‘Twilight’ and the Nostalgia of Growing Up

Looking back, I had several awkward phases during my pre-teen and teen years. I was running a Teen Wolf fan page, and at some stage I believed I was emo and refused to wear bright colors or listen to pop music. I loved Riverdale (in my defense, this was before Riverdale went off the rails), and I was die-hard Team Edward. Over the years, I grew out of most of these phases, although I never completely left Twilight behind. Every once in a while I would come back to it for the nostalgia factor – last December for example, I sat down and watched all five in one sitting. So when I saw that it was making its way back to theaters, I knew I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see it again.

However, there’s a slight adrenaline rush for those of us in Armenia who love going to the cinema but don’t speak Russian – here, many new releases and re-runs strictly come with Russian dubbing. I’ve missed out on tons of anticipated films because of this. There’s been initiatives and independent organizers trying to popularize English - or simply, original language - screenings, but generally you know you’re getting a Russian-dubbed version unless it’s a really popular film like The Odyssey (2026). Because of this, my friend Felix and I started waiting to see whether we’d actually get a screening in the first place. Two of the three major cinema chains released it in Russian, but I obviously wouldn’t be writing this if the third one hadn’t come through.

I kept telling myself that I was excited because I know that Twilight isn’t a very good movie, and I was looking forward to laughing AT it instead of with it (I did), but the more I thought about it the less convincing that explanation was. I don't think I was giddy about Superman (2025) or Project Hail Mary (2026), two of my favorite movies of the last few years. There was something about Twilight specifically, and the audience confirmed that this wasn't just me – at some point they removed the “of heroin” part from Edward Cullen's “my own personal brand of heroin” line, and everyone immediately knew something had been cut because they had the original script memorized and were quoting lines a few seconds before the characters said them.

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in ‘Twilight’

There in the theater, I could remember exactly how I used to feel about certain scenes. It was almost as if I was watching two versions of myself at the same time; the current me sitting in the theater who found Edward's staring hilarious, and the pre-teen version of me who found nothing funny about it whatsoever. We tend to talk about nostalgia as if it's a desire to go back and relive a specific time or feeling in our lives, but that’s not what I was necessarily feeling; it was more of a realization that I had underestimated how much of myself I’d left behind as I grew up. There are things I was once convinced I would do, people I thought I'd always have around forever; there were so many versions of myself, each with her own ambitions and insecurities. Mark Fisher wrote about something similar in his collection Ghosts of My Life and used “hauntology” to describe the persistence of things that are no longer here or never came into being to begin with. I think there's something to be borrowed from that idea when thinking about our own pasts. Yes, we are “haunted” by things that happened, but we're also haunted by things we thought would happen.

And I think this is why certain films – in my case, Twilight – remain so important to us even when we no longer enjoy them in the same way. Most of us have a collection of films, shows, albums, books, and otherwise inexplicable interests that belong to particular periods of our lives. They become attached to the people we knew, the things we wanted, the places we spent our time, the futures we imagined for ourselves. In that sense they are almost like time capsules. Their artistic merit (or lack thereof) doesn't undo the place they've occupied in our lives. Twilight will always remain connected to a version of myself I'll never be able to go back to. After all, we don't get to keep the old versions of ourselves, but we do get to keep the things that remind us they were there.

I won't ever watch Twilight with the same seriousness I did when I was twelve, but I can still remember what it felt like to be so invested in something and to find so much excitement in a film that, looking back, really didn't have a lot going for it. So much has changed since then, but I suppose there are also things we will forever carry with us as we grow up – because the girl who watched Twilight at twelve and the one sitting in the cinema ten years later are still both Team Edward.