A Postcolonial Analysis of Twilight (...and yes I went to school for this)

Truth be told, at 23 I never thought I’d be getting back into a show about sparkly vampires.

But as winter rolled by and I found myself either listening to rainfall or rainfall ASMR, my obsession with curating the ultimate cosy acoustics ended up on a frankly odd side of YouTube: Twilight playlists. 

In case you’re lost here, let me summarise. These are pretty much fandom compilations whose sole purpose is to evoke the atmosphere of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga. Less a movie soundtrack, more like an indie mashup created by chronically online teens, all to transport you to the fictionalised town of Forks, with its warring supernatural residents and sulky protagonist Bella Swan. 

After a few minutes of listening, you become mentally submerged in mental cloud filters and agonising stilted conversations. You wince recalling Kirsten Stewart’s fluttering eyelashes as she reacts to the most simple questions with apparent excruciating pain. All the while, your stomach churns with flashbacks of emocore and high school heartbreak — the throbbing is oddly regular, as if to the rhythm of Lykke Li. 

Before I knew it, I was obsessed. I hadn’t felt this much emotion since pre-daylight savings and suddenly one very tolerant boyfriend was subjected to a weekend binge of all five movies. Within those hours of crass dialogue and bad CGI, Twilight started to take over my brain. At the bus stop, I'd mentally replay this tragic tale of an average American mortal navigating a town bewitched by vampires and werewolves. I earnestly contemplated the merits of choosing excitement (Edward) over comfort (Jacob) in one’s love life, usually in the grocery store while deciding between yoghurts.  

By the end of Breaking Dawn, it started to feel like there was more to this story than a casual nostalgia trip. Something that felt deeper than identifying as Team E or Team J. While I’d definitely enjoyed my time as a twenty-something teenager, I couldn’t shake off the feeling there was something fishy about this story hidden behind the utterly noughties aesthetics. The part of me that chose to study a Humanities degree was confronted by a compulsive critical itch, a gnawing analysis of how the films had not aged well. 

There’s a joke among fellow Humanities students that it’s impossible to watch a movie these days without tearing it apart. Having sat through too many lectures on re-evaluating the canon or decentralising the male gaze, it’s hard not to march in as the “woke parade” and tear pop culture apart from all angles. Like a fast-track to the shooting range of the culture wars, we self-proclaimed critics looove to point out how some movies just couldn’t be made these days, could they…

Whether for misleading minority representation, racist slander or straight up sexism, sometimes it’s for good reason – we wouldn’t exactly take Silence of the Lambs and hold it up as the pinnacle of Trans representation in the 21st century, would we? Thus it's reality that it’s some poor soul’s job to throw shade at everything from David Attenborough to 2000s chick flicks, even if it means abandoning the enjoyment of cinema for the rest of your life.

A quick Google search confirmed my suspicions: Twilight has apparently long been controversial, both within its fandom and beyond. This is due the backstory featuring two ethnic communities in conflict, told through Fork’s feuding vampire and werewolf tribes. 

To be specific, the saga suggests the town's supernatural residents have been at war with each other for generations. Jacob tells Bella that according to his ancestors, vampires are considered mortal enemies who preyed upon their people. This history of violence creates mistrust between the groups, playing out into the present day as the iconic love triangle between the three protagonists.

While in theory, stories of warring neighbours are as old as the Odyssey and new as Neighbours, but what raised fan’s eyebrows over the years was Meyer’s decision to script the real Native American community, the Quileutes, as Jacob’s werewolf family. Local to La Push reservation, where Twilight was set and filmed, the Quileutes Nation has ancestral myths relating to wolf transformation, which was supposedly inspiration for the novels. However, critics have pointed out that Meyer’s saga disproportionately plagued the Quileutes with cultural misconceptions, while they received no financial compensation despite the franchise’s mega-success. 

So what’s at stake here? (pun intended). For starters, Twilight’s narrative conflates the Quileute people with supernatural beings who have the ability to transform into wolves, reinforcing exoticized stereotypes of Indigenous communities as ultimately “different” and “other” from mainstream society. 

A piece by Burke museum criticises the “glamorised” depiction of Twilight’s shirtless wolf boys, arguing it makes the Quileutes appear as “imaginary werewolves rather than real people”. This representation, created to please the audience of tween girls from Western countries, oversimplifies Quileute heritage and reinforces a norm that white authors can place their own ideas onto marginalised communities depending on the story they want to tell. 

Furthermore, all the time I’d been indulging in “Team Edward” vs “Team Jacob” (which you’ll remember was everywhere from posters to cheap necklaces circa 2010), a little digging suggested this iconic love triangle at the heart of the Twilight can also be seen as a vehicle for the postcolonial themes of subjectivity, power and submission. 

Love is distributed unequally in Twilight, particularly Jacob’s love which is unrequited by Bella. She toys with her affection for him, seeing him mostly a friend but sometimes more. This happens more often in moments where Edward is absent, as seen when the Cullens leave Forks for six months in New Moon. Jacob is thus always a secondary character, existing only because of and in opposition to the story’s central relationship. It’s argued this dynamic mirrors the erasure of Indigenous voices against the presence of a “superior” coloniser/lover.

Moreover, Jacob and his family are presented continuously in opposition to the status-rich vampire clan, who hold a position of wealth and privilege in the town. While they live in a modernist metropolis on the hill, surrounded by enough flashy cars to make Elon Musk wince, economic disparities between the Cullens and the Quilettes are clear. Despite holding similar ancestral claims to this land, Jacob’s family is constantly concerned about money, and Black family members portrayed as the “scrappy but sweet” trope in comparison to the clean and poised vampires. 

This is not unlike the history of vampires, rooted in the Victorian Dracula archetype. Many classic vampire stories depict vampires as members of an aristocratic class, living in castles and detached from the common people. This mirrors the power dynamics of social elites who hold disproportionate wealth and influence. Plus, just as vampires feed on their victims, colonial powers have historically extracted wealth, labour, and cultural artefacts from the regions they dominated.

In short, while the Cullens as vampires possess wealth and privilege, the Blacks face economic challenges which mirror historical patterns of colonisation where Indigenous communities experience dispossession and economic disadvantage at the benefit of their oppressors. Jacob's personal narrative can be seen as a reflection of broader postcolonial issues related to resource exploitation and its impact on Indigenous people, explored again recently in Scourcesses’ “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2023). 

As it turns out, these critiques of Twilight bubbled on in the background for several years while the saga was at its peak between 2008 and 2000. Of course this was the era of Tumblr and MSN, so public discourse didn’t move at the lightning speed of a Twitter storm. After the release of the first film, attention was repeatedly drawn to studio Summit Entertainment’s decision to cast Taylor Launter, a white American man, as the actor playing Jacob. Critics argued this played into Hollywood’s long history of casting non-Indigenous actors for Indigenous roles, a practice commonly referred to as "whitewashing" or "racebending." 

Launter’s PR came out to defend the decision, even declaring Launter had distant Native American heritage. However, both critics and fans were left disappointed, feeling that the decision has missed the opportunity to feature an Indigenous actors in an already undiverse industry, as well risked the accurate portrayal of Indigenous culture. Particularly since Twilight’s location and plot places the Quileute Nation centre stage, I’d argue this carries even more weight than films of a similar character.

So while in some circles it’s bad taste to tear down Twilight (cue fandom pile on), I guess the saga joins the new canon of woefully uncontemporary late-2000s media now in the firing line for perpetuating culturally normalised homophobia, sexism and racism rife in that decade. It’s an odd concept that the shows you grow up on don’t keep up with the times. But it’s a new reality to live within, given that more and more beloved shows are seen to have aged poorly.  Like many people, I don’t think this means abandoning them altogether, rather being aware of the current renaissance while kicking back to soak up the teen drama. I’m thinking, next up, Gossip Girl?