Email
The Yahoo homepage streamed the red carpet premiere of Twilight: Breaking Dawn (Part 2) this week; the final film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's series of teen vampire novels has finally escaped. The novels sold more than 100m copies, and are considered so significant that the Vatican, ever in search of devils, has attacked them – as it attacked the more benevolent Harry Potter novels before. But this is only partly a story about the power of marketing, even if a group of Boston schoolchildren decided that vampires did exist and, in a strange and tiny re-enactment of the Salem witch trials, accordingly looked for a victim to punish.
This is a story about the swelling of female masochism in popular fiction. Like Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James, which Meyer's novels inspired, Twilight is a loving-slave fantasy – Fifty Shades for teenage girls, except with vampires, because teenagers are too young for shades of grey, and prefer their disempowerment fantasies to look like fairytales. (Older women, I think, like them to look like expensive hotels or adverts for Audis.)
Some women have suggested that Fifty Shades is a feminist novel in disguise, but this is nonsense: if so, why doesn't the heroine, Anastasia Steele, like so many masochists, switch and give Christian Grey – the billionaire who reminds me of a young Jeffrey Archer, or maybe even of Richard Branson – a kick in his cable-knit jumper? I was momentarily happy to see women reading explicit pornography on the London Underground but then I realised it was S&M – he S, she M. Why would it be anything else?
Twilight is equally reductive. Bella Swan falls in love with a vampire called Edward Cullen, who is very rich, because if you aren't rich in trashy teen fiction, you're not worth loving: Stephenie Meyer is not Thomas Hardy. (The more wholesome suitor, who is a werewolf, obviously has no money at all; he is essentially a trailer-park mythical creature from the wrong side of Grimm.) Work is an irrelevance for Bella because this is princess fiction too: in one passage, which I read screaming at midnight, Edward tells her: "No, you don't [want to go to college! You want to be an accessories buyer for Jigsaw]!" Well, yes, maybe she doesn't want to go to college if passion is, literally, consuming.
Bella is rescued from a buffet of terrible fates, including a nest of Italian vampires who look like fashion designers; whole tracts of the movie scripts consist of repetitions of the line, "Bella has got to be safe!" – which is not only offensive but also incredibly boring. But the most terrible fate is already with her: she cooks, she cleans (she is a sexually promising Famous Five heroine); she does not have sex with Edward before her marriage, because nice girls don't in abstinence porn – which, if Twilight has a genre, is surely the one. Finally – and if you hate a spoiler, I care not – she becomes a vampire.
Two of Twilight's themes are particularly disturbing. One is the sexual violence of the central relationship. In a fascinating blog, the anonymous Live Journal user kar3ning detailed 15 signs of an abusive relationship, as named by the American National Domestic Violence hotline, and found many of them in Twilight. Kar3ning was attacked online by angry fans, in the same way you might be attacked for suggesting the Mr Men books were racist, but kar3ning is right.
There is the controlling male, the female with low self-esteem, the threats of suicide and murder, and so on. The day after her wedding night Bella examines the bruises on her body with something like aroused awe: "There was a faint shadow across one of my cheekbones, and my lips were a little swollen … the rest of me was decorated with patches of blue and purple."
The other is the anti-abortion agenda, which could be ignored were the premiere not live on Yahoo, as Meyer acts as the cultural arm of Abort67. Bella conceives a child on her wedding night. She resists all pleas to remove it: it breaks her ribs, her pelvis and, in an unconscious homage to early Ian McEwan, her spine; then it kills her. All this is noble, because Bella is a good mother and dies for her child as a loving martyr to the weakness of her own body. (The star of the movies, Kristen Stewart, is also rather unlucky in real life. She was photographed kissing a married man last year and, because abstinence porn can bleed into life, she is now talked of as "unbankable", Hollywood's own death, and her personal morality is – in ways the actresses of the 1950s would recognise – a public issue.)
Because Bella becomes a vampire and can, by the end, jump off cliffs and wrestle with mountain lions, it has been said that Twilight is a story of female empowerment. However, with all that goes before, it is more likely that Bella Swan surrendered her mortality (and what more can you surrender?) for a murderous love, and a private island. A kind of twilight, sure.
Twitter: @TanyaGold1
Comment from the paper
Mike Farrar: Mid Staffs was a betrayal of the NHS
Should parents have the right to smack their children?
Matthew Todd: The roots of gay shame