So far, Twilight has failed to get my attention. The little that I know about it leads me to believe I wouldn’t be interested in it at all. The word “milquetoast” has often come up in connection with it. The fact alone that these vampires sparkle in contact with the sun instead of bursting into flames or exploding like a sack of blood is enough to whatever small amount of interest I might have in the series elsewhere. Its huge popularity with people in middle school is also an indication that subject matter is something other than what I would be interested in seeing. And if I needed anything else to prove to me that I had no interest in the series, an encounter I had at a theater before seeing Fantastic Mr Fox (something, by the way, I thought was mediocre at best) with a friend proved to me just why the demographic of people interested in Twilight does not overlap with whatever demographic I might fall into on a Venn diagram:

Middle aged woman alone at the theater: What are you seeing?
Me: Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Woman: Oh… I heard about that. It seems too “indie” for me. I’m hear to see Twilight.

I mean… Fantastic Mr. Fox was made by Wes Anderson who is at this point just like… a major Hollywood director, and George Clooney was the voice of fox, so…

I mean, there are plenty of movies about vampires that I do like. But they have other things going for them… The Hunger and Bram Stoker’s Dracula are two of my favorite narrative films, but the fact that they are about vampires isn’t exactly what is interesting to me about them. The Hunger is just like a period piece about the early 80′s, and is so over the top, from the Bauhaus performance at the beginning to the endless shots of Catherine Deneuve wearing sunglasses and veiled hats smoking cigarettes while Venetian blinds cast linear shadows across her face. And Bram Stoker’s Dracula is just one of the most visually stunning narrative films ever made… and it’s just so campy, so over the top about everything, it’s unbelievable. I guess the difference between these films and the Twilight films is that while I guess they are all in some ways about romance, the two that I have seen repeatedly embody sensuality in every aspect of the film, so that the storyline is almost subservient to the visual aspects of the films, whereas I can only imagine that Twilight is like any other movie that is out now, only with glittering teenage vampires. And then of course there is Blood for Dracula, which is totally incredible also. They are all just so campy, so over the top in different ways. Twilight, on the other hand, just seems so exceedingly normal.

Needless to say I haven’t seen any of the Twilight movies. I do regularly go see films in the theater more than once, though to be fair they are rarely new releases or even narrative features. I did see La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet by Frederick Wiseman thrice in the theater last year, and also saw the newly restored print of The Red Shoes both days it was being screened, and I would go see either of them again if they were in the theater, and again and again. When Rushmore was in theaters, I went at least a dozen times. The reasons why I would see movies more than once are both obvious and inexplicable—the sensual/intellectual pleasure of being fascinated by something that is novel, and which presents an idea in a new or unexpected way.

I think it’s almost senseless to wonder how people could be excited over a new Twilight movie. The people who are interested in seeing it appear to me to be rabid fans—tweens who have eaten up the books and the other movies, and their mothers who want to fawn over the young boys in the movie—and they’re going to continue to be excited about each new release in much the same way that I am excited to see every new film that Peter Hutton finishes. I can’t imagine they are going to win over new fans that aren’t already interested in the series; by this point people are already pro- or anti- the series, and I can’t imagine me or anyone I know being switched camps (that includes a few people who do like the series).  For me, it just comes down to another movie about relationships that I don’t care about, with this veneer of vampire/wearwolf story applied to the surface of it. I imagine that advertising to the people who likely to be interested in it—young people and middle-aged women—is the right way to go. It would probably be a waste of effort and money to try and win over people who aren’t interested already. To try something like that before the series were established might have been effective, but at this point, I feel like it’s a strictly for-fans-only venture.