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When I was a tween (which was so long ago that they didn’t have the word “tween”) I didn’t have the Twilight Series to devour. There was no Buffy or Edward or any other hero with overgrown bicuspids. However, there was one vampire that made me weak in the knees: George Hamilton. I saw Love at First Bite at least three times in the theater. It was an embarrassingly bad movie in which the uber-tan Hamilton played a vampire (and whoever thought to cast the tannest man in Hollywood as a vampire is a casting director with a profound and extraordinary imagination) who had the hots for Susan St. James. I can think of three possible explanations for my repetition compulsion in regard to this movie:
- George Hamilton’s bad Transylvanian accent intrigued me
- George’s disastrous disco dancing had to be seen several times to be believed
- I was rooting for Susan St. James to get bitten so she could be with George full-time
When I watched the Twilight series, my forgotten memories of Love at First Bite came rushing back to me, and I wondered what it is about vampires that makes young girls camp out all night to see them in New Moon. What is the psychological significance of vampires and why are they especially appealing to tween and teen girls? Sure, Robert Pattinson has great hair, but great hair is not enough to get girls into a frenzy (if it was, his last film, Remember Me, would have done better). The girls don’t go gaga for Edward’s hair; it is his teeth.
The Post-Freudians, if they could get an Edward or any vampire, on their analytic couch, would analyze the pale-faced, wild-haired, bloodthirsty, night-dweller thusly: the adolescent vampire is an attempt to act out conflictual feelings toward mother. As adolescents develop, they feel conflicted about their dependency needs on their mothers, and so the vampire is symbolic of their aggression toward their mothers, the mother who has the milk and/or blood on which they are dependent. In identifying with the image of the vampire, adolescents take the energy/milk/blood from the mother; the mother is thus made dependent on the child (the mother has been turned into a blood-sucking, dependent creature, too). This means that the vampire (the adolescent) becomes the omnipotent provider for the newly dependent vampire. This game of psychic role reversal moderates the tensions of adolescence that come with the death of childhood and emerging into the unknown territory of adulthood. Let me say this like I would have when I was 16: “Oh my God! It totally sucks to be dependent on mom. I totally hate it. Wouldn’t it be awesome if mom was dependent on me? Wouldn’t it be radical and intense [yes, I was a teen in the '80s] if instead of me needing her, she needed me instead? Totally.”
Teeth are a big issue in the vampire mythology. And teeth are big milestone in our psychological development. When we get our first set of chompers we lose some of our dependency on mommy. We can now chew on our own. The vampire, even though he is on a liquid diet, has an over-developed bite. This, again, is the paradox of adolescence that is a repeat of what happens when we are two-years old: the paradox of developing independence and yet suffering continual dependence. If I were to look at a dream in which someone had huge vampire-like teeth and they weren’t able to use them to eat with (they could only suck out milk or blood from the body of another), I would likely (depending on the person) see the teeth as a means of displaying aggression. That they weren’t able to eat with these teeth I might understand to indicate feelings of impotency and dependency.
Have you ever had the tooth loss dream? You know the one: You lose your teeth and are in a total panic. They just start falling out and you wake up in a frenzy and you floss extra well and brush extra long and immediately make an appointment with your dental hygienist? The terror, I believe, that we feel in this kind of dream is the terror of regressing to a place of dependency, vulnerability and loss.
And then there is the hickey thing. Adolescents own the hickey. I don’t know any other age group that finds hickeys to be as delightful as adolescents. I can indeed say that from personal experience--I haven’t had a hickey since I was 16 and I couldn’t be happier about it. Adolescents seem to like the territory claiming that hickeys offer. A hickey is a time-released reminder that the marked person has been making out with someone. A hickey is a kind of body graffiti that says, “Edward was here.” The vampire hickey is one step further. It doesn’t just claim territory. The vampire hickey is a physical marking that says, “You have been permanently changed by this experience.” And we are changed by our dependency on our mothers and by whom we love and who love us back---these experiences leave a mark.
Another interesting element of the vampire mythology is that they cannot stand the light of consciousness. In the Twilight series, the light of consciousness makes the vampires stand out and so they settle in the Pacific Northwest as a way of being able to hide who they are. In other vampire stories if you bring the vampire into the light, they will die. According to Jungian psychology, the vampire would be a shadow figure, and for a young girl it would be her split off, dark, inner masculine that the vampire holds for her. Jungian theory claims that we all have aspects of ourselves that we aren’t able to handle/integrate and that we throw out these things as fast as we can like a psychic hot potato, into the unconscious. Emerging sexuality can be such a hot potato, just as any aggressive or other shadowy impulses. However, according to Jung, when we look at those disowned aspects of ourselves in the light of day we will see that they are important and worthy of integration into our ego.
If pushed to pledge allegiance in the Twilight world, I would be loyal to Edward. He is cute, sensitive, and fiercely protective; Team Edward also offers immortality and skin that sparkles, which is very appealing to this 40-something woman who is on a constant search for a source of skin radiance. However, for Bella, I find myself sitting in the audience with my popcorn, and yelling at her to get into therapy. I want her to take a look at her issues with her mother and her father and for her to see that this Edward/Jacob choice is a false dichotomy. I want Bella to choose herself and for her to be able to articulate her complicated feelings about her mother, dependency, and her desire to be her own independent person. Perhaps the final series of the saga has Bella getting into psychoanalysis. What a happy ending that would be.
