Twilight: Why The Cullens Went To School (Is It A Plot Hole?)
Twilight featured plenty of plot holes, but was the idea of the Cullens going to school despite their immortality one of them? Released in 2008, Twilight was the first in a series of blockbuster adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling paranormal YA romance series. Directed by Thirteen’s Catherine Hardwicke, Twilight was a gloomy, moody love story that critics disliked but fans adored, and a string of fan-favorites and financially successful sequels followed soon.
The Twilight saga continued to earn hundreds of millions at the box office with each subsequent movie, but many of the films in the series were critically lambasted for their plot-hole-ridden stories. Some, like 30 Days of Night director David Slade’s underrated Twilight: Eclipse, managed to evade critical scorn despite this. Others, like 2009’s first sequel Twilight: New Moon, received even worse reviews than the original.
Credit where it is due, not all of the issues with the plots of the adaptations were a result of the novels being compressed to fit a conventional movie runtime. Take, for example, the question of why the Cullens all still attend school when the series begins. With the youngest of their number being 17 (forever), the Cullens could easily have avoided detection for longer by graduating high school and not attending the institution thereafter. They have been moving town for decades and try not to raise suspicion, so why go to one of few places where people could reasonably demand to know their age? Like the Cullen’s inexplicable riches, this Twilight plot hole originates not with the movies but with the source novel series—and as with their wealth, it has only the slimmest explanation available.
As a franchise, the Twilight series changed a lot of details about vampire lore, something that was very controversial among genre purists during the height of the series popularity. Somewhat unfairly, many commentators claimed Twilight’s vampires were missing too many classic traits of the fictional monsters to really be considered bloodsuckers, an argument that ignores the fact that Bram Stoker’s own version of Dracula was not harmed by sunlight, and many other classic vampire tropes have been adopted and dropped by different works over the decades. That said, from the Cullens being able to survive on animal blood to them not being killed by sunlight, to Twilight’s vampires living in covens like the pre-Volturi Romanian vampires, there was a lot that separated them from the cultural imagination of standard vampires. However, one thing that the Twilight series kept was their immortality. When viewers meet Edward, he is trapped at 17 and has been for a century, with him and his clan never aging. Which begs the question, why go to school?
His siblings Rosalie, Emmett, Jasper, and Alice are all older than Edward, who at 17 could have left school in most US states. Now, the action of Twilight takes place in Washington state, where Edward will actually be required to attend school until he reaches 18. But there’s no canon explanation for why Rosalie (18), Emmett (20), Jasper (19), and Alice Cullen (19) would still be sticking around in high school, especially when Emmett’s age would raise questions even if he weren’t a vampire. The eldest Cullen child is an issue here as, while Emmett’s eggs are often incorrectly called a Twilight plot hole, the question of how his fellow students haven’t noticed that Emmett (canonically 20, and played by a 23-year-old Kellan Lutz ) is clearly not a high school student beggars belief. It certainly seems like it could cause obvious issues for the Cullen family’s hopes to maintain a low profile.
The Twilight saga works around most questions of how the family avoid raising suspicion by passing the buck to their lawyer, Mr. J. Jenks, who manages to ensure that their finances and eternal life don’t raise any suspicions from the taxman. How he achieves this is never made entirely transparent during the series but is not of great import with regards to this particular Twilight plot hole. Instead, Jenks is important here because surely he could do something as relatively easy as faking an 18-year-old birth certificate for Edward if he could hide the fact that the family earns enough money to own numerous luxury cars and a private island. Therefore, the one technicality that does justify Edward staying in school (namely, that he is technically 17 and lives in Washington state), could reasonably be undone by a character who Twilight fans know exists and had helped the Cullens out in many much more dire circumstances.
