Retrospective: Twilight (and baseball)
As someone with my finger on the pulse, I naturally watched Twilight for the first time in 2025. It’s OK — trashy pulp romance. No worse than anything else Hollywood was pumping out in the Aughts, or even the Forties. Chicks in 2008 needed a fantasy where their dirtbag boyfriend was transgressive and actually sex. There’s nothing wrong with vampires for the Jonas Brothers generation — at least Edward’s shiny due to vampirism and not because he’s never met a conditioner he liked. That Twilight hatedom was mostly misogynistic backlash to a pop culture phenomenon about a woman who wants something dangerous is hardly a novel insight — nor, probably is the fact that Edward is probably no worse a boyfriend than half of Twilight‘s critics. In 2025, it’s hard to get mad about Twilight. I can’t fathom watching the sequels — two hours of Twilight is plenty. But I can’t say I minded watching it.
Now let’s tackle the real evil of Twilight: the fact that the Cullens are resolutely, horrendously bad at baseball. Let’s leave aside the Cullens’ profound failure to grasp the importance of position players, or even what position players do. We can ignore the fact that the offense and defense are played by the same vampires almost simultaneously. Hell, I’ll even set aside my theory that the Cullens have infiltrated the Seattle Mariners and are the only reason they’ve never appeared in a World Series.
No. The abomination here is that the Cullens think they’re hot shit for playing baseball in a physical space without clearly delineated boundaries. It’s not fucking impressive for Superman to catch a high fly ball. Edward Cullen cutting off a more-or-less homer is not an act of skill. There are no rules in vampire baseball. It’s a travesty of American’s finest invention, the greatest game ever invented. “Oh, I can homer in a space without boundaries!” Get fucked. Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have redeemed themselves with Love Lies Bleeding and The Lighthouse. The rest of the cast and crew need to tour the U.S. to visit every Minor League Baseball clubhouse and apologize at length. We should have known something was wrong with American men when their objection to Twilight was the girliness of it and not the awful baseball. We know American patriarchy is about misogyny and not real strength or achievement, but the Twilight hatedom, with its nauseating silence about the fatal flaws of vampire baseball, proves it.…