Cloud without a silver lining: Why Twilight’s stark, opalescent skies had me riding the Bella-Edward train-Entertainment News , Firstpost

When the going gets tough, we turn to our favourite guilty pleasures. But when entertainment is concerned, is there even any guilt to what gives one pleasure? In our new series Pleasure Without Guilt, we look at pop offerings that have been dissed by the culture police but continue to endure as beacons of unadulterated pleasure.

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The weather determines the way I feel. The psychology is simple. The blazing sun makes me feel calm and lazy because, like most other kids, I grew up associating summers with vacations. I see a bright sky, and am automatically conditioned to be relaxed, adventurous, recreational or restful.

If it’s cold (or “not hot” in Mumbai), I feel hungry and restless, because the Christmas holidays and New Year’s Eve were precursors to tense mid-term examinations. When December comes around, I still feel the same today: free but not free at once. It’s the long monsoons that do a number on me, though. The rain triggers a heaviness in the chest. I’ve long been convinced that nothing good happens under overcast skies.

The clouds aren’t just metaphorical. I’ve lost jobs in June. I’ve lost people. It was stormy during the most recent funeral I attended. Romantic relationships seem to end only in July. The corny Chaplin line – of “walking in the rain so that nobody can see me cry” – has been a constant in my head. It was gloomy outside when I found out that my closest friend had cancer. I witnessed my first ever road accident on a rainy Independence Day in 1996. Our school and gully cricket seasons used to be suspended for three showery months. Also, is there anything more disorienting than switching the lights on in the middle of the day? I think not. Despite this lifelong aversion towards stark skies, however, I took to Twilight the moment I ‘accidentally’ watched it in late 2008.

I hadn’t read the Stephanie Meyer young-adult novels – still haven’t – but there’s something about director Catherine Hardwicke’s opalescent mood piece that has had me secretly riding the Bella-Edward train for years. I thought I’d grow out of it at some point – I’m 35 now – but if anything, I’ve only grown fonder of the puerile pop classic. Sure, there’s the campy vampire and werewolf stuff, but my reasons for enjoying Twilight have been largely sensory and personal. It’s due to who I am (not a vampire, I promise), my history, and my mental anatomy.

Let me explain. Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan moves from sunny Arizona to a gloomy small town, Forks, at the beginning of the film. It’s a place characterised by year-around cloud cover, with little to no sunlight making its way to the sparse population. An outcast, Bella joins the new school semester midway through, and instantly finds herself attracted to the pale-faced Edward Cullen, a heartthrob who seems to thrive in the dark and damp weather of Forks. Over the course of the film, “vegetarian” vampire Edward and his family integrate human Bella into their fold – and teach her to embrace the cloud-bursty, thunder-stormy climate of the shadowy town. The sun is detrimental to his health, and to the palette of the film.

Their love blossoms in the calibrated dimness of pinewood jungles. Every time I watch the wooing parts of Twilight, I confront the true identity of the unsettling emotion I experience on an overcast day: Newness. Bella’s time in Forks keeps reminding me that the reason the clouds make me anxious is rooted in my teenage years. The dark skies were always synonymous with the newness of a school year. Classes started in June, and a lot of “settling in” and adapting to a new environment with new teachers happened under the depressing glare of white tube lights and slippery stone floors. Groups and alliances were formed, first impressions were made, and the socio-academic tone for the near future would be irrevocably established.

A virginal Bella’s early scenes with Edward reveal to me another suppressed memory from those years – hormones. My first brush with adolescent love happened in peak monsoons. Most of our first meetings took place in a small corner at the back of her huge family bungalow in the dead of night. It used to be raining, and I’d tip-toe my way through the drenched darkness to meet her secretly while her parents were away at some party or another. A lot of our chemistry depended on the cover of clouds and rain. The nerves jangled. We held hands on the brink of getting caught. Some said we were too young to be dating, but we felt like old souls convening to confirm a suspected connection. The thrill of discovery aligned itself with the musky scent of wet tiles and cracked clay pots. The days would be spent plotting yet another nocturnal heist.

This newness of primal feeling – combined with the unsettling change of a school semester – marked the gloomiest of months in an otherwise-tropical year of familiar changes.

Twilight eventually became a gleefully morbid reminder that my cloud-induced edginess was actually triggered by the onset of growth, not tragedy.

Every frame of the film is awash with the endless potential of newness – of identity, romance, companionship, courage, lust, and compromise – that had defined those startling mid-year months of my teenhood. The one thing Twilight did for me is humanise the moody bleakness of the atmosphere. Thanks to the film’s stubborn commitment to sunless fury, I’ve found myself getting more curious – rather than wary – about the visual ramifications of such an existence.

Over the last few months, I’ve subscribed to the Youtube channel of a young Swedish woman named Jonna Jinton. I spend nights watching videos of her life in the remote woods of North Sweden as a filmmaker and content creator. Her hi-res cameras capture the wilderness in all its stark glory. The dark and freezing winters are six months long, and yet she – along with her boyfriend and dog – manage to keep the spirits high and hungry in a region bereft of light.

I keep thinking this is how Bella and Edward might have ended up in the real world. Twilight becomes their metaphor for cultural poetry, and people like me envy them and watch them sparkle under the Northern Lights while broadcasting their little “social experiment” as slick vlogs. For, in a film that has helped me make peace with the visual tapestry of isolation, the dawn is darkest before the night.

Read more from our Pleasure Without Guilt series here.

Rahul Desai is a film critic and programmer, who spends his spare time travelling to all the places from the movies he writes about.