Twilight has a major following among teen and tween girls (like my 12 year old niece who spent all Thanksgiving plowing through the books or my 17 year old niece who went to a midnight showing when it opened and told me it was “incredible”), but I think it’s also a movie that boys and fathers can learn something from.
In case you don’t know, Twilight is a high school romance in which a human girl and a vampire boy fall in love with each other. Although very romantic (in the gothic novel sense of the word), the film is being seen as about, or at least a plea for, abstinence, although the act being abstained from is sucking the blood of another human being.
What can dads learn from this aside from the fact that pepper spray is ineffective against sexual assailants, if they happen to be vampires? Well, it was summed up for me when the deathly pale paramour, Edward, was explaining why he didn’t want to give in to his powerful urges and drain the lovely Bella Swan’s body of life. He puts it rather bluntly, “I don’t want to be a monster.”
He meant it very literally, but I heard in this not a struggle with the creatures of the night, but a struggle with his emerging male sexuality. The movie gives us a couple creepy glimpses into the monstrous side of male sexual energy, first in the form of a group of guys who accost Bella in a dark parking lot, and later in the guise of a psycho vampire/stalker who wants to torture and kill her while he videotapes the whole thing. True to conventional narrative form, she is rescued in both cases by Edward, but in the end, the men he confronts actually embody the violence and aggression he is so afraid of unleashing on the woman he loves.
Our job as fathers is to make sure that our sons don’t become monsters. Obviously, men can be extremely monstrous (consult any morning’s newspaper or any given history book for examples), but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about helping our sons become good, strong, compassionate, and thoughtful human beings. I think we can do this by talking with them about our experiences, our struggles, and our mistakes. We also do this by teaching them that it’s not a question of being ashamed or afraid of our feelings or our (occasionally) jack-ass-ish behavior and impulses.
Instead, it’s about learning to listen to our feelings and the feelings of others as we become “men” in the best sense of the word: responsible, courageous, and wise.