By Priya Dutta
The Twilight Saga is an adaptation of the 1756 Beauty and the Beast by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, expanding Beauty’s possibilities after her initial happy ending with the Beast. The third movie, Eclipse, illustrates the peak conflict of the series as the female protagonist, Bella, must decide between two Beasts, Edward and Jacob, transforming her identity in the process. The film’s marketing is compelling because its focus on “Team Edward” versus “Team Jacob” results in the objectification of Bella, the center of the storyline. According to agenda-setting theory, marketers do not tell people what to think but dictate what they think about, leaving crafted room for interpretation influenced by visuals and messaging. Although the movie highlights Bella, newly empowered and reclaiming her identity despite pressure to succumb to male manipulation, the marketing exploits the female gaze to make problematic male bodies more desirable. The complex male gaze present within and beyond Eclipse is made visible because of the misalignment between the storyline and marketing, which inaccurately promotes regressive societal values. In this paper, I will argue how Eclipse can be used as a marketing lesson – if it highlighted the actual female-centered and progressive plot, it would have disbanded critics equating the film to the principles of the original fairy tale.
Eclipse deviates from Beauty and the Beast because the female protagonist must now consider the demands of multiple men, including her father and original beast, Edward, and a new beast found in Jacob. With the introduction of a new suitor, Bella experiences more liberty in love than Beauty, but this implies more burden to satisfy external demands. Bella is at a turning point where she must decide between risky and effortless love, all of which require her to transform in different capacities: to appease her worried father, yield to traditional marriage values, or sacrifice love for safety. The conflict she experiences among these three men reflects the intricacy of battling the male gaze.
Regarding her romantic relationships, on the one hand, Edward possesses unwavering love for Bella but maintains traditional marriage ideals that limit her scope of influence. Resembling the values emulated in Beauty and the Beast, Edward insists they get married before her virtue is compromised, adamant that he must protect her soul. His perspective, however, invalidates Bella into believing she is inferior and wrong for desiring more out of their relationship; “You really make me feel like some sort of villain trying to steal your virtue or something” (Eclipse). He continually warns Bella of the immense sacrifices she must endure, including converting into a vampire and abandoning her friends and family forever. Edward contradicts himself as he simultaneously pushes Bella away and acknowledges that Jacob is the safer choice but insists that she has the ultimate authority. To Jacob, he claims, “I know you can protect her…you can give her life, a human life. That’s all I want for her. But I’m not going to force her into anything ever again” (Eclipse). It is significant to note that this interaction occurs after Bella accepts Edward’s marriage proposal, asserting that he would never try to control her, even though he did so for the first half of the film. Manipulating her emotions, Edward tries to get Bella to choose him by telling her not to, posing himself as a forbidden love. Bella does not take this lightly as she considers Jacob, but her self-determination persists.
On the other hand, Jacob represents a flawed but more human-like love that would require no transformation or sacrifice for Bella except leaving Edward. Jacob takes an explicitly forceful approach to sway Bella’s mind, repeatedly provoking that she is in love with him, “she just won’t admit it to herself,” and “she’s not sure what she wants” (Eclipse). He offers a more transactional perspective, arguing that he can provide more than Edward, like protection and warmth, despite her lack of feelings toward him. Compared to Beauty and the Beast, Jacob resembles The Beast, using hot-headed self-pity to lure Bella into loving him: when Bella accepts the marriage proposal, Jacob exclaims, “maybe I’ll get myself killed and make it simple for you” (Eclipse). Bella kisses him following this statement, so some may argue that his tactics worked, and she surrendered to the male gaze. Bella uses this, however, to demonstrate her influence over Jacob and establish clarity over her decision. She claims agency in this scene, revealing that she loves both men, but to distinctive extents.
Finally, a role reversal appears between Bella and her father compared to Beauty and her’s. As Bella considers the advantages of marriage, her father remains skeptical of it, pushing her to wait as long as possible. He asserts, “Sure, marriage has value. When you’re older. Much older. Like your mom – it worked out great for her the second time. Later in life” (Eclipse). This difference in opinion demonstrates the familiar notion of wanting to keep young girls young, maintaining their purity forever. Considering how her father, Edward, and Jacob pull her in different directions gives context to the significance of Bella’s decision and her ultimate disregard for the male gaze.
Laura Mulvey’s 1975 Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is an influential work that defined the male gaze, revealing that cinema has a unique role in maintaining masculinity with activity and feminity with passivity. She concludes that in movies, there is no place for women to identify with a feminine agency due to a “psychic desire…voyeuristic, fetishistic, and possessive fantasy of the male gaze,” and as Kelly Oliver expands, “the male gaze is more relevant, and more dangerous, than ever” today (Oliver). Connecting this thinking with Eclipse, the film seems to romanticize a woman’s naivete in juggling two supernatural men, appearing to make no progress from the fairy tale original Beauty and the Beast. Throughout the story, Bella serves as the ideal woman for both men, reaffirming their masculinity as she attempts to satisfy their wishes. Jack Zipes, however, argues that illustrating the confusion in navigating the compounded issues women face, regardless of success or failure, holds immense value in feminist writing. He writes, “instead of focusing directly on gender issues and radicalizing the canon, women writers nowadays tend to depict baffled and distressed women and men caught in a maize of absurd situations. In doing this, they are endeavoring to unravel the causes of their predicaments and use narrative strategies that both reflect the degeneration of communication and are somewhat degenerate themselves” (Zipes 121-139). Like a fairy tale, the story resonates with reality because every woman falls victim to the male gaze in their life. Eclipse has an admittedly ludicrous storyline involving vampires and wolves, but because the writer embraced and worked through such absurdity, we can appreciate the growth of the story. Contrary to Mulvey’s caution, Bella triumphs over patriarchal values, as embodied by her final declaration.
During the final scene of Eclipse, Bella justifies her long-awaited decision, empowered with newfound confidence. When Edward claims she continues to make sacrifices to please everyone, she refutes, “You’re wrong. This wasn’t just a choice between you and Jacob. It was between who I should be and who I am…I’ve had to face death and loss and pain in your world, but I’ve also never felt stronger, like more real, more myself because it’s my world too. It’s where I belong” (Eclipse). This simple yet compelling reframing of the decision from choosing love to declaring identity shifts the narrative back into Bella’s hands. She reclaims the power seized from the men in her life, making a decision best for her despite enduring and inflicting pain. Earlier to Jacob, she alludes “never had a choice with Edward” (Eclipse), thus revealing that she remained unimpacted by their manipulative attempts. Bella asserts that the story was about self-discovery, not determining the superior man.
Jack Zipes crucially contends, “The fairy tale has become commercialized in America, and the majority of the fairy tales produced for children and adults pay lip service to feminism” (Zipes 121-139). Under this context, the mere ability of choice does not imply significant progress toward feminism, employing the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. While patriarchal values and reinforcement of misogyny persist throughout the film, it is essential to realize how these issues continue to infiltrate our lives and media. The film does not attempt to support these regressive values but acknowledges and expands on their depth. Jessica Taylor explains that “it is arguably the way the series caters for an emergent female gaze that firmly locates this series within contemporary society and makes it of our time” (Taylor). Eclipse promotes success for the female gaze because by choosing herself, Bella assumes self-empowerment and advocacy and abandons the objectification associated with the male gaze, all within the modern craze for supernatural circumstances. Within Laura Mulvey’s perspective, Eclipse remarkably associates femininity with activity.
Despite the progressiveness of the story, the marketing of the film falls short, reinscribing patriarchal values by illustrating the violent male body as desirable, embodied by “Team Edward” versus “Team Jacob” (Taylor). As elaborated, the men continually provoke and pressure Bella for their own gain, but beyond the movie, this problematic behavior is disregarded for aesthetics. The argument that Eclipse skews the female gaze to value harmful male figures as appealing exists outside the primary text. Although it can be argued that objectifying the male characters through marketing depicts recovered authority for women, it fails to represent current feminist conventions as the promotions are not woman-centered; being anti-men does not imply pro-women. The marketing, instead, objectifies Bella’s character, using her as a pawn in everyone’s personal Edward or Jacob fantasy, thus it markets the male gaze. The movie’s intent to highlight the chaos surrounding the journey toward female empowerment became lost in the audience’s decision to idolize the two men and the marketers’ choice to capitalize on this discourse. As agenda-setting theory tells us, marketers cannot shape what people think but what they think about, thus leaving room for interpretation. The result of the film’s marketing should not take away from the illuminating heart of the story and should serve as a lesson for movie marketing.
Literature, similar to marketing, is fundamentally about history, culture, and the nature of identity. Whether it is employed to make, reflect or reshape these fundamentals is up to the creator and audience. The marketing ultimately continues and changes the narrative. As exemplified with Eclipse, story intent does not always match the advertising or viewers’ interpretations, but this tension reveals what society values and desires to see. While the storyline progresses, the movie’s marketing indicates that we continue to validate society’s widespread beliefs instead of disrupting problematic discourse. The marketing for Eclipse could have focused on Bella’s choice between living up to society’s expectations versus her own, rather than “Team Edward” versus “Team Jacob,” thus allowing more people to consider the movie a victory for feminist thinking. The marketing dishonors the story as it promotes the male gaze to a female audience, just as Beauty and the Beast did. Eclipse’s marketing had the opportunity to rework the outdated function of stories as instruction manuals but failed to do so, telling young girls to resonate with the male characters. If the film acknowledged its inherent power as a fairy tale, we could have witnessed a more transformative approach to social cooperation.
Examining Eclipse, the third movie of The Twilight Saga that illustrates the peak conflict of the series, the story contains a triumph for the female gaze, although not explicit at first. By re-establishing her struggle as one for identity over love, Bella shifts the entire narrative, demonstrating how she had authority over Edward and Jacob pitted against one another. Compared to Beauty and the Beast, Bella harnesses newfound agency, but the movie’s marketing tells a different story. Highlighting the respective desirability of each man, the marketing seizes attention from Bella, and the audience points blame at her for affirming or denying their personal choices in “Team Edward” or “Team Jacob.” Based on a fairy tale, Eclipse naturally has a significant influence in shaping people’s societal perspectives, but the marketing missed the mark by, once again, promoting the regressive male gaze. Comparing the misalignment between the film and its marketing holds value to audiences nevertheless – revealing that we must never take media at face value and dig into the story ourselves.
Works Cited
Meyer, Stephenie. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. Summit Entertainment, 2010.
Oliver, Kelly. “The Male Gaze Is More Relevant, and More Dangerous, than Ever.” New Review
of Film and Television Studies, vol. 15, no. 4, 2 Oct. 2017, pp. 451–455., https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2017.1377937.
Taylor, Jessica. “Romance and the Female Gaze Obscuring Gendered Violence in The Twilight
Saga.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 11 Dec. 2012, pp. 388–402., https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2012.740493.
Zipes, Jack. “And Nobody Lived Happily Ever After.” Relentless Progress the Reconfiguration of Children’s Literature, Fairy Tales, and Storytelling, Routledge, New York, NY, 2009, pp. 121–139. EBSCOhost, https://web.s.ebscohost.com/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook?sid=95cfeb96-3e08-4876-a72e-efaedfdf5726%40redis&ppid=pp_125&vid=0&format=EB. Accessed 2022.
