Twilight fever has swept American tweendom. As a result of its incredible impact the original film is an essential addition to this study of contemporary understandings of love. The primary love relationship of the film is the romance between Bella and Edward Cullen. It is characterized by passion, melodrama, and mystery. There is a strong magnetism between the two characters. They are portrayed as soulmates, designed for one another and incomplete without each other. Essentially their love is a very intense demonstration of the love from Aristophanes’ speech in Symposium.
Aristophanes tells a story explaining that people were originally dual-featured round creatures who were split in half and scattered around the world. As scattered halves people seek their “other half” to make their halved nature whole. In the film, Edward tells Bella, “You are my own personal brand of heroine.” She is destined for him. She completes him. Bella believes the same of Edward. Though she has other romantic options, she continually pursues Edward. As far as she is concerned there is no one else to love, and she would go as far as death for him.
Though the love between Bella and Edward gets the most screen time, there are other loves demonstrated in the film. There is the love of Bella’s father for her, the lost love from her parents’ marriage, and Bella’s mother’s love for her own new boyfriend. The familial love between Bella’s father and herself is primarily demonstrated in their mutual concern for the other’s well being. For example, Charlie, her father, is concerned when Bella acts as if Edward hurt her. He immediately steps into a protective mode and desires to take care of her. Likewise after she has lied to him and left the house with Edward, Bella is concerned that she wounded her father too deeply. The film is vague on the love of Bella’s parents’ marriage except that now she is the only uniting factor in their divorced relationship. The love between Bella’s mother and her mother’s new boyfriend is only mentioned in so far as the new relationship makes the mother “happy” and thereby it is deemed good. It is important to note that there are these other forms of love in the film in order to point out how greatly the movie dwarfs them in comparison to the screen time invested in Bella and Edward’s romance.
Though the primary perspective on love, Edward and Bella are thrown together by a kind of happenstance. Like Romeo and Juliet, each of their identities possesses something that is detrimental to them being in a relationship, i.e. Edward is a vampire and Bella’s blood is more attractive to him than anyone else’s. Again like Romeo and Juliet, they decide to cultivate their love despite the danger. As much as Stephenie Meyers can, she portrays them as “star-crossed lovers.” Yet Romeo and Juliet and Twilight are both stemmed from the same idea. The idea painted in Aristophanes’s speech; for every person there is one other person whom they are designed to perfectly be with, and when that person is found, it is worth any cost to be with them.
There is also a hint of Phaedrus’s philosophy on love present. Phaedrus speaks highly of the deaths people have died for their lovers. According to Phaedrus the death of one for a lover is good even if the death was not productive because it is for the cause of love. In essence, even if Romeo and Juliet’s deaths had not united their families Phaedrus would still crown them champions of love. When Bella says, “I never thought much of how I’d die. But dying in the place of someone I love, seems like a good way to go,” there is no productive end to her death and yet it is painted as good and romantic, instead of foolish and unnecessary.
This is an interesting twist in Twilight that brings its own idea of love under interrogation. Bella pursues a relationship with a vampire who specifically desires to her blood. Yet she also has the choice of Jacob, a werewolf, sincere and compassionate, someone who knows her better than anyone else in Forks. Bella is essentially drawn to vampiric passion in the bodily manifestation of Edward Cullen. She is a product and advocate of the idea that love is and should be intense, mysterious, and dangerous. She is not as dazzled by Jacob’s plain-ness, though he is no threat to her and sincerely cares for her. She would rather be with the man who deeply desires to consume her. Her choice is a caution. She is in love with something that will destroy her. Her decision is made by passionate foolishness. Phaedrus and Aristophanes cheer. Teen girls across America have posters and cardboard cutouts of Edward Cullen. A grassroots idolatry of the specific brand of passion he represents, a passion that seduces and sucks the life from anyone who trusts in its façade of love.
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