Last week, on a whim, I suggested to my friends that we watch Twilight. Well, not really. Two of my friends had tucked themselves into my bed to nap, and, in between the two, I was wide awake and bored as hell. Feeling rather remiss with my money, I splurged on the $4 rent fee for Twilight on Amazon Prime and began to watch.
Needless to say, my two sleeping friends were sleeping no longer. They groaned and rolled their eyes at me, accused me of exhibiting Twilight stan behavior, but I stood my ground. I recognized there was a profound chaos in the air that was ridiculously compatible with the crackhead vampire children.
I was right.
It’s not a good movie. I won’t try to say it is a good movie because it’s not. It’s sort of like a time capsule though, on one end, denoting the blue-gray-green filter that was placed over the entire movie from start to finish. The low-rise jeans and chunky headbands, the lacy camisoles and mid-2000s grunge-pop soundtrack – all indicative of a time past, but one that Twilight remembers with the utmost clarity.
The love story isn’t particularly feminist. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about it, except for the fact that we all recall a time when the craze over it rivaled no other. For a film that people gushed over non-stop for about four years, it really had some flat lines and bizarre acting choices. I keep thinking about Robert Pattinson’s Edward doing his best not to vomit, upon his first encounter with Bella. Yeah, yeah, I know it wasn’t nausea, something about blood temptation; I don’t care. I just know that he looked like he was about to hurl, and it might be the funniest moment in cinematic history because what, is Bella stinky? Is that it? Even writing an article about Twilight really forces that chaos to take over my stylistic choices.
One of said friends is a film major, and I insisted that, if he wanted to be successful, he had to pay attention to the baseball game. Seriously, what was that? How did they accomplish that? The very specific ambiance that came with “Supermassive Black Hole” by Muse playing as a bunch of superhumans played a stupidly specific, super-powered game of baseball somehow managed to be the most magnificent scene I have ever experienced, in an abstract sense of magnificent. I don’t know what the producers were thinking, but I’m glad they did it.
I believe the thing that makes Twilight so unnervingly special, even in 2019, is that it really has a way of bringing people together. When you’re looking at it from the angle of a lazy Saturday afternoon with good friends at either side, it’s actually hysterical. Everything about it. The sparkles on the vampires’ faces, the bizarre CGI running and jumping, even Anna Kendrick. Yeah, we forgot she was in it too. It’s like a car accident at which you can’t stop staring. You blink, and you miss something, and your friends laugh, and then you laugh too, just because everyone’s laughing, giggling from that deep belly-pit that renders everything on the screen 100% better than it would have been otherwise.
We watched New Moon last night. It sucked, which is to be expected, but at least we know now that we’re Team Jacob, because really? He would have treated Bella so right. Nine of us packed into one skinny, extra-long dorm bed, gathered around a thin laptop screen, another $5 out of wallet, to see Bella do everything but attend high school during her senior year.
And how we laughed.
(Come around next Saturday – we’re watching Eclipse.)