fourteen
TWILIGHT OF AN IDOL: OUR FATAL ATTRACTION TO VAMPIRES
Jennifer L. McMahon
Twilight, like some of the best examples of vampire fiction, both celebrates and critiques the creature upon which it focuses. It’s easy to see what’s wrong with bloodsuckers, but what makes them so appealing? The answer is simple: wish fulfillment. Human desire is the basis for the vampire mystique. While vampires remain horrific by virtue of their transgressive acts, we nonetheless desire to be like them. But why is that? As we’ll see, existential philosophy offers an explanation for our fascination with vampires and suggests that it is a love we may want to bury.
An Undying Wish
The existential philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) argued that humans fear death more than anything else. Although other things can inspire fear, nothing arouses it like our mortality. Indeed, Heidegger suggested that most commonplace fears derive from, and are psychological substitutes for, our fear of death.
1 According to Heidegger, humans display a unique concern for being that stems primarily from the fact that we know we are finite. This awareness is the foundation for existential “angst.”
2 Throughout our lives, humans seek “flight from death,” or at least “tranquillization about death,” and the anxiety that we have about our mortality inspires a desire for immortality.
3 Here lies the appeal of the vampire. Vampires are immortal. They personify our desire to elude death. Blood is a potent symbol of life, and beings who ingest blood are figures who control life and symbolize the immortal gods that Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) argued we all desire to be.
4Twilight clearly illustrates our anxiety over mortality. At the end of
Twilight, after Edward Cullen saves Bella Swan, she laments that he did not let James’s venom transform her into a vampire. Although she is happy to have escaped a violent death, she despairs because Edward’s rescue is temporary. In rescuing her, he damns her to eventual death. Bella cries, “I’m going to die . . . every minute of the day I get closer.”
5 Although Edward and Jacob Black try to convince Bella that death is natural, she states, “I was . . . eager to trade mortality for immortality.”
6 She asks, “What [is] so great about mortality?” and regrets that Edward is wedded to an idea “as stupid as leaving [her] human.”
7 She describes transformation into a vampire positively—even religiously—as a “conversion that [will] set [her] free from [her] mortality.”
8
Although our own mortality tends to be of greatest concern, we suffer the mortality of others, too. Both because we would be injured by their death and we want those we love “to live a long, full life,” we desire their immortality.
9 This desire to extend immortality to others is also illustrated in
Twilight. Carlisle Cullen creates the members of his family not only for companionship, but also to save them from the “horrible . . . waste” of premature death.
10 He works as a physician not just as “penance,” but also to forestall human fatality.
11 Likewise, Bella’s agony over Renesmee’s “racing age” is expressive of her fear that her child will be stolen from her by death.
12 Bella expresses indescribable “happiness” at the discovery that Renesmee will not die and that she, Edward, and Renesmee “ha[ve] forever . . . together.”
13 And of course, Edward and Bella seek to love each other not until “death do they part,” but for forever. Clearly, vampires personify our desire to spare not only ourselves, but also our loved ones the horror of death.
Deadly Transformations
The appeal of vampires is not simply a function of their immortality. They compensate for other anxieties. One is aging. Although aging is fearful as a harbinger of death, it arouses anxiety in its own right. Sartre examined the anxiety that individuals have about their embodiment, anxiety rooted in the fact that humans are both consciousness and body. While he was clear that “the body is a necessary characteristic” of consciousness, he argued that consciousness feels “separated from it.”
14 In fact, consciousness lacks coincidence with anything. While this lack makes awareness and freedom possible, it also makes consciousness feel estranged from its body. This body is subject not merely to change, but also to decay. The proverbial ghost in the machine, the mind can do nothing but bear anxious witness to the progressive aging of the body and the concomitant deterioration of its own function. This compels the feeling not only of “nausea,” but also of terror.
15Aging arouses anxiety not only because it is outside conscious control and yields diminished performance, but also because we idealize youth. We decry aging because it moves us away from our ideal state toward an undesirable end. As Albert Camus (1913-1960), stated wonderfully, “[A] day comes when a man notices [that] . . . [h]e belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy.”
16 The march of time is particularly distasteful, because today “youth is no longer viewed as a transitory state . . . but [as] an aspiration, a vaunted condition in which, if one [could] arrange it, [one would] settle in perpetuity.”
17Twilight expresses our concern about aging and our wish to escape it. Because Bella seeks a long-term relationship with an immortal vampire, she expresses more concern over aging than most teens. She states that “age is a touchy subject,” and when she discovers that Edward, his family, and Jacob are exempt from aging, she screams furiously, “‘ Not . . . aging? Is that a joke?’ . . . Tears—tears of rage—filled my eyes. . . . ‘Am I the only one who has to get old? I get older every stinking day! . . . Damn it! What kind of world is this? Where’s the justice?’”
18
Bella’s anxiety over aging is expressed again in a dream in
New Moon. The dream opens with Bella imagining her Grandma Marie meeting Edward. The dream transforms into a “nightmare” when Bella realizes that she is the “ancient, creased, and withered” woman who stands next to the eternally youthful vampire.
19 She wakes from the dream in terror, describing time as a thief “lurk[ing] in ambush.”
20 She cries, “I could feel it—I was older. Every day I got older . . . [and] worse.”
21 For Bella, aging is synonymous with “wast[ing].”
22 This leads Bella to express “horror”
23 at the prospect of turning thirty, and to tell Edward that being frozen forever at the age of eighteen is “every woman’s dream.”
24 At the end of the saga, Bella is transformed into a vampire and absolved of the indignity of aging. Clearly, the appeal of vampires lies not only in their immortality, but also in their eternal youth.
Unbreakable
Mortality and aging are not the only problems that people have with embodiment. Bodies have other “weaknesse[s]” that we seek to overcome.
25 Although our bodies are possessed of many wonderful abilities, they are also vulnerable. We suffer extremes of cold and heat. We are easily injured. Minor falls can break bones. Simple accidents can cause injuries that demand emergency care. Our susceptibility to injury compels a desire for the superhuman bodies that vampires possess.
Twilight expresses the anxiety we have about our bodies. These anxieties make it easy to sympathize with Bella, the charming, yet comically clumsy teen.
26 As Edward and Jacob Black repeatedly remind Bella, she is “incredibly breakable.”
27 Bella couldn’t agree more. She repeatedly declares that it is “too dangerous to be human.”
28 Twilight contrasts human susceptibility to injury with the invulnerability of vampires in numerous scenes. Bella’s injury at the hands of James,
29 her nearly fatal finger slice on her birthday,
30 and the unintentional injuries she receives from Edward on their honeymoon express the vulnerability of humans as clearly as the general notion of humans as “prey.”
31
By personifying “virtual indestructibility,”
32 the vampires in the
Twilight saga illustrate our deep-seated desire for less susceptible bodies. Where humans are composed of “brittle,”
33 “warm, breakable”
34 flesh, vampire skin is “hard,”
35 cold, and likened to “stone”
36 and “steel.”
37 Rather than be subject to damage, vampires impart it. Contact with a vampire easily bruises human skin, breaks bone, and even dents metal. Though not immune to destruction, there are “very few ways that [vampires] can be killed.”
38 Indeed, they, and the werewolves, are nearly indestructible.
Bloody Special
Vampires are appealing not simply because of their indestructibility, but also because of their special powers. Like the superheroes from Marvel Comics, the vampires in
Twilight are possessed of superhuman strength and speed. They can swim the ocean and run hundreds of miles with ease. They leap canyons with catlike grace and crush rock effortlessly into powder. Personifying our desire, Bella seeks to trade her “human and weak” body for one with “superpower[s].”
39 She thirsts for the expanded senses, “infallible . . . mind,” and unique “gift[s]” of the vampires.
40 One such special gift is beauty. Perhaps nothing is emphasized more consistently in the
Twilight saga than Edward’s physical appeal. He is described again and again as “devastatingly” beautiful. And Edward is not unique. Beauty is a standard characteristic of vampires. We find vampires appealing because they embody the ideal of beauty to which we aspire and which exerts considerable influence. Bella wants to become a vampire partly because she knows her transformation will render her “inhumanly beautiful.” We love vampires because they exemplify a standard of beauty to which we aspire, “an ideal so remote from our daily affairs that its exemplars seem to belong to another species.”
41Vampires feed our thirst to be special in another way. Sartre and his fellow existentialists agreed that a major cause of human anxiety is our lack of necessity. We see concern over meaning in Twilight when Bella denies that she possesses any special abilities and scoffs at the notion that she could be the object of undying love. Regardless, she captures Edward’s heart, commanding his affection so powerfully that, like Romeo, he declares that he will not live without her. In addition, she ends up being a central figure in an epic battle and the unsuspecting savior of the vampires from the Volturi. Bella expresses our own latent wish to escape anonymity and ascend to a state of supreme significance.
Lone Wolves
Though not as obvious as our desire to avoid injury or obscurity, another weakness individuals seek to avoid is their vulnerability to others. As both Heidegger and Sartre asserted, humans are fundamentally social. Though Heidegger argued that we normally take comfort in others, Sartre was alert to the potential that our relationships have to arouse anxiety. Interpersonal relations cause anxiety because of the danger that others represent and the unique dependence that individuals have on one another.
42 Other people can injure us physically and psychologically. They can take what we want or interfere with our plans. We don’t know who represents a threat because we do not know what others are thinking.
Philosophers call this the problem of other minds. While people can tell us what they are thinking, they don’t always do this. We don’t like this! Vampires, though, can read minds. The vampires in the Twilight saga derive additional appeal from this ability. Although they are subject to some limitations, they are all able to see into the minds of others, with one exception: Bella. Bella’s mind operates like a shield. In combination, Bella and the vampires articulate an understandable wish with respect to others. More often than not, we would like to be able to know what others are thinking; however, we do not want them to be able to do the same.
Of course, it is not only the minds of others that compel concern. Others are also anxiety-provoking because of the dependence that we have upon them. Existentialists pay special attention to this reliance and the concern that it arouses. Rather than being only temporary, our dependence on others is permanent. Sartre argued that one of the things we depend on others for is our own identity. Challenging the traditional notion of essential self, he explained how our engagement with others prompts self-reflection, a prerequisite for personal identity, and how personal identity is established initially through the internalization, and later through the critical appropriation, of the objective characterizations that others provide.
Our dependence on others would not be so troubling were it not for the nature of consciousness; namely, the fact that it never feels identical with anything. The ability to dissociate from what we perceive is the foundation of human subjectivity and agency; however, when someone characterizes us as clumsy or talented, fit or fat, they are characterizing us as something fixed, not free. Of course, people cannot help that. They engage with us as the bodies that we are. Nonetheless, because consciousness tends to resist any objective characterization it hasn’t chosen, the fact that others judge us as “ordinary object[s]” is a source of irritation and anxiety.
43Twilight expresses this anxiety clearly. Bella’s adolescent social anxiety, her perennial concern that others will see her as strange or unattractive, is an exaggerated representation of the concern for others that most people experience throughout their lives. Whether agonizing over being the new outsider in Forks, or tripping in gym class, Bella recognizes that her self-esteem hinges on the recognition and validation of others and feels fragile because of this dependence.
A significant part of the fascination we have with vampires comes from the fact that their relationships differ radically from ours. Most vampires are loners; they do not need others the way we do. But vampires do need humans—they need them for food. As Bella remarks after her transformation, her urgent need for Jacob “had vanished . . . a human weakness.”
44 Vampires personify the desire to ascend to “another plane of being” where we are no longer affected by “constant concern” for other people.
45 Others are reduced to means, indeed, to
meals. Vampires do not have to curb their impulses to gain social acceptance. Instead, they embody our desire for “absolute freedom,” our wish to be “master of the situation,” “to get hold of [another person] and reduce [him] to being subject . . . to my freedom.”
46
Tortuous Thirsts
The biting of humans and drinking of blood are alluring for even less savory reasons than social control. Although the violent seizure of human blood is the basis for the horror we associate with vampires, it is also elemental to their appeal. In violating social taboos against murder and cannibalism, vampires personify our desire for an absolute surrender to instinct. Although this wish seems inconsistent with the desire for control, Sartre argued that these divergent wants are anchored in the unhappy nature of human consciousness. As he explained, the possession of reflexive consciousness puts humans in a unique position with respect to their instincts. While we are nothing other than highly evolved animals affected by natural impulses, our consciousness gives us the ability to decide whether we are going to act on those impulses or not. While this makes us free, it places a burden on us.
Because humans often experience freedom as anguish, we often seek to escape our nature by trying to be a pure subject or a pure object, a free agent or a determined thing. Sartre called these efforts “bad faith.” Our desire for absolute control is expressive of the desire to ascend to the level of pure subject. Our desire to surrender to instinct is expressive of our wish to escape our freedom.
Vampires are compelling because they personify command and surrender simultaneously. They represent both “dependence and rapaciousness.”
47 They are at once masters of others
and subjects to their own thirst. In their absolute abandon to appetite, vampires express our latent wish to surrender to instinct. They embody our desire to indulge our aggressive impulses, sate hunger and thirst, and of course, “lose [ourselves]” in pleasures like sex without the awful sting of conscience.
48All guilty pleasures to be sure, but not everything about Twilight is.
The Not-So-Guilty Pleasures of Twilight
The vampires in Twilight do deviate from the archetypal vampire in important ways. They are undeterred by garlic and invulnerable to stakes through the heart. They don’t sleep in coffins—indeed, they don’t sleep at all. Daylight isn’t deadly, either. Instead, vampires glisten in it. Most important, they aren’t exactly monstrous. The Cullens and the Denali clan are kinder, gentler vampires. What distinguishes them most from the stereotypical bloodsucker is the fact that they curb their natural thirst for human blood. This makes the vampires in Twilight especially compelling because it exempts them from being murderers (which lets us feel less guilty about our attraction to them), and because it allows them to personify the ambivalence that we have about our appetites.
As philosophers from the time of Plato have argued, the appetites have the potential to compromise the function of reason. Sartre argued that our appetites and desires are essential aspects of our being, even though consciousness does not normally identify with them. Instead, it tends to see them as alien forces that threaten its autonomy from the inside. We fear losing our selves and our humanity to our bodily impulses.
Vampires are captivating because they simultaneously depict our desire to dominate impulse and our desire to surrender to it. Clearly, vampires articulate the anxiety that we have about appetites. Vampires are beings who are defined by thirst. This thirst robs them of their humanity. They are made monsters by their surrender to impulse, and they personify our latent fear that conceding to appetite will compromise our being and endanger other people.
Twilight illustrates this fear both in the danger that vampires represent to humans and in the concern that Edward and Jacob express regarding Bella’s transformation. Less concerned with death than desire, Bella fears that her transformation will make her a “prisoner to her thirst.”
49 Ironically, she is already captive to her own desire. She repeatedly falls victim to her all-too-human thirst for Edward, throwing herself at him at every turn. We both agonize over and delight in her abandon. At the same time, we are thrilled by Edward’s self-control. Despite his powerful desire for Bella, he exercises restraint, stating that it is “mind over matter.”
50 Edward, rather than being prey to his impulses, embodies our wish to subject our appetites to rational control.
Because the Cullens demonstrate self-restraint and strive not to kill humans, we can love them with less guilt; however, our guilt is not absolved altogether.
Twilight not only illustrates the allure of vampires, it also articulates the ambivalence we have toward them. Meyer uses various means to achieve this end. As in classic works of vampire fiction, she uses gothic imagery, negative characterization, and graphic violence to cast suspicion on her shining subjects. From the onset, Forks is described in ominous terms. From the word itself, which alludes both to a flesh-piercing eating utensil and a point at which a precipitous choice must be made, Forks is presented negatively as an irrevocably gloomy place affected with “omnipresent shade.”
51Similarly, while the vampires are described as beautiful, their beauty is inhuman. Though they possess a powerful physical appeal, they are also disturbing personifications of death. Their complexions are “sallow,” “chalky pale,” and they have dark “bruiselike” shadows under their eyes.
52 Their pallid skin is waxy and “frigid.”
53 Their hearts do not beat, and they do not breathe. They are walking corpses.
Twilight reminds us that vampires are as grim as they are glamorous by having them personify death and having them cause it. One of the most disturbing scenes in the saga occurs in
New Moon where tourists are led like lambs to slaughter. Here, after our horror at vampires has nearly been dispelled by Meyer’s romantic emphasis on Edward, it is resurrected. Meyer also questions the allure of vampires by having her vampires suffer self-loathing. Edward declares himself a “deplorable creature” and cries, “I don’t want to be a monster.”
54 Rosalie agrees, advising Bella to stay human. Bella too expresses doubt. She worries that she might turn into a monster, and this realization reinforces the notion that the life of the vampire isn’t all that tasty.
Once Bitten, Twice Shy: Grave Concerns about Vegetarian Vampires
From an existential point of view, the questioning of the vampire mystique that occurs in
Twilight is incredibly positive. Though anxieties central to the allure of vampires are completely understandable, the desire to forfeit humanity is not one that existentialists would endorse. As Alice Cullen recognizes in existentialist fashion, being human has its problems: “You don’t get to be human again . . . [it is] a once-in-a-lifetime-shot.”
55 Although existence confronts us with challenges and arouses powerful anxiety, it is nonetheless “a perfect free gift,” a fullness that “man [should] never abandon.”
56 Rather than work to undermine the appeal of vampires by fore-grounding their inhumanity,
Twilight asserts their superiority. In
Breaking Dawn, Bella’s initial concerns about being a vampire are dispelled. She awakes as a vampire “in wonder” to a “fairy tale” world with expanded senses and powers.
57 She can run all day and have sex all night. Instead of torturous thirst, Bella experiences “ecstasy in [her] new life.”
58 She states, “I’d been so ready to string along my human time . . . I should have guessed . . . [being a vampire is] better.”
59Being a vampire offers Bella complete wish fulfillment, particularly an escape from being weak and human and from the “years of mediocrity” that she assumes being human entails.
60 She achieves eternal life and love. She has a child and saves her species. She equals or supersedes in ability all of the vampires who used to personify her desires. She matches Edward’s undying love and surpasses Carlisle’s self-control, Esme’s maternal devotion, Rosalie’s beauty, Emmett’s strength, Alice’s loyalty, and Jasper’s power over others. She doesn’t feel the need to kill humans, so she isn’t even a monster. Looking at Bella, it would seem that there isn’t anything bad about trading in your humanity for fangs.
From the existential perspective, the delight Bella expresses at becoming a vampire is the problem with Twilight. It is a romance, not a horror story. With its captivating tale of star-crossed lovers, it seduces us into loving vampires more than we should. It casts Edward as the innocent and self-sacrificing Romeo, rather than as a compelling, but vicious monster. Twilight tips the scales in favor of vampires and fosters an unhealthy distaste for human life instead of showing a balance between the two.
So what is the problem with liking vampires? After all, they’re not real. They don’t really bite. If our engagement with vampire fiction not only entertains, but also helps us dispel anxiety, then it is all for the good. But does
Twilight help us manage our anxiety, or reinforce it? While the anxieties we have about our condition are natural, Meyer’s decision to celebrate Bella’s forfeiture of humanity reinforces the notion that the human condition is flawed. Unlike other works that emphasize the desperate solitude and moral corruption of vampires,
Twilight romanticizes them. Rather than foster the “ambivalent thrill” that contemporary philosopher Cynthia Freeland describes as having the potential to inspire a critical examination of our fascination with monsters,
Twilight leaves no bitter taste.
61 Rather than encouraging us to appreciate what we have and make changes within our power, it encourages an escapist fantasy that degrades human existence.
The existential philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844- 1900) argued that the tendency to demean existence is born of “weariness with life” and an “instinct for revenge” on that which fatigues us.
62 Although life can make us weary, when this weariness is expressed as “hostil[ity],” it stands in dangerous “opposition to life.”
63 Nietzsche argued that we need to affirm life rather than oppose it.
Twilight is problematic because it demeans life and trades in impossible dreams that have the potential to cost us our lives. Not violently, of course. They bleed us slowly by directing our attention and appreciation from the life we have. Rather than alleviate anxiety, they aggravate it by encouraging our captivation with unachievable ideals.
Unlike Bella, we don’t have the option of awaking to an eternal life or experiencing undying romance. As far as we know, we have only one life, and that life and our loves are painfully finite. For this reason, it might be wise for us to abandon our wish for eternal life and love, and realize that the aspects of the human condition that we sometimes suffer from are the things that make us what we are. We appreciate time by virtue of our lack of it, are sensitive because of our vulnerability, compassionate because of our dependence, and strong because of our fragility. While we can be monsters, we are more monstrous when we ignore our humanity than when we embrace it. Because they arouse and exacerbate our appetite for inhumanity, the humanistic vampires of Twilight are more deeply seductive, and ultimately more dangerous, than the vicious variety.
NOTES
1 Martin Heidegger,
Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 177.
4 Jean-Paul Sartre,
Being and Nothingness, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984), p. 796.
5 Stephenie Meyer,
Twilight (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), p. 476.
6 Stephenie Meyer,
Eclipse (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007), pp. 109, 269.
7 Stephenie Meyer,
New Moon (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006), pp. 10, 521.
9 Stephenie Meyer,
Breaking Dawn (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), p. 7.
12 Breaking Dawn, p. 673.
14 Heidegger,
Being and Nothingness, pp. 409, 429.
16 Albert Camus, “An Absurd Reasoning,” in
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. by Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage International, 1991), p. 13.
17 Joseph Epstein, “The Perpetual Adolescent,” in
The Writer’s Presence, ed. by Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan (New York: Bedford, St. Martin’s Press, 2009), p. 368.
18 Eclipse, pp. 119, 121.
27 Ibid., p. 310, and
Breaking Dawn, p. 190.
28 Ibid., p. 92, and
New Moon, p. 539.
37 Breaking Dawn, p. 422.
39 Breaking Dawn, p. 466.
41 Daniel Harris, “Celebrity Bodies,” in
The Writer’s Presence, ed. by Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan (New York: Bedford, St. Martin’s Press, 2009), p. 427.
43 Breaking Dawn, p. 320.
46 Ibid., pp. 355, 477, 480.
47 Susan Sceats, “Oral Sex: Vampiric Transgression and the Writing of Angela Carter,” in
Tulsa Studies of Women’s Literature 2, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 107.
48 Sartre,
Being and Nothingness, p. 491.
52 Ibid., pp. 10, 19, 180.
54 Twilight, pp. 187, 277.
56 Camus,
Nausea, pp. 131, 133.
57 Breaking Dawn, pp. 386, 479.
61 Cynthia Freeland, “Realist Horror,” in
Aesthetics: The Big Questions, ed. by Carolyn Korsmeyer (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), p. 287.
62 Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols: or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, trans. by Duncan Large (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 29, 68.