ill LYTeracy -- Twi-hards Versus Fanboys

Round about the time NEW MOON opened last year, there was a meme going around on several movie sites, in anticipation of, and reaction to, the mockery that TWILIGHT tends to take in the fanboy community. It went a little something like this:

“Fanboy geeks are both hypocritical and sexist to bash TWILIGHT fandom, as they themselves like stuff which is equally stupid [TRANSFORMERS and SAW were frequently cited as examples] and are only mad at this because it’s something girls are into.”

I am not every fanboy (that should be the title of a new Whitney Houston song, right there). But I have a lot of problems with that thesis.

We’ll dispense with what I think is the most superficial TWILIGHT criticism first, which is that Comic-Con now sells out so fast in large part due to girls who are there only for TWILIGHT, and that this is an inconvenience for hardcore, old-school conventioneers, especially when – for example – this year the AVATAR panel followed the TWILIGHT presentation in hall H, and fans who wanted half a chance to see it had to first sit through TWILIGHT, if they even got in because TWILIGHT fans camped out in line for three days.

Two words: Boo hoo. All the above is true, but it’s been true of other things at Comic-Con as well. I don’t always want to have to sit through Kevin Smith free-form riffing for an hour just to get a first look at Ryan Reynolds as Green Lantern, but that’s how things go. Hey, old-schoolers: remember when they didn’t have the events in Hall H, but rather in the upstairs ballroom, and to use the bathroom, you had to leave and then get back in line? Yep, I sure do. I too preferred it when Neil Gaiman was the preferred gateway drug for girl-geeks rather than Stephenie Meyer, but you only have two more years of this, maybe three if they split BREAKING DAWN in half.

But back to the “fanboys are sexist” bit. Fanboys can certainly be sexist, and I’ve been accused of it more than once, usually by my mother. That isn’t why they don’t like TWILIGHT, though again, I can only really speak for myself here. I paid to see TWILIGHT opening day, thinking it had half a chance of being good. I’d never read the books, knew only that it was a super-popular vampire love story aimed at teenage girls, and honestly liked the general idea of sullen vampire teens skulking around the Pacific Northwest. Also, just so I can put forward my non-girl-stuff-hating bona fides...I paid to see the SEX AND THE CITY movie, and I enjoyed it. When Kristin Davis told that one guy she cursed the day he was born, I cheered alongside all the ladies.

As for TWILIGHT, when it started off as a high school drama, I was okay with it. Then all the vampire stuff started. And this is why we don’t like it, folks; the vampire stuff is really stupid. You can read my whole review if you want, but in addition to stuff that everyone talks about, like the sparkling, there’s the fact that each vampire has different powers on a seemingly arbitrary basis, and the fact that they split up to run away from the evil vampire only to finally gang up on him and rip him to pieces, which could have just been done in the first place to save a lot of running.

Girls loved Anne Rice’s vampires too, and it seems to me that we guys were pretty okay with that, because she actually thought through everything that existed in her world.

Now, can you make an argument that hey, Bram Stoker’s original DRACULA featured some stupid and arbitrary rules too? Yes, I’ll give you that you could: there is no decent explanation given as to why Dracula cannot cross running water, save old superstitions about demons. We give Stoker a pass on that because the vampire iconography was still being developed, and because back then superstitions still ruled the day...it was the 19^th century, remember. But once the rules are established, they are consistent and followed.

Which brings us to our other fanboy examples: are TRANSFORMERS and SAW as stupid in their own way as TWILIGHT is in its? I am biased as a fan of both, but I’m gonna try to look at it as objectively as possible.

TRANSFORMERS – which we will use here to refer only to the Michael Bay movies, though certainly the property is a lot bigger than that – is, first off, pretty much DESPISED by fanboys. Don’t believe me? Read any AICN talkback on the matter, or ask Devin Faraci. Viewers of the old cartoons cannot stand that Optimus Prime now has flames painted on, or that Devastator has two giant wrecking balls hanging from his crotch area...not that the old cartoons didn’t feature massive contradictions to begin with, as they were just there to sell toys. The people who go to these are mainstream moviegoers, much more so than self-proclaimed geeks.

But even as a fan of the movies, I can see that they’re not exactly serious. Every character is a stereotype, the humor is crude and broad, wink-wink in-jokes are constant, and never for a moment does it feel remotely like a real world. These movies are at heart super-expensive versions of “Godzilla versus...” flicks, which also tended not to have particularly sensible plots or deep characters. If they work for you, they are fairly mindless fun. If they don’t, they’re crappy giant wastes of money. I don’t hear EITHER descriptor used by girls who go to see TWILIGHT...do you?

SAW, which I am strongly on record as a fan of, is actually most commonly used as a metaphorical whipping boy in the fanboy community, e.g. “I like real horror movies, but not this modern torture porn!” I’m not going to vehemently get behind the whole saga, as 4 and 5 have major weaknesses. But 1-3, I can certainly take a stab at defending relative to TWILIGHT. See, SAW asks you to make one, and only one, narrative leap: you have to believe that John Kramer, a.k.a. Jigsaw, is so brilliant that he can anticipate his opponents’ every move, and do it so well that he can set in motion multiple plans to be executed upon his death by less intelligent acolytes, which nonetheless will all still work.

This is a stretch, and one you probably wouldn’t accept in, say, a Mike Leigh film. I think in a horror movie it is an excusable stretch. Now, how many stretches does TWILIGHT ask of you? Vampires and werewolves, okay; allowable under the horror movie stretch rule. Vampires glisten like diamonds in the sun. Vampires all have different powers. Hundred-year-old vampire goes to high school and nobody notices he never goes through puberty. Let’s separate to escape the bad guy, except when we all gang up on him we can kill him. Vampires avoid the sun, yet live in a house with huge windows. And this is just movie one. Shall I go on? I’m not gonna, but I probably could.

SAW and TWILIGHT do both get comparable accusations from their haters that they are pompously moralizing in a phony way. TWILIGHT, in that it’s written by a Mormon and favors abstinence before marriage, and SAW in that Jigsaw has a philosophical justification for why he does what he does, that more or less boils down to “carpe diem.” Except, of course, that Jigsaw’s is transparently flawed: his idea is to help people and cure them of their flaws by forcing them into horrific survival traps...the problem is that since none of them ultimately survives, his plan is a failure on a moral/philosophical level...and that, I would argue, gives part three an emotional resonance. As he finally dies, he realizes that the people he hoped would pass his test are all going to fail. TWILIGHT, as I understand it, ultimately ends pretty happily for almost everyone.

Now, maybe I’m choosing the wrong fanboy examples. Maybe, you say, I should be talking about STAR TREK, or AVATAR. Perhaps. But let us now come to the biggest difference between Twi-hards and Fanboys...

Twi-hards unabashedly love their stuff, faults and all. Fanboys, however, are relentless nitpickers (my friend Brian G. is the only exception to this rule)

If Twi-hards were truly the equivalent of fanboys, here’s how they would actually be...

-50% would be busy working out the actual fictional science behind sparkling skin and arbitrariness of powers, not to mention debating the paradox of figuring out what you’re going to do next by looking into the future.

-10% would spend every waking hour arguing why, point-by-point, the Twilight vampires are okay, but Anne Rice’s vampires are better.

-20% would not only argue Edward versus Jacob in a fight, but also every other combination of characters possible.

-15% would begin every online post with the phrase “Catherine Hardwicke raped my childhood!” or “DAMN YOU, CHRIS WEITZ!”

-And only the remaining 5% would sit there and enjoy it for what it is.

 

Hell, maybe they have it better than us after all.