Shoestring Century

Allow me to mark the release of New Moon by sharing an old review of Twilight, originally published on my friend Edward’s now-defunct website. Under normal circumstances, I would not have seen this film, but I’m glad I did.   It’s good to leave one’s cultural comfort zone (and it doesn’t take a trip around the world to do so).

This age has tried without success to shut down the romantic.  We claim to value human life, despite poisoning and firebombing it on an epic scale, and perhaps we really are quite fond of having it around.  But do we exalt it?  Do we tremble before human accomplishment? Do we believe our own species can navigate these historical waters, not by transcending or abandoning humanity, but by tapping into humanity’s very strengths – its ingenuity, devotion, and discipline?  No, our society tells the youngster that there is no frontier of the human heart, that victory is external, that the best one can do is to score in the 99th percentile or become President.  This dull, corporatist definition of human accomplishment has dominated for decades and decades, since at least the reign of World War I’s droll rats.  What a relief, then, to see romanticism bubbling rightly back to the surface with the success of films like Twilight.

Twilight is a film enthralled with its characters, be they vampires or everyday folks. Their humanity fills the frame, and it is enough. This naturally appeals to teenage girls, who understand, for example, that high school events are a huge deal and can shape one’s destiny;  it will leave cold those wishing to see the “fate of the world” decided by a well-choreographed boat chase (for the action here is poorly executed and irrelevant).  Like any decent fiction, Twilight asks what makes for the good life, and offers a compelling answer.

How would you live if you were to live interminably?  You might read the canon, compose music, love passionately, be steadfast to your family, dress stylishly and take care of your body.  This is how the Cullens, the Übermensch vampire family at the center of the movie, choose to live.  Questions of mortality (or immortality) focus the mind on priorities, and so these characters embody romantic author Stephenie Meyer’s values.

These heroic vampires are portrayed not as aberrant but as more fully human than their small-town counterparts.  They are more loyal, they appreciate art more deeply, and their jokes are more inventive.  While they have stronger animalistic urges as well, their self-restraint is more than up to the task.  Frivolity and self-deprecation may be foreign to them, but for the romantic such token weaknesses are not defining human traits.  The romantic work portrays an ideal and declares it possible; mediocrity-fanning slogans like “dude, where’s my car?” and “I think I love my wife” are impossible in such a world.

It may look at first a dour landscape, this world of Forks, Washington (home to the events of Twilight and my father’s side of my family).  Where’s the ironic detachment?  Where’s the academic indecision?  This aesthetic seduces with a rare aroma: sincerity.  Sincerity is not always serious. The scene in which heart-throbs Bella Swan and Edward Cullen meet in a biology classroom is hilariously overwrought – brimming with sleazy guitar solos, windswept hairdo’s and bit lips – but these effects are not detached kitsch.  The scene is funny because the director is brazenly showing how these teens in heat really do feel.

This generation is sick and tired of heroes who are sick and tired.  It’s seen what the neurotic, over-psychoanalyzed boomers left us – cities choked in the haze of entropy.  Twilight is one example of a broader aesthetic on the wax, one that values excellence, not inside jokes; lasting beauty, not the Pitchfork rating system; bravery and not apologetic slackerism.  Romanticism belongs to no medium or era, so long as its philosophy inspires.  Meaningfully, the three artists featured most prominently in Twilight’s soundtrack are Claude Debussy, Radiohead and Muse – all, to some degree, musical romantics.

Am I saying that Twilight is a great film?  No.  But has it deserved to be panned in the cynical way it has been panned by cynical writers who can’t get past the “teenage vampire” thing? Certainly not.