Lucinda Breeding

I waited for the mania to die down a bit before I visited a local multiplex to see the battle of the sparkly vampire and the buff wolf boy.

Unless you’ve been living on some other planet for the past few years, you’ve heard a lot of chatter about a book-to-movie series called Twilight.

Author Stephanie Meyer plugged her literary mojo into a genre with a built-in market: vampire lore. If you don’t think vampire literature doesn’t have a devoted following, you’re deliberately blocking out the body of work by onetime Texas Woman’s University and University of North Texas student Anne Rice. You know, the one who wrote Interview with the Vampire, which eventually became a movie starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise? Vampire lore is so popular that its fans only recently earned their own convention earlier this year in Los Angeles. Before recent years, vampire enthusiasts had to get their convention rocks off as a ghetto group at science fiction conventions. (Yes. That’s right. At sci-fi conventions, the vampire buffs were the nerds.)

Meyer has earned both undeserved praise and condemnation for her book series, which is simply a teenage girl’s romantic fantasy. The series revolve around the rather ridiculously named Bella Swan, an awkward girl whose life turns upside down when she’s packed off to Forks, Wash., to live with her father. That’s where she meets the impossibly gorgeous Edward Cullen — not to mention his equally gorgeous adopted siblings. It’s also where she reunites with a childhood friend, Jacob Black. Edward goes to Bella’s high school, but Jacob hits the books at the school on his Quileute Indian Reservation. Bella and Jacob are reacquainted through their fathers, who are best friends.

In a nutshell, Bella falls in love with Edward, who craves her blood more than any other mortal’s. He’s got great impulse control, and even proves to be overprotective. But being a teenager is never easy, and Bella’s life gets harder when Jacob Black falls in love with her and turns into a werewolf. If you know anything about vampire stories, you know that vampires and werewolves have a longstanding grudge.

Meyer has been criticized by feminist pop culture bloggers for making her heroine so helpless and consumed by her vamp boyfriend. Feminist writers have also bemoaned the way “Twihards” have lapped up the damsel-in-distress-digs-bad-boys trope. Still others have indicted Meyers for — as they’ve said — crafting the kind of vampire series that only a Mormon woman would write. One essayist condemned Twilight books as “abstinence porn.” (Meyers’ vampires are too strong for dalliances with humans. A romantic rendezvous would kill the smitten mortal. So Bella remains chaste, though very hot and bothered by her cool-skinned boyfriend, until marriage.)

And highbrow movie buffs? They hate the whole fanged mess. They don’t like the hysteria of the mostly young, female audience, and they deplore its box office heft.

I ducked into the theater to see The Twilight Saga: New Moon with all that in mind. I tend to side with the critics.

I wish Bella wasn’t so taken with Edward, who comes off to me like a dangerous, abusive and stalker boyfriend. The books aren’t great literature, and while Meyer has some real imagination, she’s not the most cunning writer. (For instance, I think Meyer’s spin on some of the lore is fresh. In her universe, vampires live in shadows because their skin glitters like crushed diamond in the sunlight. That’s why they live in Forks. It has among the fewest days of sunlight in the United States.)

I found the movie to be a satisfying slice of Hollywood cheese. It didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is: a frothy romantic fantasy about an average girl, her vampire boyfriend and the werewolf who loves her. Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg drafted a clever adaptation of the book that toned down the saccharine, tear-stained stuff and lightened it up with good one-liners and a nice dose of self-effacement.

Even better was that director Chris Weitz didn’t mock that the movie was sure to enrapt female viewers. Weitz celebrated earnest female fantasy. He also made a movie that is, to date, the only movie I can recall that has been shot so plainly for the female gaze.

Heartthrob Robert Pattinson, the English pretty boy who plays Edward, is met with screaming crowds everywhere he goes. Taylor Lautner, who plays Jacob, packed on easily 30 pounds of muscle for the role.

The first time we see Edward — striding toward Bella in the high school parking lot — he’s shot in slow motion, the wind ruffling his hair. Kind of like the bikini-clad women on the Playboy Channel. In another scene, Jacob runs to rescue Bella after she crashes a dirt bike. He whips off his T-shirt to dab the blood from her forehead. Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe shot a finely sculpted Lautner from, er, below the belt. The theater erupted in laughter — some of it of the breathless sort — and a 50-something woman in the row just ahead of me said: “I think I’d hurt myself every day.” In fact, it seems that most of the men on the reservation sport nothing but droopy shorts and hairless, muscular torsos. Especially in the rain. (I heard another adult female voice murmur: “Exactly what are the coordinates of this Indian reservation, and can I teleport myself there?”)

Cyberspace is still throbbing with tit-for-tat debates between Twihards and detractors. Lest they forget, this isn’t a series that will change the world. It’s a heavyweight version of Tiger Beat-style vampire adoration, and it’s going to make bank.

And maybe film buffs who deplore anything commercial could do well to remember this: If Martin Scorcese could fit 20,000 bare breasts in a single brothel scene in the super-serious Gangs of New York, it’s really all right for the ladies — from 16 to 56 — to enjoy some eye candy in a movie that is nothing more than a daydream.

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com.