A Man In His 30s Experiences Twilight

I need to admit this up front: I am way outside of the target demographic for this book.

Still, it all began with a few notes on Facebook. A friend of mine mentioned she was reading “shlocky vampire books.” I correctly assumed it was Twilight, the phenomenon that rivals Harry Potter in terms of sales, if not universal acclaim. She called it many different things, none of them charitable. Another friend admitted to reading them all and concurred with my other friend’s opinion. She then handed me the book.

The synopsis, in case you’ve stayed away from it all, is that a high school girl moves to a small town in Washington state with her father. She is instantly popular with the boys, something that bothers her for some reason that is not fully explained. She has endearing quirks, one of which is that she seems to have no coordination and tends to be clumsy and poor in athletics. However, she latches onto a small group of “beautiful” people who sit together and avoid others. They disappear for weeks on end, and the main boy (Edward) who looks her age tells her to avoid him and makes snide comments. She finds this attractive. When he later saves her life, she’s hopelessly in love. Since she senses something is amiss, she asks a family friend about him and learns he’s a vampire. But don’t worry, they’re not evil and don’t bite people. They also don’t need to avoid light, although they sparkle like the sun reflecting off of bubble wrap. But they’re still vampires, got it?

Anyway, she’s introduced to his family and is instantly put into danger when joining them for a baseball game (don’t ask). Edward saves her, but still berates her and treats her like a child. She apparently likes this and ends the book asking him to turn her into a vampire.

I’m told other stuff happens in later books, but they will have to go on without me. The entire book feels like an exercise in wish fulfillment: take a dangerous sort-of person and remove almost everything dangerous about them, yet he’ll still rip out the throats of everyone who threatens the main girl. They fall in forbidden-love that no one but her understands. He glitters in the sun. Even more important (and why it appears this series is as massively popular as it is), they are chaste: they vow to wait until marriage. With this, you can open the floodgates for 13 year-old-girls to read along with their approving 35 year-old-mothers. The other messages the books send outweigh the abstinence angle — the most glaring being Bella’s casual dismissal of all of Edward’s warnings and issues with a simple cry of “but I love him” after knowing him for just a few moments. Another major issue is the confusion of love with obsession and seeing jealously as evidence of love rather than an opponent of it.

This isn’t meant to pile on the women. A quick check of the magazine rack at the gas station shows that wish-fulfillment fantasy is just as abundant for men. In my anime survey here I’ve purposefully steered clear of anything of a certain nature, but more than a few series revolve around a rather boring young man and a gaggle of girls who follow him around everywhere with puppy-dog eyes. Many of these series are even more chaste than Twilight.

Nonetheless, if you decide to go through with it I recommend taking the guys from Rifftrax along. Mike and the Gang helped me through the movie version and I happily showed this to others who had heard about this Twilight thing but wouldn’t be caught dead reading it. There’s another movie coming out later this year, if you’re interested.

Believe it or not, I want to use this post as a jumping board for a look at the idea of fantasy in fiction a little later on. Not necessarily the Lord of the Rings-type fantasy, but rather stories that are unrestricted by reality. Until then, if you must rent Twilight I’ve found it’s a good idea to borrow someone’s 12-year-old niece when going to the store.

And whatever you do, don’t let them accidentally re-shelve the copy you’re borrowing from a friend — there is no easy way to tell a clerk nearly half your age at Borders “You seem to have taken my copy of Twilight when I went for a drink of water, can I please have it back?” I can attest to that personally.