Twilight and audience responses

This began life as  a response to my Popular Culture class, after a spirited reading and discussion of Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer.

First of all: The reviewers and commentators whose responses I put into a series of PPT slides exhibit different levels of skills at explaining their attraction to or disaffection for the books—and the more articulate seem to be the haters (who also seem to be older). That presents a problem—the reasons for liking the books and characters are no less serious (though they do seem rather immature and frivolous at times) to the people who write the positive responses. The two populations are working against different paradigms, different value systems. But maybe we just have to accept that people do not usually waste time and money on things that are meaningless or trivial to them--even if we don't like the meaning we assume they are getting or generating.

The "Michaelas" (a passionate defender of the books and of Meyer) out there are responding out of emotion or passion, "irrationally," maybe, but truthfully within their frame of reference and experience, to a book that represents irrational passion as an ordinary, everyday reality. One to be sought out and cherished, evidently.


Secondly: I’ve been mulling over a phrase that came up from a student: “Safe creep.”

I think that Edward as vampire is an over-determined yet typical romantic hero: a Romantic "superhero," in effect. He’s a dangerous boyfriend, albeit a dangerous boyfriend who understands quite a bit about the range of dangers he represents—to Bella, and to his family because of his relationship to Bella. As a romantic hero variety of "safe creep,"  he’s threatening, not easy to read, physical imposing, but also rational, knowledgeable, talented, and most of all a “caring animal,” or a “considerate monster,” who can be tamed by his love for the right woman.

As such a “dangerous creep,” he also provides a vicarious set of thrills to female readers, despite or maybe because of his creepiness as a mind-reading peeping Tom who sits in the corners of Bella’s bedroom, "taking care of her" by watching her sleep and listening in on her talking in her sleep. He’s creepy, but safely removed from another version of “reality.”

It’s a fairy tale: “Beauty (Bella) and the Beast (Edward),” in part. And once she becomes “Beauty,” she emerges from another fairy tale as “Bella Swan”—the beautiful swan at the end of “The Ugly Duckling.”

Women (or readers in general) who hate the books or to dislike and mock them, tend to start at Edward’s domineering, temperamental, controlling nature and Bella's lack of any standards of self-expression or self-protection from such a creep. Oddly, the ones who dislike Edward are maybe the ones most like him—restrained, disciplined, refined in taste, rational, looking for a different, more positive order of things. What brings out the irrational in Edward (and for a lot of the "haters") is Bella. It’s his emergent irrationality in dealing with her that somehow “humanizes” the vampire. Yet his rationality (typically a male-gendered trait) and self-control are also part of a different kind of fairy tale, I suppose—or a different myth cycle.

What is truly “creepy” is that he does not seem to understand or respect other people’s privacy or need for a personal space of their own. He's in constant "surveillance" mode, a perfect potential staffer for any of several state or private security firms. 

The disapprovers can reject him and his behaviours--a popular position, to judge from the PPT slides. They can resist a gendered power structure by expressing disapproval of the “patriarchal” Cullen coven and od Edward's behaviours as a "model boyfriend."

I wonder at times if a huge influence on the "popularity" of this series is that people love to hate it--it gives them scope to work out their own personal ideological boundaries, by seeing the everyday problems in extreme relief. The only danger they expose themselves to is not the "safe creep," but the angry, mocking disapproval of the other audience—the ones who love Twilight, like Michaela, who calls one such hater a bunch of insulting names: “a little nobody with no creativity,” for openers

But consider: in a book ostensibly designed to bring in or appeal to a female teen audience (and that finds another audience in the mothers of those teens), there are discernible ideas or worldviews, promoted or “advertised” in and by the entertainment in the story. This is just like a magazine, a tv series, etc. The “entertainment” or editorial part is designed to pull in and create an audience that is then sold back as a product to the advertisers. The worldviews that are the "advertisements" are evident in the discerned story shapes that support the various popular and critical stances that might not be "progressive, by some standards, but can be discernibly so by others--again, depending on the fairy tale one is within.

In order to accept Bella as a heroine of a romance, what other ideas does a reader have to “buy” into? Same for Edward as a hero? What story shapes: star-crossed lovers? (potential for tragedy)? Romance couple (grounds for miscommunication? Potential for a comic “resolution” that is typically a resolving of the miscommunication, or an overcoming of an older order of rules and customs).

 What is it that the traveling vampires at the baseball game threaten—not just Bella (whom one in his standard vampire frame of reference mistakenly identifies as a "snack") or her relationship with Edward—a lot more: the travelling vampires represent an older, more destructive idea of order; the Cullens a newer, more progressive model of vampirism, a demonstration of the ability to control appetites? restraint? The Volturi, who come up later, are a “Roman Catholic/old European” style of vampire.They represent older, more destructive, even "selfish" worldviews--though Edward seems pretty selfish in his jealous "protection" of Bella from the fumbling overtures from all the teen-aged boys in her school.

 [Here's a thought--Bella is truly 17. Edward looks 17 but is around 100 years old. There is a name for old men who pursue young women--and it isn't "hero." Well--maybe to them and their peers.]

What do the Cullens have that could make a family of vampires a model of "patriarchal" success (which is a model the feminist line of cultural criticism finds objectionable and “not progressive”?)—the ability to support each other (and Edward threatens that unity, so Bella has to be worth it)? So, to lovers of the book, part of the answer has to be their response to the question, "In what ways is she 'worth it.'”