Screening Twilight Foreword by Natalie Wilson

FOREWORD Natalie Wilson Author of Seduced by Twilight: The Allure and Contradictory Messages of the Popular Saga Much like the hard-won battle to justify cultural studies in the academy, let alone university courses focusing on popular culture, the analysis of Twilight, whether by fans or academics, has been mocked as lightweight, frivolous and unimportant. Mocked, in short, in the same way females and femininity have historically been mocked. Indeed, the criticism of the saga and surrounding franchise often relies on the same sort of gendered lens that not only constructs females as rabid, hysterical consumers, but also as silly fangirls. 1 Yet, like its pulpy romance predecessors, the Twilight franchise is being taken seriously by various academics, resulting in a growing field of what I like to call Twischolarship. Just as Janice Radway's Reading the Romance and Angela McRobbie's Feminism and Youth Culture helped to solidify the notion that academics need to take the popular seriously, so too are emerging monographs and collections justifying scholarly attention to Twilight. As this scholarship reveals, much like the Harry Potter scholarship that preceded it, just because something is popular does not mean it is undeserving of critical, serious intention. Indeed, popularity is a reason to take a cultural phenomenon seriously, although it is still often used as an excuse for dismissal. This dismissive attitude towards the popular seems all the more likely when a cultural phenomenon is coded as 'feminine' -whether due to content or to fanbase. We need look no further than the varying reactions to The Hunger Games fOREWORD Xl versus Twilight as example. As with the Harry Potter franchise, The Hunger Games was coded as a 'cross-gender' saga, appealing to male and female alike. Twilight, on the other hand, has been widely interpreted as a female cultural trend. As such, it has been attacked in much the same way as other supposedly 'femaleonly' genres like 'chick flicks', Harlequin romance and soap operas. This has been true not only of the books, bur also of the films, perhaps even more so. This surely partly explains the attempts to make the movie adaptations appeal to a wider audience - especially after the first film, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, received much ribbing despite its commercial success. Subsequent adaptations tried to 'gender neutralise' the saga via focusing more on action, special effects and derring-do, and, I would say non-coincidentally, all employed male rather than female directors. The present study focuses in particular on this transformation of the saga from page to screen, analysing issues such as audience reception and expectation, mainstream criticism and responses, the generic film traditions of horror, romance and the supernatural, and Twilight's place within the vampire film canon. The regular derision of the films, the chapters herein argue, must be examined not only via cultural studies, feminist analysis and film theory, but also with attention to genre and generic conventions, race studies, queer theory and psychoanalysis. Offering rigorous analytical dissection of the films, the essays that follow extend the existing work on Twilight, focusing on the franchise's creation of a film phenomenon that has, thus far, raked in over a billion dollars. This focus adds to existing work on the saga, most of which features analysis of the books and surrounding fandom rather than the film adaptations. Asking what the films leave out, what they add, what they assume about their audiences, and how they depict and question gender, sexuality, class, race, identity formation and so on, the following interrogations reveal that all of us, academics or not, can benefit from critically engaging with these highly popular yet often maligned films. Not only does the collection prompt consideration of film versus book, but also of how film as a medium incites different reactions and experiences, different opportunities for fan engagement, and different prospects for adapting and re-visioning the saga. Viewing and 'reading' a film, this collection reminds us, is a much different experience to reading and analysing a book. While books draw us in through words alone, films rely on framing, depth of focus, scene design, camera angle and movement. Part of entering the cinema, or even popping in a DVD, is agreeing to enter into a visual text where, unlike with reading, the images, the sound, even the emotions, are largely chosen for us. In short, films are less open to interpretation than books as they are not 'adapted' X11 SCREENING TW!LlGf-fT in our mind's eye, but via screenwriters, producers, directors and so on. This is not to say that films do not allow for varied and multiple readings, but they do indeed leave less up to the viewer from how the character looks to what facial expression she/he displays in a given scene. The larger-than-life images, the special effects and the emotionally tugging scores seem more able to subconsciously affect us as viewers, to draw us in and to semi-mute the more conscious, analytical part of our brains (buttered popcorn surely helps with this too). Additionally, film's ability to create very real-seeming worlds results in a suspension of disbelief wherein we often accept, rather than question, the various identity constructions films offer. This is not to say that film viewers automatically agree with the underlying ideological constructs of any given movie, but films - more so than literary texts - ask us to accept a particular version of whatever story they tell. As a medium, film tends not to highlight its fictionality (as literary texts, through metafiction, intertextuality and other devices often do). Instead, films present their created worlds in as 'real' a way as possible. Yet, as bell hooks argues in Reel to Real, 'Giving audiences what is real is precisely what movies do not do.' 2 Instead, they 'give the reimagined, reinvented version of the real'. 3 However, as films also allow for a closer, more vivid, and multi-sensory proximity to the text, viewers are lured to 'submit' to the filmic text. Often inciting deep loyalty, the emotional responses evoked by film are more immediate and transient, and thus also often less analysed, both by viewers and by critics. As hooks characterises it, movies provide a shared experience that requires a certain amount of submission. She writes, 'It is that moment of submission, of overt or covert seduction that fascinates me as a critic.' 4 I find her use of the term 'seduction' here fascinating, not least as it is one of the concepts I chose to frame my own monograph, Seduced by Twilight, around. The suggestion that texts actively seduce us is a fascinating one, begging questions of how and why they do so, how willing and compliant we are in such seductions, and if and to what extent we can resist, reframe or re-envision the seducing power of texts. The chapters that follow examine these and many other questions, speaking in particular to hooks' notion that 'Movies remain the perfect vehicle for the introduction of certain ritual rites of passage that come to stand for the quintessential experience of border crossing'.5 Such 'border crossing' allows for, as the following articles intimate, crossing over not only into different worlds, but also for crossing of generic conventions, of gender and sexuality norms, of the lines between film, fiction, fan fiction and slash. Our identities and ideas about the world, especially in our film-saturated society, are certainly profoundly shaped and constructed through watching films. When a film saga is viewed multiple fOREWORD xiii times, or when the experience is heightened by breathlessly awaited, sold-out midnight premieres, star-studded events, author/celebrity prize give-aways and 'making-of' books, movies are even more likely to imprint ideas and expectations about the world on viewers. What imprints is the Twilight saga leaving on viewers? How is it 'border crossing' into culture, shape-shifting into other texts and cultural phenomena? As Constance Penley notes in Feminism and Film Theory, 'contemporary film theory ... has been notable for an anti-establishment iconoclasm and theoretical force.o6 The works herein are no exception. While some of them expand upon existing Twilight criticism, such as analysing the fairytale framework of the saga, interrogating the Gothic elements of the narrative, and reading the series through psychoanalytic, post-colonial and/or feminist frameworks, all of the chapters offer original, thought-provoking and lucid arguments that open up the field of Twilight scholarship, particularly in relation to its filmic iterations? The timing of a movie-based focus is particularly relevant given that the 'stars' of Twilight continue to be featured on the big screen, as in Kristen Stewart's lead in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012; dir. Rupert Sanders), Robert Pattinson's starring role as a debonair lover in Bel Ami (2012; dir. Nick Ormerod), and Taylor Lautner's action-packed roles in Tracers (2014; dir. Daniel Benmayor) and Abduction (2011; dir. John Singleton). The career trajectories of these three actors, none of them 'big stars' before Twilight, will tell us much about the staying power not only of the actors themselves, but also of fans' dedication to these 'real-life' versions of Bella, Edward and Jacob. Snow White and the Huntsman seemed to deliberately beckon Twilight fans via its depiction of Kristen Stewart as a Snow White/Bella hybrid complete with cliff-jumping and lip-chewing. Meanwhile, Fifty Shades of Grey, which started as Twilight-inspired fanfic, is now dominating bestseller lists and already has a lucrative multi-film deal. For how long and to what extent the Twilight phenomenon will 'border cross' over into other books, films and fan events is anyone's guess. However, if the chapters that follow are any indication, this sparkly-vampire cultural zeitgeist will live on long after the midnight premiere of the fifth and final film instalment - and not only in the hearts of fans, but also in the pages of academic collections such as this one. Notes 1. See, for example, Melissa A. Click, 'Rabid', 'Obsessed', and 'Frenzied': Understanding Twilight Fangirls and the Gendered Politics of Fandom, FlowTV, Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin, December 2009, http://flowtv.