Having finally watched "Twilight," I have to shift my position slightly. I went into "Twilight" prepared for a movie where the young female protagonist makes bad choices. I can forgive bad choices, particularly when they're made by teenage girls. That's what teenagers DO.
What I wasn't prepared for was a movie where the young female protagonist makes NO choices. Bella does not act, but is acted upon. She drifts along, pulled by the current of other people's decisions. Her passivity is appalling.
Whatever happened to "Well-behaved women rarely make history"?
We expect the story of a teenage girl who falls in love with a vampire to be transgressive. But Meyer has performed the interesting trick of not just neutering the myth of the vampire, but normalizing it. He's a vampire, and he sparkles, but he lives with a tight-knit family who don't drink human blood, with a father who (as the town doctor) holds a valuable position in the community, and "teenage" siblings who dutifully attend high school, despite being several hundred years old.
Everybody loves Bella, and well they might. She is both pretty and agreeable, the perfect teenage girl. At least in the movie, the closest she comes to disagreeing with someone, making a decision, or taking a stand for something is when she tells her father that he should try a salad, because he eats too much steak.
Much is made of Bella's clumsiness. (By the way, "clumsy" is not a character trait.) This clumsiness - the sole flaw in her perfectly serene and agreeable self - is simply an excuse for other people to rescue her. When she slips, Edward is there to catch her.
The story rewards Bella for her passivity by coddling her. Bella exists in a sort of zoo, a safe environment where all her needs are met, and all dangers are averted for her. The story is an inflatable bouncy castle, and Bella is the empty plastic Barbie jouncing around inside it.
She is never confronted with actual danger, forced to make a difficult decision, or faced where a situation where she has to think on her feet. At the end, for about five seconds she is alone in a room with the "sadistic tracker" who tosses her around a bit, but the Cullens leap in before too much damage can be done, as we know they will.
The danger of "Twilight" is that Bella never thinks for herself, or takes action. For this, she is richly rewarded. She gets the guy, and whenever something bad happens, everyone rallies around to protect her. Bella never need learn how to protect herself - that's what her boyfriend is for!
And once again, we run across the old saw that "stalking = love." Edward enters Bella's bedroom without permission, and watches her as she sleeps. But it's not creepy, heavens no! It's just because he wuvs her. When she learns of his nighttime trespassing, her heart melts. In a better world, this romanticization of creepy stalker behavior would be richly punished. In our world, alas, it is richly rewarded.
Printer-friendly version
