Movie Review of Twilight (2008)

Their budding romance takes place against a backdrop of a town in peril.  Locals are being mauled to death by some wild animal.  Edward's doctor father and Bella's police chief dad are on the front line in dealing with the bodies.

But when Bella begins to suspect that Edward is a vampire, then she also reaches a terrible conclusion about Forks's trail of corpses.

Nor is Twilight the only movie to shake it off.  The Hunger immediately comes to mind. No-one whined about Miriam and John walking about in broad daylight.  Incidentally, I was reminded about The Hunger in other ways too.  The emphasis on posturing and the arty atmospheric shots were shared between the two movies. It's just that New Romanticism had been switched for Emo.

There is an obvious insertion though.  The fact that direct sunlight will cause any Twilight vampire's skin to sparkle is new.

I'd heard such disparaging things about this aspect, that I expected it to be more than it was. It was a single scene. Bella may have gushed that Edward looked like he was covered in diamonds and beautiful. It just seemed creepy to me. It was a decent enough innovation though and not worth the fuss it's engendered.

We also get Edward explaining how everything about him has evolved to enthrall humans, just like Bella. His aspect, his gaze, his very scent has an effect close to hypnosis on the object of his desire. That's one of the oldest tropes in the book.  Bela Lugosi's Dracula was practically defined by it.

So far so detractors-stop-being-so-snobby.  But none of the above really takes into account the real issue with Twilight. That is that it dilutes the vampiric genre down so much, that it practically becomes meaningless. 

Twilight is sanitized vampirism.  Violence and gore are implied, but not with the Cullens. They are vegetarians! They refuse point blank to feed off humans.  It's like Louis from Interview with the Vampire cloned himself half a dozen times and formed a family.  For him, it was existential angst.  For the Cullens, it's a way of life.

Mr Cullen is even the town's doctor.  Far from preying upon the humans around him, he seeks to heal them.

Nor do any of these vampires have fangs.  While that may be historically accurate, insofar as the pre-Hollywood legends would have it, it also removes a huge part of the modern allure of vampires. The extending fangs, upon viewing an attractive human, has an obvious phallic symbolism.

Twilight is very chaste. Edward is so afraid that proximity to Bella will cause him to lose control, that he avoids her like the plague.  These vampires are not only non-sexual, in a way which runs contrary to the whole late 19th, 20th and early 21st century genre, but they fear sex.

There may be a lot of talk about feeding frenzies, but it does leave you wondering precisely why anyone would fear the 'monstrous' Edward Cullen.  He's the kind of vampire which you could (and Bella did) take home to meet your Mum and Dad.

However all of this was missing the point, at least to my mind.  Twilight wasn't really a vampire movie. It was a High School romance, with the added twist of vampires.

The Bechdel Test requires two or more named female characters to have a conversation, which isn't about a male character.

Twilight struggled.  There were several women and teenage girls in the movie, and plenty of conversations. But the vast majority of them were about the males around them.

Then Bella, Jessica and Angela went clothes shopping. There was a whole exchange about prom dresses and whether their breasts looked fabulous.  It wasn't about men.  It allowed Twilight to pass the Bechdel Test.