Jenny Turner
London Review of Books
* Twilight directed by Catherine Hardwick (2008)
* Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
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Since Polidori, vampires have been at least in part expressions of middle-class fear and envy of a decadent but mysteriously powerful European aristocracy. How, then, does this work in a New World high school, and with vampires who are trying to be good? ‘There’s a lot of people who . . . aren’t having the Prada lifestyle,’ Meyer has said, ‘and going to a special school in New York where everyone’s rich and fabulous’ – which is both true, and a little disingenuous. The whole point of the books is that the non-Prada-lifestyle Bella stumbles into a fawning and banal fantasy of life as lived by rich (they’d probably say ‘wealthy’), highly educated (Carlisle, remember, is a doctor, and since they’re immortal, there’s been plenty of time for everyone to get lots of Ivy League degrees) and ever so slightly boho white Americans, made to seem ethereal because seen with the soft-focus vagueness of outsider envy. Their house (or ‘home’, as in ‘You have a very beautiful home’) is ‘timeless, graceful and probably a hundred years old’, and it’s ‘painted a soft, faded white’ and has a ‘massive curving staircase’. The Cullens dress ‘exceptionally well – simply, but in clothes that subtly hinted at designer origins’. The only things given any specificity are the cars: Meyer’s brothers, she says, are ‘obsessed – and I mean that in the literal, clinical sense – with automotive vehicles’ and have supplied specs for all the ‘Cullen cars’, including Edward’s silver S60R Volvo and Rosalie’s red BMW M3.
And so the pabulum slips down, spoonful by spoonful, with every now and then a neat idea, an unspoken hint of untold perversity, an almost subliminal flash of something nasty: a torn-off head, a gang rape, a bunch of tourists rounded up, they think, for a visit to the medieval prison, but really about to be descended on and blood-sucked en masse. ‘What are we afraid of? Everything,’ Ariel Levy wrote in Female Chauvinist Pigs, her 2005 study of the way the US media seemed increasingly dependent on pornographic imagery, even as federal funding for sex education programmes ‘except for those advocating abstinence until marriage’ was withdrawn. Repression and titillation don’t work in opposition: the two of them like to hang together, thieving from your pockets while you’re still figuring out these arousing, bewildering images, what exactly they are for, and what, exactly, they are telling you to do.
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