Head to Head:
What drives the popularity of the "Twilight" series? ...Other than teen hormones, we mean.
Dominick Mayer:
The Twilight phenomenon seemed to come out of nowhere. Not like Bieber nowhere (seriously, I logged into Twitter one day and he was fucking everywhere), but it nevertheless rose to massive, deafening popularity in what seems like a pretty small window of time. I remember the books being read by a few friends in high school, I heard there was going to be a movie, and then BANG. At Hot Topic locations the nation over, Robert Pattinson in whiteface was inescapable and 40-year-olds were swooning over Taylor Lautner, which is weird because he's 17 and still lives with his parents. Also, he could walk outside to get the mail and end up having more sex than I'll have in my life, so fuck that guy.
Ever since the first movie made bank and sent the Twi-hards into a frenzy, I've been trying to understand exactly what it is that's made this series such a phenomenon. In a way it worries me; I have two younger sisters both in the target age for the series, and the fact that their generation's defining heroine is an emotionally wayward waif who can't live without a boyfriend, even if he's emotionally abusive, is really depressing. I'm not here to be a moral authority, though; like Entertainment Weekly called it a decade ago, I grew up with South Park and Eminem, and now I'm prone to killing women with chainsaws while making fart jokes.
I was told that the movies weren't the best way to get into the series (to their credit, even a lot of the fans know that they're terrible), so I picked up the first book to read through. What struck me most wasn't that it was awful, or great either. The series that's making absurd amounts of money was just totally mediocre. The books definitely have more moments of levity than the films, but Stephenie Meyer doesn't know how to write more than five or six adjectives, and while they're a quick and easy read, there's not much too them. (Until you get to Breaking Dawn. I've only read parts, but there is some serious crazy going on in that novel.) The thing is, though, after reading just one of the books, it became abundantly clear why the story is so damn popular.
It's chastity porn. And I don't mean that in the derogatory way a lot of people talk about Twilight, about it promoting a message of abstinence until marriage. It does, but there are worse things. What I mean is that Edward Cullen is the perfect preteen symbol of sexuality: dangerous and yet completely sexually nonthreatening. He can be swooned over, fantasized over, even lusted after, but he would never take advantage of you or try to engage in anything icky like SEX unless he'd already made an honest woman of you. Even if you try and seduce him, he'd rather just cuddle. And then watch you sleep. It's the perfect confluence of lust and doe-eyed romanticism. For the middle-aged audience it's found, it's the same idea, only now transform Edward into a symbol of an attractive younger man who's sensitive, wants nothing more than to hear about what's on your mind and can make you just like him, so you never have to age and you'll always be beautiful to him. This isn't just a female thing, either; I know guys who really dig the novels, of all sexual orientations, and that's also born from this idea of a love story that's erotically charged but without a hint of the actual perils of sexuality.
Ryan Peters:
I think Dominick is spot-on in calling Twilight chastity porn--and not as a pejorative, but a statement of fact--so I only have a little bit to add. I truly believe that part of the massive upswing in popularity of the Twilight series is due to the power of suggestion and curiosity: Industry insiders were shocked at the huge opening box office numbers of the first film, which grossed $69 million in its opening weekend. Each film since the original has debuted to increasingly big sums. Much like Avatar, part of the draw for the series is its own unexpected popularity; people who knew nothing of the series see and hear the media hype, and want to discover the details of the commotion for themselves. More than that, the Twilight franchise, and the rash of vampire-related content that has emerged in its wake, has become such a large part of popular conversation--amongst teens, late night talk show monologues and even news reports--that to know nothing of it means a person cannot benefit from or enjoy the subject in any way--not as legitimate entertainment or the object of ridicule.
But for as much as I think the burgeoning popularity of the series is propelled by its own momentum and hype more than actual quality, we’re still left with the fact that the first film made almost $70 million in one weekend. There’s nothing manufactured about that. And this is where I think Dominick is right; the thing that originally made the series appealing to tweens coast to coast is the kind of sexuality it sells. Yes, it is indeed chastity porn: Edward the vampire is the embodiment of the non-sexual sexual entity. More than that, though, I think the series gets a lot of mileage out of denying its sexual undertones to the point of irrationality.
Not that this is a new phenomenon or anything. I can’t help but mentally associate Twilight with the video that made Britney Spears famous, “Hit Me Baby (One More Time).” That 1998 video featured a 16 year-old Spears dancing seductively in a catholic school-girl outfit to the beat of vaguely misogynistic lyrics, which was far removed from the innocence of the album cover. For at least a few years, Spears and her handlers acted as if the dichotomy between innocent teen and jail-bait Lolita simply didn’t exist, a position which creates an attractive kind of tension. Twilight (and a host of other media forces, like from N’Sync straight to the Jonas Brothers) capitalizes on the same denial. It’s a series written by a Mormon woman claiming to teach a lesson about abstinence, even as the movie series features sex-drizzled teens lusting after one another in the woods and working on their tractors (<--the fuck?) in the hot sun with their shirts off. It’s a perverse kind of pleasure, where the strain of ignoring the elephant in the room creates a kind of dissonant sexual arousal: The non-sexual supernatural sex object ignoring its own pulsating sexuality.
I mean, that’s hawt, right?
Posted by Dominick Mayer on Jul 05, 2010 @ 10:22 pm
