The Edward Delusion

He has pallid skin, an all-consuming stare, carelessly kept hair and he says all the right things in all the most paradisaical locations and he stares at the girl he has been waiting for his whole life – and that’s a long time - with those deep, intensely mysterious eyes; he is perfection personified, out-of-this-world-romantic, flawless and…

He’s not real.

Edward Cullen is a character written for the purpose of being every girl’s fantasy, every girl’s dream and I haven't met a girl yet who doesn't agree. Stephanie Meyer has certainly succeeded but in doing so, has she created irrevocably unrealistic expectations of beautiful men for young women?

We’ve seen it before, smitten tweens the world over glorifying the male stars that appear in teenage romance films, my Robert Pattinson was Leonardo Di Caprio and I remember how obsessed I was with him. My friends and I must have watched Romeo + Juliet a thousand times just for glimpses of him in the early morning light, smoking a cigarette whilst writing profound poetry of an unintelligible nature, at least unintelligible for a 12 year old, or for those adorable scenes by Juliet’s pool after the Capulet soiree.

But we’ve never encountered such a perfect character as Edward, sure, Leo was Romeo but Edward is the modern day Romeo and a vampire to boot, and vampires are oh so popular right now. Vampires of yesteryears have hardly been portrayed as gentle and loving beings, like the Cullen family are, but they are fast becoming known as just that.

We’ve been idolizing stars since the dawn of time and every so often you ask yourself why, when they are so flawed, and we can blatantly see that when we pick up Heat magazine on any given day, and we are constantly reminded that the beauties we see on the covers of fashion magazines rarely if ever look that stunning. The faces and bodies we see on those covers are all thanks to the wizardry of air brushing. The conclusion I draw is that we see their roles in film as who they are; we like to think we know the difference and we do, to some degree, but we still see them as their perfect, or perfectly imperfect roles on screen. We’ll always see Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen, the lion in a vampiric love story. Mostly, when girls speak of him, they say Edward, not Robert, which is proof enough.

Yes, Robert Pattinson has sex appeal, and he's possibly quite charming and probably a little bad and all those other characteristics that women love to love and hate in men but, as can be said for every celebrity out there, he is not the role he plays on screen. If he was, he would be a promising young wizard who died during the Triwizard Tournament, a surrealist painter who was a little left of center and died at the age of 84. The list could go on.

I've always been intrigued by celebrity culture, what's not intriguing about it? But to worshipfully gaze upon them as somehow superior, the very epitome of perfection is unhealthy, especially to young minds in their formative years.

Having said all that, I really admire the Twilight stories for their romanticism. The films themselves are shot beautifully in my favourite kind of weather; rainy. And even though I no longer crush obsessively on male celebrities, I can fathom what all the fuss is about.