"Twilight" Is Blissfully Endearing

Growing up, I hated Twilight.

Not because I’d ever read it or seen the movies - I just hated it because it was popular in a certain sub-group of teenage girls who liked really cheesy vampire romance novels. Looking back, I shouldn’t have been so judgemental. I was a big Harry Potter fan, and what made that any different? The hatred was probably stemmed from internalized misogyny; I didn’t like what “other girls” thought was cool.

As a joke, I decided to take advantage of my Amazon prime subscription and watch all five movies. Yes, five. I thought there were three, honestly, but no, the series was spread out across a four-year period to tell the shockingly predictable story.

The five movies cover this general plotline: Bella Swan is a seventeen-year-old girl who moves from Arizona to Forks, Washington to live with her father for a while (yes, Forks is a real town, and yes, I will be taking a road trip there shortly to live out my Twilight dreams). At her new school, she meets Edward Cullen, a mysterious and handsome teen with a strange adoptive family. Bella learns that Edward and his family are a clan of vampires living on the outskirts of the town. She decides to stay with Edward despite this, which puts her in a lot of danger, but he’s just so hot she can’t resist, I guess.

Over the next few movies, she learns that her childhood friend Jacob is involved with a pack of werewolves (who are the natural enemies of vampires) and after Edward leaves her for Bella’s own protection, she and Jacob kind of have a “thing” with each other, but then she and Edward get back together after promising the vampire government that he will turn her into a vampire after they graduate high school.

Then, in the third movie, literally nothing important happens. In the fourth, Edward and Bella get married and have a human-vampire-hybrid baby that almost kills Bella, but Edward transforms her into a vampire at the last second. In the dramatic finale, the vampire government tries to kill Edward and Bella’s child, Renesmee (don’t ask about the name) but then they decide that it’s okay if she lives for some reason. And they all live happily ever after.

Writing this brief synopsis of the plot makes me wonder how I even enjoyed the movies. And I left out some of the most baffling details - Jacob “imprints” on Bella and Edward’s daughter, which basically means that he claims her as his own, which was very strange. There was a really great scene featuring vampire baseball. There was also a moment where we learned that one of the main characters fought in the Civil War as a confederate soldier.

You may be confused how these were enjoyable films to watch. They were cliche, awkward, predictable, and unintentionally hilarious. But somehow, they were gloriously captivating.

It takes one back to the simple days: when Twi-hards cared about “team Edward” and “team Jacob”. The songs used as background music are nostalgic glimpses into such a prime period of my childhood. And it’s just bad enough that it is completely impossible to dissect any details of the movie - you just have to sit back and watch them play out. The character decisions are incredibly puzzling and everyone was written as a caricature of their personality type. I don’t blame the actors for the performances, as many people do; it seems that an unintelligible script was thrust upon them and they were told to just work with it. Honestly, the acting only improves from the first film. I truly believe that Kristen Stewart took all the hate she got to heart because by movie five, her character is able to form complete sentences.

My favorite characters were all of the Cullens - they were all delightfully predictable. There was Carlisle, the “good vampire” who developed enough self control to become a doctor. His wife Esme was the maternal figure for the Cullen clan. Jasper was the weird confederate soldier guy who had six lines in five movies. Alice was the fashionable “girly” character. Emmett was the jock. Rosalie was the bitchy blonde. There was next to no character development for any of them - they stayed exactly the same throughout all of the movies. Except for Rosalie; she became a lot kinder after they gave a bit of backstory as to why she resented Bella (which was, spoiler alert, because she wishes she was still human)

I loved that Edward was so fucking weird and his only character trait was that he loved Bella. I loved that Bella had no personality. I loved that Jacob was an annoying whiny bitch.

The way the movies didn’t make me think at all was what made them so charming. In Harry Potter, there was a lot more character development and the plotline were actually well-planned and complex. In Twilight, the biggest plot twist was that the final battle in the last movie was all a vision, and nobody actually died or got hurt.

My brain was completely empty watching the films. No thinking was involved at all. Just vampires and werewolves and cheesy dialogue.

I truly believe that in such a complex, quick-moving world, we need some aspects of our lives that are stagnant. For this, I highly recommend Twilight.