The Twilight Sigh-ga

About three things I was absolutely positive.

First, Twilight was a saga of nonsense metaphysical titles. 

Second, there were parts of it – those bits between the covers – that were the most pointless constructions ever to offend the page. 

And third, I couldn’t put the fucking things down.

A mis/un-understanding of the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer.

I have consulted on this, with many. I know a lot of people that are irrevocably in love with Twilight (hark at my quoth). I, shamefully, must join hoard. But thinking critically it is hard to base my interest. Every moment I consume or regretfully/excitedly turn the page it's full of conflict between my better taste and judgement and some very base simple pleasure that I want desperately to disallow and have banished to the attic with the mad women at comic con. But between the blatantly insipid prose, inability to develop tension or suspense and loathsome character construction, there is something there, something stalking. I use this term rather than haunting because it is that invasive and nonconsensual. I have been molested by Twilight. I feel dirty and used. 

So I become curious what is its appeal? It is trash, it is awful, it is just plain bad but I do persist. After one negative experience I willfully buy the remaining three books. This is not a diagnostic enquiry, and I do not profess to probe the psyches of millions of terrifying Americans, but I want to attempt an answer to a reading experience that counters everything I know and trust. 

My joy in this is hard to place. There is no seduction, literally or literary-ally. Sex is in prohobition here. The saga follows Bella's desire to become a vampire and Edward's uncompromising and simplified restraint. There is no tease, there is a gap instead of a gape where the sexual tension should be. Perhaps here we find a reverse appeal, seeing that where the reader is given nothing the imagination fills in. This would explain the steam that much Twilight fan fiction tries to blow, eagerly expressing the repressions of its protagonists. (see Furnace, Sex and Vampires, Cullenary Education: Forks Sex Ed,).   

My fundamental problem with this saga is that it sets the gothic back by about 100 years with unconvincing, and unviable, Jonas brothers rings of promise and self-inflicted sexual-repression. Where went the ‘sex, death and ecstasy’ of the art of transgression? Have we truly run out of taboos and minorities to pin our otherness upon? The vampire used to be the body though which we liberated and performed deviancy, a skin for reveling in. Desire has been a contemporary imperative in vampire fictions from Dracula's aroused Lucy, floating curtains and same sex experiences in The Hunger and Nadja, to the adolescent crushes of The Lost Boys and Near Dark. The process of becoming  a vampire is routed in seduction, a lustful carnal process that presents as orgasmic. The 'petite mort'. The 'little death' that raises one to immortality. Yet, Meyer’s constructions are insipid inversions rather then subversions. There is nothing progressive here, in terms of cultural commentary or genre. Instead of exposing repression through transgression this book wilfully endorses it, forcing the reader to endure lengthy diatribes about will power and virtue. 

This is the concerning evidence of the prevailing 'CandyGothic'. A state of horror affected by its own designs of difference. 

The CandyGothic signifies an attempt to reassess the function of horror in a (western) culture in which transgressions, repressions, taboos, prohibitions no longer mark an absolute limit in unbearable excess and thus no longer contain the intensity of a desire for something that satisfyingly disturbs and defines social and moral boundaries. 

(Fred Botting)

The Twilight saga is symptomatic of genre proliferation in which the mass production of shock and controversy has eaten itself, forcing the themes and effects back within the limits. More shocking is it suddenly to have moral contexts and safe subtexts. And this is a troublesome feeling to be addressed with such materials and actually feel challenged by a startling lack of textual challenge.  

This said perhaps the appeal is a masochistic one. Page flipping as self-harm, as though I invited the displeasure as pleasure. Everything wrong in it made right but a willful desire to dislike that became the liking of the text. 

xoxo Final Girl