From the light of a different sun

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sauvin
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by sauvin » Tue Nov 21, 2017 10:26 am

Image

Interpret it however you like. :twisted: :lol:
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dongregg
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by dongregg » Tue Nov 21, 2017 5:29 pm

Eurg!
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by JToede » Tue Nov 21, 2017 10:39 pm

dongregg wrote:Eurg!
That is my reaction also.
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by PeteMork » Tue Nov 21, 2017 11:54 pm

sauvin wrote:My personal take on it is that she is in and of herself inherently so far and so incontrovertibly transverse to the moral ecliptic that no relationship with her can ever possibly be even remotely "proper" unless it ends with her perishing in a fire, in sunlight or having a sharpened telephone pole rammed clean through her chest. Since he failed to arrange any of these things, he himself became an implicit accessory to any death she caused after he'd learned the truth, and thus an traitor to the human race in its entirety. Worse, since he took her part, at first probably as a facilitator and subsequently as an active partner, he became every bit the enemy to the entire human race that she herself is. On these grounds, I could argue that no relationship with him could ever be "proper" unless it ends - quickly - with his becoming a corpse.
This has always been the problem when we writers of FF venture ever so carefully into the 'real' world in which Eli and Oscar reside. How can we justify taking care of her, and protecting and nourishing her and Oscar, if we don't also render her dietary needs benign?

sauvin wrote:Maybe he even understood this, and maybe that understanding had already come to him before he clambered into the photo booth with her.
I tend to doubt it at that age. It's more likely he realized it gradually, as in the dismal world of your Oscar at 40...
sauvin wrote:All I know, writing this at the wee hours of the morning, is that this particular image conveys "a pained and bitter tenderness" to me.
Indeed it does. :cry:
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ltroifanatic
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by ltroifanatic » Wed Nov 22, 2017 4:15 am

The pic of Abby with Owen is just lovely.It really does show the sadness and tenderness that she has for him.In the book I think Eli kisses Hakan's hand and says something like "hello my friend" So Eli has affection and tenderness towards his helper too.It's a love story and tragedy all in one.The helpers are getting old and tired and sloppy and I think they can see the writing on the wall.Why not got out in a blaze of glory for the one they love?.Pour acid on my face to protect her as a final gesture of love?..That spark of goodness and humanity in Eli and Abby makes me by-pass the terrible things done and I just see two lonely and despairing children in need of help.As for the other pic.Can I say double urrggg? What did the skeleton say to the vampire?..You suck!..(boom- tish ) :D :lol:
Please Oskar.Be me for a little while.

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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by sauvin » Wed Nov 22, 2017 4:21 am

ltroifanatic wrote:The pic of Abby with Owen is just lovely.It really does show the sadness and tenderness that she has for him.In the book I think Eli kisses Hakan's hand and says something like "hello my friend" So Eli has affection and tenderness towards his helper too.It's a love story and tragedy all in one.The helpers are getting old and tired and sloppy and I think they can see the writing on the wall.Why not got out in a blaze of glory for the one they love?.Pour acid on my face to protect her as a final gesture of love?..That spark of goodness and humanity in Eli and Abby makes me by-pass the terrible things done and I just see two lonely and despairing children in need of help.As for the other pic.Can I say double urrggg? What did the skeleton say to the vampire?..You suck!..(boom- tish ) :D :lol:
Just to make certain I've not lost all my marbles, the doctored up screen shot of two people touching foreheads are Abby and Thomas (not Owen), at his hospital room window just seconds before his death.

You're right about how the novel went, and the Swedish movie didn't follow that cue. The most charitable thing I can say about Eli in the counterpart scene is that she evinced understanding and compassion, but in the movie gave no sign of pain or grief.

And what did the vampire say to the skeleton?

"You're an airhead."

(boom-tish)
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by sauvin » Wed Nov 22, 2017 5:05 am

Image

Painted over Oskar playing "skrika" in his room, snipped him out of the pool, plopped him into his room and filed to fit and painted to match.
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by sauvin » Wed Nov 22, 2017 10:59 am

PeteMork wrote:
sauvin wrote:My personal take on it is that she is in and of herself inherently so far and so incontrovertibly transverse to the moral ecliptic that no relationship with her can ever possibly be even remotely "proper" unless it ends with her perishing in a fire, in sunlight or having a sharpened telephone pole rammed clean through her chest.
(SNIP!)
I could argue that no relationship with him (Thomas) could ever be "proper" unless it ends - quickly - with his becoming a corpse.
This has always been the problem when we writers of FF venture ever so carefully into the 'real' world in which Eli and Oscar reside. How can we justify taking care of her, and protecting and nourishing her and Oscar, if we don't also render her dietary needs benign?
I don't bother trying because my views on moral matters are often eclectic or complex. Call it the curse of a man who can best be described as "co-existing" with society at large, I'll often not voice opinions in moral matters in real life because people tend not to appreciate trying to see apparently simple things in complicated ways, or trying to see outside the boxes they can't even see.

In FF, I'll acknowledge common moral sense, but if I bother to do anything with it beyond just nodding at it, it'll be in an exploratory vein. What if ... ?

PeteMork wrote:
sauvin wrote:Maybe he even understood this, and maybe that understanding had already come to him before he clambered into the photo booth with her.
I tend to doubt it at that age. It's more likely he realized it gradually, as in the dismal world of your Oscar at 40...
My "Oskar at 40" lived far too hard a life for far too long to understand much of anything beyond immediate survival; in French, I'd say he's "abruti", bludgeoned nearly senseless.

I don't necessarily advise this (I found out the hard way), but if you'll fire up Google or Bing, turn "safe search" off and search on "twelve year old", you'll quickly run into rashes of images of kids who actually are twelve (more or less) but vary in silhouette, some appearing to be closer to nine or ten and others looking more like fourteen or fifteen. The ages at which they start maturing physically can vary quite a bit, as can the rates at which they develop. As they can vary so widely physically, so can they also vary widely in a number of other ways that cameras can't see: in the myriad forms or facets of intelligence (whatever that might be), emotional maturity, moral outlook, tastes, temperaments, interests, proclivities and so on. If you were to confer with principals, teachers, janitors and school bus drivers who'd been working in or around middle schools for more than a few years, I'm confident they'll confirm these claims.

But we've seen that movie, haven't we? We know preteens can have secret lives, don't we?

I don't have a good idea of what Owen's intelligence is like, but Oskar betrayed his when he answered a forensics question in class towards the beginning of the movie. Stupid, he ain't. Oskar furthermore betrayed an awareness of (if not subscription to) conventional morality when he confronted Eli with money stolen from her victims ("are you a vampire" scene) and possibly a genuine principled morality when he protested that he doesn't kill people.

Oskar and Owen might be altogether too common for our comfort, but they're not what we'd generally call "ordinary". Our "ordinary" preteens make good grades in school, do well in school sports, play two or three different musical instruments, go to Sunday school and church at least once weekly and always help Mom with the dishes and Dad with the yard work. Oskar and Owen are regularly brutalised, marginalised and ignored. Essentially abandoned, they're on their own to figure out how the world works and how to co-exist or interact with it. They'll understand and accept darker or scarier possibilities more easily than "ordinary" kids would because their experience with people tends to be harsher.

Here's a vaguely relevant bit of personal experience. There's no immediately obvious moral or social dimension to it, but it might serve to illustrate just how much a twelve year old could surprise you:

I was eleven years old when I discovered a very small asymmetry, barely even perceptible at the time, between right and left corners of the jawbone. I told my parents about it, they ran me off to the doctor, the doctor poked at it with his fingers for a few seconds, and pronounced it a "normal variation". A few months later, I realised it'd gotten to be just a bit bigger, told my parents about it, ran off to the doctor, and had the doctor assure me that "normal variations" often do change size and shape in children of that age. A few months after that, it'd gotten bigger, told the parents, ran off to the doctor and came home with a prescription for an antibiotic.

Bigger it got, more alarmed I got, more I ran off to a platoon of doctors. The parents kept trying to tell me that the doctors know what they're doing, they went to medical school for $deity knows how many centuries before hanging up their shingles, and at twelve years old, what the [BEEP] makes me think I know more than an adult anyway?

I ran around for more than a year scared half to death I was going to be spending my whole adult life sucking down pizza through a straw. It was a bump, it was hard, it kept growing, and it didn't hurt one tiny bit. What else could it be?

I finally ran into one doctor who looked me in the eye and said "I don't know what this is, and I'm not steady enough with a knife to work around some nerves in that area. You're going to $Big_City to see a specialist". I was thirteen at the time. The specialist poked at it, said "Hmm", and promptly scheduled me for some tests and a biopsy.

When the results came back, my parents wanted to leave me in the waiting room while they discussed them. The doctor suggested otherwise. In that conference room, he didn't talk to my parents, he talked to me, explaining that the treatment I required meant losing a muscle or two, a whole mess of lymph nodes and possibly facing total paralysis on that whole side of my face. My parents turned white, Mom just about to start blubbering.

But when the doctor said "No, it's not the jawbone", and went on to explain exactly what it was and that the five year survival rate for this particular disease was something like ninety five percent, I was hugely relieved. Kid you not, I almost clapped my hands and laughed. I wound up having to explain to both my parents at great length on the drive home that I won't miss that muscle or two, that losing all those lymph nodes won't make a bit of difference and that this five year "survival rate" thing was just about the best kind of news anybody could hope to get.

Mind you, my parents aren't well educated. That's not to say that they're stupid or ignorant by any means, but it does mean (among other things) that they don't really know how their bodies are put together and how they work. The doctor spoke to me in that conference room because he knew I would understand; I'd bluntly told him when we'd first met that I was scared [HONK]less that pizza would lose something after being shoveled into a blender. He knew what I was afraid of, and knew that the news he brought would make me feel [HONK]loads better even with all these body parts I was about to lose. I think he knew that I'd know enough about such things to know I wouldn't miss them at all. He also knew I'd be able to spend a lot more time explaining these things to my parents than he could.

He knew I wasn't an "ordinary" kid.

Point is, it can be very hard to say what a twelve year old might understand because preteens aren't cats or dogs; they're people, just like us. If they sometimes seem stupid, silly or slow, it might be only from ignorance (in the sense of honestly not knowing) and/or lack of experience, and not from lack of ability or capacity. They can also be frighteningly agile and elastic in lots of different ways, and they can absorb and process new information faster than hot desert sand can absorb spilt water - and they can, on occasion, be a lot more foresighted than most of us are willing to admit.
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by dongregg » Wed Nov 22, 2017 7:19 pm

PeteMork: This has always been the problem when we writers of FF venture ever so carefully into the 'real' world in which Eli and Oscar reside. How can we justify taking care of her, and protecting and nourishing her and Oscar, if we don't also render her dietary needs benign?
Sauvin: I don't bother trying because my views on moral matters are often eclectic or complex. Call it the curse of a man who can best be described as "co-existing" with society at large, I'll often not voice opinions in moral matters in real life because people tend not to appreciate trying to see apparently simple things in complicated ways, or trying to see outside the boxes they can't even see.

In FF, I'll acknowledge common moral sense, but if I bother to do anything with it beyond just nodding at it, it'll be in an exploratory vein. What if ... ?
When I was accepted as a member of our forum in 2013, my reading of posts soon led me into an expletive-deleted-storm of moral chest beating about Eli killing the bullies at the pool.

Two points occurred to me. Is a work of fiction supposed to provide the reader with moral marching orders? Second, the film enchanted me because it strips away the campy baggage of previous vampire stories to present a realistic portrayal of how a 12-year-old vampire might live in a modern setting -- dirty, stinky, and clueless about how to coexist with his or her prey. An orphan, a street kid, un petit voyou.

I got this e-mail advert today from a magazine I have subscribed to for 30 or 40 years. It reads in part:
Why do writers write? They do it to answer questions that obsess them, to share what they've discovered, and, most of all, to find a community of kindred spirits. —David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker
You kindred spirits—readers and writers of fan fiction—do not have to agree with each other's moral point of view. Eli and Oskar are as we find them. Make of them what you will.
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by ltroifanatic » Thu Nov 23, 2017 3:27 am

No Sauvin you haven't lost your marbles.My mistake. :oops: What a beautiful quote Don.It's cuts to the heart of the matter.I really enjoy the FF because it makes me think of different aspects of the story through another's eyes.Here we all are.Obsessed and in love with a story that leaves so much to interpretation that we all probably have slightly different views of motivations and moral codes etc.I'm sure of one thing though and that is that all of us are united by this masterpiece.Kindred spirits..I like the sound of that. :D
Please Oskar.Be me for a little while.

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