Lay off the Robsessed

If the career trajectory of the typical teen-hunk movie star weren't already ill-fated enough, such is the pace of the modern age they now have to see their fame dissected before they've even outgrown the label. Such has been the lot of Robert Pattinson, much-admired star of Twilight and its looming sequel New Moon. Here's a man who's done more than most to bring vast numbers of teenage girls into cinemas of late, and whose more ardent fans are now the subject of a documentary, the in-no-way-cashing-in Robsessed.

Word of the project has already provoked a lightly tickled response, much of it rounded up at Spout Blog. The general tone is pretty much what you'd expect whenever RPattz and his kind come up for discussion. This, in turn, is pretty much what I instinctively lapse into as well: a thinly amused condescension borne out of the gulf between what we think of as proper cinema and the various frothy vehicles of the pin-up. Their films, we smirk, are harmless but vapid, their talent clearly limited, and any attempt they might make to break out of their gilded cage swiftly greeted with wry raised eyebrows (see Pattinson's turn as Dali in the largely unseen Little Ashes and Zac Efron's attempted reinvention in the upcoming Me and Orson Welles).

But the thing is, the more I think about it, the more bogus that sniffiness and the division it creates between "real movies" and silly teen flicks appears. It's a fact so self-evident it sometimes gets forgotten that film is and always has been completely bound up with sex and the physical allure of the faces that fill our screens. As soon as cinema evolved from scaring thrill-seekers with images of trains pulling into stations, its gaze fell long and lustful on the cast. To their very core, the movies have always been as much about Veronica Lake's pout and Brando's jawline as Kubrick's tracking shots or Scorsese's slo-mo – something that makes today's sneers at teenage girls for lowering the tone of film culture seem a little rum.

The truth is that I've seen film lovers of every stripe sporting the same look of desperate infatuation from time to time. Witness the senior figure on the renowned cinephile glossy whose response to Michael Haneke's Code Unknown was to wipe away the drool and wish aloud that one day Juliette Binoche might coquettishly iron his shirts for him; or the veteran of indie distribution with her fixated crush on, less predictably, Steve Buscemi. Lord knows, I'm not immune myself; and yes, we've all of us watched and forgiven less accomplished movies than we might otherwise have done simply due to the presence of a certain beloved cast member.

But when teenage girls do the same thing, the condescension slips in – and it's not unheard of for it to then turn nasty. Efron, in particular, provokes a degree of bile that's clearly directed less at him than at those who adore him. Truth be told, attitudes to the "Robsessed" can feel uncomfortably like a toxic mix of the revenge of grown men on the girls who wouldn't go out with them at school, and a dash of collective self-loathing from all of us grizzled film freaks at the secret knowledge that we're all, on some level, teenyboppers too. Because the truth about Pattinson and Efron is actually pretty mundane: the former is solid if slightly poker-faced, the latter a wispy curate's egg who could just as plausibly disappear within two years or turn into an Oscar winner. And anyone who watches movies with any frequency at all will know there are much worse films and far less able actors out there than either of them.

Aside from which, I reckon those of us who are inclined to diss the likes of Pattinson and Efron should first double-check the provenance of their own favourite movies. Because anyone who savoured, just for instance, anything involving Johnny Depp was of course enjoying a movie built around a former self-described "heart-throb, teen idol, teen hunk ... patented, painted, plastic". The same goes for the legion fans of Heath Ledger's Joker, and it may be worth anyone fond of Seven and Fight Club to recall how central to each was an actor whose professional breakthrough came wearing a Stetson and parading bare-chested for the jollification of Geena Davis and numberless female audience members. All told, maybe it's time the angry fanboys got real, and started dotting their i's with those telltale big pink hearts.