Every cloud has a silver lining.
For my father, after my mother died, it was that he never had to be dragged to High Holiday services at the synagogue ever again.
For the parents of “Twilight”-besotted teenage girls (known as “Twi-hards”), it’s knowing that, amidst all the vampires, wolf packs and swooning protestations of undying love, your daughter is being exposed to poet Robert Frost and composer Claude Debussy.
Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) reads Frost’s “Fire and Ice” aloud to her vamp beau Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) in their first scene in “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” the third chapter in the blockbuster series based on author Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling novels. And later, when Bella visits Edward’s house, Debussy’s “Claire de Lune” can be heard faintly tinkling away in the background.
So there’s your silver lining.
Your kid is going to be touched by highbrow culture without your having to nag, lecture or drag her off to a concert hall. And, if you’re really lucky, she may just seek out the original Frost poem -- and that might lead to her read more of his poems and then move on to Whitman, Yeats and other literary greats.
She might even download the “Eclipse” soundtrack and put “Claire de Lune” on repeat, and then hunt iTunes for additional Debussy and other classical composers.
Hey, it could happen.
Adolescence is an impressionable age. When a teenage girl becomes interested in something during those years -- and I speak from experience -- she becomes totally absorbed in it, whether it’s a boy (or boys), rock music, fashion, bicycling or the complex mythology Meyer has created in her “Twilight” franchise. She wants to know everything, see everything, suck it all up.
Teen-themed hit movies have had powerful influences in the past, some of it even good. Consider how many teens have been exposed to Shakespeare in recent decades, either directly or indirectly, and been bitten by the bug.
After Leonard Whiting bared his posterior in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 teen angst version of “Romeo and Juliet,” plenty of adolescent girls read the Bard’s original, if only to see whether Shakespeare had actually specified a nude scene. His popularity with teen girls was boosted again when Baz Luhrman revisited the playwright’s tragic lovers in his 1996 version, “Romeo + Juliet,” with Clare Danes and the teen heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio. And a young Heath Ledger sure was hunky in 1999's "10 Things I Hate About You," an updated rom-com version of "The Taming of the Shrew."
Now, I’d never compare “Twilight” to Shakespeare, but the key to the popularity of both “Romeo and Juliet” and Meyers’ series is the fervency with which its teen protagonists believe in, and declare, their love.
The older you get, the more you understand that love (and especially marriage) is about compromise. But when you’re 12 or 15 or even 17 (the age of “Twilight’s” heroine), it’s L-O-V-E and it’s everything.
