Vampire Glamour

For discussion of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Låt den rätte komma in
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Kaizarc
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Re: Vampire Glamour

Post by Kaizarc » Wed Jul 19, 2017 5:03 am

Just posting because I'm wondering about what peoples current opinions about this topic are. I have read in another thread that the "seduction" of the cancer patient had a lot to do with the fact that she was pumped full of morphine. I don't know if I like the idea of glamour. Mostly because it makes Eli that much more scary to me.

A friend of mine told me about something like this before we watched the film together and she had that "Ha! I knew it!" moment when we arrived at the Bli mig lite scene. Where Eli showed Oskar a version of herself. I don't know if it was her true self or Eli was showing Oskar that she is in fact a monster but not in any way by choice.
But if she can truly use glamour, then why did she need to convince Tommy in the basement scene? The only reasoning I can think of is that she does not have a conscious control over it.

Eli has survived so long because she knows what she has and uses it to survive. By any means necessary. Her beauty and size are a blessing to her curse. It had worked for Hakan, Jocke and countless other helpers and victims.
However Oskar was a special case. The novel says that Oskar saw that she was terribly sad. She had just told him her Mom was dead. It was Oskars compassion in that moment that made him stroke Eli's cheek and saved his life. For possibly the first time in centuries there was a child her own age reaching out to her. Giving her a brief insight to the gentler side to humanity. However small it might be, knocking her out of the trance like state that she was trapped in.

This is the main reason I don't want to believe in the glamour aspect. It undermines what Oskar has done in these small steps towards letting Eli finally open up to someone. If Eli has any use of glamour it twists the novel and film for me. Into something I'm not quite sure of yet.
I think I need to watch the film again...

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Re: Vampire Glamour

Post by gkmoberg1 » Wed Jul 19, 2017 5:41 am

In my view of Eli, both novel and film, this is an ability. However I see it as being a weak ability. In the novel, I feel Eli uses this on the play set when he wants to attack Oskar. And he uses it again, I feel, to help calm Oskar when Oskar shows up at his door (after running off from his father). And possibly again where Oskar is calming down and falling asleep on Eli's sofa that same night. I do not, though, see this as a strong ability. For example, Eli does not use it on Tommy as that was a confrontational situation. Neither does he attempt to use it in the tunnel attack. As for the cancer woman, I am unsure.

Yes, it does make Eli more frightening!

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Re: Vampire Glamour

Post by dongregg » Fri Jul 21, 2017 3:57 am

I know it's just me, but I resist supernatural abilities in Eli because they remind me that, until LTROI, the majority of vampire flics are over-the-top campy with seduction, hypnosis, and the like. Eli has been on auto pilot for centuries -- get hungry, feed, kill. And do it in such a way that danger of getting injured is minimized. With Jocke, what glamour? It's just trickery. Get the big man to lower his guard. No glamour with Virginia. Oskar? Why shouldn't she just drink his blood and kill him without a thought? Because something unusual happened. That, by the way, becomes possible if you hang around in towns for a while instead of ambushing travelers in the woods. In towns you might encounter interpersonal experiences that are new and puzzling, like a nice looking boy sympathetically stroking your face.

I said I resist supernatural readings, but I don't ignore them. Projecting your story into someone else's consciousness is pretty spooky. And pretty cool.
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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Re: Vampire Glamour

Post by PeteMork » Fri Jul 21, 2017 4:41 am

gkmoberg1 wrote:In my view of Eli, both novel and film, this is an ability. However I see it as being a weak ability. In the novel, I feel Eli uses this on the play set when he wants to attack Oskar. And he uses it again, I feel, to help calm Oskar when Oskar shows up at his door (after running off from his father). And possibly again where Oskar is calming down and falling asleep on Eli's sofa that same night. I do not, though, see this as a strong ability. For example, Eli does not use it on Tommy as that was a confrontational situation. Neither does he attempt to use it in the tunnel attack. As for the cancer woman, I am unsure.

Yes, it does make Eli more frightening!
I pretty much agree with this, but I'm not sure she very often used it for things other than for predatory purposes -- until Oskar, when she eventually uses it to show him how much she loves him, as in the 'seen with love' scene. And, more darkly, on the nurse when she was looking for Hakan's room in the hospital. A weak ability at best.
We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain. (Roberto Bolaño)

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Re: Vampire Glamour

Post by sauvin » Fri Jul 21, 2017 4:47 am

In addition to what dongregg said, as far as vampires go, Eli is actually pretty minimally equipped. No turning into bats or wolves or mists. Also, no huge crumbling castles, no harem of kept men or women, no faded dreams of past glory or lost romances, and if she's rich enough to buy a nuclear power plant, what's she doing removing valuables from the people she's killed?

Yes, she can fly, and it could be argued that without aerial flight she'd have been dead quite some time ago. Yes, she can run with ten meter strides or so, but no creature moves faster than an arrow or a bullet. Yes, she's strong enough to dismember people twice her size and four times her mass, but these things, being fast and strong, are pretty much mandatory for apex predators, especially predators who feed upon the most widely feared animal on the planet. In the novel, she's shown to have the ability to project memories or thoughts, but as I recall, that had to be done through a kiss. Not quite as useful, one would think, as being able to just transfix a victim with a hypnotic stare and commanding "Komm hehr."

We kill man-eating tigres. We kill man-eating bears. We kill man-eating anything, and that's probably only partly because there's Mom to think about, or Sis, or Little Bettie Sue: we're also rather deathly allergic to the idea that we might not be at the very top of the food chain. Sure, there's bound to be an "outlier" here and there who'll find something attractive about Eli even if they knew what she is, and Haakan isn't the only kind of "outlier" possible (can you imagine the sheer power you could amass if people knew you could order various people's deaths just by nodding your head at somebody who happens to be in the crowd, and such deaths wouldn't be pretty?)

Apart from the outliers, most of the rest of us would make ready with the torches and the pitchforks and the Molotov cocktails once we'd been convinced of what she is. I mean, why not? We've done the same to witches in the past, and we've done it to folks who speak different languages, eat different foods or go to different churches, and we've done it on staggeringly institutionalised scales.

Apart from having pretty much a minimal set of strengths and weaknesses as vampires commonly go, she's about as cursed as you can get if we're reading her right. A demon might have moved in and set up housekeeping, but Eli remained more or less what she'd been the day before she turned: human. She can't grow up, she can't grow older, she can't have family or friends or most of the other niceties that most of the rest of us require for the sake of our sanity and our survival. She's a social creature who can't be social, and since one presumes she's too young to have ever had a chance to understand the passions of adult humans, all the luxe and glamour of one night stands can't even give her momentary releases if her type of vampirism could permit it (and novel Haakan's postmortem experience seems to suggest it). Heck, since she hadn't always BEEN a "she", the body parts responsible for bringing the understanding of human passion have been... um... "excised". She's passionless.

She might be able to love, but she is inherently unlovable, and she's reduced to crying forever where no living person is around to hear. This is an essential foundation on which the story as we know it is built, and I'm with dongregg: the ability to cast a glamour would almost necessarily imply the ability to dupe people into believing they love her.
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Re: Vampire Glamour

Post by PeteMork » Fri Jul 21, 2017 4:54 am

dongregg wrote:I know it's just me, but I resist supernatural abilities in Eli because they remind me that, until LTROI, the majority of vampire flics are over-the-top campy with seduction, hypnosis, and the like. Eli has been on auto pilot for centuries -- get hungry, feed, kill. And do it in such a way that danger of getting injured is minimized. With Jocke, what glamour? It's just trickery. Get the big man to lower his guard. No glamour with Virginia. Oskar? Why shouldn't she just drink his blood and kill him without a thought? Because something unusual happened. That, by the way, becomes possible if you hang around in towns for a while instead of ambushing travelers in the woods. In towns you might encounter interpersonal experiences that are new and puzzling, like a nice looking boy sympathetically stroking your face.

I said I resist supernatural readings, but I don't ignore them. Projecting your story into someone else's consciousness is pretty spooky. And pretty cool.
The one supernatural 'ability' I disliked the most intensely was the 'can't come in unless invited' one. It works well when you don't examine it too closely; but when you do, the logic of it completely falls apart. There are several threads that argued this point at infinitum, but the basic idea is: Who is qualified to 'let you in?' Anyone? Only the owner of the house? A renter? What if the house is abandoned? What if it's an office building? A government building? What if it's the house she was born in? What if it's a house she was given permission to enter, but it has been sold to someone else, and she didn't know? What if the person who says she can come in has his fingers crossed behind his back? What if an entrance is turned into a wall? Can she still smash her way through the location? If a door were converted to a window, could she still enter, since it's purpose had changed? And so on.

I just don't like it on so many levels. :| Which is why I don't use it in my own tales. ;)
We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain. (Roberto Bolaño)

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Re: Vampire Glamour

Post by sauvin » Fri Jul 21, 2017 4:57 am

PeteMork wrote:
dongregg wrote:I know it's just me, but I resist supernatural abilities in Eli because they remind me that, until LTROI, the majority of vampire flics are over-the-top campy with seduction, hypnosis, and the like. Eli has been on auto pilot for centuries -- get hungry, feed, kill. And do it in such a way that danger of getting injured is minimized. With Jocke, what glamour? It's just trickery. Get the big man to lower his guard. No glamour with Virginia. Oskar? Why shouldn't she just drink his blood and kill him without a thought? Because something unusual happened. That, by the way, becomes possible if you hang around in towns for a while instead of ambushing travelers in the woods. In towns you might encounter interpersonal experiences that are new and puzzling, like a nice looking boy sympathetically stroking your face.

I said I resist supernatural readings, but I don't ignore them. Projecting your story into someone else's consciousness is pretty spooky. And pretty cool.
The one supernatural 'ability' I disliked the most intensely was the 'can't come in unless invited' one. It works well when you don't examine it too closely; but when you do, the logic of it completely falls apart. There are several threads that argued this point at infinitum, but the basic idea is: Who is qualified to 'let you in?' Anyone? Only the owner of the house? A renter? What if the house is abandoned? What if it's an office building? A government building? What if it's the house she was born in? What if it's a house she was given permission to enter, but it has been sold to someone else, and she didn't know? What if the person who says she can come in has his fingers crossed behind his back? What if an entrance is turned into a wall? Can she still smash her way through the location? If a door were converted to a window, could she still enter, since it's purpose had changed? And so on.

I just don't like it on so many levels. :| Which is why I don't use it in my own tales. ;)
And yet... 'du moasta bjuda in mig'. Without that rule, somebody would have had to contrive another way to scare Oskar into realising the full gravity of her situation.
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Re: Vampire Glamour

Post by PeteMork » Fri Jul 21, 2017 5:01 am

sauvin wrote:...Apart from having pretty much a minimal set of strengths and weaknesses as vampires commonly go, she's about as cursed as you can get if we're reading her right. A demon might have moved in and set up housekeeping, but Eli remained more or less what she'd been the day before she turned: human. She can't grow up, she can't grow older, she can't have family or friends or most of the other niceties that most of the rest of us require for the sake of our sanity and our survival. She's a social creature who can't be social, and since one presumes she's too young to have ever had a chance to understand the passions of adult humans, all the luxe and glamour of one night stands can't even give her momentary releases if her type of vampirism could permit it (and novel Haakan's postmortem experience seems to suggest it). Heck, since she hadn't always BEEN a "she", the body parts responsible for bringing the understanding of human passion have been... um... "excised". She's passionless.

She might be able to love, but she is inherently unlovable, and she's reduced to crying forever where no living person is around to hear. This is an essential foundation on which the story as we know it is built, and I'm with dongregg: the ability to cast a glamour would almost necessarily imply the ability to dupe people into believing they love her.
Indeed, this is the tragedy of our poor Eli's existence. Any glamour she 'casts' of any import, is that which Oskar has created for her in his own tortured, lonely soul.
We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain. (Roberto Bolaño)

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Re: Vampire Glamour

Post by PeteMork » Fri Jul 21, 2017 5:04 am

sauvin wrote:And yet... 'du moasta bjuda in mig'. Without that rule, somebody would have had to contrive another way to scare Oskar into realising the full gravity of her situation.
True enough. But I have confidence that JAL could have come up with another way -- if he had been so inclined. ;)
We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain. (Roberto Bolaño)

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Re: Vampire Glamour

Post by dongregg » Fri Jul 21, 2017 5:39 am

PeteMork wrote:
sauvin wrote:And yet... 'du moasta bjuda in mig'. Without that rule, somebody would have had to contrive another way to scare Oskar into realising the full gravity of her situation.
True enough. But I have confidence that JAL could have come up with another way -- if he had been so inclined. ;)
Gyah, Pete. Without the need to invite her in, the delightful name of the book wouldn't make as much sense. And the name, LTROI, is about all that stuck with me during the four years after I read the review and before I saw the film on Show Time. My subconscious wouldn't let go of the idea that there were two contending forces -- a right one and a wrong one.

As it turns out, it's about Oskar and Eli both having to make the decision of letting each other in.
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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