I’m Twee for Twilight!!!

This Native American/Werewolf knows what youth culture is about in 2009.

On the first night of summer break, I was overcome with a wave of nausea from some noxious tobacco that had found its way into a night of typical college rituals and libations. My stomach, churning like the whirlpool of Charbydis, forced me to lie down on my couch and clutch a pillow until the wave of sickness passed by. In the background, my TV was playing and had settled on the 2009 MTV Movie Awards. In the next hour, I could only overhear the audio as I tried not to vomit on my mother’s newly-washed couch linens, and felt as though I was in some surreal dimension. What are kids today watching?, I thought to myself. Am I no longer a kid? But I am a kid! But I don’t know any of this! Eventually I gave up and worked the will to climb up the stairs and collapse into my bed (first world problems are the worst!).

So this is a post about Twilight just as much as it’s about youth culture in the year 2009, and whether or not youth media only appears stupid to adults because we’re not living in the moment. The idea is this: Are things today really worse than things were yesterday? It’s a shockingly precise question, I know, one that will clearly find its way onto every junior-level communications class final about pop culture, but shake off the cobwebs of nostalgia and consider this: Is it not possible that all kids are just into stupid bullshit, no matter what generation they grow up in?

First of all, Twilight. I watched it last night with some friends and holy cow is it a cinematic tour-de-crap. But of course, you knew this, and of course, I knew this; what could I have expected, the Citizen Kane of vampire fanfiction? But Twlight isn’t conventionally worse than any other mainstream blockbuster film, as far as plot/character/dialogue/pacing/editing goes, because really, what else do you expect from something that’s made to make money? It was a lot more enjoyable than Terminator: Salvation (NO HOMO NO HOMO NO HOMO) and even though it’s insanely vapid it will teach you things; I hit the Stop button with a new understanding of what it means to be 13 in the Obama Age, which is a lot different than being 13 in the Bush Age.

A gust of wind has just blown through the room, giving him an epic NARB.

This is Edward Cullen, played by Robert Pattinson. He’s 17 going on 100+. His hair is gelled in a direction that human hair is not meant to gel in. He’s tall, brooding, and so pale that my friend thought he was animated when he first appears. When he stands in the sunlight, he glitters. He listens to Debussy and the Arcade Fire. His bedroom is so chic and hip he makes Karl Lagerfeld look like Kanye West, Kanye West like Billy Joe Armstrong, and Billy Joe Armstrong like Kim Jong Il. He’s always dressed like he’s vacationing in the Swiss Alps, even though he lives in impossibly dreary Washington. He can play the piano beautifully. He doesn’t care about sex; he only wants to talk about your feelings. He can also read minds and fly.

Basically, he’s going to make getting pussy a lot harder for every tween male from here on out. Edward Cullen is not a character as much as he is an escapist fantasy; the looks of the high school quarterback combined with the personality of the sensitive art kid enabled by the bank account of an Enron executive. Whatever advances Woody Allen made for the nebbish, kind-of-cute intellectual, Robert Pattinson is enacting in reverse. You don’t need to settle for the funny, smart, kind of cute kid in class! There’s a funny, smart, gorgeous male model right next to him. This is the kid you want to hold hands with and whisper secrets to in the middle of the night. You don’t have to settle for personality over looks or vice versa; you can have it all. And he’ll also buy you lots of gifts, if you want them.

I believe I can soar.

On the other hand is Bella Swan, played by the ever-disappearing Kristen Stewart. She’s also pale, cute, and impossibly moody. She’s not into dressing up like the other girls, and doesn’t like to surf or partake in physical activity. She has friends, but doesn’t really fit in. She’s always thinking she’s being noticed by the cute, broody boy in the corner (and she actually is). Everyone thinks she’s funny, but no one notices she’s laughing at them. Attractive, smart, funny, and an outsider, Bella is Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club wrapped into one: The coolest girl in school who doesn’t belong.

This is the nut graf of Twilight and what it says to fans: Are you an outsider in school? (Of course you are!) Well, you’re not alone; you can still be really cool and on the bottom of the high school totem pole (well, obviously). All you need is an impossibly shiny knight in armor to rescue you from the tedium of regular life, and you will be okay. You will barely kiss or go past first base. But you will talk about your feelings, become a part of his family in a week, and love him forever. Potentially, you will also become a vampire.

The most amazing thing about how Edward and Bella suspposedly fall in love is that the movie never shows in. We get wordless montages of them talking on hillsides and tree tops, but never hear any dialogue, never get any reason why they’re really into each other besides the fact that Edward is creepy as fuck. He follows her around, eavesdrops on her conversations, and breaks into her room to watch her sleep every night (SERIOUSLY). So, not only is this impossibly romantic courtship non-existent on screen, but it’s marked by some serious stalker tendencies. The love between them is not love; it is obsession, and most dangerously, the movie recognizes this. It just doesn’t give a fuck. It’s this puritanical idea of love, framed through the Myspace generation.

He's so heroic.

Chuck Klosterman once wrote about how movies like Say Anything were giving women of his generation an idealized version of love, one that was impossible to live up to in real life. Lloyd Dobler was a sensitive, sweet, popular, good-looking guy who taught kick-boxing to little kids and didn’t aspire to go to college or do anything other than love Ione Skye. However, he was basically just an idealized version of the guys we could be like, if we weren’t awkward assholes who had career goals. But Edward Cullen is dangerous. No one can be like him, and yet, Twilight tells its audience that the ultimate form of love is a partership with this dude. Bella loves him; she wants to be with him forever, wants to die with him, wants to become a vampire for his love. She just wants him to suck her! And this idea of love is impossible; I’m not being pessimistic, I’m being a realist. There is no goddamn way. This is what 15-year olds are getting in their head; that it’s perfectly okay to idealize someone and want to live with them forever, even if you barely know them. That guy is also a vampire.

Which brings up another question: Hasn’t all media just been doing this forever? What’s the difference between Twilight and Say Anything – won’t the former be eulogized on VH1 recap shows in 20 years like the latter is? I got into this discussion the other day when we were talking about Brokencyde, who are the musical equivalent of the Twlight novels in terms of their appeal, and I think the answer is that there’s a world of difference. This is mostly because of the Internet and the Myspace era, which has mobilized youth culture in a way that was impossible 10 years ago, when message boards and social networking sites were mostly for tech nerds. Modern social networking gives kids a way to battle out their obsessions over the nation. No longer can you be the #1 Twilight fan of your class; you have to be the #1 fan in the world. If this means showing you’re deadly obsessed with Edward, why not? If this means publicly wishing to be a vampire, so what? If this means funneling all your hopes into these ridiculous characters, who cares?

I think blog bands get so much hype because the listeners want to be a part of something, some cultural experience, and it doesn’t matter if their aesthetic tastes miss the boat 10 times if they can hitch a ride at least once. But tweens, who often aren’t trained in any real aesthetic appreciation (and I was just a teen, so I can say this!), never get that self-awareness that they’ve made too much out of nothing until they’ve grown up – if at all. Their tastes never develop – they keep listening to Third Eye Blind in the year 2009, they go to Backstreet Boys reunion concerts, they go see Scary Movie 18 in theaters.

Of course you can.

For the current generation, Twilight is going to be this experience for them, and it will fuck them up. They will grow up expecting mythological love and be upset when it doesn’t come; not idealized love, but flat out impossible made-of-legends romance novel love, and it will ruin everyone’s expectations. I know a girl my age who listens to the Jonas Brothers because she can’t imagine anything better, and cries whenever she doesn’t have a boyfriend who doesn’t want to devote his entire existence to her. I think she’s an anomaly among my peers. In 10 years, I think there’ll be a lot of girls like her.

This werewolf is keeping it real.

But I don’t think I’m being pessimistic; more than ever, this is why you have to support culture you don’t hate and talk about these things with the people who are consuming it. My little cousin is 13, and she hates the Jonas Brothers but she’s really into Twilight. Of course, her mom hates the books, and with good reason. The next time I see her, I am making it a mission to ruin her world about this shit, because it needs to happen. Aesthetically, Twilight is no shittier than any other movie; culturally, it may ruin us all. I’m glad I got out when girls my age were being influenced by The Office and Spider-Man 2 to think this is what love could be, not when glittering vampires were telling them how to find eternity. And don’t call me a hater, man.

So hip, Kristen.

Word.

Also, Radiohead’s “15 Step” plays over the end credits. It’s then followed by a Paramore cut. I don’t have to say why this owns.