Fresh from the, um, triumph of its attacks on Hallowe’en and Harry Potter (to be fair, the latter was subsequently revoked), the Vatican is now taking aim at New Moon, the latest chapter in the Twilight saga.
The Daily Telegraph has the story:
The film…contained “an explosive mix” of good-looking protagonists dabbling in the supernatural, said Monsignor Franco Perazzolo of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture. The film’s occult imagery represented a “moral void more dangerous than any deviant message”, he said.
“Dangerous”? Good grief.
Aren’t the vampires in these Twilight movies the good guys? Or is that the problem?
Oddly the occult rituals looks very similar to the non-occult Catholic rituals. From the trailer it seems that have a vampire Pope!
If occultism worked, it would be a proto-science at the very least and would probably have spawned a field of scientific inquiry or two. Since it doesn’t work, it’s faith-based ritual.
I think I can see why the Catholic Church is so down on occultism. Either it’s religion’s specific antidote, or a competitor, depending on whether you think it actually works. Either way, it’s a a threat.
@Caledonian
Very true, but did the Catholic church condemn the Bela Lugosi movies? (Maybe they did, for all I know.)Vampires-as-entertainment have been part of the culture ever since Bram Stoker dipped his quill in an inkwell. Is the church’s real objection not to vampirism a la Lugosi or vampirism in general but to hunky sensitive soulful teenaged boy vampires, presumably on the grounds that they might lure innocent teenaged girls into occult practices? Or, heaven forbid, sex? The Twilight movies and books are aimed at adolescent females.
this is a much bigger singular phenomenon, and, it is fixed on teenage girls. i think that makes culture arbiters more concerned. though as others note, the some of the vampires in twilight seem so anodyne that objecting seems to invite more laughter than fellow concern (the cullen clan is headed by a former anglican priest).
I have not read (and do not intend to) any of the “Twilight” books or seen the recent movie. But I have read about the glee and anticipation with which my 30 to 40 year old offspring have been planning girls’ night out events surrounding the movie release.
The movies and books may be aimed at teenagers, but don’t overlook more “mature” women having a helluva lot of fun with them.
But, the Vatican and other religious offices should just get over it, IMHO. Even the most “childish” of stories usually revolve around darkness and light, how to tell the difference, and what happens if you make the wrong choice. Are the “Twilight” tales that much different?
(And has anyone commenting on this site ever actually read one of the books? Myself, I’d rather read the phone book. That is, if the print weren’t so small in them these days.)
Ah, but most monster-horror books and movies present the monsters as evil and depraved, villainous freaks that are opposed by every “right-thinking” person.
Works like Harry Potter and Twilight invite us to sympathize with wielders of occult forces / monsters, and in breaking the traditional associations magic users / monsters have, undermines the kneejerk moral associations that groups like the CC spend so much time reinforcing.
Which do you think the Catholics would be more upset about: a very popular series involving demons which were unsympathetic and depraved, or a very popular series involving demons who were really mostly misunderstood and sympathetic?
Well, as I said, the real objection seems to be not to vampires as to hunky sensitive soulful teenaged boy vampires.
I have read several of the Harry Potter books and in those books, it was still light vs. dark, though portrayed in a parallel universe of magic. As I said, I haven’t read the Twilight books, but is there a difference? Are the participants not portrayed as light and dark? Is there not a morality defined?
Harry Potter worked like Star Trek — using a different world from the one we live in to highlight moral and philosophical difficulties in reality.
You’d think no one in the CC had ever read a fairy tale.
I couldn’t make it through more than 1/3 of the first book Donna. But I know the author is a Mormon and purportedly her faith infuses the way she constructs her fantasy. (Some non-Mormon commentators have suggested the books are ultimately dealing with how Christians deal with sex while remaining chaste. It’s just now translated into a question of vampirism.) Of course the real funny anti-Twilight rants come from Evangelicals who think it’s all a conspiracy to convert people to Mormonism.
Just putting in my two cents: Twilight and its sequels are among the VERY few books I’ve banned for my 9-year-old daughter. (Indeed, they’re the only books I’ve banned, unless you also count Wicked, which is clearly age inappropriate, but which she wanted to read because she loves the musical.) Supernatural and occult have nothing to do with it. Mormonism is only tangentially related. I don’t want her reading books that romanticize a really sick relationship. If she wants to read about sick relationships, she can wait until she’s old enough to understand Wuthering Heights.
Harry Potter, Unfortuante Events, and Wimpy Kids–all books that have detractors of various ideological stripes–are fine.
Jane S — your description probably hits the parts of the books that appeal to 30-40 year old women.
um neither the Pope, nor the vatican, condemned Halloween. It was one journalist in a Catholic daily, vaguely assoicated with the Vactica but not the Vatican itself. Halloween can clearly survive Catholicism, but not English Protestantism – which largely re-invented it as Burn the Pope night. Or whatever it is called these days.
In fact most of the angry anti-Halloween articles in the world are written by historically illiterate English journalists who use it as an attack on “Americanisation”, even though the festival was celebrated for centuries in the northern parts of Britain ( including Northern England – possibly from the highland clearances) and would be to this day, were it not an American event.
There seems to be a tendency in the British Press to look for any and every obscure cant from the Vatican, or anything vaguely associated with it, and yet none of these pronouncements get any kind of coverage in actual majority Catholic countries.
as I have said before in these comments – symptomatic of a very English secularism.
Well, yesterday while grocery shopping (the Twiilight books are big sellers in supermarkets and big box stores) I picked up a copy of one of the books in the series, opened it, found a major grammatical error in the first line, and closed it. So if you value good prose, you won’t be putting these books on your Hannukah or Christmas list.
Interesting point about the kinky sex aspect of the books appealing to grown women, Donna. I think that’s been the whole subtext of vampire literature and movies all along, back to Bram Stoker. Lucy Westenra is having the orgasm of her life.
Best Summation of the Twilight Series here:
http://www.cracked.com/funny-36-twilight/
Book Two: New Moon
Book Two begins with Bella angsting about reaching the old age of eighteen, which she worries will make her some sort of cradle-snatching freak because her boyfriend Edward is eternally seventeen. The fact that a 109-year-old vampire is sexually interested in an emotionally immature girl 90 years his junior apparently doesn’t bother her. Edward cheers up Bella by giving her a mix tape. Unfortunately, later Edward changes his mind, takes back the mix tape, and dumps Bella. He leaves her in the forest by herself, and being a woman and thus without a sense of direction, she gets lost and almost dies.
Bella spends the rest of the book going crazy, imagining Edward’s voice and partaking in ever more self-destructive activities. During this time she befriends Jacob Black, who turns out to be a werewolf but is still way better for her than Edward. She finally regains Edward’s attention after she deliberately jumps off a cliff and almost dies. Edward, being a thirteen-year-old girl, thinks Bella has died and goes to Italy to commit suicide. He attempts to do this by exposing himself to the sun at noon in an Italian town. Since sunlight doesn’t actually harm Twilight vampires, one must assume that Edward is hoping some macho Italians will see him in at full sparkle and beat him to death for being gay.
Bella teams up with Edward’s sister Alice, who turns out to be straight and taken but is still way better for her than Edward, to rescue her ex from his emoness. After a crazy mix up that finds Bella and Edward temporarily in an Anne Rice novel, Edward reaccepts her.
This novel thus teaches two important lessons to young girls everywhere:
1) If a guy dumps you and says he doesn’t love you anymore, he doesn’t mean it. All you have to do is beg and destroy your life to prove that you really love him, and he’ll come right back and love you even more!
2) It is perfectly cool to string along innocent but decent guys who are crushing on you and then dump them immediately as soon as your ex-boyfriend reappears, and totally normal if said ex-boyfriend forbids you from seeing your old friend. After all, your love for your ex must be far stronger, because he makes you feel ‘alive’ and ‘dangerous’ since he’s always on the verge of killing you. And stalking you. We can’t really mention that enough.
Damn, it’s “The Rules” updated for Goths.
Yeah, the creepiest bit is that the vampire is freaking 90 years old. What on earth he could possibly see in a 17 year old escapes me. Geeze. By the time I was still in my early 20’s the giddy squealy 18 or 19 year old type of girl drove me bonkers. I didn’t care what they looked like!
And yeah, while it was probably completely unintentional by the author, it really does seem to be a horribly disfunctional relationship and teaching the worst thing possible. But then, just like most action books teach poor lessons to boys, most romantic novels teach poor lessons to girls. Yet we all are drawn to them. (I loved Edgar Rice Burroughs as a lad)
Thanks for a very sane perspective, Clark. As the mother of a 9-year-old daughter, I can only hope most men in their 20s feel that way.
Of course, you don’t need trash literature to find bad lessons. I mentioned Wuthering Heights above–beautifully written “come gaze with awe into the abyss of mad passion” story. Noyes’s poem The Highwayman was once standard reading for the junior high grades–girl commits suicide to help criminal boyfriend escape justice. (But it sounds so lovely when Lorena McKennit sings it.)