Over Thanksgiving weekend, Daniel Crandall took in a groan-inducing teenage melodrama, and heard the age-old question, "What good is my soul if my boyfriend isn’t around?"
Twilight: New Moon may be a relatively faithful adaptation of the Young Adult novel on which it is based. The film, however, is marred by poor acting, clichéd writing and an overdependence on familiarity with source material to grasp the world in which the story is set. Worst of all, it treats the Soul as a commodity to be bargained away for romance and passion.
The filmmakers are clearly relying on the book’s popularity to ensure a large audience. On that, one has to give the producers credit. They know their audience. The movie brought in the third highest opening weekend box office, surpassing The Dark Knight and Spider-man 3. Fans of the Twilight books are as predictably slavish to these movies as fans of the Harry Potter books were to those movies.
Fans of the books will get more out of these movies than will those unfamiliar with Stephenie Meyer’s series. Several subtle jokes work only if one knows the novel’s characters. For example, one scene takes place in a classroom where students are watching an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. As the camera pans across Bella’s classmates, Eric’s face fills the screen. He is weeping in reaction to the drama. This elicited chuckles and a muttered, “That’s just like Eric,” from the girls behind me. One had to know this character in order to get the joke; nothing in the film set it up.
Requiring viewers to be familiar with material beyond what’s presented on screen is a tactic that risks creating a wall of separation between the audience and what’s happening on screen. Given that Eric’s metrosexual behavior is what our cultural elites expect from men, I wondered what is so funny about his reaction. The scene struck me as just another pathetic example of Hollywood turning boys into whimpering girls. Since I am not a part of the “in crowd” concerning the books or Eric, the scene literally kicked me out of the movie’s ‘clique.’
The movie not only barred me from the ‘cool kids table’ for not knowing Meyer’s characters, but the film’s dialog is, at times, ridiculously clichéd. From sappy declarations of “I can’t live without you” to a werewolf riffing on Bruce Banner’s line, “Don’t get me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” I began to wonder what bad writer the film’s creators brought in as a script doctor. George Lucas, maybe?
Even if one grants that Twilight: New Moon is pure melodrama, the dialog still fails because the actors delivering it do not have the talent to pull it off. Instead of the pretentious, over-serious performances, they might have been better served by adding a few catchy song and dance numbers and calling it High School Horror Musical.
Despite its many technical demerits, the movies greatest failing is its message. The film turns the Soul into a mere commodity offered up for worldly passions. In New Moon’s version of a Faustian bargain, it declares, “That Mephistopheles is so dreamy, romantic and just plain hot.” Bella declares, over and over again, that she doesn’t care about her soul, and will gladly give it up to be her vampire boyfriend. Ted Baehr notes that the movie turns the question, “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?” on its head.
According to Stephenie Meyer and this film’s creators, it seems, if losing one’s soul is done for teen romance, then it is the greatest good. Is that really the message we want young adults to carry into the world?
So her one boyfriend is a vampire and the other’s a werewolf? What’s in store for Bella in the third one, a hunky mummy?
Thanks for your response, Daniel. I saw Twilight and observed these elements as well, and I can see how one might be tempted to see things such as the appeal of the vampire family as advocacy of . . . something.
Yet I remain unconvinced that the “something” is moral relativism or unconcern over the state of one’s soul. It appears to me that although the presentation of the vampires in Twilight is quite far from Bram Stoker’s concept, in which he used vampirism as a way of vividly representing the demonic, there is nothing inherently wrong in treating vampires as, say, a different type of person with problems specific to their circumstances but whose choices still have moral content. That is precisely what Twilight appears to me to be doing.
I think, for example, that the very fact that these vampires resist the extremely powerful urge to feed on human beings, while other vampires give in to that desire, suggests very strong support for the notion of free will, a positive view of the Golden Rule, a depiction of the appeal of self-control as opposed to self-indulgence, and many other quite positive notions. Indeed, if one wants to see vampirism in the film and book series as analogous to homosexuality, the narratives can most plausibly be taken as arguing against homosexual behavior and instead promoting resistance as a virtue.
Similarly, it’s clear that the selfish, divorcing non-vampire parents are wrong to be the way they are, and the gossiping, self-indulgent students are likewise, and that audiences are easily able to see that and judge their actions from a moral perspective. I find it difficult to imagine that anyone seeing this film will take it as arguing that divorce and killing human beings in order to eat them are good things.
What I’m arguing for is not a refutation of your astute observation of the foolishness of Bella’s apparent choice, but instead for seeing it in a richer moral context in which her choice can be seen (and indeed is expected to be seen) critically by the books’ and films’ audience.
It seems to me that the viewer can indeed take some very positive things away from Twilight, and I look forward to seeing whether New Moon continues in that vein (no pun intended).
My description of Immortals was not clear. Percy Shelley is depicted, in Lake’s novel, as unrepentantly evil. The young poet/student is the one who gets sucked, literally, into Shelley’s vampire world with the lure of fame and immortality. One feels for the poet/student, but is never meant to see the vampire world as anything but a place of evil.
Those are good questions, Sam.
I just finished reading Paul Lake’s excellent novel Among the Immortals: A Vampire Mystery, and it does what I think you are getting at. In Immortals a young poet struggling in the world of academia discovers that Percy Shelley is still around because he’s a vampire. By pursuing his own dreams of recognition and “immortality” as a poet, he gets sucked into a Faustian bargain. At first he’s drawn by the fame. He tries to break free when he realizes what he’s getting himself into, but by then it’s too late.
New Moon never lets viewers see the vampiric Cullen family (the family that Edward’s a part of) in any way as evil. One gets the idea that these are folks simply living an alternative lifestyle. Not only are they the epitome of noble, do-gooder vampires, they are an intact family – there is a “mother,” a “father,” and “siblings,” all created by a doctor who became a vampire but doesn’t want to kill people (they survive by hunting animals). Bella, on the other hand, is an only child, her parents are divorced, her mother has nothing to do with raising her, and Bella lives with her father in Forks, WA. The love affair with Edward, the soulless vampire, is her deepest relationship and the one with which audiences are meant to sympathize and identify with.
To answer your qestion: “Can one reasonably see the film as being a good depiction of a point of view that is especially popular today, without assuming that it is advocating that point of view? Perhaps, but I think it would be quite a stretch.
At best, I think one might say it is a depiction of “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” But that would be hard to defend since Bella is not going to die. She would live eternally with her high school sweetheart.
I do not believe there is any way to spin this into something other than a pitch for the idea that a soul is nice, but it pales in comparison to eternity with a hunk.
These are very good observations, Daniel. Not having seen the film yet, I have a question regarding what you identify, I assume correctly, as the film’s underlying message. If we accept the reality that depiction is not necessarily advocacy, can one reasonably see the film as being a good depiction of a point of view that is especially popular today, without assuming that it is advocating that point of view?
That would apply equally to the comment by Anonymous. Does the film clearly try to push viewers to agree with Bella’s choice, instead of perhaps just sympathizing with it while still being free to see it as a bad deal? What I read here does not seem to refute such an understanding of the film, so I’d be very interesting in finding out whether the movie actually seems to be endorsing these messages or is in fact a bit more openminded about what conclusions one should draw.
What bothers me about Bella’s character is her eagerness to become a vampire. The way she wants it is like a thirst for power. What is it with making evil look cool? If you ask me, there’s too much sympathy for the devil.