When I was a teenager, making fun of Twilight was almost as popular as the juggernaut franchise itself. I should know―even as I made fun of Twilight fans online, I was reading the books beneath my desk in history class. Now that the Twilight movies are finally back on Netflix, I’m tired of hiding.
I never hated Twilight. It’s good actually, and for the same exact reasons why we all said it was bad. Hating Twilight when it came out was easy. It was an inescapable commercial product aimed mostly at teenage girls, whose interests are often treated with disdain. Ten years later, free from the cultural baggage of being an international phenomenon, we can see the franchise more clearly. Is it the most epic love story ever told? Absolutely not. It’s a lot more entertaining, and frankly out of control, than that.
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The Twilight movies arrived on Netflix last week, and every movie in the series immediately cracked Netflix’s top 10. The first movie in the Twilight saga has stuck around in the charts since then. Most fans are gleefully celebrating what they’ve always known: these movies are bonkers, and there are new bonkers details to discover in each viewing.
Stephanie Meyer’s books are an entirely different creature than the movies, in which the characters seem to have fun every once in a while. Unlike the movies, I genuinely struggled to get through the books, tomes that are mostly concerned with Bella Swan’s not very interesting internal monologue. The movie streamlines the actions and characters into comfortable archetypes. All you really need to know is that Bella is the new girl who doesn’t know how beautiful she is, the Cullens are the hot rich kids in town who are also vampires, and Edward Cullen isn’t sure if he wants to eat Bella or date her.
Watching this film now, it’s remarkable that all the things I thought of as “cringe” when I was younger I can now see are its greatest strengths. As I read the books I always imagined Edward and Bella as more suave; the small town of Forks, Washington as less working class; Jacob as less of a himbo. I smoothed the edges of this frankly ramshackled narrative into a shape that made sense. The movie affords us no such luxuries. What’s most remarkable is that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart largely play the characters as written. Bella and Edward are two beautiful, shallow people who want to fuck very badly but can’t, and there’s not really a whole else going on in their brains.
Both actors caught so much flack for their awkward, mumbly line reads, but they were playing the characters as true to their backgrounds. Edward Cullen is a hundred year old virgin who has been in high school for about half a century, and Bella Swan’s only consistent character motivation for the entire series is to get fucked and become immortal. Of course Edward’s a little weird, his phrases out of place and stilted, of course the small dramas of Forks pale in comparison to the Cullens’ house in the woods. No one other than Edward Cullen would say “hang on, spider monkey” as she climbed on his back while he swung through trees, and no one other than Bella Swan would be charmed by that.
The source material of Twilight is already so out of control, they have no choice but to play it all absolutely straight. In particular Pattinson delivers almost the same performance in this movie as he does in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis: a steely, impassive weirdo who delightedly dives into the worst possible fate. Pattinson’s understanding of what makes Twilight so strange and fascinating matches my own. While he famously said that the first book seems like it “wasn’t supposed to be published,” he still gets that fundamentally the events that occur in these films come from a dark and bizarre imagination, comparing them to art house films. Sure, you could point to the now infamous vampire baseball scene as an example of that tendency in the Twilight films, but what about the horrifying CGI baby Renesmee? Or this scene from New Moon, where a teenager runs out of an action movie, which they are watching because Bella has discovered that she can have visions of the vampire boyfriend that abandoned her by seeing action movies?
I don’t even know how to explain any of the choices that the actors playing the vampire overlords the Volturi make, except that they are also like this in the books, behaving in no way any person or non-person has behaved. Michael Sheen’s performance is a great example, especially given his dignified pedigree as “guy who can play Tony Blair on command.” The accent choice he makes never fails to crack me up, mostly because it is always a pleasure to see an actor enjoying himself so much. There is no subtlety in the world of Twilight, so Sheen performs “vampire” with the intensity of a bullet train, no matter what the situation calls for.
Twilight didn’t capture the hearts of millions of women and girls around the world because it is a normal, cookie cutter romance series. The young adult genre is drowning in that kind of melodrama. Twilight was always something way weirder than that, and it only became clear how weird it was once Forks took up real, physical space on screen. When you read that Edward sparkles in the sunlight, you might be able to imagine something dignified. The Twilight movies let that man look like an entire disco ball as he yells, “This is the skin of a killer.”
Of course, fans have known this for a long time. Wherever Twilight fans congregate online―basically everywhere―they’re happy to say that these movies aren’t good. It’s just that they’re great. It’s not like they’re good, but they’re amazing, and they’re amazing because they are bad. We know that Twilight is bad. That’s why it’s good. If Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart didn’t openly hate the series, if Rami Malek didn’t look extremely high in every single second of Breaking Dawn, if Renesmee had a better name, it would not make the contents of these films “good” in any way.
Watching Twilight now, removed from it’s monumental appeal as a commercial franchise, is more like watching The Room: we are all waiting for each inexplicable plot beat, for a vampire to sparkle in the sunlight, for Jacob to say “where you been loca?” so that we may look to each other in recognition. No, we’re not hallucinating, we’re all seeing the same series of events unfold on screen, unlikely as that may seem.
It doesn’t matter whether Twilight was intentionally made to be this deeply weird, or if it happened by accident. You cannot translate the unrelenting series of absurd events that occur in the Twilight series into a “good” movie in a conventional sense. The narrative is pure teenage desire, which doesn’t run on a coherent logic. It felt ridiculous as a teenager, but it was something I could push aside in order to swoon. Years after its release, removed from marketing hype and its commercial success, we can see Twilight for what it is. There’s plenty of good reasons to make fun of it, but it also has the distinguished honor of simply being unlike anything else.
