I Want to Be a Vampire

First, a confession.

I want to run my hands through some of that beautifully wonderful vampire hair, my own or someone else's.

I want to wear beautiful clothes and have wisdom beyond my apparent age and know all about classical music.

I want to hang around in the top-most crown of a coastal redwood on a clear day, overlooking the ancient forest canopy and the glinting valley river below, having climbed there by my own, super-strong, vampiric self.

And to have my own sonorous, instantly-persuasive voice. Like a vampire.

I thought you should know.

For the past three weeks, I've been obsessed with the vampire movie and book Twilight. Now that we've established that, onto the story.

First, we meet Bella, a high school junior who has just moved to Forks, Washington to live with her quiet, police chief dad. She looks kind of like a vampire, but she isn't one. She's clumsy, smart, responsible for her age, and feels like a misfit. Bella can flawlessly read people's emotions through their facial gestures and voice tones.

Edward Cullen, her love/hate interest, is part of a family of benevolent-to-human vampires who live outside of Forks and who attend the same high school. The vampire thing is a secret. Edward's super powers include lightning-fast reflexes, the ability to read human minds (except Bella's), and apparent immortality.

Bella has a super power of her own, when it comes to her relationship with Edward: she regularly saves Edward from his own self-hatred. Apparently, vampires can experience a lot of self-hatred because they walk around wanting to destroy humans in order to survive.

So, other than the whole "he's lived a hundred years and she's lived only 17," there's a nice symmetry in the two main characters.

The conflicts:

• Edward wants to both devour and fall in love with Bella (awesome!)
• Bella and Edward miscommunicate often because Bella doesn't know he's a vampire at first and because Edward can't read her mind like he can read everyone else's mind (boring -- miscommunication is my least favorite conflict)
• Some people who know that the Cullens are vampires really hate them (hate has really been overdone lately, but whatever)
• Bella is constantly tripping/ falling/ getting followed by would-be rapists, so Edward follows her around and saves her a lot (kind of fun, other than his occasional annoyed remonstrances for her carelessness)

My favorite detail about these vampires is that they can't show themselves in sunlight because they sparkle like diamonds. If anyone saw a vampire's skin in the sunlight, they would know for sure that these folks are different. And we all know where "different" leads....

Speaking of differences, there are some differences between the book and movie.

In short, the movie is better.

The longer answer: the movie is well-paced and does an artful job of using the symbols of the forest versus the city to establish the animalistic versus the cultivated sides of the vampires. The Edward in the movie doesn't need to control Bella's movements or turn his persuasive vampire gaze on her to get her to comply with his wishes -- those (very creepy!) characteristics are emphasized in the book. And the book is filled with repetitive warnings about Bella's need to "be safe" and the hero's unfounded fears for her safety. Thankfully, the movie only replays these conversations a few times.

I do like that the book lets itself be a teen novel. It's told from Bella's point of view, with a teenage girl's voice. So we get to see very realistic, perfectly paced teen angst, with a vampiric twist:

Of course he wasn't interested in me, I thought angrily, my eyes stinging -- a delayed reaction to the onions. I wasn't interesting. And he was. Interesting...and brilliant...and mysterious...and perfect...and beautiful...and possibly able to lift full-sized vans with one hand.

I find passages like this one simply delightful! The movie doesn't focus on the fact that Bella is a seventeen-year-old girls -- it's the only thing noticeably missing from the movie, for me. Perhaps it plays to a wider range of ages.

A note on teenagers, as a group: they are reliably fierce film critics. They will not put up with anything boring, overly philosophical, riddled with inside jokes (other than their own), or anything that is not mythically and visually stunning. And some teenage girls do indeed seem to cling to this movie -- a lofty endorsement. Every time I've been to see the movie, there's been at least one group of girls that are clearly serial fans of the film. One girl whispered, with perfect timing, every word of the film. One of her friends audibly caught her breath and moaned every time Edward came on the screen.

It's fun to be swept away with passion, even if you're not a teenage girl. It's delightful to go on the rollercoaster ride of emotional yeses and nos. It's pleasurable to feel that archetypal conflict running through your own body.

Ultimately, that archetypal conflict is what makes well-done vampire stories like this one so compelling. Sure, the vampires are cool. Who doesn't want to be passionately desired by someone stunningly beautiful with long, slender, ice-cold hands and perfect teeth? But the draw is more than that -- it's alluring to enter the world of conflicting desires because it's a world we're intimately familiar with, or at least wish we were familiar with. Creation and destruction, gentleness and violence -- we audience members experience the pull of both forces every day. Someone cuts us off in traffic, and we want to kill the guy. Our favorite team wins, and we love everyone. We sit in our gray grid of cubicles wishing for some lofty emotion -- any emotion -- to replace our apathy and dull self-disdain.

This movie asks us to notice the passion and the archetypal tension that we carry around in ourselves every day, just by being human. Will we love or devour the people around us? Will we love or devour the parts of ourselves that are perfect, and imperfect? However enlightened we audience members wish to be in the face of so-called over-dramatized, over-simplified fairy tales like this one, when they're told artfully, we become captive, willingly compliant, and thirsty for more.