drakkar wrote:lombano wrote:In all fairness, book Eli says he's not a boy.
No, it's Jonny saying that.
Jzz, I'd never thought we'd have this discussion again. You really really want Eli to be a girl, don't you? Or is the translation so bad on this issue that you can't figure out that Eli is a boy by reading the book?
OK, jokes aside, if the book has left you with the impression that Eli is not a boy, then I suggest you read it again. Eli has passed as a girl in order to gain sympathy/easier access to food - he even does that to Oskar in order to lure him in the beginning of the book. A hunting/surviving technique, as soon as he lets Oskar into his life he quickly comes clear about being a castrated boy.
Yes, but this is the film section, and it seems to matter. Folks who read the book before seeing the movie seem to see a boy, and folks who saw the movie before reading the book (like myself) seem to tend to see a girl.
From PeteMork's link to
this thread:
When they were in bed together and Oskar asked if she wanted to go out with him, she said, “But Oskar, I can’t. I’m not a girl.”
Oskar snorted, “What do you mean? You’re a guy?!”
Eli: “No, no!”
Oskar: “Then what are you?”
Eli: “Nothing”
Oskar: “What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”
Eli responds, “I’m nothing. Not a child, not old, not a boy, not a girl, nothing.”
Oskar then shakes his head and stubbornly asks “Will you go out with me or not?”
Eli was very quick to deny being a "guy", but almost in the same breath denies being much of anything. Together with other facets discussed in that thread, the overall impression I get is that gender isn't an issue with Eli, who has much larger emotional fish to fry. Granted that she (ah, that pronoun again!) declines to be a princess in their mock sword play in the basement clubhouse and exhibits other traces of masculine behaviour (the way she hugs Oskar from behind in the bedroom scene(s), for example), it remains possible she's chosen to adopt a more or less feminine appearance as a tool for survival for so long that it's become an initial impulse in general.
The movie makes nothing really clear. The seconds-long "reveal" as Eli is dressing just shows the scars of some horrible mutilation, as with some impromptu surgery followed possibly by a course of barnyard cauterisation that could very easily have destroyed labia.
In my crude little corn field, a boy who loses all the "interesting" bits that make him a boy almost necessarily makes him a girl, even if said girl is still missing a few bits internally. He'd just grow up to be a sterile "woman". Less generously, in my crude little corn field, a boy who loses all his "interesting" bits is neither a boy nor a girl, and therefore arguably not human. He's just a "he/she/it".
Point is, if novel Eli's gender matters to you, it matters to
you; Eli doesn't seem to care, and when she tells you she can't "go out with" you because she's not a girl, she isn't necessarily talking about her gender.
I saw the movie first, and saw it many times long before the novel graced my reading corner. Even before having seen it the first time, I knew that the two major actors were going to be Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson, and it took no time at all to figure out which one wound up being Oskar. Yes, her appearance from the collarbones up can be a bit confusing at times, but even on first viewing, it never occurred to me that Eli might have a boy - I saw a girl, then, and still saw a girl after having read the novel a couple of times, and still see a girl now.
It's primarily for this reason that I continue to refer to Eli as a girl both on the boards and in my fan fiction, so much so that it's still sometimes jarring to see people referring to her as "he".
The story also is about the process of Eli reapproaching humanity through Oskar, and in the book bedroom scene referred to, Eli has still not opened up to Oskar.