Vampires seen from the victims' perspective

Opinion:'Twilight' is about the problems good girls face as they move towards independence

NEVER MIND the Budget, Bella Swan has real problems. Her mom has just got married for a second time, to a baseball player who travels the country. Bella must go and live with her dad, a depressed loner who works as a policeman in a small town in Washington state. As a consequence of this move Bella has had to start at a new school. This is where she gets a boyfriend. And the boyfriend is a vampire.

Now this is a crisis, if you like. Bella cannot turn to advisers or appear on phone-in programmes in order to gauge public opinion. Her mom is thousands of miles away, loving but a bit ditsy. Her dad is following a trail of mangled corpses (okay, two corpses, but they keep him very busy). Bella’s new school friends aren’t that mad about her boyfriend anyway. Bella has to sort this out on her own.

Twilightis a good girls' film, and it is about the problems that good girls face as they start moving towards independence. The parents are nice but dim, and have to be left behind. The friends don't understand your boyfriend; and the boyfriend is gorgeous.

Although Edward looks only 17, he is a very old-fashioned, romantic hero. Besides being impossibly handsome, Edward, played by the young British actor Robert Pattinson, is aloof, unsmiling and driven to distraction by desire. He loves Bella so much that he cannot go near her. He is from a family of great beauties, and he and his siblings keep themselves to themselves at school.

In addition to all of this, the Cullens are much richer than Bella’s dad. Edward’s dad is a doctor who seems entirely in charge of the local hospital. When Edward brings Bella home to meet the folks it turns out that the Cullens live in a postmodern palace in the woods. Their house is hung with posh paintings. Its uncarpeted stairs fairly clatter with the footsteps of Mr Darcy, Mr Rochester and Heathcliff. Outside James Dean is revving up the car.

Inside, in Edward’s bedroom, Bella notices that Edward does not a have a bed.

First of all Edward has to tell Bella what he is – a vampire, but a vampire on a 12-step programme designed to keep him off human blood. Then he has to tell her that if he gets too close to her he could bite her.

“I can never lose control around you,” he says. She is unique to him – Edward can read everybody’s thoughts but Bella’s. When Bella brings Edward home to meet her dad his reception there is pretty frosty – but no frostier than it is when a dad sees his young daughter going out with a normal teenage boy for the first time.

For Bella, of course, this situation has its perks. Not only is she going out with a guy who is, literally, too cool for school (the Cullen children are kept at home on the rare days when Washington state lacks cloud cover) but it is Edward who has to worry about Going Too Far. And, despite the fact that Edward flies Bella over mountains and on to vertiginous tree tops, no one watching this film has a moment's doubt what Going Too Far means. The beating heart of the Twilightfan base seems to consist of girls aged between 11 and 14.

The vampire story has always been about sex. But it has also always been about ravening aristocrats. Ravening aristocrats who fly through the bedroom window of the lovely victim, as she lies sleeping under a satin quilt.

In TwilightEdward makes frequent visits to Bella's bedroom because, he says, he loves to watch her sleeping (well...). When he finally allows himself to materialise in front of her, Bella is not at all resistant. All of this is firmly in the vampire tradition, notwithstanding the fact that Bella is wearing a T-shirt and boy shorts and that she sleeps under a duvet.

It is interesting, too, that the young actor who plays Edward Cullen – Robert Pattinson – although he has the messed hair of any member of a boy band, is in real life a posh boy. He started his career with the Barnes Theatre Club, and his first wages from acting went to pay his school fees.

Here is a boy so handsome that not only does he hold in his hand the heart of every girl aged 11 to 15, but it says on his website (run since 2005 by two devoted fans, Amy and Michele) that he won Hello!magazine's Most Attractive Man Award of 2008. Hello!is not routinely read by girls between 11 and 14.

As far as I know the Twilight books, written by Stephenie Meyer, are the first to deal with a vampire from the point of view of his female victims, or potential victims. The truth of it is that vampires solved a lot of ethical problems for moral females, from Bram Stoker’s time onwards. Stephenie Meyer is a Mormon who does not approve of sex before marriage. And so, of course, Twilight is as sexy as all get out.

As Robert Pattinson put in a recent interview: " Twilightis a metaphor for the virtues of chastity, but it's had the opposite effect. I get letters that say, 'I'm going to kill myself if you don't watch High School Musical 2with me.' It's a little nuts."