Twilight Hate: Why the success of New Moon is good for Hollywood

With the buzz ad success surrounding Twilight, there is also an enormous amount of hate hitting the franchise. From scorned fanboys to strong willed feminists, the Twilight saga is receiving flack from the books to the movies.

The recent success of New Moon is just one of them. Online blogs and newspaper articles are lambasted with comments ranging from how the movie sucks to how anti-feminist and weak is Bella. But in an article by Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly, the success of the Twilight franchise can mean a good thing too – if you look at the bigger picture. Here is an excerpt of his article:

Frankly, I think it’s this: The ascendance of the Twilight saga represents an essential paradigm shift in youth-gender control of the pop marketplace. For the better part of two decades, teenage boys, and overgrown teenage boys, have essentially held sway over Hollywood, dictating, to a gargantuan degree, the varieties of movies that get made. Explosive truck-smashing action and grisly machete-wielding horror, inflated superhero fantasy and knockabout road-trip comedy: It has been, at heart, a boys’ pig-out, a playpen of testosterone at the megaplex. Sure, we have “chick flicks,” but that (demeaning) term implies that they’re an exception, a side course in the great popcorn smorgasboard.

No more. With New Moon, the Twilight series is now officially as sweeping a juggernaut on the big screen as it ever was between book covers. And that gives the core audience it represents — teenage girls — a new power and prevalence. Inevitably, such evolutions in clout are accompanied by a resentful counter-reaction. For if power is gained, then somewhere else (hello, young men!) it must be lost. Yet such is the populist magic of Hollywood that these movies can’t simply be written off as some overblown high-school vampire version of a Miley Cyrus concert. Or, more to the point, they can be (hello, haters!), but that completely misses what’s going on in them.

I went into New Moon having not read the book, and so I didn’t really experience the movie as an adaptation, or watch it as any sort of Twilight die-hard. Leaving aside a few leaping boy-to-wolf transformations (which could, at this point, have come out of any routine horror film), what I saw, in essence, was a moody romantic melodrama from the 1950s, a movie that told its story, more than anything else, with faces. For two hours, they loomed up there — Stewart, with her pale crystalline severity, her ability to communicate desire and distress at the same moment; Robert Pattinson, with his sweet-but-not-too-safe, hurtin’-eyed, chalky-skinned delinquent chivalry; and Taylor Lautner, with those naturally wolfy features, as the group’s Troy Donahue, a friendly, quick-grinned stud-muffin who’s just buff enough to divert the heroine without threatening to capsize her devotion to her true love.

To read more of his article, click on the link above.

jediyoda