Twilight, Revamped
Twilight has hurt me. No, it has physically hurt me. While Bella Swan was bleeding out on a hospital bed in the Cullen household, red lights began flashing out of the movie theater screen. I then promptly fainted, and then, later, threw up on the suspiciously sticky movie theater carpet. This entire debacle made me miss the final minutes of the film (Bella’s transformation), which I then cried about to my mother. Although this situation hurt (a lot), it still does not measure up to the pain and sorrow of Catherine Hardwicke leaving the Twilight franchise after the criminally underrated first installment.
Hardwicke proved her directorial skills in the making of her 2003 debut film Thirteen, a movie about a young adolescent dabbling in the adult world of drugs, sex, and theft. Hardwicke's style is quite distinctive through her use of unsaturated cool-toned shots, shakey, frantic camera work, and giving direction to the actors, all of which allow the viewer to feel every emotion the character is experiencing on their screen. Thirteen was met with relative critical acclaim. A simple search on google will be able to tell you the film has an 81% score on rotten tomato, with reviews from Stella Papamichael for BBC.com stating, “Hardwicke shows great instincts, using a frenetic documentary style to hammer home the brutal realities of modern teenage life. ”Or “Thirteen is a provocative peek into the raw world of modern urban adolescence -- but it's a peek with lots of thought, and some fine filmmaking, behind it,” by Paul Clinton from CNN.com. Both Thirteen and Twilight have similar storylines, in which the plot follows a seemingly normal girl who is lured in a new and strange world filled with danger and suspense- except Twilight does have sparkly vampires, I’ll give it that.
Additionally, these two films also have a similar color scheme and camera style, with the focal point of the movie being the darker aspects of teenage life. Whereas Thirteen is much more literal than Twilight. So why do two films with the same premise, same aesthetic and same director get treated in two completely different ways?: the lack of a previous narrative and prejudice towards Thirteen, as there was towards Twilight. Thirteen is more of a cautionary tale aimed at parents of teenagers rather than teenagers themselves. (To put this in perspective, this film was shown in health class in my junior year of high school.)
Twilight is a New York Times best selling series written by Stephanie Myer, although you have to be living under a rock in the Marianas trench not to know this. The fan base before the films consisted of mainly female teenagers and their mothers, and the gays, of course. After the release of the first movie, the fan base grew ten-fold; the series became sensationalized, and since the fanbase was teenage girls, and everything liked by adolescent girls is viewed as trivial and dumb by the larger part of society, Twilight was seen as trivial and dumb. If only everyone realized The Beatles were the blueprint for One Direction.
Upon Twilight’s release, it was, and still is, trivialized. Compared to Thirteen’s 81% Rotten tomato score, Twilight has a 49% and is certified rotten. Some key phrases about the target audience in the criticism of the film are “indiscriminate adolescent females” and “14-year-old girl who gets all giddy at the thought of cute boys.” If you agree with these critiques, I must ask: Do you hate Twilight, or do you just really hate teenage girls?
Even before men began to attack it, Twilight was supposed to fail. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Kristen Stewart also says Twilight was “a weird thing nobody believed in.” It’s a probable conclusion to draw why Hardwicke was asked to direct in the first place. As female directors are often not trusted with movies which have a potential to gross, but after proving its worth in box office numbers, male directors deemed it worthy of their time and efforts. Once Hardwicke left the franchise, the rest of the movies began to lose the artistic integrity the first film possessed in favor of a more shiny and polished look. This drastic shift in style is more like a cash grab than having an authentic artistic foundation. Ten years after Twilight's initial release, Hardwicke reveals, “[The sequel] would require too tight of a turnaround; if she had said yes, she barely would have had a chance to breathe after post-production and promotion for the first movie.” They lost the true meaning of the film; there was no more grit or anxiety. They even shifted the color scheme from dark and dreary to light and sunny, also though the movie supposedly takes place in the region, which is nearly always under a “cover of clouds and constant rain.” You weren’t able to see the excitement and chaos of first love through the use of the almost acrobatic camera movements. The male directors put more emphasis on making Bella’s character likable for the small percentage of male viewers. Hardwicke directed Kristen Stewart to act a certain way so the female audience would find her relatable, not so the men watching would want to sleep with her. Hardwicke was Ted to show how Bella was awkward, clumsy, and nervous because that is the reality for the majority of the teenage girls watching.
Amiri Barka states in Jazz and the White Critic, “Most jazz critics have been white Americans, but most important jazz musicians have not been.” Well, I would like to utilize this statement for this beloved film of mine, and any other female-oriented movie in general. Jazz was unfairly ridiculed by people who did not understand the concept and was not the target audience of this genre of music. This can be mirrored in ways by the idea of a man reviewing a movie made for, and by, a woman. They unfairly discriminate against something they have no understanding of or jurisdiction over. When seeing a “rom-com” or “chick flick,” I can only assume they go in with the mindset of I hate it already just because they believe a film is beneath them because girls enjoy it. It is understandable men do not endorse these movies, I don't endorse James Bond or Indiana Jones, but why do they get to dictate what is good or bad? In our culture, we put more emphasis on what men like. We are forced to hate things if they are female-oriented; we have to say they are a guilty pleasure, or else we seem like rudimentary beings. I refuse to accept the opinions of critics who practically jizz in their cuffed jeans while watching overrated Scorsese and Tarantino films. Imagine a utopia where the often referred to “film bro” takes down their Pulp Fiction posters. He replaces them with a poster of Bella and Edward in a tender embrace: imagine a world where boys were fawning over Kristen Stewart as they do Margot Robbie: imagine a world where film critics are from a diverse perspective, rather than just cis, straight, white men. What a world that would be.
