Search Results for: Tanya Erzen

The Religion of Twilight

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by Tanya Erzen

Last November, I sat in a theatre in South Jordan, Utah with 4,000 Twilight Moms, who had gathered for the weekend to celebrate the release of New Moon after two days of raucous pre-film festivities.  As I sat watching Eclipse, the newest film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s blockbuster Twilight series (in the six days since it opened, Eclipse has grossed $176.4 million), it wasn’t the wolves, newborn vampire army, fight sequences, love triangle or brief appearance by the Volturi that I found mesmerizing.  It was the fans seated around me.   They had come to watch the film after holding their own red carpet events at home, sharing Eclipse-theme dinners, exchanging flowers with one another, reciting lines from the book, donning golden vampire contact lenses, holding sleepovers, and wearing t-shirts bearing slogans with variations on favorite quotes: “Edward Cullen, I Promise to Love You Every Moment of Forever.”   The women and girls in Ohio were just part of the millions in the fanpire worldwide who have built imaginative social worlds around the film premiere and the series in general.

Writers like Jana Riess have astutely noted the Mormon religious themes embedded in the books.  However, an overlooked aspect of the series is the way fans worldwide have created a Twilight-inspired universe that encompasses all aspects of their lives. Continue Reading →

Pray Away the Gay; Abort the Retort

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Prayers for Bobby “is a film designed to teach us a lesson about religious intolerance,” writes Tanya Erzen, “but in doing so it reproduces the unspoken rules for rendering gay people sympathetic or likable to a television audience: they were ‘born that way,’ they never have sex, and, of course, they die tragically.” We thought the same thing when we saw the much bigger budget Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes’ accidental advertisement for the anti-abortion movement, a move so misogynist that it makes Underworld: Rise of the Lycans seem like a feminist parable. In the film, women are ‘born that way,’ of course, but in more ways than one — they’re conniving but not too bright, sex for them is a form of vengeance or control, and they often talk too much. Star Kate Winslet does have sex — once to control Leonardo DiCaprio, once to take vengeance on him, and then never again. And, of course, she dies tragically, the wages of sin — the result of aborting a baby Leo wanted. The movie opens with a deluded Winslet berating her husband; it ends with an old man happily turning off his hearing aid as his wife yammers on. Continue Reading →

In the News: Captain America, Serpents, Google’s Gods, and more!

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A round-up of recent religion and media stories in the news. Continue Reading →