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The Twilight Saga and Surviving Adolescence
7This essay was written in loving memory of Marina Husky Lopez, who did not survive adolescence. We love you and miss you.
Don’t you see, Bella? You already have everything. You have a whole life ahead of you. And you’re going to just throw it away. You have the choice that I didn’t have, and you’re choosing wrong! (Rosalie to Bella) Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse, 166 (2007).
Perhaps some exposition is in order. For those of you living in a cave or under a rock for the last year or so, the Twilight saga is a very titillating, sexually repressed teen romance between a plain, quiet high school girl (Bella) and an attractive, angsty, permanently-teenage vampire (Edward). The story basically chronicles the ups and downs of this relationship, with some vampire/werewolf fighting and a love triangle in between. Bella and Edward’s romance is tumultuous, mostly because Edward experiences a lot of inner turmoil over being in love with a creature that he is designed to hunt and kill. He has a lot of emotional outbursts, which Bella bears the brunt of by proximity. But Bella accepts the roller coaster of their interaction, and decides by the end of the first book that she wants to become immortal (turn into a vampire) so she can be with Edward forever. This—Bella’s willingness to throw away her mortality—I take issue with.
Please note that I’m writing this from the perspective of a fan. I loved these books. I spent an inordinate amount of time parsing through them, rereading my favorite parts, thinking about the minute details, being in love with Edward, justifying Bella’s actions to myself, and generally enjoying them way too much for a thirty-year-old. So these thoughts are expressed out of love. At the same time as I adored these stories, I think it’s important to examine some of their more disturbing aspects. One of those that particularly struck me is the trajectory of Bella’s goals and life. Bella’s main goal is to be with Edward; so much so that she’s willing to give up her mortality for it. As a result of her decision to trade her mortality for her man, I don’t think Bella survives adolescence; I think she dies. And I find that incredibly disturbing, especially in light of the fact that millions of teenage girls (not just thirty-something women) have eaten this story up. Surviving adolescence is something many teenage girls do not think they will do. We’ve all been there; it’s such a trying time in life, and most of us wouldn’t relive it for all the money in the world. But somehow we make it through; that one B- didn’t end our careers, that gossip about us didn’t end our social lives, breaking up with our first love when it just didn’t work anymore didn’t end the universe. Some of us had deeper struggles, and coming out of adolescence alive and in tact was an enormous accomplishment. Therefore, I find Bella’s willingness to give up life based on the flush of emotion that accompanies first love insulting; it’s kind of a slap in the face to those of us who have worked so hard to pull through childhood and live as strong and independent adults, fighting to be good role models for our sisters, nieces, and daughters. I’m scared to think about what kind of effect Bella’s decision has on younger readers.
I know, I know, Bella becomes a vampire; she doesn’t die. But what does it really mean to become a vampire? When Bella is finally changed, she gives this first-hand account:
My heart took off, beating like helicopter blades, the sound almost a single sustained note; it felt like it would grind through my ribs. The fire flared up in the center of my chest, sucking the last remnants of the flames from the rest of my body to fuel the most scorching blaze yet. . . . [M]y heart galloped toward its last beat. The fire constricted, concentrating inside that one remaining human organ with a final, unbearable surge. The surge was answered by a deep, hollow-sounding thud. My heart stuttered twice, and then thudded quietly again just once more. There was no sound. No breathing. Not even mine. Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn, 385 (2008).
In Meyer’s mythology, becoming a vampire is very painful; your heart stops beating, your lungs stop breathing. Blood no longer flows through your veins, accounting for your pale countenance. You don’t eat (in the traditional sense), you don’t sleep, and you don’t change. You keep the same characteristics and attributes you had at the point of transformation; you don’t develop, grow, or mature, either physically or emotionally. All of these factors indicate to me that becoming a vampire is dying. You are no longer mortal; you are no longer human; your being no longer interacts with time. Some might argue that this transformation isn’t death; it’s just that the parameters of existence have changed for a person who goes from human to vampire. But don’t the parameters of existence also change for a person who goes from life to death? And what is death, if not the obliteration of one’s humanity and mortality, and, as far as those of us left alive know, the stopping of the clock, freezing one in time? Other characters in this saga appear to agree with me. Rosalie likens the transformation to death on multiple occasions. In the Cullen family vote regarding whether Bella should transform, she votes for Bella to maintain mortality, saying she wished someone had chosen differently for her. Later, she divulges her tragic story of transformation and chastises Bella for choosing to throw life away. Edward, the most skittish Cullen regarding changing Bella, definitely thinks the transformation constitutes some type of death; he doesn’t want Bella to make the change because he’s afraid it will claim her soul. He fights for her humanity and mortality throughout the series, trying to assuage her decision by first leaving her, then blackmailing her with college and marriage, and finally enticing her with sex.
If vampirism is death, why does Bella choose it? Of course, the easy answer to this question is she chooses it to keep her man. Which is not exactly a healthy or admirable goal for an eighteen-year-old. I know, I know, this story is a fantasy; it not only involves mythical creatures, but it’s about what we would do if we could do (hold on to that first “true love”), not what we actually have to do (let it go and move on). But think about it. If vampirism is death, not only does Bella not live through her adventures, she doesn’t even want to. She wants to die. She wants to permanently preserve the state of emotion that is falling in love for the first time. Rather than sucking it up and surviving a notoriously difficult time in life, Bella cops out and chooses permanent adolescence. And my resulting question is: how can she be a reasonable heroine if she doesn’t make it through?
I find Bella’s goal of vampirism throughout this saga particularly perplexing because I don’t think she is necessarily a weak character; I can’t just write her off as a ditzy girl without empathy or intellectual capabilities, a person who needs to be taken care of. Bella is a very conscientious young woman with a high capacity for the strange and unusual. She puts a lot of thought and energy into the feelings and comfort of her loved ones. She loves people/creatures unconditionally, regardless of who they are, and sometimes regardless of how they treat her. She wants to protect them, to fight for them and with them, and she hates that she doesn’t have the physical strength to run with monsters. She doesn’t like sitting safely in the back while others risk their lives on her behalf. She wants to do her part.
Bella is also emotionally sophisticated; she is a very serious young woman who thinks a lot about her emotional existence, prioritizing it over her physical existence. She’s in tune with her emotional self, and she feels what she wants with the full force of her emotions. However, despite her emotional sophistication, she is incredibly emotionally immature. This makes sense; she is only eighteen, after all. This immaturity is shown by the fact that she has no sense of physical self-preservation, only emotional self-preservation. When it comes to becoming a vampire, Bella doesn’t care about the risk to her physical body. She also does not consider the effect her transformation will have on her physical environment: she doesn’t ever really face what her changing will do to her mortal family and friends, or the impact it will have on those relationships. (And this is a point Meyer never really works out satisfactorily; for instance, Bella maintains a relationship with her father after her transformation, but not with her mother, to whom she is supposedly closer.) Bella’s only focus is the longevity of the one relationship, and how maintaining that relationship at any cost will help her avoid experiencing the emotional pain that comes with separation from Edward. Her youth and inexperience fuel her obsession with her man. That love/obsession causes her to give up her mortality. Her decision to change denies her the opportunity to turn her emotional sophistication into emotional maturity. All the potential to grow into a mature, independent woman is there, if only she could see beyond the cloud of emotions she seeks to infinitely preserve.
Experiencing, and living through, emotional pain (particularly the pain of first love) is part of the process of becoming an adult. Bella’s rejection of that process says to me that she doesn’t want to mature; she doesn’t want to grow up. (The saga is fairly explicit regarding Bella’s aversion to physically aging; however, I think the fact that she also displays an aversion to emotionally maturing is less noticeable and more troubling.) Is Bella’s ability to make her dream-like adolescence permanent why so many thirty-something women relate to her? (Indeed, I have seen some well-educated women, myself included, go nuts over these stories.) Is it because Bella is able to preserve the things we wanted so badly when we were eighteen; because she takes a route we weren’t able to take? That makes sense to me. I don’t have a female friend who wouldn’t want to relive those first love feelings (though perhaps not the entire first love experience). Some of us still look for that now, and against our better judgment, make long-term relationship decisions based on that rush of emotions rather than considering the realities of living with another person for an extended period of time. Bella’s fantasy is fine for (most of) us; we’ve at least seen these adolescent experiences to completion, know the sky doesn’t fall when that love is over, and are capable of handling new loves that come along with a more mature eye. But what about the readers who are still in the throws of adolescence? What message does it send to them? “Don’t be concerned with surviving the emotionality you are experiencing”; “don’t try to live through it and learn from it”; “this emotion can/will last forever, and you should do what you can to make it”? At the very least, having Bella as a major cultural figure/role model can’t be helping teenage girls see the temporary nature of what they are going through. I definitely don’t think these are productive messages for young girls, regardless of your political/religious/moral bent.
To be fair, Bella is slightly redeemed by the time she changes; after all, she does choose life, for a short period. After her wedding, after discovering how good sex can be, she decides she’ll live a few more years as a mortal, maybe go to college, and have sex with her husband every night. These happy plans end quickly; Bella finds out she is pregnant on her honeymoon. Because the baby is half vampire, with many vampire attributes and growing at a rapid rate, Bella is not expected to survive the pregnancy. Therefore, in order for her to exist in the world and be a mother to the child, Bella must become a vampire. Yet, it’s a waiting game. She can’t be changed too early, or her transformation will kill the baby. But if the Cullens wait too long to change her, it will be too late; she’ll be killed by a half-vampire creature ripping through her during childbirth. In creating this conflict and taking Bella to the brink of death before changing her, Meyer offers some redemption for Bella’s previous easy willingness to give up her mortality. Yet, Bella’s transformation under these circumstances is almost too neat of a package. It’s admirable (?) of Meyer to try to make Bella’s sacrifice of her mortality necessary, but this situation comes at the tail end of a ~3000-page saga, throughout most of which the heroine is begging to give up her life to be with her boyfriend. I don’t know if it’s enough. I don’t know if it’s enough to redeem Bella’s previous attitude, and I don’t know if it’s enough to convince us that Bella would have stuck to her post-sex decision to choose mortality had she not gotten pregnant.
Personally, I find a lot of beauty in a finite life, a human life that hopefully has the opportunity to run a normal course through time. To willingly cut off your mortality before you’ve even begun . . . I have a hard time getting behind that, even in a fantasy world where teenage girls fall in love with vampires and werewolves. Despite the fantasy, the underlying message doesn’t go away. Any way you slice it, Bella still loses her human life, and that’s the way she wants it. She does it to infinitely preserve her adolescence; she does it to avoid growing up. And I think that is a tragedy; for her potential as a character, for the millions of girls who have read about her and want to be like her, and for the legacy of the millions of women who have worked so hard to move beyond all that.
MJ: What do his life and death say about us?
1We can’t pity him. That he embraced his destiny, knowing how fame would warp him, is what frees us to revere him. . . .
“Deep inside I feel that this world we live in is really a big, huge, monumental symphonic orchestra. I believe that in its primordial form, all of creation is sound and that it’s not just random sound, that it’s music.”
May they have been his last thoughts. John Jeremiah Sullivan, Back in the Day, GQ Sept. 2009.
This past July, a lot of bloggers expressed irritation about how much media coverage Michael Jackson’s June 25 death received, especially in comparison to Walter Cronkite, who died a few weeks later. To them I say, sure, I agree that MJ was probably not as culturally significant as Cronkite, at the very least by virtue of the fact that Cronkite lived 42 years longer than Jackson. Neither is MJ’s death as politically important as our economy, our war with Iraq, our escalating problems with Iran and North Korea, our upcoming surge in Afghanistan, or our healthcare reform (to name a few national concerns). On the other hand, MJ’s life is a compelling story because it is so very difficult to reconcile his gifts with his foibles. His story is a cautionary tale; the ways in which a small child can be ruined by others, the ways in which an adult can ruin himself. Despite all he accomplished, MJ was a pretty damaged person; partially through circumstance, and partially through his own making. People are trying to figure out what his life meant, to him, his family, the entertainment industry, his fans, and the world at large. Thinking about MJ’s life is a lot harder than thinking about Cronkite’s life. Cronkite doesn’t have a narrative that splits in two in the middle. He had a fairly singular trajectory. MJ rose to heights we can only imagine through his work, and fell to depths no one wants to experience through his personal travails. What does that mean to us? What does that mean to those of us who display similar mental health issues, but lack similar talent? Are we relegated to an existence similar to MJ’s worst times? Or are those situations reserved for the very mentally ill who also happen to be the very wealthy? If so, what does MJ’s life say about celebrity- and fame-culture in the US? What does it say about wealth and excess? Fame and wealth are things everyone wants a little piece of; I don’t care who you are, you’ve thought about what it would be like to be a rich and famous celebrity. Otherwise, why would reality television be so successful? Why would people like Heidi Montag, Lauren Conrad, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, etc. be trying so desperately to claw their way to the top of the entertainment tower without having any entertainment skills to speak of? And what does MJ’s life say about other child stars who have fallen apart much younger and much faster? The slow-burning self-destruction of Michael Jackson has been played out in double-time for Britney, Lindsay, and a host of others. They seem to have one thing in common with MJ; not necessarily his talent, but instead similarly pushy, money-hungry, stage parents trying to live out their own dreams through their children (and hanger-on siblings trying to leverage themselves off the former’s successes). MJ is a lesson in what constitutes very poor parenting, to say the least.
These aren’t insignificant or trivial questions, and some of them verge on existential. They are not easily answered, and they are why American society is having its own meltdown—played out via excessive media coverage—over losing Michael. They make us—at least MJ’s fans, if not American society as a whole—consider this person’s existence in more than black and white (no pun intended; sorry MJ). The story of Michael Jackson, the trajectory of Michael Jackson, cannot fit in a box. He doesn’t make sense in terms of an overarching narrative. That’s because his existence, like everyone else’s existence, is much more nuanced than that. His otherworldly highs, combined with his dramatic lows, create a very stark example of how a person’s worth can’t really be painted in such broad strokes. We can’t effectively judge whether this person was good or bad (though I’d point out the basic: no one is pristinely good, or completely evil), and we’re not used to having our narratives limited by nuance like that. We’ve relegated MJ to the obscure, the bizarre, and even the criminal for many years now, but he was extremely prominent in the public consciousness for quite a while, and his successes can’t be ignored any more than his questionable judgment and suspect behavior. How do we, a society that has historically focused on quick answers and simple narratives to explain ourselves, make sense of Michael Jackson? Time and revisionist history have allowed us to forget a lot of our dichotomous past, but with MJ, the ups and downs of his existence all happened in the span of a very short 50 years. Combine that short time with modern media accessibility, and you end up with a public processing problem. Nothing about MJ can be swept under the rug, and nothing can be ignored. It’s all out there for us to consume, examine, and ruminate on. We’re almost forced to do so. And it’s stark and scary. It’s scary to think someone who reached orbit professionally could fall so far personally, and it’s scary to try to reconcile that.
As MJ’s death forces us to examine the nuances of his life, his life makes us examine our pervasive, sometimes subconscious, societal goals of fame and wealth. The results, and their broader implications, are also unnerving. MJ’s life shows that happiness does not automatically accompany success as measured by fame and wealth. Many people understand this concept intellectually, and other public figures’ lives also show it, I suppose. But MJ’s story proves it in a very drastic way. And our confusion over MJ’s dichotomous life goes to show that no matter what we know intellectually, societal currents are strong; we still expect a person with MJ’s success to be happy as a result; it’s a permutation of the American dream. The fact that he wasn’t seems almost unreasonable. But the man was probably never truly happy at any point, not even during the height of his career (he was reportedly so lonely during the Off the Wall/Thriller years that he couldn’t even contemplate moving out of his parents’ house, at the age of 23-24). His life very loudly declares that being the best doesn’t necessarily make a person happy; being the richest doesn’t necessarily make a person happy; being the most famous doesn’t necessarily make a person happy. So if the factors our culture understands as happiness-making do not actually accomplish happiness, then what goals should our society advocate for us to pursue in order to reach that equilibrium in our time on earth? Does religion really provide the answer? (After all, plenty of religious people still feel compelled to pursue fame and fortune.) Does art? Obviously neither art nor religion helped MJ, despite his strong roots in both. What should our societal goals for life be, if not pursuing these measures of success, which function as calibrations of happiness? If we know, intellectually, that these values do not actually make our lives better once realized, should we be taking a more active role in rooting them out of our collective consciousness and replacing them with more psychologically healthy and socially beneficial values? What kind of social movement would that type of change necessitate? Is that kind of change even possible? What does it say about us if we try, and what does it say about us if we don’t?
Ultimately, I didn’t mind the MJ coverage; his story took up an incredible amount of space in my head and every little piece of information seemed to help me gain a clearer picture of the man, and consequently the meaning of his life, for my own resolution as a fan. But as to those who were and are bothered, I really think this man’s life and death could and should stimulate a societal self-examination/self-reflection that we need. The important points bear repeating: how do we reconcile such disparate narratives in one person? We need to learn; it’s hard to see how we can keep painting our world in broad strokes and simultaneously expect to have any sort of accurate view of it, especially in the age of extremely accessible media. And what do our values mean if a person who exceeded every one of those hopes and dreams still had a monumental meltdown? It’s hard to see how those should remain our values, to say the least. I don’t know what the answers are, but I think the questions are worth thinking critically about. In death, as he saw himself in life, MJ is just a vessel. In life he saw himself as a vessel for music, dance, and art; in death he is a vessel for a reexamination of the quintessential American success story. He is necessary to us in that way. I guess I hope we not only learn the lessons, but also work to “make that change.” I don’t know how to make any more sense of his story, and our obsession with it, than that.
