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.'”

Seeking common signage

I’ve been prepping a reading of the first novel in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series for an upcoming “Issues in Popular Culture” course, dealing with the issue of community-building or tribalisms. Part of the motivation for the theme is from Michel Maffesoli, "The Ethic of Aesthetics." Part from John Fiske's idea that we create (or join) popular cultures from the cumulative consumer choices we make from among the products of the "culture industries." Effectively, consumption becomes an act of production as many, many individual choices combine into a community of common interest.

Three quotations rub together in this context: “A work of art only stirs those for whom it is a sign” (J.M. Guyau, Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, trans Mafessoli, I think, in “The Ethic of Aesthetics”: 17);  “In a ceaseless movement of actions and retrospective effects, I recognize a sign by recognizing it with others, and so I recognize what unites me with others" (Maffesoli); and “The combination of widespread consumption with widespread critical disapproval is a fairly certain sign that a cultural commodity is popular” (Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 106). Critical disapproval would be an ironic "stirring" of a different sort, by that combination. We can join with the lovers of the sign, or the haters: with those who see a positive, inviting sign, or those who see a negative, off-putting sign.  Or we can, after Stuart Hall, take a more "negotiated" position that sees or accepts some aspects as having value in our personal circumstances, but only when taken just so far.

 Twilight is certainly in the prime seats of Fiske’s arena of the popular: huge enthusiastic consumption combined with some of the most desperate and disparate critical disapproval. It is just as “popular” a different way to scorn Twilight, as it is to “consume” it. Of course, “consumption” is a loaded term when dealing with a vampire book, in which the heroine gets called a “snack” on one occasion. But the book can be “used up” a variety of ways. One novel option I read of was invented by Regina poet and educator Gerry Hill. He did an exercise with his writing class, giving each student a page torn from a found copy of Twilight, with the instruction to find something in the flattish prose to build a poem around. Not that hard, actually, if you get the right page, since Meyer does have a skill with description--so page 8, for example, provides a rich imagery of an “alien” landscape of too much green. But I have to admit, some of the pages of dialogue would pressure the most willing imagination to find some touchpoint from which to go somewhere metaphorical.

Yes, Twilight could use a serious edit as a single title and as a series. But it also provides so many points of connection and decoding for so many potential audiences, ranging through Hall's schema of reading positions from dominant-hegemonic to counter-hegemonic (oppositional). It develops lines and relationships that are right out of the formula that has made the romance novel a staple since the formula was first used “seriously” over two-hundred years ago. A heroine who has to overcome her own squeamishness about herself and others to accept the finer qualities of herself and of the hero (or to bring them out in him). A darkly mysterious but wealthy and caring hero who evolves into a “perfect” match once he overcomes a problem in the way he behaves or is perceived by the heroine. A “rival” (Jacob), who is also a stud, but not quite “perfect” for her—in this case too young. And, as it turns out, expresses himself through the wrong kind of inner animal to cure what ails her.

Fine. Harlequin has made a fortune off this formula, and it is one that actually does open up a wealth of signs. The solutions (love conquers all, after it soothes and humanizes the beast in the man) are often laughable, but the problems are real enough to stir something familiar in a reader, to stir that “ethical” attachment Mafessoli writes about: “something which leads me to recognize myself in something which is exterior to me” (“Ethic of Aesthetics” 17).

Just consider two of the “critical” points of departure: What do we usually call a 100+-year-old man who hangs about in a high school and picks up a seventeen-year-old girlfriend?  “Hero” is not quite it. (Dorian Grey, maybe?) Then again, Edward is an eternal seventeen-year-old himself, in one sense, having been "saved" to eternal living death at that age. In Washington State, Bella and Edward are at least past the age of consent--Edward WAAAAY past. The age of consent for sex, anyway. I have not been able to fine an age of consent for vampire conversion, for allowing oneself to be envenomed (serpent allusions, anyone) by the love bite of your boyfriend.

What do we call a man who hangs hidden in a girl’s bedroom, watching her and listening in on her when she talks in her sleep? “Hero,” again, is not quite it. Consider what Bella would say if some other classmate, Tyler for example, were found at her window at bedtime? Yet in Edward's case, all she can do is worry about what he might have heard. 

So where is Edward’s “heroic” quality? In his self-control, apparently. When he practices self-control, and prevents Bella from acting on some of her own self-destructive impulses (urges, stirrings---), he is exercising positive choice. Of course, as a 100+-year-old, he has a much bigger perspective than she has. And he is a typical older man in the way he controls her options. Model of self-control? Or control freak? 

Where do I recognize myself in Twilight? Where would I find my contact point with “others”? My "ethical vector"? The logical node would seem to be Charlie, the concerned father/law-and-order enforcer, who wants his child to have a normal and safe life, with lots of friends, but has no sense of what she has attached herself to (he defends the Cullens against local gossip), so has to be protected in and by his own ignorance of what’s really going on. Maybe.

I feel a more common bond with Tyler, I think: The class clown, the eternal optimist who thinks he’s finessed a prom date with the delectable Bella, and shows on the night up all tuxxed out only to be told she’s been taken by that weirdnik, Edward. Any of several of the high-schoolers, actually—maybe a combination of them, even if I’m maybe now almost as close to Edward’s true age as to the seventeen-year-old I once was. They have so much to learn about themselves and each other, our life-long pursuit. The big thing they have to learn is that they have a lot to learn. That's always such a downer.

I think what stirs me most is the sense I am just as glad not to have to be that age again (though it would be nice to be it physically, if I could age eternally like the hard-bodied Edward), needing to go once again through all that awkward socializing into functional adulthood. Then a sense of chagrin mixes in, and I have to acknowledge that we never really age past the need to adjust, explore, reread the signposts, and find our fit; we just move farther along in our starting (over) points.