Coming to Terms with My Adulthood
Revisiting Twilight on its 10th anniversary
by Jenna Lennon
November 2018 marks the ten year anniversary of the film adaption of Stephanie Meyer’s bestselling young-adult novel Twilight. Before its theatrical release in 2008, I picked up the romance-sci-fi-fantasy to read on a whim. I was in the sixth grade, and everyone I knew was already knee-deep in the franchise, so to avoid major FOMO, I dropped it into my Target shopping cart and convinced my mom that she would want to read it after me: two for the price of one.
For sixth grade me, I couldn’t imagine a more intriguing premise: Romeo and Juliet if they were separated by the need for Romeo to suck Juliet’s blood. Isabella Swan (Kristen Stewart) moves from sunny Phoenix, Arizona to Forks, Washington (the rainiest place in the continental United States) so her mother (Sarah Clarke) can travel freely with her step-father (Matt Bushell), a minor league baseball player. But Forks is home to the mysterious Cullen family. The Cullens are pale, quiet, and seemingly disappear every sunny day that Forks (rarely) has, yet Bella is instantly drawn to Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). The two are star-crossed lovers, and an epic story begins.
My mom was — is —- a die-hard Harry Potter fan, and Twilight was definitely the opposite of that. I spent my summers from the time I was in the third grade through middle school ignoring all of the required summer reading lists and instead flipping through all seven Harry Potter novels. It’s a love we shared together, and I was hoping Twilight would become a similar phenomenon.
That never actually happened. Even though I was obsessed with every werewolf and every glimmering vampire, my mom certainly was not. She tried, on multiple occasions, just to get through the first novel, but she’d remind me time and time again that Twilight was a poorly written novel for tweens. Simply put, “not good.” (You were reading it from a story perspective, Jenna, my mom recently told me, and I couldn’t even get past her terrible writing.)
But Twilight and the subsequent films that followed (New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn: Part 1 and Breaking Dawn: Part 2) were important and prominent films in my childhood. They renewed my love of reading, and they sparked my love of writing. They’re also the first time I can remember genuinely and actively caring about the quality of an adaptation because the Harry Potter novels that I read prior to Twilight were already made into movies long before I picked up the books. Sure, I still cared about those movies and those characters, but Twilight felt wholly and uniquely mine. Harry Potter’s magical universe obviously didn’t exist, but Forks, Washington is a real place. It felt feasible and accessible — and on at least two occasions, I may have Googled how possible it would be to move there.
With all book to film adaptions, disappointment is almost guaranteed, and I expected at least a little bit of that; apprehensive that Twilight wouldn’t meet our expectations, it took my cousin and I (Dee: several years older, equally obsessed) quite a long time to finally see it in theaters. And when the day finally came, I was short of breath from the minute I woke up; when Dee picked me up after school and drove to the theater; for two hours and two minutes plus fifteen minutes of trailers; and all the way back home again when I was finally able to relax and take a breath.
Twilight was everything I could have wanted and so much more. Of course, I remember some awkward acting and a few points where I thought Woah, I’ve never seen so many close-ups in one scene, but I also remember thinking Wow, Robert Pattinson is exactly what I pictured Edward to look like. And that’s what I really cared about in 2008. I went to see Twilight at least five or six more times before it left theaters and before it was released to DVD, but every movie that followed, I had pre-ordered tickets to the midnight screening.
Fast forward ten years later, and in the biggest I-told-you-so ever, it physically pains me to admit that my mom…was right. I’m not caught up in the excitement of it anymore to ignore the forced performances, uncomfortable extreme close-ups, or the color grading: a now-distracting mixture of greys and blues. It’s something I now see as a failed attempt to reinforce the cold and dreary setting while referencing the cold skin of the vampires, but what I once thought was a genius decision by the filmmakers now just makes everything feel washed out and artificial.
The smaller interactions in the movie from the supporting actors feel genuine: rough housing in the school parking lot, goofing around outside the diner, prom dress shopping in a small boutique. Oddly enough, it’s most of the major actors that deliver subpar performances due in part to what I now see as Catherine Hardwicke’s poor directing (Stewart, for example, consistently feels forced and uncomfortable, more so than her character should; Pattinson, at times, also delivers forgettable performances, though we’ve seen him in stronger roles proceeding and succeeding Twilight).
But ultimately, Twilight as an adaptation is spot on, something I’ll argue about even today. Dialogue is taken directly from the book, most scenes play out exactly as the novel does, and the scenes added to the movie keep in line with the heart of the novel, intended to move the narrative along. Twilight the movie begins much the same way that Twilight the book does: the preface of the book is practically verbatim what we hear as the first voiceover of the movie (I’d never given much thought to how I would die). On screen, we witness a deer chase that ends with a man (who we assume to be Edward) tackling it. Perhaps it’s Hardwicke’s attempt to be artsy with its twisting camera angles and extreme closeups. But it also offers a sense of foreshadowing and plays with the larger metaphor at hand: the hunter and the hunted, or in a larger sense, the chase.
At age twelve, I ate that metaphor up. Middle school was hard, and boy problems were totally a thing, and I just thought I relate to this so much! But at twenty one? There’s a few moments when I watch Twilight where I can’t help but think Wow, I paid money five times to see this in theaters, like the deer chase scene or when Bella stands in front of the fan in biology class and Edward smells her for the first time. Her hair goes all over the place, Edward grabs the lab desk and clenches his hand around his mouth and dramatic music starts playing. There are other times where I can’t help but think Wow, this ridiculous music still makes me smile, like when Edward appears out of no where to save Bella from a group of men thinking “vile things” … and then takes her out to dinner, afterwards.
Much like my mom’s first assessment of Twilight, the novel, Twilight the movie, is “not good.” The cinematography is bad, the directing is bad, the acting due to the directing is bad. It’s sometimes nauseating to look at and scenes are uncomfortable to watch. Stephanie Meyer manages to humanize the Cullens as vampires, but Hardwicke’s direction leaves it feeling lifeless and unobtainable, which was (still is) pretty earth-shattering for the twelve-year-old inside me who felt that anything was possible — even falling in love with a vampire.
I can’t lie and say I’m not upset about how Twilight hasn’t aged very well (at least in relation to my own age). But I also can’t deny still defending the saga on several occasions in college classes. The novels and the movies meant so much to me that coming to terms with their below-average-ness is also coming to terms with my growing up. But as much as I’ll admit that Stewart, Pattinson, and Hardwicke aren’t really a dream team, I already have plans to commemorate the end of my college career and the beginning of my adulthood with a special showing of Twilight on its tenth anniversary in November.