“Twihards” hate Bella. In each installment of author Stephenie Meyer’s blockbuster Twilight book series, Bella Swan embodies Meyer’s own distinctly feminine sexual anxieties. This Difference distinguishes the popular saga—justifying its appeal despite its perverse conceit. Bella’s recognizable yet frustrating choices—displayed during the books’ stages of social-sexual development—are perceived through the temptations offered by the world of vampires and werewolves. Bella embarrasses Meyer’s and the audience’s desire to displace sexual anxiety onto macabre romance and demonic iconography.
A real artist, Twilight (2008) director Catherine Hardwicke, raised the ire of fans and Hollywood-media patriarchy alike by visualizing the book’s fevered adolescent female sexuality. More memorable than any of Meyer’s purple prose: a fan blows Bella’s (Kristen Stewart) hair in slo-mo while her P.O.V. reveals dreamy vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) staring back, flanked by the wings of a stuffed owl in biology class. Hardwicke aces the biology and sociology by visualizing definitive American Teen myths gleaned from the raw material of the books. The film ends with the richest representation of the prom ritual since Carrie (1976): young sexuality given proper social outlet, but without entirely containing female sexual appetite. In other words, Hardwicke not only enables the romantic appeal of the books to fully bloom, she also interprets its complexities cinematically.
Hardwicke proved the ideal filmmaker to bring the first Twilight to screen. Her best previous film, Lords of Dogtown (2006), exemplified Hardwicke’s empathic understanding of teen culture and palpable sense of sexual security. These qualities evidenced themselves in her casting and directing of Stewart, Pattinson and Taylor Lautner (as Jacob the werewolf)—all of whom she made stars. To maximize the box-office potential of the series, however, film studio Summit perverted the saga’s genuine appeal.
The mass audience missed out on a pop breakthrough—a franchise of one’s own—through which women filmmakers might have commanded the movie-making apparatus and popular attention. Twilight introduced to the male-dominated movie art form (and business) the possibility of a female-directed equivalent to Coppola’s Godfather trilogy or Spielberg’s Indiana Jones serial. Compare the untapped potential with the limp results:
New Moon: Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break) would have brought kinetic force to the themes throbbing under the skin of Meyer’s “break-up” Myth. Definitive Bigelow: Bella’s self-destructive thrill-seeking response to heartbreak, Edward’s psychic male domination, and Jacob’s pubescent/tumescent sense of male competition. Instead, director Chris Weitz (of the sexist American Pie comedies) emphasizes uninspired digital effects and dull action—an ungifted adolescent male’s P.O.V.—with absolutely no sympathy for the motivation behind Bella’s travails or for the book’s sense of tension, momentum and release. These are qualities of which Bigelow’s mastery shames most male directors.
Eclipse: Catherine Breillat (The Sleeping Beauty) might have identified the feminist/porno-fantasy essence of the most thrilling (and moving) of the Twilight books in which the Jacob-Bella-Edward love triangle is viewed through the options society offers women. Imagine Breillat dramatizing the cultural resonance of Bella’s fate: drawn to the allure of forbidden sexuality and romantic love with Edward—a transgression—but intended for domestic bliss with an entirely human Jacob, an alternative fate that pulls at her with animal ferocity (and comfort). Fashionably “dark” indie director David Slade (Hard Candy) received the best reviews of the big(ger) budget franchise, but Breillat understands the significance of “size.”
Breaking Dawn – Part I: Sam Taylor-Wood (Nowhere Boy) is best suited to provide a healthy perspective to Meyer’s “grotesque”—as my Twihard niece called it—conflation of motherhood and dread. This book completes the stages of Bella’s development—marriage, honeymoon, pregnancy, birth. It also reveals the core of Meyer’s sexual disturbance: motherhood. It drives Bella to go full vampire. Taylor-Wood doesn’t suffer these hang-ups. Her open expression (cinematically) of sexual agency (she films men with palpable appreciation) ends up indistinguishable from her proven aptitude for the mystery of mother-child bonds and the unpredictability of maternal impulses (she is brilliant with actresses). Instead of Taylor-Wood’s artistry, Bill Condon (Dreamgirls) treats feminine mystery with camp grotesquery—a parade of monstrous women. His gyno-repulsion is surpassed only by his filmmaking incompetence. Meyer needs—and her audience deserves—Taylor-Wood’s hard-won sense of liberation.
Hopefully these imaginary credits illustrate what the studio sacrificed to a vampiric celebrity culture. Summit reached into the nadir of male directors to find (inexpensive, safe) hacks to helm the consequent films. In those movies, Stewart and Pattinson—seeming bored—signify decadence, while Lautner’s sinew and gusto serves to make careerism sexy. The mass audience that responded to the books and made the first film the biggest box office success by a woman director of all time, lapped up what Summit served. The studio replaced the anxieties dredged up by—given form in—Hardwicke’s film with the salvo of hype—welcoming its fans into the consumer fold. This is how patriarchy—oppression—works.
