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Shedding Light on Women’s Response to “Twilight”

In the last two decades, there has been a growing recognition that popular culture may be a rich source of educational material for medical students, psychiatric residents, and other mental health professionals (1–3). Films, in particular, have become the storehouse for the psychological images of our time (4). They serve many of the same functions for today’s audiences that tragedy once served for 5th-century Greeks (5). Popular works of literature and film often owe their appeal to the portrayal of universal psychodynamic themes. Bettelheim (6) analyzed classic fairy tales and suggested that characters in these stories “personify and illustrate inner conflicts” of their readers. He observed that a story need not be realistic to resonate with readers, because it is the internal struggles of the characters that are of principal concern, rather than external events. Moreover, filmmakers may also articulate the underlying cultural mythology of the era, specifically, Levi-Strauss’s (7) notion that myths are transformations of fundamental conflicts or contradictions that, in reality, cannot be resolved. Students in the mental health disciplines can sometimes learn as much about what it means to be human from studying popular films and novels as they can from sitting with a patient. In this article, we will explore what can be learned from the extraordinary success of the 2008 film Twilight. Based on Stephenie Meyer’s cult classic vampire-romance novel of the same name, the film grossed more than $350 million (8). The novel was published in 2005, and, in 2008, was the best-selling book of the year, reportedly selling 22 million copies (9). In 2009, first-time author Meyer was ranked Number 26 in the Forbes Celebrity 100, a list of the world’s most powerful celebrities, based on earnings estimates and fame (10). The success of this film (and the novel) suggests that it taps into universal psychological themes, many of which may be unconscious, involving love, desire, sexuality, and womanhood, which resonate powerfully with women of various ages. In order to better understand these underlying psychodynamic themes, we perused various fan web-based discussion forums, including twilightteens.com, twilight20somethings.com, and twilightmoms.com. We also watched and discussed the film with colleagues of varying ages and experience levels to expand our understanding of the movie’s appeal. Vampire folklore has been postulated to provide a vehicle for projection of negative or anxiety-provoking unconscious sadistic drives onto an external, evil object (11). This view seems more appropriate for historic vampire portrayals such as F.W. Murnau’s 1922 classic Nosferatu, in which the title character is horrific, alien, and deadly. However, more recently, vampires have been portrayed as loving companions to humans—for example, in movies such as Underworld or TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The new direction that vampire mythology has taken merits a reappraisal of the relevant underlying psychological themes.