It wasn't until last year, I was sitting in Dance examining this girls shirt that had printed on it, "Edward, I'll be your vampiress." I throughout the next month or so, I had no idea what the hell that meant! I just thought the girl had some weird inside joke with her friends and they all had T-shirts made a Valleyfair. Then one day, I was at work and the topic of some vampire movie came up, my place of employment was just beating the pulp out of this movie "Twilight". I made the mistake of asking what they were talking about. That's when I got an earfull. I worked with an English/Theatre major who did a study on the books that the movie was enspired by, for her Popculture class. She explained to me that the books were about this girl, Bella, who just can't seem to get herself out of this abusive relationship with a vampire, Edward. She said that Bella was absolutely stupid, because she was so unbelievably in love with Edward who just kept jerking her around and who didn't treat her very well. Then others started joining in on the conversation. The next girl mentioned that these books were sending really bad messages to girls, like "go ahead and be miserably infatuated with a vampire (boy) and let him be mean to you, just whatever you do don't leave him!" I forgot about it, until I had plans to go to the movies and saw that it was playing, intrigued by all the hoopla, I dragged my husband into the theatre to watch Twilight. After leaving the movie, all that I really thought about it was that the actress was really bad and I felt like I missed a lot of information. I had to read the books.
After finishing the books, I agreed, the books really did portray the character of Bella being treated quite badly and the girl definitely wasn't someone who you would want your child to look up to because she displayed really low self esteem. On the other hand, I thought maybe my friends were being too feminist. Go ahead and hate the books because there were many spelling and grammatical errors, but we all make mistakes and why didn't people previewing the books catch these glitches? Setting my feminist self aside, I could see how it was so easy to fall in love with Edward. He was sweet and smart and of course, good looking. I also thought that maybe Bella was somebody that these girls could really connect to, maybe they needed to have somebody they could really compare with considering society today is ruining self esteem and body image. I also thought that Edward was a little pushy and numb at times, but he always had a reason, which was that he knew it wasn't right for him to be with a human and he didn't want to risk her life.
I have a really hard time choosing a side, so I don't. I'm neutral!
No comments:
Post a Comment