The Twilight Effect

Last Fri­day night, I dragged three of my girl­friends out to the movies to see a lit­tle film called Twi­light . Per­haps you’ve heard of it?

If you haven’t, I will assume you’re either a shut-in or a male.  After all, it was a 75% female-dominated audi­ence that con­tributed to Twilight’s stag­ger­ing $70 mil­lion open­ing week­end , a huge coupe for direc­tor Cather­ine Hard­wicke and Sum­mit Enter­tain­ment.  To help put that fig­ure in per­spec­tive, Twilight’s suc­cess ranks in the top 4 Novem­ber box office fig­ures of all time–ahead of sum­mer block­buster Trans­form­ers, and the lat­est James Bond flick . As it turns out, Twi­light also boasts the high­est rank­ing box office debut ever for a female direc­tor.  Con­sid­er­ing the eco­nomic cri­sis we’re sup­posed to be in, these num­bers are even more impres­sive.  So impres­sive, in fact, that Sum­mit Enter­tain­ment has already announced plans to begin pre-production on Twilight’s sequel, New Moon.

But none of this news comes as a sur­prise to Twilight’s legions of diehard fans , whose fierce dis­play of buy­ing power pre­vi­ously helped pro­pel all four books of The Twi­light Saga onto the best­seller list, and keep them there, mak­ing author Stephe­nie Meyer a huge suc­cess.  Even Eclipse, Meyer’s third book of the series, dethroned Harry Pot­ter and the Deathly Hal­lows from the best­seller list.

But let’s back up to a few months ago, before I had so much as read a sin­gle page of this hugely pop­u­lar series, before I saw the movie (twice), and before I knew I was on Team Edward, or that there even was a Team Edward.  I remem­ber casu­ally surf­ing the inter­webs, mind­ing my busi­ness as usual, and com­ing across an occa­sional Twi­light glim­mer: a movie ad, a book review, some obsessed fangirl’s glit­ter­ing “Bella ♥‘s Edward” forum sig­na­ture.  It was easy enough to ignore–at first.  But it wasn’t long before Twi­light pro­pa­ganda seemed to creep into every facet of every web site I ever vis­ited.  (My hat’s off to whomever is behind Twilight’s aggres­sive web mar­ket­ing cam­paign, by the way.)  So I guess it was inevitable that I’d even­tu­ally click one of the ads and watch the movie trailer, right?

My reac­tion went some­thing like this:

• That looks pretty cool, I guess…
• And that vam­pire guy is pretty hot!
• Oh hey, it’s Cedric Dig­gory from Harry Pot­ter and the Gob­let of Fire.
• I’m a Harry Pot­ter fan, maybe I’ll like this movie too?
• And Paramore is on the sound­track!? I LOVE Paramore!
• Novem­ber 21st? What a coin­ci­dence, because that’s the same week­end Half-Blood Prince was sup­posed to come out…

The next thing I knew, I was headed for the local library to check out the first book, which I soon dis­cov­ered was a com­plete impos­si­bil­ity.  Checked out; on hold; back-ordered; trans­ferred to another branch–every sin­gle one of the fifty-something copies fell into one of these cat­e­gories.  What was going on here?  Why is Twi­light so pop­u­lar?  Like many unini­ti­ated fans before me, I set out to unravel this mys­tery.  Hell, I thought, maybe if the books are that good, I should just buy them.

So I did.

And that’s how I dis­cov­ered the secret sauce, if you will, of what makes The Twi­light Saga so suc­cess­ful.  The recipe con­sists of teen angst, sex­ual ten­sion, impos­si­bly good-looking main char­ac­ters liv­ing impos­si­bly ide­al­is­tic lives, and a heavy dose of romance deliv­ered to the sap­pi­est degree pos­si­ble.  Sim­ply put, these books are pure escapism.  No real sub­stance, but no real need for it, either.  I could elab­o­rate fur­ther, but I’ve already done that  here , here , and here .  Yet despite how unre­mark­able these books really are, I spent an entire week con­sumed by them.  And I’ve already seen the movie twice.  And I’m anx­iously await­ing its sequel.

What the hell have I got­ten myself into?