Editorial: Final Thoughts on The Twilight Saga
Now that I've reviewed each one of The Twilight Saga films, it felt right for me to write one final article looking at the series and sharing my overall thoughts.
Watching The Twilight Saga has been my favourite blogging experience so far. I've had so many people interact with me about these films, and share how the series is a great nostalgic guilty pleasure for them, which I've thoroughly enjoyed.
I was also pleased with the series because it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I had believed these films would be laughably bad, and true, there are many scenes that would suggest that my original thoughts were accurate. Yet I was oddly happy to find myself become invested in this series, learning about the fandom and the world-building of it all. There seems to be a lot more for me to explore about this franchise that I haven't even properly begun with. This series made me want to as much research as I could, so that I could try and justify the nonsense moments in it. I think that's made me a better blogger.
The main question I had before watching these films for the first time was about the fandom. Did this series justify having such an expansive audience of teenage girls?
I can now answer that yes, it does.
The Twilight films are very flawed, and in many ways ridiculous (toxic romances; cringe-inducing dialogue like "hold on tight, spider monkey!"; vampire and werewolf rule systems that get broken and are flawed, to name a few), but I can completely understand why young girls responded to it so positively at the time, even though much of it wasn't healthy. The fact is, Twilight followed Bella: a quiet, awkward teenage girl who felt like she didn't quite fit in with everyone else in her school and town.
A lot of teenage girls are quiet and awkward, and they certainly don't feel like they belong anywhere, because they don't know themselves yet and don't know where they belong.
Yet Bella is embraced by people who see her as special, and they are quick to be protective of her, despite her not being like them.
She has two guys desperate to show her their affection, and she's welcomed into two families as soon as she meets them: The Cullens, a beautiful vampire family, and the wolf-pack Jacob is a part of. She's unwittingly acquired all of these people who are willing to nurture and support her, despite their differences. She even has a group of teen friends at her new school who bring her into their group as soon as she arrives there.
There's something about being a teenage girl -or at least, there was for me- that's frightening. There was a constant feeling of vulnerability and loneliness, accompanied with a fear about the future, where you belong and who you're supposed to be. Bella builds this remarkable support network of creatures (granted, not particularly by any skill of her own) who love her, and want to know her throughout these films. I can see a lot of young girls trying to insert themselves into the Bella role in their minds, and feeling safe within it. Additionally, unlike a lot of other YA aimed at teen girls, this series offers a fantasy for the audience to escape into, while grounding Bella in a world where she still has to worry about her dad and getting good grades. There is escapism, but it still feels familiar to the world the audience knows.
One key problem that irks me about this series is that the side characters have so much more potential for an interesting story than either Bella or Edward or Jacob do, as those characters seem so bland, especially once you look into the backstories of other characters. I'm talking about the Cullens in particular.
I can't help but wonder how successful this series would have been if someone like Carlisle had been the main character, and the kind of audience that would have attracted.
Picture a series starring Carlisle, the first vampire in the Cullen family. He transforms his wife into a vampire, and also transforms a boy, whose mother begged Carlisle to save his life (that boy was Edward). Carlisle then went around saving other people from horrible deaths by turning into vampires, and tried to build a family with them, while dealing with some of them resenting their immortality, and possibly him for making them that way.
This situation of turning people and bonding with them in vampire form to become a family spans centuries for the Cullens. Think about how interesting it would be to see how they continually have to adapt to changing times, and how there might be things they don't agree with in more recent years than in the time they're from. How would they feel about the treatment of minority groups progressing into something more equal, when they were all probably from respectable white families in their day? How about gay marriage, and why aren't there any gay vampires in Twilight? What about the change in school systems, seeing as Carlisle makes his adopted teen vampires go to school still? The change in school punishment, going from being beaten with a cane to just getting detention for example? After being alive for so long, surely they would have some thoughts and feelings on these subjects?
Seeing Carlisle and Esme have to deal with one of their adopted sons -no less than the first "child" Carlisle took on- falling in love with a human, and how they manage that as a family, could have been really interesting. Additionally, Carlisle appears to be the only working Cullen, and his field is medicine, an area that continually grows. Imagine seeing that development in medicine over centuries, and thinking about the lives that could have been saved years prior, if only the right equipment had been around. There's so much to play with in the terms of family, vampire transformations, relationships, society and time periods.
We would also have better understanding of their enemies, like the wolves and the Volturi. Those things only seemed to be put in place to cause trouble for Bella and Edward, but it would have been good to see if there was any layered logic to them.
With the Twilight we have, it's just a moody teen vampire brooding over a girl. That's fine for a guilty pleasure, but once you research and find how much more interesting the other Cullens and their backstories are, it becomes a little frustrating. There's potential for such a big, well-developed world here, yet I couldn't say I believe that such a series would capture peoples attention the way Twilight did. Unfortunately, that's just not how it works.
Overall, if I had to rate the Twilight films in order of my favourite to least favourites, it would be as follows:
Twilight (best)
Breaking Dawn: Part 2
New Moon
Breaking Dawn: Part 1
Eclipse (worst)
Are these the best films ever made? No. Is this the height of great storytelling for teenage girls? By far, no. But whatever you say about Twilight, it made its mark, and it will always be remembered as a key series in the young adult and romance genres. It's iconic. Whether you like this series ironically, or as a guilty pleasure, or if you genuinely think it's great storytelling, that's fine. I think I just about understand it now. I even went out and got a copy of the first book in the series to try - something I didn't see myself doing when I started to review this series.
I won't forgive Twilight for spawning the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise though. But still, I'll get to those films another day.
