It’s finally the opening weekend of Twilight, the much-hyped movie adaptation of the first book in Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling normal-girl-falls-in-love-with-teen-vampire book series. The hardcore fans of the series have been waiting with bated breath for months, biding their time until the film’s release date by obsessing over the minutae of the production process, from casting decisions to locations, from special effects to song choices.
One thing that fans haven’t seemed to spend a great deal of time and energy on, though, is the backlash against the series that started simmering back in August when feminists started getting wind of what the book series is about. There was a brief flurry of feminist rants that was spurred, in part, by author Meg Cabot (The Princess Diaries) slamming the book (which she’d not even read) on her blog, saying, in part, “Do you honestly think I’d like a story about a girl considering changing SPECIES for a guy? No offense to any of you, but as a feminist, I just can’t go there… ”

The anti-Twilight writings, which took place largely in various online forums, deplored the perceived passivity of the books’ heroine, Bella Swan, an average, clumsy teenage girl who falls in love with a 17-year-old vampire who’s much older than he appears. Bella was promptly labeled a “Mary Sue” by the anti-Twilight set — a derogatory term that implies a female character who is passively acted upon rather than taking action, is overly idealized, and exists primarily as a vessel for fulfilling the author’s fantasies. Interestingly, though, when I had the opportunity to interview the cast, screenwriter and director at the LA junket recently, none of them seemed aware of the backlash.
Lead actress Kristen Stewart had this to say on the subject: “I’d love to talk to them, really. When I read like little brief descriptions of the movie, it wasn’t something I wanted to do. I didn’t want to be part of this very set, unrealistic, ideological idea of love and push it on every little girl, because they’re never going to get that. But the vampire in our story is entirely damaged, and Bella wears the pants in the relationship, she is the sure-footed, confident one. She’s naive to the world of vampires and everything like that but she’s not doing it for him… It takes a lot of power and a lot of strength to subject yourself to somebody completely and to give up the power and it has to start there… The fact that she is … so trusting of herself, it really has nothing to do with Edward and giving herself to him and being this sort of weak damsel in distress, it’s very courageous what she’s doing. She’s like, believing whatever that’s inside her. It’s a very personal thing she’s going through, it really has nothing to do with Edward.” When pressed on whether she felt there was truth to the criticism that Edward’s behavior borders on abusive or controlling, though, Stewart added, “It’s totally self-inflicted. Girls are like that, girls take a lot of crap. They subject themselves to abuse, it’s like they need it.”
Ashley Greene, who plays Alice, the vampire sister of Twilight’s vamp-hero Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), had her own take on the feminist view of the series. “I think it’s ludicrous. I think that people unfortunately are going to try to pick and find things wrong with it … It’s a love story. He’s a vampire, he’s not a normal kid, and he’s not some guy who’s abusive, who’s beating people up; he loves Bella, he doesn’t want to hurt her at all. He loves her so passionately that he’s trying to stay away from her, but he can’t. And I think Bella’s a strong character for being able to put up with things like that and accept it, and understand it, and not run away terrified like most girls would. And I think they did a really great job of portraying Edward in the film, portraying his turmoil, that he’s not a perfect man, and she responds to that, to him unconditionally loving her. No, I don’t think there’s anything bad in that.”
Which brings us around to one thing I haven’t seen discussed a lot in the myriad conversations I’ve followed and articles I’ve read analyzing Twilight: the somewhat unsettling, unspoken aspect of the relationship between Bella and Edward: Bella is 17 and Edward, though frozen in time physically at 17, has lived 109 years. Talk about your May-September romance. What’s fascinating to me about this, though, is what it says about both Bella and Edward as characters; Bella is a teenager who relates more strongly to a man who’d lived nearly a century before she was even born than she does to other boys her age, whereas it’s taken Edward over nine decades to get to the point of finding love and being ready for a commitment to a relationship. Which, as a lot of women might tell you, rings true in more ways than one, but still, it’s intriguing to me that most of the fans of the book view Edward as a teenager and not as an old man in a teenage body; the latter, of course, would involve rationalizing the predatory aspects of an old vampire in the guise of a teenager setting his sights on a young girl. I suppose, if we want to give Edward the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the decades he’s lived without love speaks more to his conflicted feelings over his vampire existence.
That’s kind of the thing about vampires that makes them so intriguing as literary characters, I guess — they’re eternally stuck at the age at which they were changed, both cursed and blessed never to physically grow older, even as internally they presumably do have the ability to learn, to change and to grow. Edward, for instance, is a talented musician, having had centuries of practice to develop his skills; all the Cullens have chosen to live a life free of killing humans for food although most of them have hunted humans in the past, so we can assume that in the world of Meyer’s vampire lore, vampires do have the ability to grow and evolve morally. Carlisle and Esme, Rosalie and Emmett, and Alice and Jasper are all paired with eternal partners; Edward alone of the Cullen family has lived a solitary life romantically speaking, until he meets Bella, the one human above all others whose blood makes him thirst to kill.
It’s really a rather interesting set-up for a storyline, and in a lot of ways I almost wish they’d chosen to develop Twilight as a fairly edgy television series ala Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, which would have allowed for a broader exploration of those aspects of the Twilight saga I find most interesting (and for what it’s worth, Rosenberg, who also co-produces and writes serial-killer series Dexter, probably could have done a decent job with such an effort, given the time to do it right). Bella rhapsodizing endlessly about Edward’s physical perfection and magical, sparkling skin, I don’t need to see a whole lot of on the screen; a deeper exploration of the psychology of what it’s like to be a vampire, with a somewhat different take than, say, Buffy’s relationships with Angel and Spike in Joss Whedon’s excellent series, could have been intriguing in the episodic format of a series, if done well.
Pattinson’s performance is mostly fine, and his Edward should satisfy the inner fantasies of the hardcore Twilight fans in breathing life into their beloved teen vampire, but personally, I found myself somewhat longing for the more nuanced vampire angst portrayed by David Boreanz as Angel and James Marsters as Spike in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel television series. If you were a fan of those shows, you know what I’m talking about: both Angel and Spike (vampires) loved Buffy, a human sworn to kill their kind; it was a great set-up for a conflicted love story — much as the Bella-Edward conflict is — but if you compare the ways in which Boreanz and Marsden conveyed their inner anguish to Pattison’s portrayal of Edward, the former did a better job of arcing their characters in more subtle ways. To be perfectly fair, though, both those actors had the benefit of multiple episodes across several seasons in which to develop their roles, whereas Pattinson thus far has only had this one, two-hour film to develop Edward, so perhaps over the next couple of movies we’ll see growth in the way in which he portrays the character.

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