“The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” early numbers are in, and while the film’s take doesn’t quite measure up to that of predecessor “New Moon,” anti-Twihards have little reason for joy: ‘Eclipse’ pulled in $262m worldwide in five days, broke the midnight screening record, and its domestic gross was less than the second installment’s by just $3m at that point. Yes, analysts were wrong in predicting exponential growth on the last film’s totals, but in the words of Summit exec Richie Fay: “I think it has a ways to go before we can say it’s falling short.”
So by any reasonable standard “Eclipse” is already huge and now that we’ve passed the halfway point in the five-film franchise, perhaps it’s a good moment to take a look at the Twilight phenomenon and judge whether it’s a tween fad best ignored, like Justin Bieber or Heelys. Or an apocalyptic plague galloping over the horizon, with fellow horsemen Famine, War and Death bringing up the rear. Or something else.
It is tempting to dismiss the Twilight brouhaha: the films are, by objective standards, rubbish – a slight upturn in quality in “Eclipse” does not address the hamfisted plotting, risible dialogue and seriously dodgy SFX that characterized the first two. Also, its appeal is so well-defined as to be almost hermetically contained: the series is made for young girls and found a surprising supplementary audience in older women who for some reason want to relive the most socially awkward period of their lives. If you do not belong to either of these groups, you can easily chalk the hysteria up to the inexperience/idiocy of those that do, and shrug it off like Scientology, or line dancing, or any other example of collective madness exhibited by a particular group to the exclusion of everyone else.
But Twilight is more insidious than a daffy celebrity religion or a wacky dance fad. The notions of masculinity and femininity, power and control, fantasy and desire that it espouses would be troubling in a small cult-y young adult book series, but when they’re elevated to such epidemic, comment-on-modern-society proportions and packaged for consumption by impressionable teenagers, they’re kind of alarming. Reams have already been written about Bella’s disturbing passivity; she is but a limp rag doll endlessly buffeted on tides of hormones between the rock of her soulmate Edward and the hard place of Jacob’s abs (this despite screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg’s insistence that movie-Bella is more dynamic than book-Bella – the mind boggles). But it’s not just women who come off badly: men are corralled into one of two stereotypes: slender, soulful R-Patzes who, Christ on a bike, sparkle in the sunshine, or buff, animalistic Lautners, with simian overhanging foreheads so lunkish they have to keep taking their shirts off to distract us. How long before a self-help book hits the shelves that encourages us to divide our menfolk cleanly into vampires or werewolves? Has anyone done that yet? If not… [scribbles book outline on back of yogurt lid, makes a jillion dollars].
It’s depressing when audiences of any age live down to the basement-level expectations of Hollywood marketeers, but the t(w)eens who are swallowing the films’ dodgy politics whole at least have time on their side. “Twilight” may be a more concentrated, more ubiquitous, more successfully-marketed dose of what teenagers of yore went through with “Titanic” or “Dirty Dancing” or whatever, but the principle is much the same, and we turned out OK. The really worrisome aspect of “Twilight” culture is that these poorly-made films haven’t just done the business in terms of deluded young girls swooning over Robert Pattinson and subconsciously absorbing the reactionary wish-fulfillment dross that comes with him. Grown women who should absolutely know better have flocked to the films – creating a secondary audience that further swells the “Twilight” coffers, and legitimizes (and sometimes mimics) the fawning fangirl excesses of their daughters, sisters, nieces, etc.
Of course, I am now open to accusations of treachery to my sex, as one point of view would have it that since “Twilight” is popular with a predominantly female audience (while males formed a third of the “Eclipse” numbers so far, up from a fifth of “New Moon”, we presume they’re mostly long-suffering boyfriends or brothers of real fans, though it’s a trend worth noting), it is therefore somehow ‘feminist’. Hilarious. If you are the kind of deep thinker who cheers the advent of terms like “cougar” and “milf” (for which there are no male equivalents – may I suggest “jaguar” and “dilf”?) and sees it as ‘liberating’ that women can now be lust objects well into their 50s, then maybe insipid Bella, who has no personal resources other than being endlessly adored by two hunky men, is your Emmeline bloody Pankhurst. But actually the “Twilight” films pander to all that is basest and most shameful in the conventional idea of the collective female psyche (if there is such a thing). The desire to be desired without reason; to have one’s life made remarkable by the men who fight over you; to define yourself entirely in terms of someone else; all this may sound thrillingly romantic to some, but it’s also just fucking stupid, and if you’re over 15 and still buying this crap, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Teenage girls have never been the most discerning group and modern social media trends tell us they’re more susceptible than ever to herd mentality and peer group pressures. They deserve our pity, our understanding and our fervent prayers that this, too, like the sulkiness, the emo haircuts and the “I didn’t ask to be born” attitude shall pass. In most cases, it’s likely that time will teach them they were sold a pup with “Twilight”, and they will look back on the episode with nostalgia and embarrassment.
But what of ‘Twilight Moms’ and co.? Whether you share the opinion that large single-sex groupings of adults almost never bring about anything positive (think hooliganism, hen parties, “Sex And The City” bus tours) surely we can agree that any new reason to further dumb down is a bad thing — not for men or women, but for people who like stuff to be smart and interesting and vaguely justifiable as being for the greater good (“Harry Potter” made everyone who touched it rich, but at least it’s lesson is something about following your own path, accepting others for who they are, etc.). The ‘Twilight’ franchise, however, is a perfect storm of questionable morality, slapdash production values and cross-generational popularity, and by embracing it in an effort to relive the first blush of impossible love or somesuch claptrap, grown women in their droves are endorsing a moronic, creatively bankrupt series of films. In the reductive world of the Hollywood analyst that can only mean that female audiences don’t care about the quality of the films they go to, and thus the cycle of contempt and lowered standards begins anew – only this time those of us who would champion a better class of female-aimed movie have that much less ground to stand on.
Apocalyptic? No. Depressing? Most definitely.
