So I Finally Got to Watch LMI too ;)

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lombano
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Re: So I Finally Got to Watch LMI too ;)

Post by lombano » Sun Aug 24, 2014 5:57 pm

I'm not passing judgement on lack of character. I'm merely saying Oskar's more stoic reaction represented a greater degree of resistance than Owen's. Oskar's only hope in the pool was outside intervention - realistically he wouldn't be able to get out of the pool fast enough to escape all three bullies, so flight wasn't an option, and unarmed and outnumbered, neither was fighting.
metoo wrote:
Jameron wrote:I can't think of anything that tells us Conny is picked on. Are you thinking of when his brother grabs him from behind when he comes to borrow Conny's keys? For me that is just familial horseplay, they part on mutually friendly terms.
I agree.


Coming from behind, yes, but there's a certain attitude when he demands Conny's keys that clearly shows him acting as the boss, and he's knowingly doing it in from of Conny's friends.
Klesk wrote:
lombano wrote: I don't think there's anything attractive about the violence in LTROI - both Oskar and Eli accept violence can be necessary, but they don't seem to relish it.
That is not what you see in Oscars face after he hit back. Necessary? Maybe, but there is more than that. It is a two-edged sword. Somewhat attractive, exciting and wrong. It is nothing what really helps Oscar to solve his problems. On the contrary the situation escalates and becomes worse.
If Oskar relished violence, he would've hit Conny more than once or tried hitting the other, too, and not tried to dissuade him from attacking until the last possible moment. Oskar employs the absolute minimum of force that would still mean effective self-defense. I don't think Oskar's exhilaration is at the violence, but at his victory over Conny, which I think is an important distinction. And Eli's advice would work with the garden variety of bully, and in any case Conny is an obvious coward and it would've worked like a charm had it not been for Jimmy (Conny is such a coward that though his gang outnumbers Oskar three to one once Oskar does hit back he runs to his older brother to save him - we also don't see him pick on anyone who will fight back, however feebly).
Klesk wrote:
lombano wrote: Eli certainly doesn't.
At the end Eli is very brutal, more than it is necessary. She does not just kill them, she literally slaughters them. In fact, even to kill the bullies is not necessary. Jocke and Lacke are getting a “smarter” death, because it is not revenge what drives her.
That depends on what is meant by "necessary." It certainly put an end to their bullying of Oskar. As far as Eli knew, they'd shown themselves to be pitiless and not easily deterred, and not run-of-the-mill bullies but genuine threats to Oskar's life. She dispatched them quickly and with the only means immediately at her disposal. She did not torture them or inflict drawn-out deaths on them. Given what Eli knows, she's merely applying overwhelming force to a problem that had proved intractable with more moderate approaches (yes, killing Jimmy would've been enough, or even just breaking his arms, but Eli has no way of knowing that). She spares Andreas, perhaps because she's not sure he's part of the gang, perhaps because as he's not near the edge of the pool he clearly poses no immediate threat, but in any case it shows restraint, and there were pragmatic reasons to leave no witnesses, yet she spared him. Yes, I'm biased in that I think Jimmy had it coming, but still.
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Re: So I Finally Got to Watch LMI too ;)

Post by dongregg » Sun Aug 24, 2014 7:44 pm

Is there a way of seeing the massacre such that contemporary standards of justice can be set aside? Is there a way of seeing the massacre as something that doesn’t involve Eli in making morally reasoned (or even particularly practical) decisions? For the sake of argument, let’s see Eli as existing largely out of time and, before she met Oskar, living in a semiferal state--or at least, living in a way that was stripped down close to the bare animal essentials. She’s not quite that when she meets Oskar; there are still vestiges of humanity, still some sense of what is right and wrong from her childhood. And by the film’s end, she has recovered much of her humanity through her relationship with Oskar, albeit a humanity from a distant past, remembered by a child who is perpetually 12 years old.

But when Eli must feed, she is a fearsome--but not necessarily reasoning--predator. Ditto when she is enraged. Note the dazed look on her face before she flees from the Sun Palace crowd. Note the flash of anger (not fear, I think), when she realizes that Lacke is threatening her. When he turned away from her, she may also have jumped to the conclusion that Lacke was threatening Oskar, which would make the scene an adumbration of the pool massacre.

Let’s say, then, that aspects of the pool massacre could be explained by this: Do not enrage a semiferal, not quite human predator and expect a calm and reasoned result. I would say, for example, that she didn’t kill Andreas simply because she didn’t. And I would further say that her rage was evident based on two things—the way she dragged Martin the length of the pool before dispatching him, and the way she violently separated Jimmy from his head and arm.

***

Some see Eli as returning because she promised to help Oskar. That’s okay if you think it means watching over him in a general way, because neither she nor Oskar could know that the bullies continued to be a threat, could they? I want to believe she was at the pool because, having tried to resume her semiferal existence, she found that Oskar had awakened too much in her to be able to go back to it. Said another way, perhaps she found she could not bear to be away from Oskar.

I realize that the discussions on the forum about the massacre aren’t only about Eli’s mindset, but about how we ourselves view justice. Indeed, carry on. These are worthy considerations. My own conclusion regarding the massacre is an old-timey, pre-Modern defense: “Dudes needed killin’.”
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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Re: So I Finally Got to Watch LMI too ;)

Post by sauvin » Sun Aug 24, 2014 11:27 pm

dongregg wrote:Is there a way of seeing the massacre such that contemporary standards of justice can be set aside?
I think some folks from the eastern Mediterranean Basin area - and probably other parts of the world - might resent the implication that theirs isn't a "contemporary" standard of justice.
dongregg wrote:Is there a way of seeing the massacre as something that doesn’t involve Eli in making morally reasoned (or even particularly practical) decisions?
Veni, vidi, screamy.
dongregg wrote: For the sake of argument, let’s see Eli as existing largely out of time and, before she met Oskar, living in a semiferal state--or at least, living in a way that was stripped down close to the bare animal essentials.
Let's suppose for further sake of argument that what humanity she might have retained is also "out of time", another time some two or three centuries ago, and another place. What we call "standards of justice" depend very heavily on both time and place. Our senses of justice are the products of acculturation, and hers had likely been harsher times.
dongregg wrote:And by the film’s end, she has recovered much of her humanity through her relationship with Oskar, albeit a humanity from a distant past, remembered by a child who is perpetually 12 years old.
But what kind of humanity?
dongregg wrote:Let’s say, then, that aspects of the pool massacre could be explained by this: Do not enrage a semiferal, not quite human predator and expect a calm and reasoned result.
And let's say that even under the umbrella of what we're calling a "culture" exists a multidimensional pyramid of substrata between which the concept of justice can vary wildly. Contrast the likely outcome of dissing (for example) a bank president, a lawyer, a cop and one of da boyz in da hood. Wouldn't you say that context matters?
dongregg wrote:I would say, for example, that she didn’t kill Andreas simply because she didn’t. And I would further say that her rage was evident based on two things—the way she dragged Martin the length of the pool before dispatching him, and the way she violently separated Jimmy from his head and arm.
For the record, I believe Martin shuffled off the mortal coil mid-drag.

I'm not quite sure what to make of Andreas' survival, honestly. My impression is that since he had separated himself from the rest of the pack, he distanced himself as an immediate threat to her friend, thus taking himself off the list of "People I Gotta Do". She can't have known that Andreas was a part of the qabal that arranged this little tableau for Oskar.
dongregg wrote:Some see Eli as returning because she promised to help Oskar. That’s okay if you think it means watching over him in a general way, because neither she nor Oskar could know that the bullies continued to be a threat, could they? I want to believe she was at the pool because, having tried to resume her semiferal existence, she found that Oskar had awakened too much in her to be able to go back to it. Said another way, perhaps she found she could not bear to be away from Oskar.
I think it's also possible she had planned her departure and simply didn't tell anybody - including Oskar - so as to be able to slip back in, unnoticed and unlooked-for, and ask if maybe he'd like to run away with her. Given the situation she came back to, extirpating the bullies makes excellent sense if she knows or suspects she'll have to leave him behind again if she cares about his continued survival. She might only be a child, but she has been around the block a few thousand times, and is a survivor. I think you'd find children living in somewhat similar conditions (orphans living in an urban theatre of war, for example) who don't have a lot of common emotional ground with children of rich Americans living in the suburbs with the highest property values.
dongregg wrote:I realize that the discussions on the forum about the massacre aren’t only about Eli’s mindset, but about how we ourselves view justice. Indeed, carry on. These are worthy considerations. My own conclusion regarding the massacre is an old-timey, pre-Modern defense: “Dudes needed killin’.”
What is "justice" generally but a (quasi-)formalised system of institutionalised retribution?

Then take away the lights, the radio, the heated pool. Let this confrontation happen in some Paleolithic setting - a cave lake, for example, with a campfire near the edge of the water. Three or four boys, wearing nothing maybe except fig leaves or fur loin cloths and armed with nothing more artificial than a wooden club or a sharp sliver of stone. Let's even let all the participants of this tableau be scarcely more articulate than a reasonably intelligent chimpanzee.

This is about as primeval a setting as I can imagine and still have the boys (more or less) human, duplicating in the most elemental possible terms the pool scene. It's in these terms that the human heart still thinks, and will likely continue to think for quite a few millennia to come. In my opinion, the truest measure of the human heart isn't found in boardrooms, courtrooms or halls of acadaemia - it's in the dark back-alleys of the poorest parts of the largest cities.

She's two hands and two fingers old (more or less). She's been two hands and two fingers old for $deity alone knows how many hordes of hands and fingers. And she's just moved into the cave a stone's throw away from your own.

The boys would still be alpha or beta males trying to give a gamma or a delta a beat-down for daring to try to rise above his station.

And Eli, twelve years old or two hands and two fingers old, would still be Eli.
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Re: So I Finally Got to Watch LMI too ;)

Post by lombano » Mon Aug 25, 2014 4:20 am

sauvin wrote: I'm not quite sure what to make of Andreas' survival, honestly. My impression is that since he had separated himself from the rest of the pack, he distanced himself as an immediate threat to her friend, thus taking himself off the list of "People I Gotta Do". She can't have known that Andreas was a part of the qabal that arranged this little tableau for Oskar.
Perhaps, but there were pragmatic reasons to kill him - namely, because he was a witness to what Eli was. Yet Eli didn't kill him, which shows a distaste for killing (weeping over Jocke's body shows it even more dramatically, of course).
sauvin wrote: Given the situation she came back to, extirpating the bullies makes excellent sense if she knows or suspects she'll have to leave him behind again if she cares about his continued survival.
I agree this was probably very much her reasoning. Also, consider that she had no way of knowing that only Jimmy really wanted to go through with murder.
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Re: So I Finally Got to Watch LMI too ;)

Post by sauvin » Mon Aug 25, 2014 4:40 am

lombano wrote:
sauvin wrote: I'm not quite sure what to make of Andreas' survival, honestly. My impression is that since he had separated himself from the rest of the pack, he distanced himself as an immediate threat to her friend, thus taking himself off the list of "People I Gotta Do". She can't have known that Andreas was a part of the qabal that arranged this little tableau for Oskar.
Perhaps, but there were pragmatic reasons to kill him - namely, because he was a witness to what Eli was. Yet Eli didn't kill him, which shows a distaste for killing (weeping over Jocke's body shows it even more dramatically, of course).
Weeping over the jogger's body seems to be one of the major points of contention when comparing Abby's "sympathetic" quality to Eli's. Eli certainly wasn't weeping over the death of Jocke, a particular person; she probably never even knew his name. it's been argued that she's still crying over her lost existence as a regular human being, but I'd think after a couple hundred years, she'd have come to some kind of terms with that loss. I'm thinking Jocke was only tangentially involved in that little crying jag, and that Eli herself had no idea what turned on the waterworks. If memory serves properly, Jocke died minutes after Oskar touched her with his Rubik's Cube, and while she might not be able to articulate it, this was the first time anybody in many, many moons that anybody touched her as an outright gift, rather than with some kind of ulterior motive.

IOW, I'm thinking the fact of Jocke's death, or the fact that she's just caused another death, may not even be directly related to that outburst.

Abby, on the other hand, walked into a McDonald's, waited for a Happy Meal to drift by, gobbled it down and split faster than a New York businessman on his way to a meeting without even bothering to chuck the bags and boxes into a garbage bin.

We don't know what Eli saw. She may have dropped in and looked in through the window a couple dozen milliseconds before intervening. If so, she probably hadn't known that Andreas was part of that gang. He was off to the side, having some kind of emotional episode, when she barged in, and her taste for killing (or lack thereof) just wasn't a factor in her decision to spare him. I think it's possible he just wasn't on the radar.
lombano wrote:
sauvin wrote: Given the situation she came back to, extirpating the bullies makes excellent sense if she knows or suspects she'll have to leave him behind again if she cares about his continued survival.
I agree this was probably very much her reasoning. Also, consider that she had no way of knowing that only Jimmy really wanted to go through with murder.
Then take away the lights, the radio, the heated pool. Let this confrontation happen in some Paleolithic setting - a cave lake, for example, with a campfire near the edge of the water. This, in my belief, is the level at which the human heart thinks, regardless of how "civilised" we want to think ourselves. Even if in "reality" Jimmy was just having a bit of cruel fun, in the eyes of a predator, Oskar was being set-on by a pack of predators. In Eli's place, I'd have found absolutely nothing to laugh about.
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Re: So I Finally Got to Watch LMI too ;)

Post by dongregg » Mon Aug 25, 2014 5:19 am

sauvin wrote:Even if in "reality" Jimmy was just having a bit of cruel fun, in the eyes of a predator, Oskar was being set-on by a pack of predators.
Pretty much a summary statement of the way I characterized the massacre. Not a lot of thought required on Eli's part. Fury and action. The same rage and action we see from a mama croc who sees her nest of eggs being disturbed. It just takes an amygdala, not a neocortex.
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Re: So I Finally Got to Watch LMI too ;)

Post by drakkar » Mon Aug 25, 2014 6:23 am

You certainly put way more thought into the killings that Eli does.
Remember his piece of advise to Oskar, urging him to hit back: "You have a knife". When that doesn't suffice, it's "Then I'll help you".
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Re: So I Finally Got to Watch LMI too ;)

Post by sauvin » Mon Aug 25, 2014 6:30 am

drakkar wrote:You certainly put way more thought into the killings that Eli does.
Remember his piece of advise to Oskar, urging him to hit back: "You have a knife". When that doesn't suffice, it's "Then I'll help you".
In the movie, something to this effect: "You have to hit back. You have to hit back harder than you dare. Then, it'll stop." In matters of defense, Eli probably views this as a simple matter of practicality - don't hit unless you have to, but if you do, try to make sure you don't have to hit again.
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Re: So I Finally Got to Watch LMI too ;)

Post by metoo » Mon Aug 25, 2014 8:46 am

sauvin wrote:[...] - don't hit unless you have to, but if you do, try to make sure you don't have to hit again.
Sounds like an advice that Ender might have given. And it sure worked for him...
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Re: So I Finally Got to Watch LMI too ;)

Post by dongregg » Mon Aug 25, 2014 6:27 pm

sauvin wrote:
dongregg wrote:Is there a way of seeing the massacre such that contemporary standards of justice can be set aside?
I think some folks from the eastern Mediterranean Basin area - and probably other parts of the world - might resent the implication that theirs isn't a "contemporary" standard of justice.
dongregg wrote:Is there a way of seeing the massacre as something that doesn’t involve Eli in making morally reasoned (or even particularly practical) decisions?
Same thing. Setting aside contemporary standards of justice doesn't leave out Sharia or any other contemporary standards. All that follows in my post is based on setting aside questions of any moral (or even practical) decisions at the pool and focusing instead on the actions of a semiferal creature for whom hard thinking has played a lesser role in her life and who is less influenced by vestiges of an almost Medieval, church-dictated morality learned during the few precious years before she was turned. What follows is a hypothetical picture of an enraged predator protecting Oskar, not unlike a mother bear protecting her cubs. In this hypothetical picture, asking why she didn't kill Andeas is like asking the bear why she only killed one hiker and not the other.

I set it up as a hypothetical picture to allow us to focus on the bare minimum that would explain features of the pool scene. There are other ways of looking at it, but as a "suppose..." construction, it allows us to isolate a few variables to see how just those could explain Eli's actions.
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