Rage Month: Twilight

Know thy enemy. That’s what they told me. You had to know your enemy if you were to defeat it. Without understanding, there could be no chance to overcome that which faces you. With this in mind, I did the unthinkable two years ago.

I read Twilight.

Now, I’m an English major here at William and Mary, so I have a good idea on what makes a book good (and for those of you who wish to make this argument: no, being popular has no indication of quality. Michael Bay’s movies are popular despite a critical consensus of a lack of talent on his part. The overwhelming majority of people in this world aren’t good indicators of quality. If that makes me elitist, sorry. You can still enjoy it, but don’t call it good. Big difference), and as far as I could tell, there was nothing that could justify Twilight’s existence on a literary basis.

Before I tear Twilight a new one, let me make it clear that I actually don’t hate the premise of this series as a whole. Re-imagining werewolves and vampires into high school archetypes and working them into the real world is actually one of the more interesting ideas I’ve seen in a fantasy setting. There are a ton of ways you could make this interesting, relatable and fun.

Stephanie Meyer does none of them.

Her style is short and choppy, never approaching anything that can be described as elegant. Her characters are uninteresting at best, and many of them exhibit behavior that is downright offensive. And the whole series focuses on some of the worst messages that could ever be sent to the age group for which this series was intended.

Let’s go over a few of the more prevalent themes of the Twilight books: shall we?

1. Stalking = love. Always. If you wake up and find out that a boy was watching you sleep, you shouldn’t be creeped out by this. You should find it endearing because it clearly means he loves you.

2. You must keep your virginity at all costs. Remember, girls, abstinence is the only way you can remain pure and beautiful. If you have sex, you will become far less appealing and worthless to the opposite sex, because there’s no such thing as a mature healthy sexual relationship.

3. Always listen to what a man tells you to do. Independence is wildly overrated, and it’s much better to go back and forth between loving two different guys instead of forming your own independent thought process. I mean, who would want that, right?

4. For the guys: never give up on a girl, even when she’s marrying someone else. Giving up on your family and friends is totally justified if it’s for a girl you “love”, even though she’s led you on for years and is marrying someone else (also ladies: remember to keep this constant threat to your new husband that you still have feelings for and trust more than your actual spouse around at all times and turn to him, not your husband in a time of need. That’s a completely healthy thing to do).

Seriously, I kid you not, all of these themes have made themselves known in this four book series that can hardly be called a book at this point. With horrible messages to young people and very little literary proficiency, it still amazes me that this series has grown to the heights that it has. I mean, really people? This is all you ask for? A half-baked idea that’s never fully carried out with choppy, mediocre writing that beats you over the head with its pseudo-Chrisian philosophy? Come on, public. Demand better than this! Just once! Please?

Now, I can’t rage against Twilight without talking about the movies that have come out as well. I won’t say much about them, however, because once again, I feel as if people I greatly respect have already done it better than I could.

There are two camps to the Twilight movie theory. The first claims that these movies need to be viewed as comedies-so bad they’re good movies if you will-so they’re relatively harmless (Doug Walker of Nostalgia Critic fame leads this camp, though even he seemed to find the last one offensive). If you take this view, you can get enjoyment at the ludicrousness of Taylor Lautner (the only decent actor in these movies) ripping his shirt off every ten seconds, the complete lack of ability to express emotion by Kristen Stewart, and the atrocious attempts by Robert Pattinson to seem appealing. These movies are too bad to be taken seriously if you’re in this camp, and you believe that those who watch it aren’t in danger of actually being affected by the theories presented

The other camp (led by MovieBob) claims that the Twilight movies are the worst things to happen to modern cinema in recent history because of the horrible undertones that are presented. You can’t ignore the horrible messages they seem to portray to young children and, honestly, they shouldn’t be ignored. They should be fought against, and Hollywood should be challenged to produce far better than this. It’s tough because you have to stay true for the source material, and the source material is rubbish, but the movies can’t be forgiven for it, and Stephanie Meyer deserves even more flak for making it mainstream.

I tend to be in the middle. I get why they are making the movies, but I refuse to ignore the horrible dialogue and the dangerous messages presented to its fan base. It pisses me off that this is the teenage girl’s response to the Harry Potter phenomenon that had been written mainly for younger boys to get into reading, and I hate that the public refuses to demand for anything more.

Well, I’ve gone on enough for Twilight. Come back tomorrow for my final Rage Month thoughts.