Los Angeles Man Unsure if He Has seen all the twilight movies
“Maybe not the last few,” replied Ari Kononov, a music executive in the outer Pasadena area. This was a rather cavalier response to a seemingly trivial question sent over text message: have you seen all the Twilight movies? I sent it on my iPhone 14 pro.
What Ari didn’t know, was that I was going to follow up with another question. I promptly inquired, “which one do you remember most?” Ari typed for five to six seconds before stating, “Twilight, for sure.”
A revealing response.
Of the five films in the Twilight saga—Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn – Part 1, and Breaking Dawn – Part 2—Ari could only confidently recall the one whose title is identical to the franchise itself. Was this simple laziness? Efficient categorization? Or evidence of a broader cognitive phenomenon quietly unfolding beneath the surface of modern life?
Every day, we consume an astonishing volume of media. Television series blur together. Marvel movies with 1,000 characters on the poster become interchangeable. We can quote TikToks we watched yesterday but have to scroll 100 feet down our ‘likes’ to show it to someone so they get it too. The human brain, once tasked with remembering the location of berries and avoiding predators, is now expected to distinguish between Jurassic World Dominion and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, or Spider-Man’s on His Way Home and Spider-Man is Coming Home.
Perhaps this isn't Ari's failure at all.
Perhaps we've simply reached the upper limit of the prefrontal cortex's storage plan. I dug a little deeper with Ari to find out.
Ross: How many of the twilight movies do you think you’ve seen?
Ari: Maybe 3 in my life but I only remember 2. No wait, 1.
Ross: Amazing, thank you. And you’re fairly confident that the one you’ve seen is the first one, Twilight?
Ari: Yes, I am spider monkey.
Interesting. He remembers a quip from the film, but can’t recall any of its successors. I began to wonder if this was how we were meant to consume art now: not as complete works, but as loose collections of moments that can be retrieved when prompted. Perhaps the brain no longer asks, “What happened in Twilight?” but instead, “Was there something about a spider monkey?” and, if the answer is yes, considers the matter sufficiently resolved.
The sheer number of sequels could also be part of the problem. Every somewhat successful film now seems to arrive with an implied obligation to produce at least three more movies, a prequel, a spin-off, and a television series that somehow takes place 30 years before the original but features a younger version of a character who was never particularly interesting to begin with. We used to ask whether a movie was good enough to warrant a sequel. Now the sequel appears to be part of the original business plan. We could be seeing a new Minions movie every summer for the rest of our lives. Quick complaint: the last time I went to see a movie, it started at 2:30pm, and they showed us 30 minutes of Minions promotional bumpers and trailers until the real feature started at 3:00pm.
To test these theories, I asked Ari one final question: Do you feel like the reason you can’t remember much about the franchise is related to the amount of content we consume?
Ari responded: “I don’t. I think it’s about the quality of the source material.”
I continue to search for more enthused interview subjects. And I still believe the breaking down of media memory could be related to too many Breaking Dawns.
