short life.

I suppose it’s still possible at this point that you don’t know what the movie is about, so I’ll tell you: A strong-willed teenage girl named Bella goes to live with her police-chief father in the perpetually overcast city of Forks, Washington. At school, she meets Edward — a tall, pale character who doesn’t say much. He is initially rude to her, but she’s intrigued. So she pushes. He says they shouldn’t be friends. She pushes more. He starts following her around and protecting her from whatever shit happens to hit the fan on that particular day.

Turns out, Edward’s a vampire, part of a family of vampires (all in bad pallid makeup) who choose to live as “vegetarians” — that is, they only feed off the blood of animals. Then Bella showed up and put that practice into jeopardy for Edward, who desperately wants to suck her blood. (I’m pretty sure you get more than detention for that.)

You’re no fools, readers. You know the vampire bite is a euphemism for sex and loss of innocence. Last year, not one but two films about minors in love with vampires, Let the Right One In and Twilight, forwent the bite. Several of the critics I most admire adored the first film and panned the second. Twilight struck them as an abstinence fable, and it is perhaps lucky that I am not extraordinarily familiar with the source material, Stephenie Meyer’s novel of the same title, or I might feel the same way.

New York Times co-chief film critic Manohla Dargis, for example, wrote in her review of Twilight that Meyer’s “contribution to the vampire chronicles” was to turn out a series that is “less threatening and morally sticky” than its forebears. “Safe,” she called Meyer’s books.

What I’ve been thinking through, though, is that a vampire movie all about ravishment is kind of old-hat. A woman’s outstretched neck being pierced by fangs as she shrieks and moans with fill-in-the-blank isn’t trangressive anymore. Not biting is trangressive to the genre.

Twilight is sexy nonetheless. Director Catherine Hardwicke is a master of delayed pleasure, and the actors who play Bella and Edward, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, are good at throwing one another longing, intense, mysterious glances — fondling one another without making physical contact for much of the film.

It’s no secret that Twilight was a hit with a certain demographic — and frankly, good, our friends in Hollywood need to make movies to please the ladies. (How about it — one Twilight for every Transformers?) That Twilight was written, adapted for the screen, and directed by women is refreshing in an era when even most “girly” romantic comedies seem to be written by men. (And we’re not seeing them! Shock!) Something obviously clicked here, and I hope the industry recognizes that.

I’ve purposefully waited until the end to address at length the matter of gender roles/depiction in Twilight, simply because it has been the topic of much thoughtful debate between myself and friends and friends of the blog. (Don’t you jump ship on me now.) One individual found Pattinson’s tall-dark-handsome-brooding-protective-perfection particularly irritating because it reinforces unfair standards of male desirability.

That’s a tricky number, for sure. I keep coming back to is this New York Times magazine piece that ran in January titled “What Do Women Want?” In the article, sexologist Marta Meana tried to identify what she called the “dilemma” of female desire: “Women want to be thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and caring.”

I honestly feel like it’s more that about Edward Cullen than that Pattinson is some sort of gorgeous god. Women fall in love with Edward because of his nearly uncontrollable craving for Bella: Is he going to kiss her or kill her? Again, not having read the book — that the actor is tall and slightly Neanderthal-ish seems like movie-shorthand for the fact that Edward is physically intimidating, like an English accent is shorthand for “smart” or “evil.”

Anyone with half a brain knows that in reality there are plenty of short, mysterious guys who can protect you and toss you into bed, and plenty of tall, boring fellas who get spooked by their own shadows — and plenty of women who prefer the second type and don’t need to be protected, thank you very much. Edward might ultimately function as a protector, but only because Bella is aggressive enough to initiate and perpetuate a relationship that is fulfilling to her. Twilight is one female fantasy, not every female fantasy. (But really, don’t you think the Brontë sisters would dig the hell out of this shit?)

March 22, 2009. Tags: Bella, Bronte, Catherine Hardwicke, DVD, Edward, Kristen Stewart, Let the Right One In, Manohla Dargis, Marta Meana, New York Times magazine, Robert Pattinson, Stephenie Meyer, The New York Times, Transformers, Twilight, Underworld, Vampire. Movies. 1 comment.