The Glow is Gone

I deliberately put on blinders to Twilight, hoping its ascendance could go mostly unnoticed until it died a natural and good death. Fads  charged with an almost exclusively sexual fuel make me want to hurl. Things were going well until late Sunday ennui lead me to ignore the Marcel Carné stagnating in Netflix envelopes on my counter in favor of some illicitly-downloaded fluff.

Twilight. Fucking Twilight. I expected to be appalled, but not fascinated. Vampires have almost always been about sex; even Bram Stoker and Camilla were wholly indebted to Victorian erotic mores. Contemporary culture has easily picked up the metaphor, using sucking and sexual swagger to underscore ready-made insecurities and values.  I knew “Twilight” was written by a Mormon yes-wife and cheerleader mom who publicly regards her own genre as “icky,” refusing to watch gory vampire films. What I didn’t expect was that her own narrative, more Harlequin than horror, would so unselfconsciously acknowledge itself. Stephanie Meyer might be a brilliant postfeminist satirist without even knowing it.

Well, no, she’s being serious, but the point stands; her own vampire story is a thinly-veiled and thickly-retarded abstinence metaphor, a hilariously Utopian gesture and “fuck you!” to sexual liberation. The cultural pendulum swings in Bush/post-Bush America are getting farther apart, exacerbated by an internet digital medium; today we can see shots of Lindsay or Britney’s shaved vagooter passed around the mediascape even as “purity” fads like the Jonas Brothers or Twilight do their part for the conservative counter. It’s no surprise that the latter is way more disingenuous, offering up their succulent treats and then espousing a doctrine of denial. You can have your frottage, but you can’t fuck.

Meyer’s metaphors are as bald as her tropes. Her Mary Sue protagonist, impossibly loved and attractive, indulges a creepy, compulsive and codependent relationship with a 100+ year-old virgin who refuses to “bite” her and taint her “soul” even though he can barely control himself. Real subtle. I’ve come to believe that wish-fulfillment is an almost deliberate form of masochism, but something else is going on here. Bella yearns both to be boned and bitten, but ultimately the decision and moral responsibilities lie with Mr. Vampire Hunk (side note: anyone else think this dude looks like E. Honda?).

or

Women are free to express their desires, but men are forever the gatekeepers of fulfillment. Go team Patriarchy! What’s truly bizarre to me is not how transparent and laughable this all is (and really, is it any worse than Anne Rice?), but how readily the almost exclusively female fanbase acknowledges it with irony. Much of the hand-wringing over Twilight is misplaced – I’d be willing to bet that as many readers/viewers laugh at it as take it seriously, a gesture Meyer appears unable to make. It’s too bad money is the ultimate yardstick, else that ironic backlash might actually matter.