To Receive a Kiss

[Clubmeister]

Oskar as Oskar... How about Kare? I try to recall myself in this age. I don't know WHAT would made me to do this action. No fame, no money... I would run as quick and far as I could
May be only if they Said something like "Aleks! USSR in danger! Kiss that girl and you will save us!". May be only then...

[intrige]

TA said that both Lina and Kåre were very nervous about the kissing scene. They did it very well. And someone said that Oskar moved forward a bit when Eli ended the kiss, mabye that was just Kåre?

I have also thought that it was one heck of a kiss. If I compare it to other children's kisses, they are fast and. Daring in a way. While this bloody kiss is more: Lasting end lingering, and emotional. And closer, much more closer. One thing I also like is that it's not just a kiss, we also see that they both express emotions when they kiss. Eli with her eyes open to see if this is okay for Oskar, Oskat all into it with his eyes closed: Oh yes he is okay with it. Then Eli calmes down and moves a bit closer before she drawes herself back. And Oskar lookes down sort of imberrest.Like I suppose any kid would be after something so "close" like that.

_ If I were Oskar? Ah, to be honest I never really liked kissing, because I am not used to it. Nor was I when I was twelwe, nor was Oskar or Kåre. So that wouldn't matter. I have never been afraid of blood. When I was a kid, I hsed to get down on my knees and slid down the road, so I started to bleed. So no, blood haven't been a problem, ever. And Lina, sweet Lina. If I were Oskar and loved Eli as much as he does, this kiss would be the highlight of my young life. And then the emotion will get killed by realizing that Eli now has to go away.

[TigerEyes]

Embarrased to say, i've never really been kissed before. But if i had been in Oskar's shoe, knowing Eli and what he/she is, i may still kiss him/her. I would be a little worried and concerned, but i know that all that matters was Eli. I can understand the problem with transmitting diseases via blood, but Oskar doesn't understand that hench; the blood pact. I would not have been that concerned about the blood all that much, but that maybe just me. We're all different and we all may respond differently than oskar in many ways.

[PeteMork]

...I have also thought that it was one heck of a kiss. If I compare it to other children's kisses, they are fast and. Daring in a way. While this bloody kiss is more: Lasting end lingering, and emotional. And closer, much more closer. One thing I also like is that it's not just a kiss, we also see that they both express emotions when they kiss. Eli with her eyes open to see if this is okay for Oskar, Oskat all into it with his eyes closed: Oh yes he is okay with it. Then Eli calmes down and moves a bit closer before she drawes herself back. And Oskar lookes down sort of imberrest.Like I suppose any kid would be after something so "close" like that...

QFT.

This scene really touched me. When Oskar looked down after the kiss, It was almost as if he was thinking, "Me? Does Eli, the person I love more than anything in the world, really like me that much?"

And the look on Eli's face right before the kiss. It's as though she couldn't help herself. She forgot the blood (even though if she had given it any thought, she probably would have wiped it off; even if it had been ice cream. ) She loved him so much, she simply had to do it.

[intrige]

Embarrased to say, i've never really been kissed before.

Same here..

[EEA]

I haven't kiss anyone either. Kissing I just find it strange. Maybe is just me. I agree that Oskar is in shock and thinking about all that has just happened. If it was me I would run to my house. It would be just too much.

[sauvin]

No. What do you think?

Maybe a little. You know, he's really not in a calm, cool, collected state of consciousness wherein one could just experience the whole thing and grasp, intellectually, its deeper meaning. Emotionally, though, I think it's all there for him. I think Oskar's a little hard to read in this scene, though, esp. after the kiss--no doubt the experience is tinged with the sad realization that Eli is going to leave. It's funny--right before Eli kisses him, Oskar glances down at Eli's mouth. I think maybe he's a bit concerned with what he sees. But I think it's fair to say that he's pretty much blown away by the entire experience, including the kiss.

Gots ya "deeper meaning" for ya right here...

I'll shamefully enough admit I've given the kissing scene barely any thought at all.

How long had it been since he'd confronted her through the windowed inner door? Less than a handful of days, if I'm not mistaken, and even less time had elapsed since Eli shed a pint or so all over her clothes in his living room. Even knowing for sure what she was at an intellectual level with some rather unsettling evidence to dwell on, he'd still passed a night with her willingly, presumably to do what kids do: play games, share jokes and maybe share a bit more of themselves with eachother.

I'd presumed that life for Oskar was renormalising, that spending so much time with human Eli was pushing the fact that his girlfriend is a man-eating monster into the more remote reaches of his personal horizons. When he woke up to read Eli's note, in his place, I might have just shrugged off Eil's having implied she's snoozing in the tub. "OK", you can almost hear him thinking, "so she's a little different. So what? We still had a gas, didn't we?"

Enter Lacke.

Who's this? Why is he here? Do random people normally wander into Eli's apartment while she's sleeping? Think maybe it's best to hide and see what happens.

Had Oskar been cognisant of the danger sunlight poses Eli? Had the kids covered this ground yet? Maybe not, but the knife in Lacke's hand that Oskar surely had to have spotted couldn't be good news. I think it's still more than remotely possible Oskar hadn't yet taken in the fullness of what Eli is. All he knew for certain was that this man wasn't bringing his girlfriend lollipops and bubble gum.

Oskar yells. Lacke turns to confront him.

Exit Lacke.

For all that Oskar kept a scrapbook full of horrors, for all that he'd dreamed the tree he'd been busily trying to reduce to decorative wood chips was actually his bully antagonist being reduced to ground pork, here Oskar is having the full graphic horror of what Eli is thrown into his face.

Did he revel in it? Did he jump up and down and whoop with joy? Did he pump his fist into the air shouting "YES!"?

Nope, what he did was close the door and run away. Fine young potential serial murderer Eli chose, can't handle some screaming, can't handle some blood! Poor Oskar looked like he'd have liked nothing better at that moment than to have some actual food in his stomach to hurl, because dry heaves, man, those really are the pits.

Oskar was sickened. Seeing what Eli is, see what she does, it very nearly unmanned him. I'm guessing on this point, but I interpreted Oskar's casting his knife away as an admission to himself that his own fascination with blood and gore - with the idea of inflicting deadly injury on anybody - was a lie. He'd never really wanted to mince his tormentors, he'd just wanted them to go away and leave him alone, but knew only one way to express that wish to himself.

I'd said on the IMDB boards, before some kind soul abducted and chained me to THIS forum's dungeon walls, that when Oskar threw his knife away, he'd renounced violence utterly and permanently, that this complicit blooded Oskar would never raise his hand against another human being unless he simply saw no choice.

Mind you, this is not weakness - the Oskar who yelled at a knife-wielding Lacke who outmasses him easily twofold knew he'd been drawing potentially disastrous attention towards himself, and I still think Oskar would have tried to gore Lacke definitively with his own hunting knife if Eli hadn't stepped in. At some level, Oskar may have realised this, too, in the moments between Lacke's death and Eli's hugging him from behind, and Oskar may have been even further sickened with the realisation that he, too, could have done what he'd just witnessed Eli doing, if he'd had no choice.

Enter Eli again. She's hugging a clearly rattled Oskar, thanking him for her life. Is she hugging him with gratitude? With love? With concern for his mental state? Any or all of the above, and other things besides, maybe? Who knows, and who cares? It seems clear enough that if she'd had any, she would have brought him lollipops and bubble gum, if she'd thought it'd make him feel any better.

Oskar doesn't turn around right away. He's still too busy trying to put his stomach back into his gut. The little girl with the steely arms now encircling him is a vampire. No kidding, no fooling around, no other way around it. She isn't just a girl with a strange skin disorder that makes blood come out of everywhere when she's not happy. She's not just some kook with a fetish for spilled blood, and not just somebody whose face and voice seem to change in dimly lit basement clubhouses.

This is the real deal, Jack. This little girl is the thing that goes "bump" in the night, leaves corpses everywhere and takes little boys on joyrides to [deleted].

And oh, by the way, Eli, now that you've got your arms around me, um... did you get enough to eat? You're not still mad, are you? I didn't do anything!

If I were to write another fanfic, I think it'd be easy to bash out about ten pages of crap just expanding on everything I've just mentioned, and probably chucking more in as I go through the scene moment-by-moment.

Point is this: Oskar was so far away from being in a "calm, cool, collected state of consciousness wherein one could just experience the whole thing and grasp, intellectually, its deeper meaning", it wasn't even in the same country code.

Did the blood on Eli's face register with him? Maybe he was in deep enough state of shock he'd seen strawberry jam instead. Yea, that's the ticket, strawberry jam, something sweet and delicious and life-affirming to take away the terrifying grossness..!

Or maybe did Oskar just look into her eyes, the way we believe he looked at her just days later as he bobbed in the swimming pool trying to collect his senses (again)? Maybe Oskar didn't want to see the gore, maybe he couldn't let himself see it.

Again: who knows? Who cares?

And now, they kiss. Or, rather, Eli kisses Oskar, and for at least a few microseconds, Oskar just stands there and passively accepts it.

Do peaches have fuzz for preteen Oskar? I'm thinking not. Their kiss, just like just about everything else in their relationship, has absolutely nothing to do with biology. You hear that, IMDB folks? Not a d%#n thing!

Yes, Oskar closes his eyes, and yes, he seems OK with it. I think maybe more than just a little bit OK. This poor boy's whole world-view has just been slam-dunked, spiked, drop-kicked and [deleted]canned. He doesn't know where "up" is, and for all of him, maybe it's the same direction "down" is. He's lost, and now here's a very human Eli to hold and comfort him, to thank him for her life and to let him know that Eli is, after all, still only Eli.

Some things in this world will never change, and Eli is one of them. You can cling to her.

In that moment, while they're kissing, I think maybe Oskar isn't just kissing his girlfriend. I think he's desperately holding on to the only thing handy that can put "up" and "down" back where they belong.

Mind you, at any age, when crap like this is happening, it's perfectly possible to have about a hundred and fifty thousand different things flying through your head at light speed. Maybe he also had an errant thought about what his mother was up to during that kiss, or worried about his next math test, and maybe a few milliseconds spent wondering what he wanted for dinner that night (well, maybe not blood sausage...)...

... and yes, some part of him also had to have realised that he's just locked lips for the very first time with a girl. Not just any girl, either - this is Eli. This is the girl kissing him. His newest and best best friend. She's kissing him, and holding him, and not poking fun at him or making "eeww" noises or trying to move away. $deity alone knows what Oskar is kissing, precisely, but whatever din might be bouncing around inside Oskar's head, it's almost certain he understood that Eli was kissing him.

I've tended to disregard this scene because it's my feeling that the kids' relationship had already been mostly cemented, that it'd take a lot to get either kid to leave the other. It'd take more than just Eli being a minor demon. The whole "surviving the horror" thing that Lacke represents wasn't another milestone for the kids to reach and grapple with, it was just a demonstration that said milestone had already been reached, even if I can't say precisely where or how.

I'm thinking now that disregarding this scene has been a mistake. There's a lot here to look at.

Edit: 5 Novembre 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.

[ZWD40]

Ill kiss you three
*mwah*

and yeah, Lina having her eyes open was great in the scene

[celedril]

I thought it was touching, and Sauvin's long expo up there says a lot. I like the milestone comment: their relationship, imo, was mostly settled, but with the witnessing of Lacke's death/taking part in it, Eli and Oskar are bound, and sealed with a kiss--a kiss of blood, the blood of the man whose death has bound them together indelibly. Oskar was likely stunned, having come face to face with real, true violence and death. He'd imagined it before, kept his scrapbooks, but he'd never really seen it. He has now. I think the kiss pulls him back into himself, seals the deal (so to speak ), and is a milestone of sorts: Eli and Oskar know their feelings for each other, but the kiss is a goodbye. After Lacke, she knows she has to leave, but she also knows that Oskar has saved her, at great risk to his body and sanity. And thus she knows she has to leave him behind. That's why it's beautiful to me. It says everything: love, fear, acceptance, sadness, damnation, all transmitted by bloody lips.

The other thing I think is that somewhere in that fogged up brain of his the following dim realization hit him: hungry, scared, surprised, without thinking Eli simply destroyed the person who woke her--in this case Lacke. I think he has also become cognizant of how much control it must have taken for Eli not to have devoured him when he cut his hand and tried to make an oath with her in the basement, that had it been anyone else, he would have been just as dead as Lacke is now.

I'm sure a million things were whirling in his little brain at that point, pleasure, satisfaction, terror, relief...you name it, he was probably feeling it. The kiss coalesced everything into something tangible and transcendent, brought him back into himself.

At that age, given what happened to Oskar, I think the least of my concers would be a little blood on my lips, were I in the same position.

[a_contemplative_life]

Could the kiss scene in the film be the part of the novel when Eli shows Oskar how she sees him?

For a few seconds Oskar saw through Eli's eyes. And what he saw was ... himself. Only much better, more handsome, stronger than what he thought of himself. Seen with love.
For a few seconds.