TWILIGHT Review

Bad Romance, Good Film

This film is hilarious, campy, surprising and honest about a teenager’s yearnings and is a deeply misunderstood film. This film is not about a romance. It is about a teenager’s thoughts, feelings, experience of romance.

Bella is treated as an object of desire in the first half of the film. As soon as she enters the school, she is leered at, looked over and hunted by the boys of the school like she is an object to be won. It makes Bella uncomfortable and we empathise with her discomfort. 

When she has her first real encounter with Edward, she is the one that is making HIM uncomfortable. Edward is uncontrollably aroused, so much that he disappears from her, keeps telling her that they can’t be together. 

Edward is an impossible romantic partner because he’s a male heterosexual character who is physically powerfully, well read, never sleeps, follows his crush to make sure she is safe from sexual assault, has a large, beautiful home with a large family who cares for him and expresses how he is worried he could lose control around Bella at any moment because “Your scent is like a drug to me like my own personal brand of heroin.”

He is NOT meant to be a realistic model for men. He is a romantic projection written by a heterosexual woman. Bella gains agency in choosing the impossible over the attainable. She is the Pygmalion figure, loving her inhuman statue and wanting it to be human. That desire for the impossible is so human and honest. 

I think the film and the book get a lot of flack from certain male audiences because it scares them when a woman wants the impossible over them. We are so used to films gearing towards male fantasies that they just can’t deal with the content and have to dismiss it as trash.

Twilight is knowing, aware of its absurdities and doesn’t care if everybody gets it - it connects to enough audiences that you know it reflects something real and honest. 

Currently on Netflix in Hong Kong