It was an inescapable commercial product aimed mostly at teenage girls , whose interests are often treated with disdain. Ten years later, free from the cultural baggage of being an international phenomenon, we can see the franchise more clearly. Is it the most epic love story ever told?
Absolutely not. It's a lot more entertaining, and frankly out of control, than that. The Twilight movies arrived on Netflix last week, and every movie in the series immediately cracked Netflix's top The first movie in the Twilight saga has stuck around in the charts since then.
Most fans are gleefully celebrating what they've always known: these movies are bonkers, and there are new bonkers details to discover in each viewing. Stephanie Meyer's books are an entirely different creature than the movies, in which the characters seem to have fun every once in a while. Unlike the movies, I genuinely struggled to get through the books, tomes that are mostly concerned with Bella Swan's not very interesting internal monologue. The movie streamlines the actions and characters into comfortable archetypes.
All you really need to know is that Bella is the new girl who doesn't know how beautiful she is, the Cullens are the hot rich kids in town who are also vampires, and Edward Cullen isn't sure if he wants to eat Bella or date her.
Watching this film now, it's remarkable that all the things I thought of as "cringe" when I was younger I can now see are its greatest strengths. As I read the books I always imagined Edward and Bella as more suave; the small town of Forks, Washington as less working class; Jacob as less of a himbo. I smoothed the edges of this frankly ramshackled narrative into a shape that made sense.
The movie affords us no such luxuries. What's most remarkable is that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart largely play the characters as written. Bella and Edward are two beautiful, shallow people who want to fuck very badly but can't, and there's not really a whole else going on in their brains.
Both actors caught so much flack for their awkward, mumbly line reads, but they were playing the characters as true to their backgrounds. He posited that readers loved Twilight , it turned out, for the same reason most vampire stories succeed:. I was a late bloomer. When I was 16, holding hands was just—wow. Their tension comes from prolonged, superhuman acts of self-restraint. Write to Lily Rothman at lily. Little, Brown. By Lily Rothman. Get our History Newsletter. Put today's news in context and see highlights from the archives.
To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Ten years ago this month, the first Twilight movie sparkled broodily into movie theaters. By then, the four-volume book series had already been published in full, made the best-seller lists several times over, and was safely established as a cult phenomenon for its target demographic of teen girls — but with that first movie, Twilight became mainstream.
In the fall of , America at large was introduced to the story of Bella Swan, teenage everygirl, and her fraught, star-crossed love for glitter-streaked vampire Edward Cullen. Twilight introduced us to Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, and it continued the Harry Potter tradition of the YA book-to-movie franchise as a dominant box office force. It also became a cultural flashpoint. In , Twilight was adored, but it was also hated, feared, and mocked.
Here in , we finally have room to get a little perspective on the whole thing. In celebration of the year anniversary of the first Twilight movie, Vox culture writers Constance Grady, Alex Abad-Santos, and Aja Romano joined forces with deputy managing editor Eleanor Barkhorn to look back at the unlife and legacy of the Twilight phenomenon.
Constance: When the first Twilight movie came out in , I was 19, and I was positive that the entire franchise was a blight on the pop culture landscape. Before the movie even came out, I made up my mind about it.
He chews the baby out of her uterus! But I was also completely fascinated by the franchise. I picked up the first book to see what the fuss was all about, and even though I thought the love story was creepy and the prose was blah and absolutely nothing happened until about three-quarters of the way through the book beyond some vampire baseball vampire baseball!
I was compelled. I hate-read every Breaking Dawn review, and every review of the movie. I developed opinions on Kristen Stewart bit her lip too much and Robert Pattinson I appreciated his palpable hatred of the franchise.
I spent so much emotional energy thinking about the whole Twilight thing that I was, for all intents and purposes, a fan. I was just a fan who hated it. The structure of the plot is bananas. I was wrong about Kristen Stewart, though, and the way she was penalized for sometimes seeming mildly uncomfortable with the Twilight phenomenon while Pattinson was lauded for his outright hatred of it says a lot about gender politics circa It did speak to me.
And that pissed me off. There are few pop cultural products that our society likes to shit on more than the pop culture created for teenage girls, and Twilight circa was the pinnacle of that phenomenon. This was a franchise that was built for teen girls, marketed to teen girls, and loved by teen girls, and because of that, it became accepted common knowledge that all correct-thinking people could only despise and revile it. So when I look back 10 years later, I find it difficult to untangle my hatred of Twilight from my own internalized misogyny, and from my profound and at the time unexamined belief that anything made for teenage girls must inherently be less-than.
How did you feel about Twilight back in ? Has it changed for you since then? Eleanor: I was 24 when the first movie came out, and I think being just past teenagehood made all the difference for me. I loved the movie — fully, earnestly, without irony, without reservations. I loved the moody Pacific Northwest setting. I loved the longing glances.
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