FILM / Zora's Super Short Show / Twilight Saga New Voices Shorts / Zora Satchell
Anyone who follows my Twitter knows that I am a huge Twilight stan. Over the last year, I’ve gotten my friends to rewatch these beloved films over and over. I tweet constantly about its awful delights and violent faults. I speculated about character development or lack thereof, I complained endlessly about my issues with Meyer’s abysmal politics and less than ideal approach to prose, but mainly I gushed endlessly about the cinematic masterpiece that was the first film in the franchise. Everything about it comes together to make the perfect indie-teen-supernatural-romance. From the soundtrack and blue filter to the hand cam shot final battle, to the fashion (Victoria’s sheepskin cloak! Bella’s lesbian chic bowling green button-up!) and of course, the moment that invented cinema itself: the baseball scene. Catherine Hardwicke put her foot in that film and I’ve admired her for it ever since. For me, her work as the director on that film got me interested in the process of filmmaking, and for an entire summer, I lived only off her director’s notebook and filmography. While she was unable to lead the entire franchise, it was her vision that laid the groundwork for the franchise to be a blockbuster success.
Twelve years later, the films and books have been enjoying a massive renaissance and maintained a steady fan following. There are in-depth podcasts that provide insightful commentary (my personal favorites being Into the Twilight and When in Forks) as well as endless tik tok fan accounts, and even the first Twilight Festival which will be held in Forks, Washington later this Fall. While its impact on film is too long to record here, I do want to focus on The Storytellers: The New Voices of Twilight, a short film contest produced in 2015 by Stephanie Meyer in partnership with Lionsgate.
The contest was meant to promote women in film. At the time of the first movie’s release in 2008, the franchise was highly berated. While there were genuine criticisms about the franchise such as the racist treatment of the Quileute tribe and the rampant religious-based misogyny within the text, those criticisms seemed overshadowed by media backlash geared towards the franchise’s target audience. For most of the 2000s (and hell, even now) it was popular to hate on something just because teen girls liked it. Media made for and by women had never truly been treated respectfully. Meyer, who went on to start her own film production company after the franchise, spearheaded the project as a means of supporting women in film and giving the narrative back to the fans, which was what made this project so fascinating.
Fans were encouraged to write scripts based on her illustrated guide and then to submit to a contest where Meyer alongside seven other judges (Kstew, Octavia Spencer, Kate Winslet, Catherine Hardwicke, among others) would handpick the winning scripts to be adapted into a short. This resulted in seven shorts from within the Twilight Universe: Masque, Sunrise, Consumed, Turncloaks, The Mary Alice Brandon File, Groundskeeper, and We’ve Met Before. Each short was distinctly unique in terms of directing style and gave fans a fascinating look into beloved but underdeveloped characters such as Esme, Benjamin, Garret, Alec & Jane, and Alice.
The three shorts I want to primarily focus on are Alice: The Mary Alice Brandon File, Groundskeeper, and We’ve Met Before. All three center around Alice Brandon before she was a Cullen. These three shorts follow Alice over three major points that lead to her turning and her relationship with the Cullens: her childhood and imprisonment in an asylum, her turning, and her first meeting with her husband, Confederate soldier Jasper Hale. For me, these shorts highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the source material. While Stepanie is strong at presenting us with compelling side characters, her work perpetuates racist stereotypes against its few characters of color.
The Mary Alice Brandon File, directed by sisters Sam & Kailey Spear, focuses on Alice’s time imprisoned in an Asylum for her visions in 1920s Biloxi, Mississippi. Out of the three shorts presented its story is the darkest and most compelling. Alice, who’s had an insight into the future, uncovers the fact that her abusive father had her mother killed. In an attempt to shut her up, he used Alice’s visions as an excuse to send her to an insane asylum where electroshock treatments slowly eat away at her very sense of self. Each treatment results in further loss of memory and Alice must resort to writing her name and age down in between treatments just to retain the smallest bits of herself. It is tragic and the visuals rise to the occasion. There's a gray color palette and smoke to characterize the asylum and the violence of the electroshock therapy. The tone is dark and serious to match its equally dark subject matter.
In contrast, Groundskeeper directed by Nicole Eckenroad, is a more stylized and campy (but insidious) look at Alice’s time in asylum leading up to her change. The camp is in the directorial detail, such as the opening credits song which has heavy western influences which sounds like something straight out of a Tarantino film, the head matron of the asylum styled like an extra from Rocky Horror Picture Show, James and Victoria present as parodies of their movie counterparts in terms of wigs and line delivery. But the insidious politics lie within the plot. Alice, haunted by the visions predicting her death at the hands of James and Victoria, requests a round of electroshock treatment to chase the images away from her mind. Her distress summons the vampire asylum groundskeeper/self-appointed protector Kumboh, ( and one of the few Black characters within the entire universe) to her side. After warning him that saving her would both result in his death and the loss of her memory of him, he still insists on turning her, which leads to his battle with James and Victoria.
Throughout the battle, we see hints of a rich backstory for Kumboh, a man who was previously a leader of his people but was now reduced to a magical negro. The introduction and subsequent killing of Kumboh are insulting and unfortunately in line with Meyer’s established racism. Prior to the release of the illustrated guide, the groundskeeper was assumed white in Eclipse, in fact, Meyer implied that no person of color within the universe could be a vampire or that the process made you lighter/more in line with white beauty standards. While casting for Twilight, Catherine Hardwicke tried to push for a more diverse cast but was vetoed by Meyer for every major role. The only Black casting allowed was Edi Gathegi as the villainous Laurent and Gregory Tyree Boyce as the human Tyler Crowley; two characters who had previously been white within the books. For Meyer, Black characters were either villainous or disposable and the legacy of that racism is evident in the film.
This brings us to the third and lightest short, We’ve Met Before directed by Yulin Kang, which centers around how Alice and Jasper’s first meeting. While the style of the short is very Instagram does Pleasantville, ugly racial politics rears its head once more. Alice is sitting at a diner being served coffee by a Black waitress as she waits for Jasper to arrive. At one point Alice envisions Jasper killing this waitress and prevents this murder with a distracting kiss making Alice a white savior while still affirming Jasper as a romantic hero. The problem with this is that Jasper, a proud soldier in the confederate army, is never once throughout the series challenged on his views but the narrative of his love story with Alice is that her love was powerful enough to “change him”. He gives up human blood and abandons his nomadic coven to be with her. Jasper is affirmed to the audience as good because he gave up human blood but his pro-slavery politics is ignored at best and romanticized at worst. To Meyer, it doesn’t matter that Jasper was a confederate because she doesn’t view slavery as inherently evil. This is proven in the text by how unbothered the other Cullens are by this aspect of Jasper’s history. In fact, this aspect of his history is beneficial for them because they can use his knowledge to train again the New Born army rising against them. Jasper’s military knowledge gained through his time with the confederacy is beneficial to them and given how astronomically wealthy the Cullens are it wouldn’t be unfair to assume that their financial gains were achieved through unsavory means.
These shorts are so much as intentionally underlining the issues with Meyer’s text but are rather affirming them. It makes sense given that Meyer retained a lot of creative control over any adaptations of her work as a producer of these projects. She had picked the scripts most in line with her vision for the context and had previously blocked certain creative liberties a director may have been inclined to take (see above for her pushback on more diverse casting). Looking at the project as a whole, however, I cannot help but wish there were more programs such as this that looked at fandom as a generative creative space for a cinematic universe. While her refusal to look to other nonwhite creatives to supplement her shortcomings sour the potential of the franchise at several points ts unsurprising that Meyer’s interest in movies lead to her creating this initiative, after all, it’s normally women and femmes who create the path for others to follow behind. If this project were to be done now I’d want to see the Black, Indigenous, and queer creatives who’ve fueled the Twilight Renaissance take the lead and breath new life into brown characters left behind.
