As I sit attentively in the lecture “So Many Species, So Little Time: the Men of Twilight,” a teenage girl, Rachel, wearily plunks herself down beside me. Her face is obscured by stringy blond and purple-streaked hair, but I can see her wrists, clad in dozens of black rubber bracelets. One reads, “I’m in love with a fictional character.”
She scribbles notes, and when she nonchalantly meets my gaze, I see that her unnaturally golden-brown irises are encircled by orange and black, the result of vampire-inspired contact lenses. Our classroom door has a sign that reads, “No Vampires beyond Here!” and as the talk ends, a scratchy but authoritative voice explodes from the intercom system: “Will Bella Swan please report to the principal’s office!” Rachel considers whether she’d like a boyfriend to be a human, vampire, or werewolf. Vampire, or rather the revamped 21st-century version of the vampire, wins by a landslide. To Rachel and others like her, he’s old-fashioned but still sexy, loyal but tantalizingly dangerous, brooding and anguished about his bloodthirsty nature, young with an artfully disheveled head of hair.
I have officially entered the Twilight Zone, as the banner over the high school where we’re sitting proclaims. Rachel is indeed a student, but not here at Forks High School in Forks, Wash., which is holding a summer symposium on the author Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga. Rather, Rachel is a self-described “twi-hard,” just one of the millions of fervent fans, ranging from ages 10 to 80, of the beloved series, a continuing young-adult romance between the exceptionally clumsy teenager Bella Swan and a swoon-inspiring vampire named Edward Cullen, who has been 17 years old since 1918. Thousands of fans like Rachel have flocked to Forks, an economically depressed former logging town, eager to immerse themselves in the setting for the books. Forks has responded by remodeling itself as a destination for all things Twilight.
The Twilight “fanpire” spans the globe, but Rachel traveled from Bloomington, Ind., to be here at the Twilight Summer School. Her obsession with the series began when a friend recommended it to her. Entranced, Rachel spent the night in the bathtub finishing the first book as the water cooled and her skin puckered. She proceeded to tear through the other books in the series, but those weren’t enough to satisfy her enthrallment. She logged on to fan sites like HisGoldenEyes and Twilighters Anonymous for at least one hour each day to chat with other fans and peruse the latest Twilight gossip. When I spoke with Rachel at the summer-school symposium, she told me that the current buzz in the fanpire centered around a YouTube video of a recent screening of Eclipse, in which a man proposed to his girlfriend on bended knee in front of the theater audience. The couple then rejoined the cheering crowd to watch the film.
Rachel’s wardrobe consists of Twilight-themed shirts reading, “Bite Me: Vampires Only Please” and “It’s an Edward Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand.” After months of pestering, she’d persuaded her mom and her cousins, who’d finally succumbed to Twilight mania, to wait in line at Barnes & Noble with hundreds of other girls for the midnight release of Breaking Dawn, the final book in the series. An enormous poster of Robert Pattinson, the actor who plays Edward, looms over her bed where he watches her sleep. No boy at her high school can pass muster next to the impossibly sparkly perfection of Edward.
“I don’t know what it is about the Twilight series that has captivated me,” she says. “Once I had read Twilight, my life was changed.” Fans call this phenomenon Twitten: reading the first book and getting bit by the Twilight bug, and the inexplicable force that drove them to read all the books in (practically) one sitting. At the elementary school down the block from my house, fifth graders segregate themselves in the schoolyard according to their allegiances to male characters, “Team Edward” or “Team Jacob,” for Jacob Black, Edward’s shape-shifting rival for Bella’s attentions. Friends are forsaken as a result of affiliating with one emblem of eros over another.
Other fans dissect the personalities of the Cullens, Edward’s fabulously wealthy and attractive vampire family, and bicker over the merits of the Quileute werewolf pack. They write fan fiction, serial novels in countless genres, including the popular “fade to black” fiction with its explicit erotic and sexual details. (One such fade-to-black effort was an early version of the Fifty Shades of Grey story.) Many Twilight fans had never read an entire book before picking up the series, and now they are devouring it in repeated readings of 10 or 15 times or more. They build Web sites like Twilight Singapore. Gay and lesbian fans create Facebook pages dedicated to the series, and through it discover lifelong friends. At conventions, fans donate blood, exchange extra Twilight buttons and T-shirts, and bond over bonfires, lunches, and volleyball games. They book tickets for the Twilight cruise to Alaska to mingle with fans and celebrities from the films, read the Twilight graphic novel, meet up with a Twilight moms’ group, or buy Twilight merchandise like heart-shaped Sweethearts candies that say “bite me” or “soul mate.” They wear the au courant hoodie from Nordstrom’s Twilight-inspired fashion line. Fans like Rachel do not want to merely read the books; they want to climb inside them and live there.
In all, 116 million copies of the books have been sold worldwide, with translations into 38 languages. The film adaptations are some of the highest-grossing movies of all time. Meanwhile, the Twilight saga has spent more time on The New York Times best-seller list than even the Harry Potter novels. Its appeal can be encapsulated in the fact that it was recommended to me as a must read by my daughter’s 40-year-old preschool teacher, a 14-year-old neighbor, and a university colleague.
Fanpire, one of the collective terms Twilight fans use to describe themselves, evokes the ubiquity and popularity of the Twilight phenomenon, as well as the fact that its readers cross generations, economic strata, and countries. Fans from Romania to Salt Lake City have invented a Twilight-inspired universe that encompasses all aspects of their lives: from Edward-addiction groups and “twi rock” music to Cullenism, a religion based on the values of Edward’s family of “vegetarian” vampires (they feed on the blood of animals only, not on that of humans). There is a lexicon of fan terms. Twilighter: a Twilight fan. Twibrary: your collection of all things related to Twilight.
I met fans on tour buses to Twilight-inspired sites; attended thousand-strong conventions; danced at a vampire ball; watched the film premiere of New Moon with 4,000 primarily Mormon Twilight moms in Utah; befriended people who adorn their bodies with tattoos like the flower on the cover of New Moon; observed vampire baseball games; and struggled through a Bella self-defense class. Approximately 600 people responded to my online fan survey within a few days after some of the major fan Web sites provided links to it.
The fanpire in the United States, based on my online survey of self-described ardent fans, is almost 98-percent women. Eighty percent identify as nondenominational Christians or Roman Catholics, while the remainder self-describe as “spiritual.” In my survey, 85 percent of respondents were white, and most respondents over age 18 had completed at least two years of higher education.
The four books of the series—Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn—were written by Meyer, a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a graduate of Brigham Young University who based the narratives on a dream she had of a human girl and a vampire boy lying in a meadow. This paranormal confection of 2,000 pages is narrated by Bella, who is sent to live with her father, police chief of Forks, Wash., after her mother remarries. Bella falls irrevocably in love with Edward Cullen, a mysterious and spectacularly gorgeous student at her high school. He lives with his adoptive family of vampires. To the townspeople of Forks, the Cullens are merely a rich and attractive doctor’s family with five foster children.
Edward possesses superhuman strength and speed and the ability to read minds. But Bella is the exception, and her mental impenetrability frustrates and captivates him. They meet inauspiciously in biology class as lab partners, where Edward, tempted by the beguiling and unusual scent of her blood, wrestles with his moral values and desire to attack and suck her dry. After a period in which Bella is convinced that Edward despises her, and in which Edward struggles with his contradictory desires to both protect and devour Bella, Edward reveals that he is a vampire and that he loves her. “You are exactly my brand of heroin,” he says.
Their interspecies romance is plagued by numerous obstacles, like Bella’s insecurities (she can never believe someone like Edward could love her) and her predilection for nearly dying on a regular basis, whether at the hands of rival vampires, a motorcycle accident, or a gang of would-be rapists. At the end of the series, Bella and Edward marry and live happily ever after as vampires.
Why do women and girls derive such satisfaction from these particular fantasies of romance and power? Certainly the Twilight series contains a romance between a girl and a vampire, but it also taps into deeper, more pervasive notions about marriage, family, girlhood, sexuality, and celebrity. In Twilight’s funhouse mirror, the fears, insecurities, and longings of many girls and women are simultaneously confronted and upended.
Your biological family is dysfunctional, abusive, or disconnected, but in Twilight you are embraced by a chosen, nonbiological, and obscenely wealthy family. Your marriage may be disappointing or abusive, but marriage in Twilight is a supernatural heterosexual model of eternal passion and monogamy. You may be overwhelmed by the American mantra of empowered girlhood that says you are responsible for creating your best life, but Bella marries at 18, forgoes college, and forsakes her friends because it’s her choice to do so. You may live with anxieties about when and with whom to have sex, and whether you can admit to liking or disliking sex without being deemed a slut or a prude, respectively. In Twilight’s world, Bella demands and initiates sex without repercussion. Her first time is phenomenal, and it’s with someone she is assured will love and respect her forever. You might feel anonymous and insignificant, but Twilight promises that you can become extraordinary. Enchantment lurks around the corner, beckoning in the form of a shimmering, supernatural world where you are desirable and powerful.
The Goodreads Web site produced a map of the United States showing which states have the most Twilight readers. Its methodology may have been flawed because the results were based on self-reporting, but the outcome is telling nonetheless. The map looks eerily like the red state/blue state patterns of America’s political proclivities that surfaced after the 2000 presidential election. The belt from Texas to North Carolina through the Midwest harbors the highest numbers of positive reviews of the Twilight books. Meanwhile, readers on the coasts rated the series the least favorably. In most states where Goodreads members love the books, abortion is restricted by parental consent and mandatory waiting periods, abstinence-only curricula predominate in high schools, and both teenage pregnancy and adult divorce rates remain higher than the national average.
A series that promotes the flip-flopped world of a boy who insists on preserving his girlfriend’s virtue and forces her to wait for sex until marriage because he cares for her soul and safety, as well as depicting a nonbiological family of married adults who will love and desire one another forever, is the most supernatural aspect of the series. Bella is assured of eternity with the person she loves because, unlike humans’, vampires’ emotions are not fickle and transient. She will remain in the form of a lithe teenage girl without the creeping malaise of middle age, disillusionment, and financial strain that accompanies marriage over time.
What makes Twilight so compelling is its bewildering mix of inverted fantasies and the contradictory desires it evokes for fans: Edward is both devastatingly romantic and a creepy stalker. Bella is heroic and a wavering, quavering damsel in distress. The sex or lack thereof harks back to an era of gentlemanly chivalry, and yet the sex is potentially violent and can kill you. The Cullens are a model family of Leave It to Beaver vampires, yet simultaneously self-obsessed and materialistic.
Readers might want to revert to an invented, halcyon past where men waited patiently until after marriage for sex. Or they might identify with an ordinary girl who no longer has to make decisions about her life as she’s swept away by the romantic hero. Those are the fantasies of our contemporary postfeminist moment. Postfeminism, as a form of common sense, tells us that women no longer need economic or political power because women have achieved equality and parity with men, and that feminism, therefore, is redundant and no longer necessary. Any choice that women and girls make is indicative of their personal empowerment and freedom. The idea that it’s daring and commendable for Bella to sacrifice college, friends, family, and even her human life to devote herself to the mercurial Edward, all the while asserting that it is her choice to do so, is an exemplar of postfeminist fantasy.
Gloomy, deserted streets dripping with rain greet me when I visit Forks in December 2011. Whereas there were close to 73,000 Twi-tourists in 2010, by the count at the Forks visitor center, only a little more than half that number made the trek in 2011. As the countdown begins for Breaking Dawn-Part 2, the last film in the series, set for release this fall, the Twilight craze that drew thousands to this sleepy town may finally be dwindling.
The local pastor of a nondenominational church believes Forks has been in what he calls a “fog of Twilight.” He writes to me: “I’m bracing for the shock when the fog lifts, the movies are over, the books quit selling, and our poor community goes back to dealing with the reality of having to sustain itself economically.”
Fans’ loyalties are shifting to other books poised to become blockbuster franchises, like the Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins, with a love triangle and an intrepid teenage heroine who ignites a revolution in a totalitarian world. TwilightMoms is hosting a premiere party for the first Hunger Games film; the woman who writes the Twilight column for the National Twilight Examiner is now writing a Hunger Games column on another site; and one fan site has reinvented itself to serve new fantasy films and media. Other fans are intrigued by Veronica Roth’s Divergent, the first book in a trilogy set in a dystopian Chicago and featuring yet another dauntless young heroine.
Nostalgia for the days of peak fandom is already seeping into conversations on blogs and at conventions. At one blog, someone asked readers, “How will you keep the Twilight world alive?” Another person responded, “I almost cried reading ur post. ‘Cuz really what will be left? I know nothing will go on forever and eventually we will all move on too, not to say we won’t have a piece of it in our hearts forever and im sure as grandmothers our teenage grandchildren will stumble on to our books and we can open up a wonderful world to them.”
Others defiantly commented that the phenomenon is over only when the fans say it is. As at Star Trek conventions years after the TV series and films stopped being produced, fans might mingle with Edward and Bella impersonators at anniversaries of the books’ publication, exchanging vintage Twilight merchandise and swapping old stories. A 40-year-old Robert Pattinson, his once uncontrollable hair now thinning, his body inevitably collapsed into middle-age softness, can greet them as a VIP guest.
Thousands of fans will no doubt storm the theaters for Breaking Dawn-Part 2. The blogosphere is abuzz about Twilight, the Musical and with rumors of a Twilight television series. Imagine Better, a project initiated by Harry Potter fans, is attempting to rouse disparate fandoms, whether they slay or sparkle, into a united front to focus on issues relating to human rights, media, the environment, and other areas of concern. “All of our favorite movies, books and shows have heroes, villains, triumph and defeat. Every time we band together for good, we get exponentially stronger,” reads the group’s Web site. “One hero standing strong can change the world, so imagine what thousands of us together can do.”
But the Twilight fanpire as a rallying point for social change seems unlikely. Rather than a launching pad for revolution, Twilight is a soothing palliative of enchantment far from our own disappointing world of foreclosures, war, debt, and shriveled futures. It offers us, with the dazzling mirage of the meadow, the vampire, and the plain girl he worships, true love that lasts forever and the possibility of transforming our lives. The giddiness and joy overwhelms and propels the fanpire for a time. It consoles, buoys, and connects us, and then, like the fleeting sparkles on Edward’s skin, it vanishes.
Tanya Erzen is an associate professor of comparative religious studies at Ohio State University and, this year, the Catharine Gould Chism Scholar at the University of Puget Sound. This essay is excerpted from Fanpire: The Twilight Saga and the Women Who Love It, to be published next month by Beacon Press.
