by Melody Platz
I’ve had enough of the
indiscriminate dissing of the movie Twilight. Some of the slaps go too far.
In a recent Time Magazine blurb, while stating that there will be a new director for the sequel, New Moon, a nameless person wrote, “But really, does it matter who directs this thing?”
The answer is yes. Yes, it does matter who directs this hugely popular franchise.
Imagine Lord of the Rings without Peter Jackson or Forrest Gump without *Robert Zemekis.
Creative care is one of a director’s most obvious contributions to a story. They lend a voice and a mood and they make the choices that send a movie soaring to a hit weekend or plummeting to a direct-to-video embarrassment.
Yes, Twilight has a built in audience, but that does not mean those fans will put up with anything. Girls and women flocked to the opening weekend of Twilight because for months they saw sneak peak photos, watched interviews and were reassured that Catherine Hardwicke had her heart where we had our hearts, firmly on the passion between Edward and Bella.
It was not a perfect movie, but it was good. Business people who make future decisions about the franchise should heed this advice: If you respect Twilight fans and make a good movie, we’ll make you rich. Cheap out and try to fake an understanding of our Stephenie Meyer's books and we’ll abandon you. We have the books, we’re perfectly willing to re-read them without watching a hack movie.
Here’s the elephant in the room. I think Twilight is being dissed because there are a lot of little girls who are going to see it.
While boys have to suffer the label
“nerd” if they obsess on Lord of the Rings, girls have to deal with the label
“silly”. Dictionary.com has
the following definition of the word silly: weak-minded
or lacking good sense; stupid or foolish.
I object to this label.
Twilight is not a treatise on anything as serious as the state of global warming. It never set out to be. Stephenie Meyer set out to write an entertaining love story to explain why a vampire might be in a meadow trying not to kill a teenage girl. I believe you must judge books on their intentions. So if you judge Twilight on its initial purpose, it is a wildly successful story.
Just like Spiderman or The Usual Suspects. They didn’t change the world. They tapped into the psyche of their audience, which is a deceptively difficult thing to do. If just anyone could send thrills through you by filming a few kissing scenes, then no movie would ever be a flop.
Now, I have one last point. Some of you may be thinking, “You take Twilight too seriously.” That isn’t the case. I love humor. On YouTube, there is a puppet show spoofing Twilight. I loved it. My boyfriend and I regularly laugh about how I lust after a 17-year-old vampire. I’m not afraid to see the fluff and the melodrama of a story I love so much.
I am just unwilling to let people who don’t understand the story dismiss the phenomenon as simply a tween girl story that could be thrown together and dumped on the market like an after thought. When you dismiss the things we love, you are in danger of underestimating us.
We, the fans, love Twilight. The next movie, New Moon, will matter. And how it is directed will be a testimony to how a corporation and a male director sees a legion of mostly women united behind a story that touches us deeply.
*Thanks to Lita for the correction about Robert Zemekis. I sincerely believed Ron Howard had directed Forrest Gimp. I was wrong. : )
