'Twilight' Becomes The Second Vampire-Adjacent Frontlash Victim Of 2008

The view from the cheap seats: Robert Pattinson of Twilight wore his good shoes for this appearance, most likely. Kevin Winter/Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

Robert Pattinson is a huge, huge star, capable of showing up at a Hot Topic store and drawing a crowd -- a crowd of teenage girls -- that was apparently menacing enough to get the event canceled by the police.

Most of these girls are fans of his work in a movie they have not seen yet.

Pattinson is the male lead in Twilight, the teen-novel adaptation opening this weekend after a period of anticipation so alternatively fascinating and irritating that it's creating just as much hostility among people who have never seen it as adoration among people who have never seen it. For every crowd of Pattinson fans who can't get enough Twilight, there is an equal and opposite crowd of people who have already had way too much Twilight, and who got there months ago. (For example, look at the comments to a recent Slashfilm post about the film.)

Call it frontlash: when speculative cultural saturation, either top-down or fans-up, builds a wave of anticipation that, in turn, causes a wave of equally ill-informed hostility.

Robert Pattinson's toes, an odd connection to a prior frontlash victim, and more, after the jump...

It is funny and coincidental that 2008 has already had one particularly painful outbreak of frontlash -- against a phenomenon with which Twilight shares some nominal cultural DNA.

Remember Vampire Weekend? It's not that they're gone -- they're not.

But as New York Magazine carefully outlined early this year, the cycle of buzz and hype about the band was extraordinary, in part because of its constant presence on music blogs that would naturally defy any organized attempt to control the flow of publicity.

So extraordinary, in fact, that a post on the popular music blog Idolator spoke of the "nauseating" coverage and vowed to never read another word about the band.

The date of the post? January 28, 2008. The release date on Vampire Weekend's buzzed-about first album? January 29, 2008.

Maybe it's something about vampires.

Sure, the books have already spawned their own industry of naysayers -- try Googling "Twilight sucks." But at least with the books, the naysayers were battling yaysayers who had actually read the books.

What do Pattinson's current obsessives have to go on? Not the movie, in most cases. But they do have an Entertainment Weekly profile that makes him sound really smart if you're 12, sexy and a little dangerous if you're 16, adorably scruffy if you're 20, and seriously tiresome if you're much older than that. (Okay, that's how I would have reacted. Fortunately, I never encountered a vampire.)

Check out this bit:

For this story -- the first in-depth interview of Pattinson's young career -- the actor's manager suggested that Hollywood's next It Guy be interviewed at the Chateau Marmont hotel, in L.A., over a civilized lunch on the chic outdoor patio. So on a recent afternoon, Pattinson, looking slightly befuddled, wearing secondhand black jeans, what he assumes was once a rather large woman's bowling shirt, and old Chinese slippers with his big toes sticking sadly out of large holes, folds his lanky six-foot frame into a tiny chair. He speaks softly, hunched over his water. Tugging at his unkempt hair, he tries to explain why Jack Nicholson is his favorite actor, before admitting that he feels absurd. ''Why are we here?'' he wonders, looking around at the uptight crowd. ''I feel judged!''

Oh, ugh. The bowling shirt of undetermined origin! The secondhand jeans! The quirky shoes with holes in them! The "tugging at his unkempt hair." Ugh, ugh, ugh.

And that's not to even mention "I feel judged."

It all seems to be an incredibly studied version of the portrait of the young man as an artist. He hasn't done anything -- anything! -- that most of his many admirers have actually experienced and then seen fit to admire (yes, he was in Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, but that is not what is drawing the crowds). He is not famous for his work, but for the fact of his casting.

It has been a phenomenon with no center; a storm with no eye. Perhaps the movie is good and perhaps it isn't, but none of this -- not the screeching mania, not the fatigue that is its opposite -- is about that. There is fundamentally empty excitement and fundamentally empty exhaustion; a battle with nothing at stake except the battle itself.

8:49 AM ET | 11-21-2008 | permalink

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