SO THE WOMAN YOU LOVE HAS THE HOTS FOR A VAMPIRE. WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT YOU?
EACH MONTH, THOUSANDS OF WOMEN GO TO FORKS, WASHINGTON, TO INDULGE THEIR PASSION FOR EDWARD CULLEN OF TWILIGHT. IF YOUR WIFE OR GIRLFRIEND IS ONE OF THEM, YOU BETTER START BUYING FLOWERS.
Jude Larrimore has come here—to this sleepy Pacific Northwest town with a population of 3,175—looking for love. Which doesn't mean that she's prowling for a fling. She has been comfortably married for 17 years to a guy named Matt, and though Matt is back home in Colorado this September weekend, he was game enough to tag along on one of her previous Twilight pilgrimages to Forks, Washington, and he is such a gentleman that he has accompanied her four times to see the movie. On her own, Larrimore has seen Twilight 28 times, she estimates. She is, to put it mildly, obsessed with it. Obsessed with Stephenie Meyer's four best-selling Twilight books; obsessed with the high school romance between the two main characters, vampire Edward Cullen and human Bella Swan; and obsessed, on a deeper level, with what that all-encompassing, skin-tingling, pulse-quickening romance tells us about love and how it's supposed to feel.
"It reminds me of first meeting my husband and falling in love," she says. She's sitting at a long table in the auditorium of Forks Congregational Church on Spartan Avenue, sipping from a souvenir coffee thermos that says BITE ME! "Of course, that's changed, because everything changes, but it's nice to be reminded. That devotion. The appetite—and I don't mean just for sex, but for the other person. Remember when that half hour before that person came by was the longest of the day?" She smiles, sighs. "I read somewhere that only a vampire can love you forever."
Larrimore is 38. She comes across as calm and sane, which cannot be said of everyone in the room. The church auditorium is full of Twilight fanatics from around the world—women, mostly, who have traveled from the South, from the Midwest, from as far away as Australia to see, firsthand, the fog-banked burg where the Twilight saga takes place—and their excitability level is so high that it's not uncommon to hear them break into unprompted gasps, giggles, and squeals.
Traditionally those are the sounds of teenage girls, but what's striking about the majority of fans who have trudged to the Olympic Peninsula to celebrate the Forks Chamber of Commerce's Stephenie Meyer Day (which in fact consumes an entire weekend) is that they haven't been teenagers since the heyday of Benetton and Bananarama. Most of the folks lining up for Bella Swan's birthday breakfast this morning are wives and mothers, dutiful employees and corporate executives, people you live next door to—grown women—and more than a few are acting like someone slipped a psychotropic agent into their Bonnie Bell lip gloss.
Of course, the man they are swooning over does not exist. Twilight has taken their hearts and glands hostage because of a poetic, protective fiction known as Edward Cullen, a love-addled bloodsucker who is played, in the first Twilight movie and its upcoming sequel, New Moon, by young British heartthrob Robert Pattinson.
"I dream about him," says Tanna Noble, a 46-year-old Twihard from Eatonville, Washington. Dangling from her neck is an ancient-looking pendant that represents the Cullen family crest. "I dream explicit dreams about Edward. You can't put down what I dream about Edward. It is very, very erotic. It's not Rob Pattinson. It's Edward."
"Rob is just Rob," chimes in her friend Lynn Robbins, a 46-year-old mother of two who has made the trip from Virginia. "It's not about Rob at all." Tanna and Lynn first met electronically, on a Twilight fan site where Tanna, using the pseudonym "Cynder," has logged more than 7,200 posts. Right now, Lynn is wearing topaz-colored contact lenses that cover her normally blue-green eyes, because—well, it's complicated to explain, but in the first Twilight book, Bella tells Edward that her new favorite gemstone is topaz because of the color of his eyes. Twilight fanatics are as precise with their details as Civil War reenactors.
"I would love to be bitten by Edward," Tanna says. "He's just everything. Oh, my God. It's O.M.E.—oh, my Edward! Not a day goes by that I don't think about Twilight. I think about Twilight as much as men think about sex."
Ask these two friends why so many women their age have latched onto Twilight, and they answer in unison: "Forbidden love." Then ask them if Edward bears a resemblance to their husbands.
"Not at all," Lynn says.
"Nooo," says Tanna. "No way."
They go on to talk about something that becomes a running theme during this weekend—so much so, in fact, that a casual visitor might come to the conclusion that all that vampire stuff is little more than a red herring. What Stephenie Meyer Day really boils down to is a cloaked symposium on the state of American marriage. In other words: Gentlemen, your wives have something they want to tell you. The polite way to put it is that the pressures and demands of running a home in the 21st century have a way of siphoning off the platelets from even the most red-blooded of romantic unions. To be blunt: Life is a grind, and our wives are bored shitless. Edward Cullen has, for millions of passion-starved better halves worldwide, become the undead embodiment of everything the contemporary schlub seems to have shed: danger, poetry, strength, speed, eternal devotion, and an insatiable hunger for the jugular. Meanwhile, the defanged mortal males of Earth, their rumps firmly planted in front of the flat-screen and their breath faintly fragrant of Pirate's Booty, have become, thanks to Edward, one big collective cuckold.
"A lot of guys tell me they think Edward's a stalker," says Kristina Hart, a 30-year-old Boeing employee. "I wouldn't mind being stalked by Edward." She's wearing a T-shirt that says, "Edward can BUST my headboard, BITE my pillows, and BRUISE my body any day!"
Apparently it's not Edward Cullen who's been living in the dark. It's you.
The topic of Edward Cullen has, inevitably, touched off an endless and tumultuous dialogue on the Internet. He has become what Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Titanicwas in the late nineties: a gleaming ideal (of what women want a man to be) and a snarling rebuke (because so few dudes even come close). There are YouTube symposia for men such as "7 Lessons Guys Can Learn from Edward Cullen." There are swoony yet self-lacerating posts along the lines of Natalie Cottrell's "Why Edward Cullen is bad news," in which the Texas blogger writes that "upon reflection, I've realized that all the same reasons I salivate every time his beautiful, pale mug comes on screen are the same reasons that I continue to be disappointed by guys." An Australian scholar named Lisa Bode frets that Edward is draining the lifeblood from relationships in the nonfictional realm of dull, flabby mortals. Pointing to Facebook groups like "Twilight has ruined any chance I have at a realistic relationship," she's said women are "idealizing Edward to the point where real men can't compete."
Or can they? Cristina Nehring, the author of a new book called A Vindication of Love, suggests that too many men have bought into a stereotype of maleness that is, to a lot of women, an automatic buzz-kill. "I don't think most men are unromantic by nature," she says. "They are unromantic by training. They are taught that they are supposed to be rapacious animals with healthy self-esteem and a wham-bam-slam sexual nature. This was not always the case. In various historical moments, a man was thought to be as masculine as he was emotional." It's not a shock that married women are melting for Edward Cullen, Nehring says, considering that "the men they are stuck with are red-blooded, healthy, go-getter guys who are not very sentimental, not very hard-to-get or thoughtful, and the sex life they go home to is probably as dutiful as mounting an exercycle at the gym after work."
More than anything, Nehring argues, men and women of the Oprah era have been forced to memorize the mantra that a "healthy" relationship has to be nice, stabilizing, and safe. "It seems to me that the passion for Twilight is a rebellion against the reasonable romance women are taught to practice today," she says. "What's missing, most likely, is ardor, idealism, and risk. We live in an age not merely of safe sex, but ofsafe love. Romance in our day has become a safe, sane, subordinated activity—the sense of the forbidden, the over-the-top, the sublime is gone. And what could be less safe, after all, than sex with a man whose stated instinct is to kill you?"
After breakfast in the church auditorium, fans start lining up across the street for a tour of Forks High School. Christina Nelson, a 43-year-old mother of two from Salt Lake City, bounces down the linoleum-tiled hallways carrying a copy of Twilight under her arm. This is her third time in Forks. The book looks like it might start crumbling at the spine—for months, she's been underlining or highlighting one passage after another with Kabbalist ardor. "I wanted to find out," she says, "why so many of us over 30 are crazy about this book. I started to analyze it. I think men care more than they tell us. About the women they love. Edward tells her. He expresses it." Here, in the middle of the hallway, she flips through the pages and pulls out lines that seem to capture two people, Edward and Bella, giving each other a pathological level of undivided attention. "He looks. . . . She looks. . . . He looks at her," Nelson says. "So then when that icy finger goes down her collarbone, you go, 'Ooooooo.' "
"I just got a chill," Jude Larrimore says.
"I have makeup on," interjects another woman. "No tears today. I have been emotionally overwhelmed by all this." There are empathetic nods.
"We were just saying that there's a little bit of Edward in every guy. You just have to look for it," Nelson says. "Imagine having somebody who loves you so much he reads everything you read."
Yeah, imagine. Many of the women here admit that their husbands haven't bothered to glance at a single page of the Twilight books. Several say their mates consider the whole phenomenon "ridiculous."
"My husband is totally unamused by this," Noble says. "He says Edward is a 17-year-old fictional character. But that's not how I think of it. I say he's a 108-year-old character."
"He doesn't get it," Robbins says. "That's what he told me yesterday. But with life so crazy, this is my escape— Twilight. Edward. Men get into that comfortable rut once the relationship is there. Life gets so busy&" She trails off, then adds, "Men and women both, they lose that need to impress each other."
She has a point. (Attending a vampire festival brings new meaning to the phrase morbid obesity.) But at least a handful of men are perceptive enough to take note.
Consider Tom Peebles, a 40-year-old pilot with Alaska Airlines who's here with his wife, Mikey, and their daughters Lynsey and Leigha. "I just read Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. I'm learning about the huge difference between men and women," Peebles says. "It's definitely emotions. Edward listens." Dudes ought to consider giving that a try, he says. "It's actually fun, if you learn to do it. Embrace it." A few seconds later, a Forks tour guide flips open a school locker and tells everyone that she's found oh my God! a love letter from Bella to Edward. The group gasps and rushes in for a closer look. The letter says: Dear Edward, I love you. Your eyes are stars in the sky. I want your fangs in my neck and for you to suck out my blood.
Or consider Mario Taravella, a 30-year-old account manager for a Tacoma aluminum company who seems to have spent some time absorbing Edward Cullen's guidance on how to turn yourself into a goth sex god. Nearly alone among the husbands here in Forks, Taravella is truly enjoying himself. He's dressed all in black. He's got a studded belt buckle. He's skinny. His T-shirt says YOUR SCENT IS LIKE A DRUG TO ME—a line straight out of the story. "I actually have a pair of fangs in my suitcase," he says. "Twilight is different from other vampire movies. Not to sound too girly, but I liked the love-story aspect. Edward's like an old-fashioned gentleman. He's got strength, speed, and a charm that women can't resist."
If the Twilight saga taps into a vein of female fantasy and male failure, then Forks—smack-dab in the part of the country that gave us Kurt Cobain and Twin Peaks—truly is the perfect setting for it. Forks is, in a way, an emasculated town. It used to be a timber hub; right on Main Street there's a commemorative slab of Sitka spruce nearly 12 feet in diameter and marked by a sign that says: WELCOME TO FORKS: LOGGING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. You can't miss the phallic symbolism. In the 1970s, thousands of local loggers lost their jobs after environmentalists used the Endangered Species Act to protect the habitat of the spotted owl. In the years that followed, Forks disintegrated into something of a ghost town; if men were lucky, they got jobs as guards at the local prison. With Twilight, though, Stephenie Meyer has miraculously revitalized the place. The motels are full, the restaurants are packed until late at night, and nearly every shop on Main Street makes a killing from Twilight souvenirs. David Cook, 20, who spent last summer working at the town's chamber of commerce, estimates that the guest book in the tourism center racked up 60,000 signatures during the past year alone. The entire local economy hinges on what you might call Edsploitation.
Instead of logging, Forks has love. And the smart guys, it appears, are the ones who see the global implications in that shift. Jim Roden, a 37-year-old Navy reservist from Oregon who's about to ship off to Afghanistan, made a pilgrimage to Forks with his two young sons and his 33-year-old wife, Dawn. This whole Edward thing—Roden's given it some serious thought. "The seduction aspect of it, that forbidden romance, that hint of danger and intrigue—most of the girls dig that stuff, and most of the guys are not able to pan it out on a daily basis," he says. "It makes you think: Why can't I ante up and do those kinds of things? Have I slipped a little? Have I gotten a little too comfortable? When was the last time I bought her flowers? Or took her out? When was the last time I was spontaneous?"
Roden's on a roll. "Being married doesn't give you a free pass to let yourself go. If it takes some silly little girls' book to remind you, that's kind of sad, but you've got to keep plugging away at it," he says. "And an occasional bite on the neck can't hurt."Source
xoxo
Carrie
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