I heard you on the radio talking about the mystery of Twilight’s appeal. In the many biographies of Lisa Simpson on the Internet, it’s almost always noted that her favorite magazine is titled “Non-threatening Boys.”
Edward Cullen may be playing a vampire, but he’s perceived as one of the Jonas Brothers. That’s why aging tween girls think he’s so swell.
Absolutely. He’s a safe bad-boy-who-can-be-redeemed-if-only‐the-good-girl-loves-and-trusts-him-enough. He might talk about the danger of losing control, and warn Bella to stay away from him for her own good, but we know he won’t really lose control. He’s all cuddling and petting with no pressure for sex.
Which is just another connection to Titanic’s Jack Dawson, a romantic guy who is so safe that he can draw the heroine naked without making a pass, and who lets her initiate sex, choosing the time and place for losing her virginity.
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Chastity is a precious thing, and the struggle to be chaste is both an inevitable part of a moral life and a legitimate subject for narrative art. In part, this quest for chastity may legitimately form some part of
Twilight’s appeal. At the same time, a narrative that wallows in the intoxicating power of temptation and desire, that returns again and again to rhapsodizing about the beauty of forbidden fruit, may reasonably be felt to be a hindrance rather than an affirmation of self-mastery.
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There is even a
Twilight tourism industry, centered on Washington State, where much of the story is set. While Robert Langdon fans get to go to Rome and Paris for the Dan Brown experience, Stephenie Meyer aficionados converge on rainy Forks, Washington to take “Twilighter tours” of locations more or less corresponding to settings in the books, from a Craftman-style house similar to the Swans’ to a locker at Forks High School designated Bella’s locker.
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C- |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Twilight and
New Moon are essentially uncritical celebrations of that overwrought, obsessive passion that is the hallmark of immaturity — passion that wholly subordinates all sense of one’s own identity and elevates the beloved to
summum bonum, or even the
sole good; passion that leaps as readily to suicidal impulses and fantasies as to longing for union.
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