Twilight: confessional

I hate myself for watching you…  Yes, I have a confession to make, one that has taken me a few years to admit.  I watch the Twilight movies and I even read one of the books.  If you know me, you know I always make fun of them and act like I’m way too cool and too smart to enjoy them, like I only watch them because I hate them and I think they’re funny.  That’s what I want you to think, because they are terrible, terrible stories.

We all know the Twilight Saga is a poorly written, over-dramatic rip-off of gothic romance. First, there are the characters... Bella is insufferable, annoying, and unlikeable.  She is not “spunky” or “endearingly stubborn”; she is whiny and stupid.  Edward is just plain unbelievable.  First of all, he is supposed to be an incredibly attractive, irresistible predator that could overcome any foe, with no weakness at all.  I mean, he’s super-fast, super-strong and he can read minds.  Even Superman had his kryptonite.  What is this creature’s tragic flaw?  Only his undeniable love of Bella, a singularly unremarkable human being, who “smells good”.  I am gagging even as I write about it.

Then, there is the message…  The message to young girls (and women who should know better) that if a man treats you like he hates you, he might just really, really like you (except he wants to drink your blood, so he has to avoid you).  The idea that if you refuse to believe your boyfriend is bad, he will turn out to be good.  The idea that true love will make you want to kill yourself if you have to be separated from the object of your affection.  The idea that if a man hurts you, it’s OK because he probably didn’t really mean it, I mean, he really, really loves you and he can’t help it if he’s super strong and having sex with him gives you bruises and breaks the bed.  That is more than gag-worthy--it’s plain offensive to women.

So, yeah, I hate it.  Here’s the confession--I still WATCH it!  The first time was an accident.  There was nothing else on and I thought, “Oh, this will be funny. I wonder how long I can stand it.”  Within minutes, I was hooked.  I don’t know if it was the pretty actors, the melodramatic camera shots, the breathless inner monologue, I don’t know.  But, I was hooked.  I watched the first movie, the second, then I actually got a Netflix account just to get the newest one.  I even made my friend go with me to see the fourth one in a theatre.  She’s one of the few people to whom I could confess my dirty secret:  I was compelled to see the stupid movies.  Why, why, why?

I blame the fourteen-year-old girl inside of me.  The one with a secret crush on the captain of the football team, or the high-school musical star.  The ordinary girl who wants to believe she is special, so special that no regular boy can recognize it, but a superhuman, 200 year-old, romantic love-machine is the only one to see it.  The girl who sighs and thinks, “Oh Edward…”  I thought she was buried under a cynical, smart-ass woman, a woman who scoffs at lovey-dovey gestures, who values the reality of her regular-guy husband and laughs at romantic tragic-comedies.  I thought I outgrew her, but I now admit she is hiding inside of me, waiting for the next vampire love story.  She’s a lot like Bella.  I kind of hate her, too.