I am drawn to blockbusters and not just because I like the sociology of it. I like participating in this shared experience of being a fan. It makes me feel warm :)
And it helps me understand. Feel.
I take popculture seriously because I believe that when we tell ourselves stories, it's everything but simple or unimportant.
The whole history of is nothing else but storytelling. Not just the "big" history. Everything we do, everything we believe, everything we are.
Stories are what we, as cognizant creatures, are made of.
And I am drawn to it, and find it heartbreaking, how we seek salvation in re-writing our stories. How we want to write ourselves into a fairytale, where our self-sacrifice (as if we gave up our lives, at 18, for a man, for the idea of love, for a baby), our pain (as if we had all our bones broken, our blood drunk), our experience of being dominated (as if we were a mere human in a world of super-strong, super-beautiful and super-virtuous vampires) and violated (as if he who professed to love us threatened to kill us with his desire if we get too dirty and sinful) was going to PAY OFF in this afterlife of eternal perfection, beauty, grace, superiority, youth, virtue (and freedom from all things
True, Twilight is not a clever story. It is wrong, dangerous, button-pushing but it doesn't know that about itself. It is not meant to carry a message. And that is precisely why it is so powerful to me. It doesn't restrain itself, doesn't police, doesn't aim. It just speaks. A raw masturbation. A true portrait of how we are and how we want to be. An authentic scan of the pathology.
To move forward, of course, we need to tell ourselves a whole another story, one put together with imagination and wisdom and courage. To me, Twilight is a story that helps me understand the way we are written now. And how we need to re-write ourselves.
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