Love and Pain and the
Teenage Vampire Thing
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY
AS the
legions of
teenagers who have read the novel on
which the forthcoming film “Twilight”
is based know, the awkward passage
from youth to maturity isn’t the very
worst problem an adolescent can have.
You could fall helplessly in love with a
vampire, which is what happens to the
virginal 17-year-old heroine and
narrator of Stephenie Meyer’s book.
“We’ve all had the experience of being
that age and feeling that everything is
life and death,” said Melissa
Rosenberg, who wrote the screenplay.
“You know, ‘I have nothing to wear
today, I’m going to kill myself.’
What’s so wonderful about this story is
that everything actually is life and
death.”
The transition from page to screen is
itself often a less than graceful process,
and while it’s rarely a matter of life and
death, it can give filmmakers that
adolescent sense of unease: “If this
movie tanks, I’m going to kill myself.”
There’s no denying that in the case of
“Twilight” the stakes (so to speak) are
high. The four novels in Ms. Meyer’s
horror/romance series for young adults
— “Twilight” was the first — have
sold somewhere near 10 million copies;
the most recent, “Breaking Dawn,”
racked up sales of 1.3 million on its
first day in bookstores in August. And
fans are on the rabid side. “There’s all
this stuff online,” said the film’s
director, Catherine Hardwicke. “People
were making casting suggestions, and
now they’re doing their own trailers
and posters. It’s stimulating, in a way.”
A particular hazard with books like Ms.
Meyer’s — or like J. K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter novels — is that younger
readers, unlike their more jaded elders,
tend to like their stories just so, with as
little variation as possible. And as any
adult who has ever read bedtime stories
to children understands, when
youngsters really go for a story, they’ll
insist on hearing it again and again,
which is why movies aimed at children,
tweens and teenagers can have such a
huge payoff for producers and
distributors. Two words: repeat
business.
“I didn’t want to be the screenwriter
who disappointed all those readers,”
Ms. Rosenberg said. “Nor did
Catherine, I’m sure, want to be the
director who did so.”
Ms. Hardwicke said that when she was
approached about directing “Twilight,”
she was handed a script that she later
realized was “very, very different from
the book.” Soon after, “I read the novel
myself and I thought, let’s get back to
this story, it’s just so much better.”
Neither would admit to feeling any
constraints on her creativity from the
readers’ demands for fidelity to the
novel. “My biggest problem was how
to condense,” Ms. Rosenberg said.
Clearly, the strategy is to swear
undying fealty to the book and hope the
fans will be merciful.
And what, exactly, is this story to
which the makers of “Twilight”
(opening Nov. 21) have plighted their
troth? It’s the tale of a bright girl
named Bella Swan who moves to the
gloomy town of Forks, Wash., and on
her first day at school meets, across a
crowded cafeteria, the eyes of a
mysterious classmate named Edward
Cullen, whom she describes as
“devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful.”
Edward is a little standoffish, but Bella
falls for him hard, while remaining
somewhat puzzled by his unteenageboy-like sexual restraint. He’s
determined to keep a tight rein on his
impulses, which include, in addition to
the usual ones, a powerful yen to feed
on his new admirer’s blood. When she
discovers his secret, she isn’t quite sure
how to, you know, feel about this
unnerving kink in his personality, but
soon decides that being a vampire’s
significant other is preferable to
depriving herself of this really, really
good-looking guy’s company. He
remains a perfect gentleman, she a
well-behaved lady and their fatal
attraction stays (at least in the first
novel) unconsummated.
Ms. Meyer goes to some trouble to
persuade her young readers that there
might actually be a Count Charming
out there for every shy Bella in the
world. The perennially overcast
weather of the Pacific Northwest
allows Edward to attend school on
most days, despite his species’
legendary photosensitivity, and he was
raised, as it happens, in a family of
“good” vampires, who thoughtfully
eschew the consumption of human
blood in favor of the nourishing
(though less tasty) vital fluids of
animals. (They’re kind of the vampire
version of vegans.) Edward’s
forbearance, however, is sorely tested
by the power of his feelings, and Ms.
Hardwicke said she believes that the
ever-present possibility of Bella’s death
actually enhances the story’s romantic
appeal. “If ‘Romeo and Juliet’ came
out now it would be just as popular,”
she said. “Look at ‘Titanic’ a few years
ago.”
She’s on to something there: the
extreme life-and-deathness of the
adolescent notion of romance. But the
vein that Ms. Meyer’s story taps most
obviously is simple, basic fear of sex.
Bella is, recognizably, every teenager
who is terrified of going all the way,
and Edward, less grounded in reality, is
a fantasy incarnation of that scared
girl’s ideal boyfriend, infinitely — you
might say eternally — patient with her
trepidation. (And have I mentioned that
he’s extremely good-looking?)
“The truth,” said the writer Sarah
Langan, whose novel “The Missing”
won this year’s Bram Stoker Award
from the Horror Writers Association,
“is that sex can be terrifying at that
age, even when you’re in college.” But
Ms. Langan, who considers “Twilight”
“more romance than horror,” isn’t
entirely persuaded by the fear-of-sex
model here.
“Abstinence is a perfectly valid point
of view,” she said. “ ‘Twilight,’
though, struck me as kind of a strange,
wrong version of what teenagers are
like, especially Edward, who doesn’t
even seem to want sex all that much. It
made me long for Judy Blume.”
The truly peculiar thing about
“Twilight,” of course, is that the figure
presented here as a paragon of
masculine self-control is not, in fact,
human and drinks blood. Over the
years there have been a fair number of
youthful vampires in film and fiction,
and some have even been portrayed as
objects of desire. The title character of
George A. Romero’s “Martin” (1977)
probably wouldn’t qualify as
anybody’s romantic ideal. But the
young lovers in Kathryn Bigelow’s
superb 1987 film, “Near Dark,” are
tragically cute, as are many of the
teenage bloodsuckers in the lame “Lost
Boys” (1987), a long-unawaited sequel
to which was released last year. There
is a broodingly handsome vampire in
the lurid new HBO series, “True
Blood,” too. “Vampirism is sexy,” Ms.
Langan said bluntly. “It’s inherently
arousing.”
But until “Twilight,” even vampires of
the devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful
variety did manage, between tragic
embraces, to be kind of scary. Angel,
the hunky, centuries-old love object of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, would
occasionally get a wrinkly, from-hell
look on his face, bare his fangs and
give vent to the darker side of his
nature. At those moments the viewer
would fully understand why he was a
candidate for what Buffy and her gang
referred to as “slayage.” In “Twilight,”
slayage isn’t a possibility: the only
serious question for Bella and her
breathless readers is whether she’ll
dare to Do It with her bad-boy lover.
Psychologists call this
approach/avoidance. And we all might
as well figure out a way to approach
this strange turn in pop culture, because
it looks as if there’s going to be no way
to avoid it. The 20 minutes of
“Twilight” footage that the studio has
made available indicate that the film
will be, as Ms. Hardwicke and Ms.
Rosenberg promised, exceptionally
faithful to its source material.
The leads, Kristen Stewart and Robert
Pattinson, look right — there’s a touch
of “Titanic”-era Leonardo DiCaprio to
Mr. Pattinson — and the mood is
appropriately ominous. Describing the
shoot in Washington, Ms. Hardwicke
said the weather was almost too
apocalyptic for her taste. “There was
hail,” she said, still shuddering with
disbelief. “I bought all this Gore-Tex,
and nothing worked.”
The whole thing has a slightly funky,
no-big-deal air about it, which is
perhaps the result of the movie’s
relatively modest budget (less than $40
million) and the filmmakers’ modest
temperaments. Ms. Hardwicke is best
known as the director of youthcentric
indie films like “Thirteen” (2003) and
“Lords of Dogtown” (2005), while Ms.
Rosenberg’s background is mostly in
television, as a writer and producer of
“Party of Five” and “The O.C.” (More
recently, she has worked on the
Showtime series “Dexter,” whose
characters are grown-ups but which,
she said, has something in common
with “Twilight” nonetheless: it’s about
a “good” serial killer with “internal
demons he’s trying to control.”)
The movie also appears to capture the
oddly timeless atmosphere of the book,
in which e-mail notes are sometimes
sent but no text messages are, no video
games are played, and no one seems to
have an iPod crammed with gangsta
rap, emo or heavy metal. “You try to
keep current with teenagers’ culture
and idioms,” Ms. Rosenberg said, “but
in ‘Twilight’ some of that feels
incongruous. One of the producers
actually said to me, ‘I’m uncomfortable
when Edward uses a cellphone.’ ”
What that means, maybe, is that the
world of “Twilight” is one where
incoming calls from the real world can
rarely be heard with any clarity in a
fantasy universe of perpetual neitherhere-nor-thereness. Sort of like
adolescence itself, only touched up for
maximum (devastating, inhuman)
desirability. It’s a place on which the
sun never has to set, where the bedtime
story never has to end — and that’s
what its fans like best about it.
Published in the Arts section on
November 2, 2008.
Trailer: 'Twilight'
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