Bad Boys

Why is it that some women are attracted to "bad boys"? What exactly is a "bad boy" anyway? Do some men look like "bad boys" who are in fact are good men? Are some men who don't look like "bad boys" exactly that?

I don't know the answers to those questions but I recently saw a movie that really made me think about the concept of the "bad boy". When I was in North Carolina last weekend visiting friends one of my dearest girlfriends wanted to go see the movie Twilight. Because I felt bad for making her miss the premiere showing with other friends of hers (I was arriving in town at that time), I offered to go with her to see it later on in the weekend. All I really knew about the movie was: 1. it was based on a series of books extremely popular with women which my friend loved, and 2. there was a male vampire in it (though my friend assured me it wouldn't be a horror movie...I don't like those).

To put it bluntly, the movie was pretty bad. I've seen worse (The Invasion with Nicole Kidman comes to mind), but Twilight came close to the bottom of the list because it was just so ridiculous. What about the movie was so bad? Where do I start? First of all the production reminded me of a bad television movie on the Lifetime Network. The action sequences were extremely fake looking (maybe the extremely well done action sequences in movies like The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon have raised my expectations). The story is set in High School (High School!)...and grown women are slobering over the lead male character. I don't get what all the fuss is over. He looked like he had lipstick and eyeliner on! Throughout the movie the women in the theater (there were maybe two men in there...poor souls) oohed and aahed, and laughed on cue and all the while I kept thinking I was missing something....because it wasn't anything worth oohing and aahing over, let alone laughing over.

The lead male character is a vampire by the name of Edward Cullen. Every time I heard that name it reminded me of the character Tom Cullen (M-O-O-N spells Tom Cullen) from Stephen King's The Stand. Edward Cullen is supposed to be "impossibly beautiful" with pale skin that glistens and sparkles like diamonds in the sunlight (I kid you not). In one particularly corny scene he carries the female lead, Bella, up to the top of a mountain where the sun is shining, so she can see what he "really looks like". He steps into the sun, throws his head back, closes his eyes, unbuttons his shirt and pulls it open to expose his chest in some kind of a cheesy underwear model pose. We see his skin glittering and sparkling in the sun, kinda like mine did when I accidently bought some lotion with glitter in it from the clearance rack. Seriously.

Even worse than all the corny-cheesiness was the basic premise underlying the relationship between the male lead, Edward Cullen (M-O-O-N spells vampire) and the female lead Bella. You see, Edward, the vampire, is extremely drawn to Bella...her smell is like "heroin" to him and he longs to suck her blood. But, Edward is a "good" vampire who only feeds on animal blood so he wants to resist this draw he feels for Bella. But, in the end, of course, he just can't stay away from her. You'd think Bella would be afraid of this guy who wants to suck her blood, but no, she trusts him. Even weirder than that, she wants him to suck her blood...she wants to be with him forever...isn't that romantic ? Um, what?!?