In preparing to answer this question, I watched the first Twilight movies with my two roommates. Though our tastes vary, all three of us started watching the movies with low expectations, based mainly on the gap we perceived between the quality of movie Summit set out to make, and the quality of movie we usually watch. For the record, my roommate Masha (19) watches mainly foreign animation (her father is a well-known Russian animator) and French New Wave. My roommate Henry (21) watches all movies voraciously (including American blockbusters and romantic-comedies!); his favorite director is Stanley Kubrick. While I watch a lot of “art house” movies, most of what I watch is big-budget (but generally good) American television or movies. As we began watching Twilight, the group consensus was that the movies would be an opportunistic hack-jobs meant to appeal to uncritical fans rather than the average movie attendee.

While that summarizes the extent of Masha’s bias before watching Twilight, Henry and I had especially low expectations of Twilight which we developed based on internet articles we’d read about the movies just before watching them. One of my favorite sites, The Editing Room, publishes “abridged scripts” of Twilight and New Moon:

Suddenly, ROBERT PATTINSON enters. The paleness of him and his family members reach blinding levels while the squeals in the movie theater reach deafening levels.

KRISTEN STEWART: Who’s the albino Wolverine?

ANNA KENDRICK: Oh, him? That’s Robert. He’s universally acknowledged as the hottest boy in school but he doesn’t date anyone because no girl is good enough for him.

KRISTEN STEWART: No girl is good enough for him? Man, the excuses closested homosexuals come up with these days…

KRISTEN sits next to ROBERT, who nearly vomits in his mouth and leaves school for a week. Eventually, he returns.

Rifftrax, a site created by stars of the award-winning TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000, sells satirical audio commentary on the two movies which you can play as you watch Twilight:

Of course, there are thousands of other anti-Twilight sites out their (and probably millions of pro-), but Rifftrax and The Editing Room were especially influential to Henry and I because they’re both well done and they confirmed the perception of the movies we’d had before we began watching the series. Quoting The Editing Room again:

KRISTEN wakes up to find ROBERT watching her sleep.

KRISTEN STEWART: Holy fucking shit! If you weren’t so hot I’d have you arrested! How long have you been doing this?

ROBERT PATTINSON: 2 months.

KRISTEN STEWART: But I’ve only lived here one month according to the script.

ROBERT PATTINSON: Yeah, the script was written in six weeks. Don’t get hung up on shit like that.

So my roommates and I watched the movies. We watched the first Twilight twice and watched New Moon once. We took a break and watched some parodies. We concluded that the movies weren’t terrible… but they weren’t good either. Overall, if a friend asked me about the movies, I’d probably describe them as mediocre, then spend the next five minutes complaining about how many parts of the movie were insulting to the intelligence of Twilight’s intended audience. Looking through my viewing notes, I found this quote from Henry that describes Twilight fairly well:

I think I’ve hated these characters five different times now. It’s not so bad except for the characters. When Edward or Bella are on the screen, I start to hate Twilight again.

Out of the three of us, Masha had the most favorable reaction to Twilight. While I think some of her enjoyment was based on being in what I assume is Twilight’s target demographic (19-year-old, Caucasian, middle-class), most of her enjoyment of the movie came from her attempts to analyze the care which Twilight’s creators took to ensure that the movie appealed to her. I’ll discuss this in more detail later, but I believe that this same phenomenon explains the continuing public and critical interest in other terrible movies, like the Transformers series or Avatar.

Before I do that, here’s what I liked about both Twilights:

1. Good unified color palette and shooting style through both movies. If you look at a single frame from the movies or a preview of the next movie, you are instantly able to identify it as Twilight.
2. Interesting (but under-developed) high school dynamics. Bella’s interaction with her “friends” was sketchy, which led me to believe that her circle of friends had been more fully developed in the novels. However, the occasional scenes which made it into the movie seemed realistic and well thought out (ex: the girl who rushes over jealously when Bella talks to her crush during volleyball practice, the two boys competing with each other for Bella’s affection.)
3. Good soundtrack.
4. Washington is beautiful.

So let’s talk about Transformers, Avatar, and Twilight. I think it’s safe to say that all three of these movie franchises are terrible. However, unlike the majority of terrible movies, they’ve been massively commercially successful. In addition to commercial success, Transformers and Avatar have been critically successful – though they’ve generally been badly reviewed, both franchises have been extensively analyzed in the media, both as movies and as “cultural phenomena” (another example). Transformers’ and Avatar’s statuses as cultural phenomena allows them to transcend criticism: instead of potential viewers seeing those films as being “good” or “bad,” we simply see them as films which we must watch in order to participate in popular culture.

Twilight has a lot in common with Avatar and Transformers: it is a film which is based on schlocky roots, heavily marketed, starring beautiful young actors, and specifically targeted towards a carefully managed fan base. It is poised to be a cultural phenomenon, but hasn’t yet reached that status, as seen in the relative scarcity of discussion of Twilight outside of book or movie criticism.

I believe my roommate Masha’s reaction to Twilight could be useful in developing a model to elevate the movie’s status beyond fad-of-the-week. Masha (and to a lesser extent, Henry and I) viewed the Twilight series both from the perspective of how in-tune the movie was with her experiences as a teenager, while simultaneously remaining aware of the movie as a well researched machine whose purpose was to pretend to be relevant to her teenage experience. This is similar to the way in which cultural critics analyze the Avatar and Transformers franchises, approaching the movies as zeitgeist first and entertainment second. Therefore, Twilight could best be promoted amongst my community by highlighting an ironic awareness of both the movies shortcomings as well as its existence as a cultural juggernaut. By doing this, Avatar transcends the labels of “good” or “bad” and becomes simply a movie that must be seen.