Post
by sauvin » Wed Jul 07, 2010 4:13 am
If you don't like this particular Eli looking at this particular Oskar, that's OK. I am at times sorry I even wrote Oskar at 40 because he reminds me too much of people I've actually known. Ugly son of a [deleted], and I never intended that anybody like the story or the Oskar in it; this may well be the only time in my life I deliberately created something I knew I would hate. What's so amazing about the story is that I was even able to write it at all. My own internal running monologues never take on this kind of tone.
I was very disappointed with how Eli's view of 40something Oskar turned out when I crawled out of bed this morning. Writing into the wee hours of the morning well past normal bedtime can be disinhibiting, but it'll also likely be markedly unbalanced. It may furthermore be a mistake to try to write something like this after having read too much LTROI fanfic and having watched the movie a couple of times for the first time in quite a while: Elina does at times strike me as being a very sweet girl, and it's easy to forget she can have the mind, heart and soul of a crocodile when her stomach starts rumbling loudly.
It's easy to forget that I spent quite a while wrestling with the idea that Eli manipulates people masterfully. She's a vampire, after all, whose diet consists exclusively of the most dangerous, effective and omnivorous large predator this planet has ever seen: us. There's no guarantee the humanity we see in her (in the movie) isn't just some kind of facade. I personally reject the idea she's totally a masquerading child-sized lizard but find it advisable to bear in mind that even if she's fully human with cyclical fugues, the term of her survival is due at least in part to her acquired proficiency at hunting.
It occurred to me that Oskar at 40 is a very angry man, dangerous and potentially murderously violent, and sexually voracious. This anger may (or may not) be relatively diffuse and quiescent most of the time, reaching the near extremities suggested in the story only when exacerbative circumstances (such as procuring) challenge Oskar's normal control, but if this is the case, one would expect some of this violence to accompany Oskar when he goes home to Eli. Her view of 40something Oskar not only doesn't discuss it, it explicitly denies it in at least two places. There's a disconnect here that states that either Oskar at 40 isn't normally like what we saw in the monologue, or that Eli is in profound denial, or some combination of both.
I think I goofed. Badly.
I didn't give 40something Oskar a lot of thought when I wrote it. Like JAL, I was just trying to paint an emotional picture without the slightest concern for being able to "prove" its plausibility. Rereading it, it seems to me the anger, the capacity for murder and the sexual rapacity mask (and are propelled by) raw fear. Any normal person can fear losing his lifemate, even after thirty years of being together, but Oskar can never allow his fear to abate, fear that somebody will discover them somehow and destroy them both, fear that his continued aging will drive him further away from her, fear that he is himself becoming less human when it's plain that she wants nothing more than to be more so. An Oskar worn down by decades of vigilant fear is an Oskar who manifests it more palpably, if not with crystalline clarity.
I'm going to let the story stand as it is. It's not only good for comedy relief, it's also not terribly inconsistent with the majority of the fanfic on this site. Also, it's one heartfelt perspective from a gibbering old fool with a genuine fondness for LTROI camp and kitsch.
If I were to rewrite it, though, the issue of domestic violence would play a much greater role, even if only subtly. In another thread, I'd speculated that much of her interaction with "normal" men seems likely to have been with paedophiles who'd tend to have a magnifying effect on her view of her own monstrosity: she's not only a serial murderess, she's also just a piece of cold meat to serve as a vessel for her minders' pleasure. Nothing more than that, just a cordless vacuum-operated masturbatory device that doesn't even need batteries.
This alone would be enough to create an emotional recursively descending [deleted] that produces the wooden and lifeless Elina as she leaves the cab in the movie. If her paedophiliacal minders had been given to physical violence (as I understand many are), would the anger the 40something Oskar brings home not also be something she'd accept as a matter of routine course, not knowing that "normal" couples never countenance such things? She certainly seemed to forgive him easily enough in the deleted scene; there, my impression is that the only emotion she experienced after having been struck so forcefully was a very mild and fleeting disappointment. Maybe she felt she deserved it.
One of the major failures I see in the story I wrote was then the fixation on "deviant" sexuality as I imagine it would proceed from years of using it and being used by it in the course of routine daily survival and ignoring (or forgetting) the myriad other aspects of dysfunctional relationship.
I can hear the other members of the forum shouting "Not our Elina! She doesn't even go to the bathroom! She's strong! She's powerful! She's an angel! She has an ethereal gossamer purity you can obviously never understand! She doesn't peddle her a%#, and she sure as [deleted] won't let anybody smack her around like a painted drunk trailer trash whore! Take your streetbound pseudosophistry back to IMDB where you belong, you cheap guttersnipe iconoclastic [deleted], and take your fake [deleted] pervert Oskar with you!"
And to such members, I say this: I don't blame you one tiny bit for taking such an attitude. I might be the one writing about it, but it doesn't mean I like it at all. I just can't get away from the passage in the novel where Eli tells Oskar about how her long sleeps leaves her "small" again, leaving her with needing "helpers". I can't help remembering how she grimaced after saying that her size makes people want to help her... but "for different reasons". That tiny handful of sentences opens up whole dark horizons of what her backstory might be like beyond the surface horror of what we plainly see of her, and within her, in the present.
PeterMork, a truly meaningful discussion of what adult sexuality might mean or imply to a castrated preteen boy would probably take much more time and effort that any of us can easily spare. It would probably also tax this forum's tolerance unbearably. This is partly because sex, sexuality, sexual {morality,ethics,values} and so on and suchlike may be the most complicated thing I've ever tried to encompass. The simple mechanics are certainly seem straightforward enough, but I used to get really confused when I heard stories of how these things differed in various places around the world. As an example, Eskimo hospitality, I remember hearing, demanded that a host share his wife with his guest. Some folks in various places in Africa are said to [deleted] like bunnies on speed as a normal part of their funerary functions. I've yet to try to unravel polygamy.
I've not made a study of these things (my actual interests when nosing about other people's customs have very little to do with sex) and so can't certify that these to examples have any solid basis, but it seems clear enough that on top of being very complicated for us, there are very few "golden standards" to which the world in its entirety adhere with any consistency. The world cannot even agree on a common age of "consent".
As another vexing aside, the notorious American Puritans, according to the History Channel, were far less concerned with the reality of premarital sex, for example, and much more concerned with paternal responsibility. A young woman became pregnant, and throughout the course of her pregnancy, people would pester and heckle her, asking "Who's the father?" When she went into labour, they withheld some service or boon (I forget what) to coerce from her whom to assign paternity. As I recall, she relented, the baby was born, the young couple were actually married and went on to live unencumbered lives. If this is true (and other sources do indeed accuse Puritans of often recording remarkably abbreviated periods of gestation), I'd then suggest that Americans don't even understand their own sexual values if Puritanism is raised as the iconic standard of sexual "purity".
PeterMork, I say all this in defense of Eli's apparent lack of sexual "moral compass". The usual rules don't apply to her for a variety of reasons, and the harm done her (which is undeniable) is at odds with the harm done by her profound isolation and by the resolutely deferred weight of her murders. There's no sexual "right" and no "wrong" for her, no "badness"; there are only degrees of acceptability (witness her reluctance to allow Hakan to touch her; she doesn't SEEK it, she merely endures it when she must).
I can't myself imagine what it must be like to be a preteen who endures sexual contact with adults as a matter of survival, but there's a great deal more besides that we do know of Eli's life to suggest that even real-life child prostitutes may be leading relatively safe and comfortable lives by comparison.
Wasn't it you, PeterMork, whose Oskar noted that "you wouldn't believe how much pain she can take"? Having no apparent chance of understanding why adults want such things, she might simple accept small degrees of physical discomfort without attaching any "meaning" to it at all. Odd pressures here, unusual feelings of fullness there, maybe a few faintly unpleasant odours. It doesn't hurt her, it seems to make her minders a lot more mindful, and yes, as you suggest, PeterMork, I fear she'd have quickly discovered that allowing her body to be used in this manner greatly enhances her survival odds.
I don't suggest her (non)attitude towards sex parallels her attitude towards killing. The former is an empty, meaningless thing, and the latter is what denies her utterly what she wants more than anything else. She's specifically said (in my fiction) she hates that people die when she gets hungry. I tried to suggest (and apparently failed) that the Elina we see in the movie (and the Elias in the novel, to an even greater extent) kills only when it can't be avoided precisely because she values other people's skins almost as much as she does her own. She doesn't think about it because she can't; "something inside her" tells her with strident clarity that thinking about it means dying because her tiny mind and her partially formed heart can't handle the "moral" responsibility for all those uncounted deaths. She can't safely consider the turmoil and the misery she brings her victims' survivors. In other threads, I've likened her attitude towards that of a soldier in the bush: fight or die, and then get back to camp and have a couple of beers with a couple of buddies.
"I am a vampire, and I live by my own rules because people's rules would kill me", reflects my Eli as she lay in bed with her father, both naked, because she's very well aware of the incest taboo that could never realistically apply to her - it's just utterly impossible for her to have (or cause) funny-looking children. She makes this assertion to herself in recognition that various social welfare agencies would take a very dim view indeed of such a scene. She makes this assertion because conceding to prevailing values would deny her yet one more comfort in her already inhumanly deprived existence.
How did Oskar become her father? Heh... how could he not? She may be unchanging, but Oskar isn't. He grew, physically, mentally, emotionally and in every other way any other person grows. As he did so, he saw weaknesses and shortcomings in her makeup, vulnerabilities he felt he had to shield. He'd start seeing many of the things members of this forum see, in fact.
She might be more and more a child to him, but this in no way necessarily implies she would become less and less important. One way or the other, she's the very centre of his life, and it's not much of a stretch of the imagination to assert she's the very core of his being. Whatever he's become, wherever he's been, she was there helping him with it. She's just always been around, and it'd be the easiest thing in the world to believe he believes that if anything happens to her, his life just wouldn't be the same, maybe even not worth living at all. Maybe he even consoles himself that he's leaving the world a better place when he passes if he leaves it with an improved, morally and socially expanded Eli.
Besides, after all, she did save his life at least once. That's gotta be worth a couple of brownie points.
As he aged, Eli would have become somewhat less of a "friend" as we understand it, and more of a responsibility. My Oskar cherishes this responsbility almost as much as he does her, even if the way he sets about it isn't what we'd liked to have seen, and even if we're repulsed by what it is costing him.
He would have started taking a more minder-like role in any event. Being a man does have certain advantages, after all: no more hiring potentially unreliable people to pose as parents to get hotel rooms or sign leases.
I don't see Oskar as being a "wimp" or being unable to make or enforce hard choices. Life with a vampire would quickly dispose of him otherwise. Quite the opposite, I see him as being one who's just a little too ready to make hard choices without indulging his childhood habit of long reflexion. The man will not hesitate to kill on suspicion of mortal danger.
One of these hard choices would be in tolerating Eli's habit of "buying daddies", conceding to the necessity not only of having a second pair of shoulders to ease the burden of assuring Eli's survival, but also of buffering himself and Eli against discovery. Eli's minders aren't just procurers, they're also red herrings for the communities to hunt down and destroy when "food shopping" goes badly in a given area.
It's certainly possible Oskar's stomach burned with anger (and probably jealousy, at least at first) when Eli uses "other things" than money to secure their services, but an older Oskar with broadened horizons and more complex experience might eventually view these paedophiles' predations as being harmful to her emotionally. If the stalls in the men's room have any credibility (and their rude little gems often do have a hard core of reality to them), then Oskar would be correct at least as far as her social development is concerned: "You can't be good friends with a [deleted]buddy". These minders, however, face a much greater danger with Oskar around than just with Eli alone: if he should come to suspect their sexual predations source more from anger (or other destructive emotion) than from simple lust, they're worm food.
Worse, Eli's Oskar isn't stupid. Her having to "buy" such men (and sometimes women) almost necessarily means being exposed to other victims on occasion. He'd see what they're like and probably connect their damages causally to the paedophiles. He'd research. He'd be appalled. And then he'd set about trying to armour her against the harm he sees them bringing.
For these reasons, and probably a few I've forgotten, never considered or never knew to consider, he starts taking his love to town. Or, sometimes, when he's unusually angry or distracted, when he brings home the bacon.
PeterMork, Oskar wouldn't view sensuality with child Eli as unimaginable (or even particularly disturbing, truth to tell) if their lives together unfurled the way my stories suggest because he'd have the memories of having experienced it. In fact, if they'd lived in total isolation, Eli's child-like appearance would probably never be brought to the fore to impact this aspect of their lives. His natural aging and attendant socialisation (such as it may be) would imbue her with more and more of a child-like appearance, and thus naturally less sexual appeal.
He loved her before sex, and he'll continue loving her long afterwards, but not with his nads.
Their growing sexual estrangement is something that I fear Eli would misinterpret, given she's just a child and especially in light of her probable background. I could very easily see this stressing their relationship in ways we'd consider paradoxical: when the adult stops having sex with the child, does this mean he doesn't love her anymore? If not, can she still trust him? How? Remember, even after long years of being with Oskar's empathy and concern for her true welfare, Eli would still be wrestling with two centuries of conditioning as a masturbatory device and the only "real" influence she has with her "daddies". The paradox is this: normal human children normally experience indescribable relief when chronic sexual abuse stops; Eli's first thought would be "Uh oh... wa fan...?"
PeterMork, I also don't see that Eli was no longer able to support Oskar in any way. She might not have the emotional depth and the perspectives to understand his various crises to help in any directly significant way, but she can continue being the one unchanging fact of his life, the comfort of immutability no other girl could give him. In material terms, she's got him covered a few million ways from Sunday; she's rich, she can get lots more money if she has to, and if the chopped steak she cooks for him don't always come from the grocery store, well, ain't it wonderful what a few spices can hide? As Oskar grows, he'd need "support" less and less, and he actually needed so little by the time he'd left Blackeberg anyway, Eli didn't actually have much to fear on this score.
However, I'm forced to agree with PeterMork that the Oskar at 40 monologue is just an extension and reasonably plausible expansion of the irresolvable conflict Eli's vampirism imposes on her, and an extension of Wolfchild's assertion that Lindqvist deliberately engineered a story for which there is no possibility of a "happily ever after".
I'd never considered it in these terms, and never intended it, but it does seem so. These poor kids are tragic :\
Edit: 29 Octobre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.
Edit: 29 Octobre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.
Edit: 29 Octobre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.
Edit: 29 Octobre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.
Edit: 29 Octobre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.
Edit: 29 Octobre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.
Edit: 5 Novembre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.
Last edited by
sauvin on Sun Nov 06, 2011 12:30 am, edited 6 times in total.
Fais tomber les barrières entre nous qui sommes tous des frères