Good Looking

November 18. Breaking Dawn Part 1. Forever is only the Beginning. If this means nothing to you, you have managed to escape the whirlwind of marketing and popularity surrounding the Twilight film series. I just saw the trailer at my gym for the first time and some of the diversity of people present around the room had stopped working out to watch. Others sniggered. For major Twilight fans, or "Twi-hards" (see my other blogpost), this is a big deal. For educators, Edwards suggests it is an opportunity to use an item of massively popular culture to unpack the many complicated issues the films set up around gender and power relations especially as they relate to looking and the gaze (2009).

In the article, Good Looks and Sex Symbols: The Power of the Gaze and The Displacement of the Erotic in Twilight, Edwards sees the Twilight films as a context to talk about how youth negotiate and become aware of looking and being looked at and how this is represented in the fictional reality of Twilight. Edwards plays on several meanings of the word “look”, also mentioning the importance of taking on a certain “look” with regards to experimentation with constructing an identity and forming and belonging to social groups which are rigidly defined in the films (2009). Twilight fans adopt these looks in costume play performance and in the construction of their online identities.

The Twilight films and books draw upon many traditions of the gothic romance, for example the tension between desire and repulsion in the construction of it’s main characters, a late teenage girl named Bella and a vampire named Edward (Seltzer, 2008). However, Twilight recasts the vampire as “vampire-lite", an attractive boy, more mature than his looks, who wants to protect his girlfriend rather than a predator / prey relationship (Schiavo, 2008). In the films, for the most part

The female lead, Bella on the other hand, is constantly portrayed as relying on men, first her father, then Edward, then in Edward’s absence, upon a third character, Jacob, before returning to Edward again. She is at once victim and vulnerable in the space of high school and desiring, wanting to attain Edward (Seltzer, 2008).

Watching the film is an opportunity to deconstruct the director’s intention of our view into the world as we shift perspectives from characters along with their shifting passive and active roles of desire / objectification / prey. Edwards suggests this both as an opportunity to talk about a feminist understanding of the idea of the objectifying masculine gaze and the possibility it may shift as Bella takes an active role (2009). In the first film, for example, Bella is set on becoming a vampire to be with Edward. The film ends with Edward passively reclining in the grass with Bella looking down over him wanting to become vampire, having carved a space for herself saying “it’s my world too” (Godfrey, 2008).

The films and books have come under criticism from feminists for making a romantic fantasy out of a young girl drawn into a violent and controlling relationship with a much older man. (Housel, 2009). It has also been attacked for encoding a message of abstinence from sex. Both Edward and Bella long for intimacy but the male lead (vampire) keeps in check his dangerous sexual appetite in order to protect the fragile female (Seltzer, 2008). When they finally do have (post-marital) sex in the fourth film, Edward seriously injures Bella and gets her pregnant (Godfrey & Meyer, 2011). Housel suggests the series give many bad messages about gender and relationships to Twilight’s young female fans (2009).

Fans have responded to the controversy by forming their own answers to the questions raised by the films. In an example of participatory culture, the Twilight fan site, Bella and Edward, empowered its members to contribute to the publication of a book, “Bella Should Have Dumped Edward”, a compilation of their varied views to 31 questions.  These ranged from analysing whether Bella is strong or a “blank canvas” relying on Edward to whether the relationships between Bella and Edward and Jacob are controlling as suggested above or healthy (Pan, 2010).

In terms of popular culture, the Twilight films series can also be contrasted with the contemporary television series, “True Blood” (Ball, 2008). True Blood also addresses themes of gender, sexuality and relationships in a supernatural vampire world. It’s encoded messages about sexuality are against homophobia, with vampires coming out of the closet and fights with religious organisations who graffiti “God Hates Fangs” (Tyree, 2009). The female lead in True Blood, Sookie, played by Anna Paquin is also a non-vampire in love with a male vampire. Also, like Twilight, the vampire, Bill, positions himself to protect her but she can clearly protect herself and in the first episode it is she who saves him. Later, when she is being attacked, his vampire qualities prevent him from protecting her (Ball, 2008). Another example of a strong female lead is the Buffy the Vampire Slayer film and television series which plays with the genre of predator and prey in gothic fiction (Whedon, 1992).

References

Ball, A. (Creator). (2008). True Blood [Television Series]. USA: HBO.

Godfrey, W. & Meyer, S. (Producer), & Condon, B. (Director). (2011). The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 [Motion picture]. USA: Summit Entertainment.

Godfrey, W. (Producer), & Hardwicke, C. (Director). (2008). Twilight [Motion picture]. USA: Summit Entertainment.

Housel, R. (2009). The Real Danger: Fact vs Fiction for Girls. In Irwin, W., Housel, R. & Wisnewski, J. (Eds.) Twilight and Philosophy: Vampires, Vegetarians, and the Pursuit of Immortality. ISBN 0470554126.

Pan, M. (2010). Bella Should Have Dumped Edward. Berkely, CA: Ulysses Press

Seltzer, S, (2008). "Twilight": Sexual Longing in an Abstinence-Only World. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-seltzer/twilight-sexual-longing-i_b_117927.html

Schiavo, I. (2008, November 25). ‘Twilight’: Vampire lite, The Weekender. Retrieved from http://www.theweekender.com/

Tyree, J.M. (2009) Warm-Blooded: True Blood and Let the Right One In Film Quarterly Vol. 63, No. 2 (Winter 2009), pp. 31-37

Whedon, J. (Writer) & Kuzui, F. (Director). (1992) Buffy the Vampire Slayer [Motion Picture]. USA: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.