interdisciplinary approaches to twilight
between Edward and Bella takes place in the space (or sometimes the distance) between them. As Kim Edwards points out in her essay on the gaze, looks are an important part of communication in high school, which is probably one reason why the exchange of looks and gazes in the novels are transposed very vividly to the screen in the first film.21 The film, in which ‘the obsession with the gaze in the novel translates onto the screen with new intensity’22 evokes the experience (and, for the older audience, the memory) of life in high school or its equivalent, because the narrative development of the first third of the film consists almost entirely of the exchange of looks.
Investigative gaze With a few exceptions, the film follows the narration of the novel, which gives us Bella’s perception of events. This is done consistently, and is one of the reasons that Bella’s gaze drives the narrative forward in the first third of the film. The exceptions are those few instances when we see the other vampire coven (consisting of ‘bad’, human-blood-drinking vampires) attacking humans, adding to the uncertainty and air of danger about Edward in the first act of the film, especially for those in the audience who do not know the story.23 In two other instances, a point-of-view camera shows us someone watching Bella: in one case it is clear that it is Edward, and in the other we are later given to understand that it was him. In both cases, these aberrations prefigure bad things that happen to Bella from which she is saved by Edward: in the first, it is the car-park accident in which Bella is nearly killed by a skidding car and Edward saves her; in the second, the subjective camera, framed by the branches of a tree, evokes the first scene with the deer, and, consequently, this time the threat is from sexual predators – although the one watching Bella is Edward, the protector. Apart from these instances, the only information we are given in the narrative is what Bella knows and finds out. The first act plays out like a mystery or a detective story in which Bella has to put the pieces together. Edward is introduced when Bella sees him for the first time – the last of the Cullens to enter the school cafeteria. The moment is underlined by the use of slow motion, and, as they enter, Bella’s 70