Twilight and the Crisis of Adolescence

In my house we are fans of Joss Whedon, but we have always been puzzled by his obsession with high school. The first three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are half about battling evil and half about the trauma of being high school outcasts. Whedon, along with John Hughes and various other authors and film makers, seems to regard high school as the most important, the most vibrant, the most fully lived part of modern life. To them, or so it seems to me, high school was both acutely painful and amazingly wonderful because everything meant more and everything was felt more powerfully. To be excluded from the right clique was agony; to be kissed by the right girl was heaven.

I was reminded of this because there is an amusing piece by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post today about women who wanted to hate Twilight but found themselves unable to resist it:

In "Twilight," Edward Cullen waffled between wooing and eating new girl Bella Swan. He chose love. In "New Moon," the darkest installment of the series, Edward becomes convinced that his girlfriend would be safer without him, so he dumps her in order to protect her and then vanishes. Bella, catatonic from the pain, finds solace in Jacob Black, the devoted friend who has just learned he is a werewolf, and their relationship grows deeper, and this description is utterly, utterly useless because none of it gets at what the "Twilight" series is actually about, which is being 17.

It's a time capsule to the breathless period when the world could literally end depending on whether your lab partner touched your hand, when every conversation was so agonizing and so thrilling (and the border between the two emotions was so thin), and your heart was bigger and more delicate than it is now, and everything was just so much more.

I suppose the great advantage of having had a boring, mainly miserable high school experience is that I never miss it. I do recall how acutely I felt some things, mainly embarrassment and anxiety, but I certainly don't think that my feelings then were more powerful than the ones I have as an adult. Looking back, my adolescent loves seem mainly silly to me, based on hormones rather than understanding another person. My ambitions seem trite, my fantasies pathetic. The main things I felt in high school were boredom, restlessness, a strong desire to be somewhere else, and a vast, quiet arrogance that told me I was better than everything around me and destined for greater things. Compared to things I have felt as an adult -- compared to marrying, to holding my babies, to forming lasting friendships, to achieving real understanding of little bits of the world, to planting trees and watching them grow -- what I felt in high school seems dim or trivial.