Architecture of the Story

For discussion of Matt Reeve's Film Let Me In

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sauvin
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Re: Architecture of the Story

Post by sauvin » Tue Apr 08, 2014 6:15 pm

In the movie, after running away from his father's bottle and drinking buddy, it's the dead of night. Oskar is shown running towards a light on the road that's surrounded basically by a whole lot of nothing, almost as if he were running towards a light at the end of a tunnel. Together with the quietly menacing music accompanying this flight, what kind of symbolism is at work here, do you suppose? Something involving passage, or maybe even birth, but not necessarily a "positive" one.

There's no such scene in LMI. Without the 'drinking buddy' scene and the subsequent flight through the night, greater relative impact accrues to the bleeding-out scene in LMI. Oskar may already have been committed (and was just being a twerp when he says "What happens if you come in anyway?"), but for Owen, if there's a "no turning back" point in the movie, it may well be when he's holding his girlfriend in his arms and asking "What would have happened? Would you have died?"

Contrast this with Oskar's first question afterwards: "Who are you? (what have I let myself in for?)". What Owen brought to the table in that scene (and Oskar didn't) for me was that this may have been the very first time in his young life somebody else's life may have been put in danger by something he said or didn't say, or something that he did or didn't do, and it's left him at least temporarily rattled.

Overall, a major difference between the two boys is the impression I have (for which I can offer no real support) is that Oskar made a choice. This much could be said of either boy, witness that both had very strong reason to suspect he was risking his life to ask "are you a vampire", but Owen didn't have to haul his skinny butt into a Swedish winter night and hitchhike with strangers to do this; all he had to do was open a door, do a hop, a skip and half a step to knock on hers.

Oskar made a choice because the mother he was living with wasn't always busy making water from cheap wine or being swallowed whole by an electronic church; she probably actually was a good mother in material terms, if not in terms of emotional support (possible cultural differences alert!). He was leaving more behind than Owen was, and Owen was just drifting more or less aimlessly because he really didn't have any better direction to drift into.
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