“Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl,” a thirteen-year-old girl said in a memorable film, justifying everything she did and didn’t do. Today, anyone can feel like a thirteen or fifteen-year-old girl simply by watching “Twilight”: this vampire thriller is as dull and insecure as girls on the cusp of adulthood.
A Teenage Love Story with a Twist
Young Bella moves to a town where her father works as a police officer. She falls in love at first sight with her classmate, Edward Cullen, a disgustingly handsome teenager with a predatory smile. He possesses superhuman strength and can move with incredible speed. He, too, has fallen for Bella but is afraid to touch her because he might not be able to control himself: he’s a vampire. He takes Bella for walks in the woods and shows her how sunlight paints his vampire skin with a vibrant golden hue.
Oh, you are beautiful, my beloved, and our bed is green. Everything we never wanted to know about the inner world of growing girls is here, in “Twilight.” The strongest, most beautiful, and fastest boy in the world is driven crazy by your scent alone, can stand by your bed for hours admiring you, but won’t touch you because, well, you never know.
More Than Just Vampires
Like “Harry Potter” – a novel not really about magic – Stephanie Meyer’s bestseller, upon which “Twilight” (2008) is based, isn’t really about vampirism. “Potter” is a book about heroic pioneers, about wonderful school years overshadowed by the need to fight invaders. “Twilight” (the first part of a vampire tetralogy) is about the fear of first sex, about a girl who desperately wants it but is afraid, and about a guy whose hormones have completely overwhelmed him, but one careless kiss – and the girl will be with him for life, and who can endure that?
The creators of “Twilight” (both the screenwriter and director are former thirteen to fifteen-year-old girls) don’t quite understand what needs to be focused on to make the film successful: youthful passion, vampire life, or school activities. Therefore, at the beginning of the film, the screen boringly talks about carrot tops and tapeworms, and towards the end, the film suddenly blossoms with unexpected vampire aestheticism. One design decision in the Cullens’ house is worthy of a trendy interior design magazine, and the vampires’ baseball game is the best episode in the film: everyone is so lively, so interested.
A World of Lilac and Shadows
There is absolutely no blood in this fairy tale, but there are good adults with a sense of humor and bad vampires with a sense of hunger. And only the main characters wander through an obstacle course between childhood and youth, unable to understand what feelings they are experiencing. Whether they want to do something good or kill someone. When Bella comes to her father, he tells her: “The saleswoman helped me choose the bedding, it’s lilac, you like that color, right?” Lilac is when a dark twilight shadow of something scary and incomprehensible falls on pink, the favorite color of senseless girls. Adult life, for example.
Everything in the film is lilac, and everything was chosen with the help of a saleswoman.