I know Twilight is awful, but …

by Anne Billson

Reviews for Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 have been so gleeful in their derision it reminds you that critics love nothing better than a chance to sneer. Why try to say something useful when you can exercise your excoriating wit? That’s fine – I do it, too. Edward looks like a marble statue covered in talc, only now he’s in shorts! The wolves argue with each other in English, not even wolf-talk, which is just silly! And let’s face it, if you’re going to have a caesarean, it’s not a good idea to have vampires in the room.

But if Twilight is so awful, why do we invest so much effort into slagging it off? Especially since everything that needs to be said about teen chastity, female passivity and Mormonism-on-the-sly has already been trotted out in response to previous entries in the franchise. God knows I’m Team Buffy, not Team Bella, and I prefer my vampires evil, but it seems to me that Twilight attracts a lot more vitriol than any other nonsense aimed at the young male demographic. I gave up looking for sample quotes, because the same adjectives came up. Ludicrous, ridiculous and risible are favourites, along with cheesy and sappy, but words such as these could equally be applied to, say, Green Lantern, Cowboys and Aliens, or Conan the Barbarian.

This article is more than 10 years old
I know Twilight is awful, but …
Anne BillsonThis article is more than 10 years old
Twilight caters to the sexual fantasies of teenage girls. I’m not saying in a good way, but there’s not much else at the cinema that does
Twilight Breaking Dawn 10
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1.
Thu 24 Nov 2011 16.59 EST

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Reviews for Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 have been so gleeful in their derision it reminds you that critics love nothing better than a chance to sneer. Why try to say something useful when you can exercise your excoriating wit? That’s fine – I do it, too. Edward looks like a marble statue covered in talc, only now he’s in shorts! The wolves argue with each other in English, not even wolf-talk, which is just silly! And let’s face it, if you’re going to have a caesarean, it’s not a good idea to have vampires in the room.

But if Twilight is so awful, why do we invest so much effort into slagging it off? Especially since everything that needs to be said about teen chastity, female passivity and Mormonism-on-the-sly has already been trotted out in response to previous entries in the franchise. God knows I’m Team Buffy, not Team Bella, and I prefer my vampires evil, but it seems to me that Twilight attracts a lot more vitriol than any other nonsense aimed at the young male demographic. I gave up looking for sample quotes, because the same adjectives came up. Ludicrous, ridiculous and risible are favourites, along with cheesy and sappy, but words such as these could equally be applied to, say, Green Lantern, Cowboys and Aliens, or Conan the Barbarian.

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Except they aren’t; reviews of such boy-tosh may be predominantly negative, but the tone is not so much derisive as regretful at opportunities wasted. No matter that movies aimed at boys feature superpowers or super-robots or saving the world with super-ninja skills. Those sorts of fantasies are permissible, almost cool, even when the films peddling them are awful. And I must confess that, ever since a brain transplant left me with the cultural tastes of a 15-year-old boy, I, too, prefer them to the 100-year-old-vampire-falling-in-love-with-little-old-me.

But Twilight caters to the sexual fantasies of teenage girls. I’m not saying in a good way, but at least it caters to them, and there’s not a lot else at the cinema that does – not in a young adult fantasy genre that invariably reduces females to also-rans or decorative sidekicks while the Harry Potters and Lightning Thieves get on with their questing. In fact, I wish there were more films like Twilight, not fewer. There, I’ve said it. Because so long as supernatural fantasies aimed at teenage girls are raking in money, we’re likely to see more of them produced.

The Twilight effect is already discernible, surely, in the new wave of fairytale movies – not quite Angela Carteresque revisionist as seen in The Company of Wolves, but all featuring heroines spunkier than your traditional Disney princess-passive. We’ve had Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood (too much in thrall to the Twilight films she inaugurated) and there are two new Snow Whites to set alongside 1997’s Snow White: A Tale of Terror. Pixar has its first female protagonist coming up in Brave, and Disney has come up trumps with the unexpectedly wonderful Tangled.

I bet I’m not the only one impatient to see how 18-year-old Emily Hagins will follow My Sucky Teen Romance, her endearing vampire love story, which is everything Breaking Dawn is not. And, while it’s more sci-fi than supernatural fantasy, next spring we have The Hunger Games, adapted from the first of Suzanne Collins’s trilogy, which plunges a resourceful heroine into a dystopian life-or-death situation; I started reading it expecting Battle Royale Lite, but ended up impressed. Here’s hoping it’s successful enough for a green light on the other two books, which introduce a romantic triangle far more interesting than Bella-Edward-Jacob. But would even the first Hunger Games have been made without Twilight?

Who knows? One of these days we may get a young adult fantasy that cracks the genre wide open, a teenage romance to rank with, say, the sublime The Ghost and Mrs Muir. It could happen! Breaking Dawn is a small price to pay.