The Auctioneer-the official blog of Auction.ph

Over 17 million of the tetralogy in print and box office sales swiftly passing USD70M worldwide, Twilight is the dawning of a new fad. My sister invited me to a special screening of the movie and I was actually interested in seeing it although mildly. My agenda was more “academic” than the need to be swooned. I was hoping to be in the thick of hysteria and find clues that can help me dissect the hoopla. It was puzzling how a concept that rings like a rehash can cause such fervor.

Unfortunately, due to an emergency at work, I missed the screening. My sister said it hardly qualified as a misfortune. She said I only missed, quite fortunately, sitting on a monobloc chair and straining to hear the dialogue over ear-splitting shrieks and a chorus of coeds reciting the lines along with the actors on the screen. In that respect, I actually missed a lot.

I’m sure you know the movie and the storyline. Supernaturally gorgeous vampire falls in love with someone extraordinarily plebian. Not sure if I am on the dot though, it’s just an assumption based on the casting.

I find, after profound musings invigorated by insanely cold showers, that the reason why it works is the same reason why I found it only mildly interesting in the first place. It works because it is not original. It polishes and modernizes recurring themes that are universal and relevant. Themes that pique at our primordial desires. Like the desire for romance, the need to belong and all that mushy stuff the male of the species keep trapped in toilet humor and aggressive sports.

It was a rather disappointing discovery. But the fact that it is a recurring theme is only half of a more interesting story. The second half and the other reason why Twilight worked: high school girls. Forget the messy tween demographic. We should zero in on the guileless agent provocateurs, the girls in uniform.

My sister teaches English and Research in one of the more reputable all girl high schools in Metro Manila. I usually ask her what high school kids are in to these days. Online, it’s Friendster and MySpace and other SNS sites. Entertainment, it’s Naruto, High School Musical and Twilight. Fashion, it’s Chuck Taylors and flip-flops.

I found the attraction to Naruto intriguing. I have been hearing about the manga but I only recently started watching it. I’m on episode 5 now and I can’t get enough of it. Naruto is a mischievous teen ninja struggling to gain the respect and recognition from his peers and the rest of the community. I watched the first episode and I can’t help filtering allusions from Harry Potter. Naruto and Harry Potter are both orphans. Their misadventures revolve around the fact that they are enrolled in highly-specialized schools. And the parallelisms go deeper. I haven’t seen Twilight yet, but I’m sure that ten minutes into the movie, the same recurring themes will come to fore.

In a Twilight feature on a recent issue of Time Magazine, Rebecca Winters Keegan wrote “it’s not just the size of a fan base that matters but the degree of its ardor.” When you consider high school girls and their choice of entertainment, it seems that their motivations are not driven by outside coercion but are rather self-propelled. Naturally, they can relate to themes that are relevant to their set of experiences. More often than not, they don’t simply buy into such themes and concepts, they embrace it. Dearly.

The high school environment is a suitable incubator for soon-to-become fads. In a high school setting, you have cliques representing market groupings. You have connectors, the high school students with the ability to crossover cliques. You have your mavens who read magazines, consume a lot of media and possibly have relatives living abroad. And then you have influencers. The most important element of the high school microcosm is that the influencer is the environment itself. What starts as a statement by an individual can easily become the statement of the collective. And it’s because of the one thing we all went through: peer pressure. In high school, as the search for identity reaches a point of volatility, peer pressure works like a charm.

And word spreads rapidly for high school girls because they are very active communicators and the technology is available for mass broadcast.  Technology turned high school girls into efficient hype machines.

The power of high school girls in catapulting trends into pop culture icons is already recognized in Japan. In Japan, the Harajuku district is a retail sector that is unabashedly schoolgirl-centric. You can find Sample Labs in the said district. Sample Labs is a salon where women aged 15 and above gain access to free merchandise. All they have to do is pay a minimal registration fee and take the time to answer surveys.

Alas, I am again left without a book to read. My sister has brought home the first two volumes of Twilight and I was surprised to see her actually reading it. She gave some lame excuse about it being “academic.” I read the back cover that said “I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.” I decided to put off reading the book for now only because it contains the word I am hopelessly trying to avoid. (I usually reserve “irrevocable” for letters of resignation.)

Still, the fact remains inescapable. If you want to skyrocket a brand name into iconic status, you have to get in touch with your inner schoolgirl. (That sounds perverse.) Because when you save the cheerleader, you can save the world. Or, to a lesser degree, when you persuade her, you can make tons of money.