The Twilight Saga: Negotiated Readings of a Vampire Romance
By Lisa Thompson
In the late 2000s and early 2010s The Twilight Saga was an enormously popular media product. Across four novels and two related books, the series sold more than 160 million copies worldwide, while the movie series made more than US$3.3 billion globally. The books and films thus became a significant cultural product. The series had an enormous fandom with which I engaged, however, the text also held a unique personal significance. Both my personal and collective experiences with the text can be understood alongside media studies theories such as the hypodermic needle, uses and gratifications theory, as well as encoding and decoding. During this discussion, I focus primarily on the first Twilight film, however, I also refer to the franchise more generally, encompassing the whole book and film series.
The Twilight Saga primarily follows two characters, Bella Swan and Edward Cullen. The characters fall in love, however, their love is not easily embraced as Edward is a vampire. Twilight is a forbidden love story, as Edward resists the temptation to drink Bella’s blood. The story meets further complication when Bella discovers her cousin, Jacob, is from a rival werewolf clan that has a generations-long feud with the Cullen family. The story engages the audience through interpersonal politics and the allure of forbidden love.
The Twilight Saga was a formative text during my early adolescence. It was a time in my life when I felt eager to grow up and the series was irresistibly tied to adulthood in many ways. I am dyslexic and Twilight was the first non-children’s book I read unassisted. Twilight therefore symbolised successfully overcoming the barriers of my disability, while also developing literacy skills and independence more associated with adulthood. As Twilight was also enormously popular, engaging in the books and movies became important to building a sense of belonging with society in general. Furthermore, the Twilight audience appeared to be comprised mainly of adolescent girls. As I was eager to be part of this demographic, engaging with the Twilight books and movies became a vehicle to communicate my identity to myself and others. My engagement was also driven by the allure of the forbidden. My parents disallowed the text originally, meaning I was only more eager to read the books and see the movies.
As Twilight grew in popularity, concern arose over whether the text was promoting problematic messages to its largely female adolescent audience. In addition to mild to moderate sexual themes, the series presented some concerning messaging about relationships and gender roles. The relationship between Edward and Bella was not equal in many aspects. While Bella was presented as a vulnerable teenager with low self-esteem in a new town, Edward was frozen at the age of 17 despite being born in 1901. For some purposes, this enormous mental age gap positions Edward as the male protector of Bella, and a significant amount of the plot revolves around Edward and his family of vampires protecting Bella from human-consuming vampires. Twilight can therefore be considered to perpetuate a ‘damsel in distress’ narrative where women defer to men for safety and other problems. Edward is written to show other controlling and domineering behaviours, including watching Bella as she sleeps and driving at an intense speed despite Bella’s obvious discomfort. Concerns that young women would consume this text and uncritically accept these messages about gender roles is consistent with the hypodermic needle theory.
Emerging in the early 20th century, the hypodermic needle theory originated from World War One propaganda, where communications professionals theorised the public could be manipulated through the media. The theory has close links to behaviourism, the psychological principle that considers human behaviour open to manipulation. This is an extreme view of the audience as entirely unquestioning and passive, although, arguably, audiences are more critical at present. Through the course of globalisation and the emergence of the internet, domestic audiences have become more aware of the diversity of content, and perhaps parallel to this, the diversity of opinion, alongside the realisation that truth is not as binary as it perhaps once appeared.
It is difficult to discern whether my personal engagement with Twilight impacted my own expectations of gender roles and relationships. As I consumed both the films and the books multiple times, it is likely I did internalise these messages to some extent. Despite a level of conditioning, I think I did have some interest in thinking about the gender roles portrayed in Twilight. This was most likely due to my exposure to a network of media and personal relationships that simultaneously discussed gender issues and perhaps mitigated the messages perpetuated in the series, leading to a more negotiated reading of the text. Although discussion of the text can quickly become political, my engagement with Twilight was for the simple purpose of enjoyment.
The uses and gratifications theory purports that audiences are active in their media consumption choices, with varying motivations for the consumption of media. The five identified reasons for media consumption are cognitive, affective, tension release, personal integrative and social integrative. My consumption of Twilight was consistent with all categories except the cognitive. My consumption was ‘affective’ as it satisfied an emotional need. From a similar perspective, my engagement was motivated by relaxation consistent with ‘tension release.’ Uses and gratifications theory also provides a framework for more complex components of my engagement. My consumption was consistent with the ‘personal integrative’ model as Twilight contributed to my construction of personal identity as I observed the romance as an experience I also desired. Furthermore, my consumption was compatible with the ‘social integrative.’ As aforementioned, I desperately wanted to identify with the adolescent female demographic, meaning my engagement was motivated by a desire to outwardly signal my identity to others as a fan of Twilight. While I identified with Bella’s alienation and social difficulties, I vicariously indulged in the excitement of her romance. Uses and gratifications theory moves away from the view of audiences as controllable, instead suggesting audiences show autonomy in their choices and engagement with media.
The encoding and decoding theory proposed that texts may be ‘encoded’ with a specific meaning or intention by the author, while they may be ‘decoded’ by the audience to produce a different meaning. My engagement with Twilight was innocent and I consumed the text through enjoyment of the romance and dramatic plot, thus I decoded the series through the dominant reading of a vampire romance. Many people in the fandom engaged with Twilight for similar reasons.
As a fan at a time of global communication due to the internet, I had access to an almost infinite amount of information related to the text. I watched reviews by fans and engaged with the ‘interpretive community’ of people collectively forming interpretations. I viewed countless interviews with the actors and consumed any related media. These included an issue of the magazine Dolly devoted to Twilight, where the text was deconstructed to a level of detail where one feature provided instructions on which Australian retailers sold clothing similar to characters in the movie. The interpretive community of the fandom also created ‘fan trailers’ in anticipation of the next film. Despite my simple interpretation of the text, I watched the movies with an enormous amount of background. If any of this extra media consumption impacted my interpretation, I think the primary result was that I began to view the characters as extensions of the celebrities in the film. Regardless, this interpretive community contributed to my reading of the text.
Twilight has become a young adult fiction staple, with many people becoming engrossed with the text. Twilight was met with controversy from those who identified problematic messaging related to traditional gender norms in the books and films. This perspective is comparable to the hypodermic needle theory, where audiences are easily manipulated by media. The uses and gratifications theory challenges this framework, arguing that audiences are more autonomous in their media choices. Furthermore, the encoding and decoding theory illuminates the evolving audience experience with the advent of the internet. Although a communicator might intend to disseminate one message, ultimately, the significance and meaning of a text is determined by the audience.