Bella and her truck

In the first chapter of Twilight, Bella Swan falls in love at first sight^[1]:

There, parked on the street in front of the house that never changed, was my new--well, new to me--truck. It was a faded red color, with big, rounded fenders and a bulbous cab. To my intense surprise, I loved it.

It struck me when I first read Twilight and has stuck with me since that whenever Bella thinks about her truck, her language is specific and sensual. For all that she claims not to be much of a car person when she worries about how she'll maintain an old truck to her dad, or discusses the truck with one of the other love interests, Jacob, she sure seems to notice a lot of pleasing details about the truck:

I couldn't pause and admire my truck again as I wanted; I was in a hurry to get out of the misty wet that swirled around my head and clung to my hair under my hood. Inside the truck, it was nice and dry. Either Billy or Charlie had obviously cleaned it up, but the tan upholstery seats still smelled faintly of tobacco, gasoline, and peppermint. The engine started quickly, to my relief, but loudly, roaring to life and then idling at top volume. Well, a truck this old was bound to have a flaw.

Damn, talk about masculine energy! I mean, leather, tobacco, gasoline, and peppermint sounds like a description of an ultra-masculine perfume^[2]. Like, dad energy but also hot. Reliable and a little spicy. Bella imagines just how tough and protective her truck could be:

Plus, it was one of those solid iron affairs that never gets damaged--the kind you see at the scene of an accident, paint unscratched, surrounded by the pieces of the foreign car it had destroyed.

OK, so maybe there's also a little touch of xenophobia there in the car-as-boyfriend-and-dad. I'm not going to keep quoting at length from Twilight but I'll just tell you that when I word searched "truck" in the ebook I borrowed from the library, I got 101 matches^[3]. That truck is important.

Like for most Americans, having her own vehicle is key to Bella's independence. It's not just symbolic. You can't get around a town like Forks without a car. For example, Bella drives herself to school and observes:

The school was, like most other things, just off the highway.^[4]

But the truck is also symbolic. When that no-good vampire boyfriend starts interfering with Bella's life, one of the first things he does is shit-talk her truck. Then, as he worms his way into her life, he slowly separates her from the truck, insisting first that he drive the truck, and then that she should go in his safer car, and then eventually he actually sabotages the truck.^[5] Whoa. So on one level, abusive boyfriend red flag. On another level, what an amazing symbolic depiction of stripping away of her autonomy by the predatory coven of vampires. We start the book with Bella's distant but healthy-ish relationship with her dad who gives her a truck as a kind of proxy for his protection which also grants her independence. As the book goes on, Bella drives her truck less and less, is literally carried around by the vampires, and the vampires drive her truck.

Anyway, I've always said forget Team Jacob or Team Edward, I'm Team Truck. So when it was pointed out to me that there's a new Lego Ideas set that's based on Twilight, I quipped (again) that Bella/Truck^[6] is the real romance. The truck is part of the set, and on first impression it looks like it's minifig scale, that is, big enough for the figurine to get inside of.

Get in your red truck, Lego Bella and drive away from those two weird dudes and their creepy cultish families!

Photo credit #

The header image is a cropped version of one of the photos from the press kit issued with the Lego Group's January 16, 2025 press release, Relive the Romance with New Twilight-Inspired LEGO Ideas Set From the LEGO Group and Lionsgate. If you're actually interested in the Lego Twilight set and not just my opinions about the symbolic weight of Bella's truck, you can see many more photos and details about the set.