Last night I watched Twilight for the first time ever. About the series of books and movies, I’d only known what I’d heard second-hand from friends or read online and I’d had a general idea of the adoration and the criticism that the series has inspired. Frankly, I’d been trying to go as long as humanly possible without being exposed to these particular narratives, but it was a Wednesday night and Jersey Shore wasn’t on.¹

For me, finally watching Twilight didn’t really confirm or dispel anything. Yes, it was bad. No, it wasn’t as bad as everyone seems to think it is. But then again, I haven’t read the books, so maybe it’s worse than I’m aware. But, in my extremely brief online search, here is the best criticism I found of the series of novels:

Good books deal with themes of longing and loneliness, sexual passion and human frailty, alienation and fear just as the Twilight books do. But [good books] do so by engaging us with complexities of feeling and subtleties of character, expressed in language that rises above banal mediocrity. Their reward is something more than just an escape into banal mediocrity. We deserve something better to get hooked on.

To wit, the most popular definition of twihard on Urban Dictionary: “[O]bsessive people … who are in love with fictional characters and wouldn’t know a good book if it punched them in the face.” All of this echoes the sentiments of a fantastic interview with David Foster Wallace about his essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction. In it, Wallace perhaps offers a little bit of hope to the fiction that Stephanie Meyer is offering:

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering … We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.

Even “low” art can be redemptive and, whether you believe it’s low art or not, the Twilight series can elicit a feeling of redemption. But I think what distinguishes high art from low art a lot of the time (because the difference sometimes can be unclear) is whether the art encourages you to get outside of yourself and be uncomfortable rather than retreat inside of yourself and imagine a better life—good art forces you to accept that your life is perfect in its imperfectness, rather than the other way around. Say what you want about its love story, but at the end of the day Twilight seems to me only to encourage the viewers/readers to imagine what their lives would be like with Edward, or Jacob, or even Bella. There’s no empathy there for any real-world parallels you might have to these people in your life, probably because these characters are expressly written to be unrealistically gorgeous and romanticized.

So then, besides the whole imprinting on toddlers thing, what’s the real problem with Twilight? Take it away, David.

But now realize that … most kinds of “low” art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.

1. Actually, I primarily watched it because the girlf wouldn’t stay awake for my movie (the hilarious 1984 comedy, Top Secret!), but she seemed pretty chipper for some R-Pattz. ↩