The Vampire leTwat

When I was a callow young fellow and first got interested in girls, I asked about and learned that what girls really like is a bad boy. Needless to say, I promptly took to kicking puppies and hurling babies under trams with gusto in the hope that it would get me some action. When this proved unsuccessful I investigated more and learned that apparently what girls really want is a bad boy who is redeemed by love for them, but when I put that into practice I found that “I’ll stop kicking this puppy if you go out with me” is probably the least effective chatup line I’ve ever used and there’s quite a lot of competition for that title.
However, the bad boy has been a popular literary staple ever since Heathcliffe or before, and Stephenie Meyer, the author of the teen pop-culture phenomenon Twilight is the latest to discover that the combination of brooding doomed man redeemed by love + adolescent fangirls writing fanfic = $$$.
In case you haven’t heard of it, Twilight is the first of an astonishingly popular series of books in which the teenage heroine, Bella Swann*, falls in love with the eternally-seventeen-years-old vampire Edward Cullen who happens to sit next to her at school, and it’s just been made into a film (and optioned for at least three more sequels) which guarantees that it will rapidly come to replace Harry Potter in the ever-fertile imaginations of adolescents everywhere. I went to see it last night. It’s by no means the worst film I’ve ever seen (that prize still belongs to Ultraviolet), but it’s by no means, well, good either.
Moving from sunny Arizona to Washington State (where it is always cloudy and overcast), on her first day at her new school Bella finds herself sitting next to Edward who promptly goes into spasms and rushes from the room. Bella soon learns that this is not because she hasn’t showered since May or because she is so physically repulsive that it was a race between Edwards’ lunch rising and him making it to a lavatory, but because he finds her so utterly irresistible it is only with great strength of will that he can resist jumping her there and then.
Leaving aside some certain basic questions like what the hell is a vampire doing going to school in the first place, especially when he could easily pass for old enough not to have to, it’s not entirely clear why Edwards falls for her. One of his vampiric powers is to read minds but for some reason Bella is immune to this – the one suggestion never explored, and on the face it of the most likely given the way she acts, is that there is simply nothing there for him to read. Instead Edward does the usual fantasy boyfriend things like save her from a car crash and a gang of muggers** and asks merely for a chaste kiss in return.***
You see, in a move of unsurpassed creative genius, Meyer has ignored the precedent set by writers like Bram Stoker, Sheridan le Fanu and Anne Rice and courageously made the whole vampirism thing a metaphor for sex – or rather celibacy. Edward has a desperate, all-consuming desire to penetrate Bella’s firm but yielding tender young flesh with his hard, manly, throbbing, pointy fangs, but he doesn’t because he respects her general goodness and purity so much. Instead he slakes his unholy lusts on farm animals, which I think is stretching the metaphor further than the author might like but is still the inevitable conclusion that one reaches and really is no worse than what most seventeen year old boys get up to.
In return, it’s a wonder what Bella sees in him. Edward is given to saying things like “You should be afraid of me” and “I’m the world’s most dangerous predator”. Normally, men who talk like that are shunned by women because they tend to be morbidly obese and have an unhealthy obsession with Manga comics. Instead, Bella finds him curiously irresistible**** and doesn’t seem to mind that he lives with half a dozen second rate Vampire: The Masquerade players who all act in a really meaningful way, like they’re trying to get the 'best roleplaying' XP award at the end of the evening.
Edward is one of those modern, revisionist vampires*****. In the old days, being a vampire came with some bad things attached, like eternal damnation, inability to walk abroad during daylight and a healthy aversion to crosses and garlic. In Twilight, being a vampire simply means a moody demeanor, some bad special effects superpowers and a haircut like a Pokemon trainer. He won’t kill or really use his powers for anything interesting much except leaping to Bella’s defense and showing off to her, and instead spends most of his time moping around being generally the gayest vampire since ukporl played a Setite.
There are one or two good scenes in the film such as a vampire-powered game of baseball which is really great fun and I enjoyed it a lot, but things only really get going beyond the heavy-browed moping and declarations of chaste, non-bitey love about an hour in when a bunch of human-eating vampires turn up and also find Bella irresistible.****** This bunch are considerably more interesting than Edward’s housemates as they go around generally acting like the sort of travelling player I used to get complaints about all the time when I ran the Cam; eating people, smashing things up and generally doing more traditional vampire villainy than Edward’s spaghetti-making housemates. Unfortunately we don’t see that much of them, as by that stage the film has speeded up into nigh-incoherence. Edward drives from Washington to Arizona in about twenty minutes flat to save Bella from an evil vampire on another conveniently cloudy day and then it’s straight back to more romance during which Bella declares she wants Edward to have his way with her, only for him to simply nuzzle her neck.
I mean, if she hasn’t twigged that he’s gay and she’s just his beard by now, there’s really no helping her.

^{*Bella Swann? Really? Could the name have been any more obvious?
** Given that the town has a population of less than 3,000, Bella’s father is not only chief of police who knows everyone in town personally but also sits at home drinking heavily and cleaning his shotgun, the muggers aren’t so much as a credible threat as candidates for shows like America’s Dumbest Criminals.
***He also uses his superpowers to spy on her in her underwear, like Superman in Superman Returns. This is not seen as being in any way creepy or stalkerish, but instead romantic. I’ll be using that defense next time I’m in court.
****A shrewd piece of marketing to the morbidly obese, Manga obsessed male fantasists out there as well.
*****He also won't eat people, only animals, because he doesn't want 'to be a monster'.
******Bella is the most blatant case of an author writing herself into her own fantasy I’ve seen since I first read any Anne McCaffrey.}