Thursday, April 8, 2010

BLOGGING TWILIGHT: In Conclusion

And he leaned down to press his cold lips once more to my throat.

So concludes Twilight, the first book of The Twilight Saga. That'll do, Stephenie Meyer, that'll do. I liked this book. There, I said it. I liked it! I've been going over Twilight in great detail since December, and in the end my serious objections were few. Stylistically, this book is bad. Some of that is my own peculiar taste - I like the simple, punctuation-free, adjective-light final sentence because I like my art stark and affect-less. But it's a good, compelling sentence! And Twilight could have used more of those. It had some; I've tried to indicate the bits and pieces that really got me on a real reading jag (to paraphrase Bella), but more often than not I've pointed the overly colorful stuff, the grammatical errors. I haven't been exhaustive in either case, but it's worth noting that there are hundreds of sentences in this book that I didn't point out for either reason. It's also worth noting that the grammatical errors, especially the problems with paragraph breaks (there are dozens- even on the last page there's one) are actually not S. Meyer's fault so much as her editor's. I'm not saying she isn't partly to blame, but the buck doesn't stop at her.

I didn't go into this blog expecting to like Twilight, but I didn't plan on hating it either. What I really found interesting was not the fact that so many people hated it, but the fact that so many people did like it so much.I'm emphasizing the grammatical errors because all of the criticisms I hear about Twilight rarely stem from such a place. A lot of people hate Twilight, this is true. But I don't think their reasons are very good.

I've already spoken at length in several places about how Twilight fully acknowledges its own break from the standard vampire myth, but so many people dismiss these books along those lines. Twilight is the book about the emo vampires. The gay vampires. Vampires don't sparkle. Before the Twilight phenomenon hit, did you know anyone over the age of nine who gave a shit about vampires? Were vampire purists ever a thing? I'm sure they were in some circles, but suddenly this has gone mainstream? It's irritating because some of it definitely comes from a kind of bizarre masculine/misogynist/homophobic place, and the rest of it just comes from a phony place. People get on the bandwagon, because haters gotta hate. I understand that, I guess. But I doubt that anyone is genuinely worried about the Sanctity of the Vampire.

The other place where the haters hate, and are right to hate, is the fact that Twilight is an exceptionally crass marketing juggernaut. Witness the Volvo commercials, the t-shirts, the pillows. Witness the way it has trickled down. Other, unrelated movies are desperately attempting to attach themselves to Twilight's coattails. Wuthering Heights has been republished and repackaged as part of this universe. Ashley Greene is repeatedly pimping SoBe on Twitter. It's a little upsetting. I've long found it kind of darkly ironic that Chuck Palahniuk's official twitter account basically hawks merchandise 24/7, but it took Palahniuk years to become a shill. How old is Ashley Greene?

A lot of the blame for the Twilight Industrial Complex falls on the filmmakers, but the weird emphasis on Volvo and avoidance of other brand names in the text itself is disconcerting. Plenty of people who are concerned about Twilight are concerned because of this kind of thing - concerned for the young teenage girls (and some boys, I'm sure) who are getting bombarded with this kind of marketing - who don't have the context to put it in. When will Naomi Klein make a picture-book version of NO LOGO for these kids? There's a good possibility that the reason so many kids like these books is precisely because of the aggressive marketing that made Twilight something "cool" in the first place. But I hope that is not why.

Why else might they like it, though? To take a positive angle, one of the reasons it seems like TV has become the primary storytelling medium in the last decade or so is because on long-format, five-0r-six year shows, showrunners can really build authentic, rounded characters. Bella Swan is not Tony Soprano, but I think attachment to characters is a big factor, especially in a book like this, which is largely plot-less. Ill-defined Rosalies and Esmes aside, there are quite a few compelling characters in this book. Charlie, for one. Fucking Jacob. And especially Bella. Maybe I'm wrong, and people just read this because they want to fantasize about being with Edward. I didn't, but I'm not in the right demo, really.

That was another one of the big questions I tried, and mostly failed to answer: Why am I not in the target demographic? What qualifies something for YA Fiction? The correct answer has to do with marketing, but again, that's sort of depressing, isn't it? And what led to that? I don't know, I'm still asking.

My compliments to Twilight notwithstanding, I'm worried about where some of this is going in future books. I do think Edward's attitudes are kind of frighteningly patriarchal. I do think that Bella's tendency to become fully absorbed in the man (men?) she loves could lead to some morally disturbing plot elements. I have an idea of where this is going, and I'm worried.

But we'll get to that. New Moon is coming, so get that one off your shelves. I had a lot of fun reading and writing about and discussing this book, and for that I have you all to thank as much as S. Meyer. Now we get to do it all over again! And hopefully more of our fellow weirdos with misdirected intellectual impulses will find us. Next time we will talk about Twilight the film adaptation, and we'll do a proper roundtable discussion to sum up both, but if you want to get your thoughts on the first book out of the way now, I'll move them into the Roundtable post whenever I feel like starting it.

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

2 comments:

Kira said...

have you spent any time exploring stephenie meyers's website? a twitter friend turned me on to it and it's pretty interesting, for a lot of reasons. it's got tons of content, with stuff she cut from her rough draft and lots of FAQs about all the books. she actually addresses the question of why she talks so specifically about cars.

http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/twilight_cullencars.html

i get the sense that maybe she wasn't especially media savvy or pop culture savvy when she wrote the books, so didn't know what would be considered cool brands for most things, but she DID have access to people who knew a lot about cars, so could be specific about that.

wish she'd talked to me about their clothes. a cream turtleneck sweater with a tan suede jacket doesn't say "mature vampire hottie" to me.

Anonymous said...

Can't wait for New Moon to start up.

This blog made me go back and actually re-read all four of the books with an open mind. I read Twilight originally with an open mind, but the next three books I was sort of "corrupted" by all the hate.

A real eye opener. Thanks ZL.