Have you seen Twilight?

While I'm still putting together the next entries in my grocery store series, I thought I'd share a few excerpts of a review in The Atlantic of "Twilight," the teen vampire romance movie my two girls and seemingly every other one of their female friends has seen. No teen I've talked to thinks the movie was as good as the book, but they liked the movie anyway.

After hearing what my girls said about the movie (they don't seem to be caught up in the Twilight fever some of their friends are), and after reading this review, I'm still not sure what to think of the book or movie. Even though these quotes make the author appear to think the movie is salacious or erotic, she actually seems to say elsewhere in her review that the movie harkens back to an earlier time of clear moral choices and stances, and provides a sort of alternate scenario of teen romantic relationships as mutually committed pacts instead of just quick "hook-ups." I don't plan on seeing "Twilight" myself, so I'll rely on any of you who do to tell me if she's got it right.

Twilight is fantastic. It’s a page-turner that pops out a lurching, frightening ending I never saw coming. It’s also the first book that seemed at long last to rekindle something of the girl-reader in me. In fact, there were times when the novel—no work of literature, to be sure, no school for style; hugged mainly to the slender chests of very young teenage girls, whose regard for it is on a par with the regard with which just yesterday they held Hannah Montana—stirred something in me so long forgotten that I felt embarrassed by it. Reading the book, I sometimes experienced what I imagine long-married men must feel when they get an unexpected glimpse at pornography: slingshot back to a world of sensation that, through sheer force of will and dutiful acceptance of life’s fortunes, I thought I had subdued. The Twilight series is not based on a true story, of course, but within it is the true story, the original one. Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven’t seen that tale in a girls’ book in a very long time. And it’s selling through the roof.

The erotic relationship between Bella and Edward is what makes this book—and the series—so riveting to its female readers. There is no question about the exact nature of the physical act that looms over them. Either they will do it or they won’t, and afterward everything will change for Bella, although not for Edward. Nor is the act one that might result in an equal giving and receiving of pleasure. If Edward fails—even once—in his great exercise in restraint, he will do what the boys in the old pregnancy-scare books did to their girlfriends: he will ruin her. More exactly, he will destroy her, ripping her away from the world of the living and bringing her into the realm of the undead. If a novel of today were to sound these chords so explicitly but in a nonsupernatural context, it would be seen (rightly) as a book about “abstinence,” and it would be handed out with the tracts and bumper stickers at the kind of evangelical churches that advocate the practice as a reasonable solution to the age-old problem of horny young people.

From “What Girls Want” by Caitlin Flanagan, Atlantic December 2008. Go here to read the full article.