Twilight

The Blue Tint of Teenage Longing

It is almost impossible to watch *Twilight* now without wading through the cultural wreckage it left behind—the mall tours, the merchandise, the endless parodies. But when you actually sit down and look at the 2008 film, divorced from the hysteria, it’s incredibly strange. It isn't a glossy studio product. It looks and moves like a moody indie feature that accidentally wandered into a billion-dollar franchise.

Catherine Hardwicke brought the same handheld, documentary-like nervous energy she used in *Thirteen*. She didn't shoot it like a fantasy epic; she shot it like a high school movie where everyone is deeply depressed. Forks, Washington is drenched in a bruised, cyanotic blue filter. The sky is perpetually threatening rain, and the camera hovers too close to people's faces, catching awkward glances and uncomfortable silences. I’m not sure the studio knew what they were getting with Hardwicke, but her choice to treat adolescent desire with life-or-death seriousness is the only reason the movie works at all.



The biology class scene remains one of the most bizarre meet-cutes ever. Bella walks in, a fan blows her scent toward Edward, and he reacts like he's been physically assaulted. Robert Pattinson leans away, hand covering his nose, his body rigid with a mix of disgust and starvation. It’s funny, sure—Pattinson has always played the role with a dose of self-loathing—but it also captures the suffocating physical intensity of being near someone you’re drawn to at seventeen. The movie leans into the discomfort instead of smoothing it out.

A lot of the film's reputation rests on Kristen Stewart, who spent years absorbing blame for Bella's perceived passivity. People called the performance wooden, but they were wrong. Stewart gives a highly internalized, aggressively introverted performance. She stammers, bites her lip, and refuses to make eye contact. She acts exactly like a teenager who feels out of place in her own skin. As Manohla Dargis later wrote, Stewart is a performer who makes good movies better and dreary ones tolerable. Here, she does the heavy lifting of grounding a ridiculous premise in recognizable insecurity.



The script by Melissa Rosenberg is undeniably clunky, with dialogue that sounds like it was lifted from a teenager's diary. The pacing stalls whenever it has to explain the supernatural rules—the sparkling skin, the baseball during thunderstorms. Whenever the movie tries to be an action film with wire-work that looks like a high school play, it falls apart. The effects are an afterthought.

But maybe the shoddy effects are a feature. They keep the focus on the overwhelming, myopic tunnel vision of first love. Hardwicke understands that when you are that age, nothing else matters. The rest of the world is just background noise.



*Twilight* is a messy film. It takes itself far too seriously, and its gender dynamics are very much a product of their time. Yet, there is a hypnotic sincerity to it. It bottles the feeling of listening to an emo album on a rainy afternoon, staring out the window, and waiting for your life to finally begin.