Spring Break
Guest columns
Twilight has no sex, no drugs, little kissing. Yet it still provides romance.
By: Cate Morris
Issue date: 3/5/09 Section: Opinion
With Spring Break just around the corner, I have been marking off the days on my calendar, counting down until the much needed week of freedom from school with building excitement. As much as it pains me to admit, Spring Break is not the only reason I am excited about mid-March. On March 21, the "Twilight" DVD will be released.
Unlike most of my girlfriends, I did not immediately jump on the "Twilight" bandwagon, sure that no book could really fill the hole that had come with the end of the "Harry Potter" series. Consequently, I was not particularly excited to learn of the upcoming movie based on the book. However, I still ended up - with the rest of the female population - at the theater at midnight on the opening night, enticed there by a free ticket from my friend's sorority. I have not seen so many girls excited over such a wholesome movie since "Pride and Prejudice." Then again, maybe never.
The movie might have been draped in the vogue of vampirism, but beyond that plot detail was a story completely traditional in its values. There was no sex, no drugs and a mere two kisses throughout the almost two-hour movie. Yet the movie (and the book) still has girls in a stranglehold of love and passion, seemingly blind to the abstinence promoted by the movie, their vision fogged by all of that sexual tension. It is always a hopeful sight to me, in the MTV-polluted, cavalier-attitude world that we live in, to see traditional morality make a comeback. Only heaven knew a book with no-sex-before-marriage morality could look so darn sexy.
"'Twilight' centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her," wrote Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic, " and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that." What a concept in a society where love usually looks so cheap on the big screen, with the main characters usually sleeping together at least before the end of the movie and often shortly after the end of the first date. So the fact that the characters of "Twilight" managed to make it through the first movie (and from what I hear three and a half books) without loosing their virginity is quite a feat.
Yet the real triumph is the success of the series. In a culture where mainstream entertainment has been overrun with songs like "I Kissed a Girl" getting the most air time, and a pregnant teenager as the heroine of a blockbuster movie, it is all I can do to not stand up and shout for the old-school romance, reworked into a bestseller for today.
Unlike most of my girlfriends, I did not immediately jump on the "Twilight" bandwagon, sure that no book could really fill the hole that had come with the end of the "Harry Potter" series. Consequently, I was not particularly excited to learn of the upcoming movie based on the book. However, I still ended up - with the rest of the female population - at the theater at midnight on the opening night, enticed there by a free ticket from my friend's sorority. I have not seen so many girls excited over such a wholesome movie since "Pride and Prejudice." Then again, maybe never.
The movie might have been draped in the vogue of vampirism, but beyond that plot detail was a story completely traditional in its values. There was no sex, no drugs and a mere two kisses throughout the almost two-hour movie. Yet the movie (and the book) still has girls in a stranglehold of love and passion, seemingly blind to the abstinence promoted by the movie, their vision fogged by all of that sexual tension. It is always a hopeful sight to me, in the MTV-polluted, cavalier-attitude world that we live in, to see traditional morality make a comeback. Only heaven knew a book with no-sex-before-marriage morality could look so darn sexy.
"'Twilight' centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her," wrote Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic, " and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that." What a concept in a society where love usually looks so cheap on the big screen, with the main characters usually sleeping together at least before the end of the movie and often shortly after the end of the first date. So the fact that the characters of "Twilight" managed to make it through the first movie (and from what I hear three and a half books) without loosing their virginity is quite a feat.
Yet the real triumph is the success of the series. In a culture where mainstream entertainment has been overrun with songs like "I Kissed a Girl" getting the most air time, and a pregnant teenager as the heroine of a blockbuster movie, it is all I can do to not stand up and shout for the old-school romance, reworked into a bestseller for today.
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