'Twilight' hunks part of film's heartthrob history
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Besides his looks, Chloe loves the character he plays: a kid-next-door type who's sweet, funny and just a tad awkward.
"I like him because I can feel like that might actually happen, like this guy could be real," she says.
Pattinson is really hot, too, but Chloe finds his character's infinite devotion to Bella "kind of unrealistic."
Fans of the series fall on two sides: Team Edward and Team Jacob. Chloe aligns firmly with the latter, but "it's pretty much half and half at my school," she says.
Each has his charms. On screen, Pattinson plays a dashing vampire. Off-screen, the British actor is shy and soft-spoken, humbled by all the "Twilight" attention. He's 23, lanky and pale, with thick, tousled hair he constantly runs his fingers through.
Lautner is buff and bronzed, with a gregarious personality, dark eyes and an easy smile. To reprise his character in "New Moon," he packed on more than 9 kilograms of chiseled physique.
Pattinson and Lautner may be slightly sexier than teen idols past, but they're cut from the same teen-heartthrob cloth as their predecessors: smooth-faced stars who seem wholesome - and just a touch away from attainable.
Heidi Hurst, executive editor of teen pinup magazine Tiger Beat, notes that since the magazine was established in 1965, the guys on its pages have been "non-threatening, more on the boyish side of good looks." The November issue features Lautner and Pattinson on the cover.
Most Tiger Beat readers, who range in age from eight to 16, "still aren't dating boys in real life and this is their first exposure to boys as in 'They're cute. I like them'," Hurst says.
Chloe buys Tiger Beat when it has a good Lautner spread. She'll also Google him from time to time and, until recently, kept a "very hot, shirtless picture" of him as her computer screen-saver. But she's not as obsessive as some of her friends, who check YouTube for him daily and follow various "Twilight" fan sites. She and a dozen of her friends were planning to make their own Team Jacob T-shirts, and they've seen "New Moon" which opened last week.
Chloe's mom, Jill Mullikin-Bates, approves of her daughter's love for Lautner, calling the young actor "a wholesome, realistic role model."
"He's the right age and super cute," says the 47-year-old mother of two. "It totally brings me back to when I was that age and having those fantasies."
Mom's teen heartthrob? Leif Garrett, a late-1970s icon adored for his feathered, Farrah Fawcett-style hair.
Fawcett, of course, was the most popular pinup of her day. But the boys who bought her iconic poster related to her in a completely different way than Chloe does, because they typically don't have relationships with their on-screen idols the way girls do. Most guys want to get physical with their love objects, where girls fantasize about their heartthrob becoming their boyfriend.
"Pinups are more explicitly eroticized where a heartthrob ... is about feelings, being able to imagine romance rather than just sex and sexuality," says Karen Tongson, a professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California.
Former heartthrob Rick Springfield says he never believed his adolescent female followers were attracted to him sexually: "If they were confronted with this older man and they saw all this body hair and whiskers, they'd probably completely gross out."
He theorizes that young, screaming fans are merely responding to fledgling feelings of attraction they can't yet define. "They're just letting out all this new energy that they're discovering," he says.
Chloe says if she ever met Lautner in person, she'd be "freaking out on the inside but trying to act cool on the outside." Sometimes when she's with her friends, "we pretend what we'd say to him if we were more confident."
Then there's the life-sized cardboard cutout of Lautner that Chloe's mom and dad recently bought for her. He now stands in her bedroom - her first vision every morning and the last thing she sees each night.
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