"Twilight" - Long May It Reign

The Last Normie YA Series

Last weekend, my teenage daughter had a sleepover and the girls and I rewatched the first Twilight movie from 2008. Teenage zoomers love these movies. What’s not to love when you’re 16?

Then my daughter and I spent the next few night watching all four of the rest of the Twilight movies: New Moon (2009), Eclipse (2010), Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011), and Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012).

For me, it’s a little painful to rewatch the Twilight series now, knowing how the real-life romance between its costars turned out. It’s even harder knowing what happened to the real Bella Swan, also known as America’s Weirdest Fake Lesbian, Kristen Stewart.

She crashed out after her five-year romance with Robert Pattinson ended in scandal when she was caught in flagrante with her older, married, uglier movie director in a car on a public street in the Hollywood Hills.

Then she shaved her head and became a lesbian, relishing her new persona as punk rock millionaire rebel. Now she’s engaged to an older woman named Dylan and claims to be bisexual, posing in male underwear on magazine covers in what seems like an obvious “doth protest too hard” admission that this is a straight woman whose child superstardom pushed her over the edge.

I wasn’t planning to rewatch the series again. I did see all the movies when they first arrived (2009-2012), since my little sister had forced me to read the books (years after they first appeared) and dragged me to the theater to see them. Surprise: I enjoyed them—as embarrassing as that is to admit in some circles.

Despite their weaknesses, and there are many, the story delivers irresistible romantic fodder: a tortured, dashing, impossibly handsome, totally off-limits Byronic anti-hero who is totally out of reach to an ordinary girl, and yet he falls in love with her anyway.

He also craves her blood and wants to kill her! But he can’t tell her he likes her, since he’s a bloodsucking vampire and she will wisely run away. It’s a simple, perfect internal and external heroic literary conflict. Bella Swan embodies every woman who has ever thought “I can fix him,” or longed to somehow get the cute boy at school to like her.

What teenage girl could resist such sorcery?

The casting of Pattinson and Stewart was ideal: she really does look like the kind of lonely wallflower you’d find in the average high school, beautiful and makeup-free, and not quite fully bloomed yet.