THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE
Directed by David Slade
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For those of you who’ve been living in a tween-proof bunker for the past five years, Twilight is a series of four novels by Stephenie Meyer that’s been turned into a mind-bogglingly successful movie franchise. The books and their screen adaptations chronicle the romance, heartbreak, angst, and abstinence of clumsy, obsessively conscientious Bella Swan (played onscreen by Kristen Stewart) and her true love, the devastatingly handsome, obsessively conscientious vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). The inevitable love triangle is completed with euclidean punctiliousness by Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), a childhood friend of Bella’s who also happens to be Native American and a werewolf. Fans of these two male protagonists are often referred to as Team Edward and Team Jacob—though they might as well call themselves Team Effete Aristocrat and Team Earthy Ethnic.
In this corner, there’s Edward. Extravagantly cultured and ridiculously wealthy, Edward composes classical ballads, writes in an immaculate hand, and, in the book, offhandedly buys his sister a Porsche as a gift. Like a real product of the inbred upper crust, he lives with his brothers and sisters, who are all paired up as husbands and wives. His family has amorphous connections to Italy and is obsessed with blood (as it were). He’s foreign, exciting, steeped in ancient traditions, and ludicrously pale-skinned. As Bella says in the film, Edward is “old school,” dropping on one knee to propose and giving her his mother’s ring. Meyer name-drops Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, and Shakespeare’s Romeo, but Edward is more like Prince Charming—a fantasy noble who sweeps Bella into a deliciously decadent life of luxury.
In short, Meyer covers the class tension with a patina of fantasy; those tensions may be important, but the fantasy is as well. At the end of the movie—and take that as your spoiler alert—Bella chooses the alabaster prince over the dusky gardener, declaring that she wants to become a vampire herself. In the human world, she says, she’s “always felt out of step,” but with the vampires she feels “stronger and more real.” She wants to lose her place in the world—and one’s place in the world includes one’s class. Twilight resonates because it manipulates stereotypical romance narratives but also because it denies them. Bella plays with various social roles at the same time as she gets to transcend them all.
