Let Me In Ending Explained

For discussion of Matt Reeve's Film Let Me In

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Jameron
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Re: Let Me In Ending Explained

Post by Jameron » Sun May 24, 2020 12:46 pm

cmfireflies wrote:
Sat May 23, 2020 8:43 pm
About a decade ago, I spent loads of time on the IMDb message boards of both Let the Right One In and Let Me In
Me too. I'm sure you'll remember Harpo :lol: :lol: :lol:

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"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."

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cmfireflies
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Re: Let Me In Ending Explained

Post by cmfireflies » Sun May 24, 2020 3:06 pm

Jameron wrote:
Sun May 24, 2020 12:46 pm
cmfireflies wrote:
Sat May 23, 2020 8:43 pm
About a decade ago, I spent loads of time on the IMDb message boards of both Let the Right One In and Let Me In
Me too. I'm sure you'll remember Harpo :lol: :lol: :lol:

.
Hey Jameron,
Glad to see you're still around. Crazy how I'm still thinking about this movie 10 odd years later.
"When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it."

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dongregg
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Re: Let Me In Ending Explained

Post by dongregg » Sun May 24, 2020 7:33 pm

Maybe not so crazy. It occurs to me that discerning people continue to think of signal moments in art. For a lifetime. :wub:
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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Jameron
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Re: Let Me In Ending Explained

Post by Jameron » Mon May 25, 2020 11:38 am

cmfireflies wrote:
Sun May 24, 2020 3:06 pm
Jameron wrote:
Sun May 24, 2020 12:46 pm
cmfireflies wrote:
Sat May 23, 2020 8:43 pm
About a decade ago, I spent loads of time on the IMDb message boards of both Let the Right One In and Let Me In
Me too. I'm sure you'll remember Harpo :lol: :lol: :lol:

.
Hey Jameron,
Glad to see you're still around. Crazy how I'm still thinking about this movie 10 odd years later.
It's a testament to JAL's and Tomas' skill. They must have infected us somehow ;) . I hear the chances of recovery are slight :D .

.
"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."

danielmann861
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Re: Let Me In Ending Explained

Post by danielmann861 » Sat Aug 08, 2020 11:26 am

cmfireflies wrote:
Sat May 23, 2020 8:43 pm
About a decade ago, I spent loads of time on the IMDb message boards of both Let the Right One In and Let Me In arguing that Eli is good and kind while Abby is evil. Mainly it was driven by my dislike of LMI and how Reeves copied 90% of the movie but completely changed Thomas's character and backstory, making-perhaps unintentionally-Abby a much less sympathetic character.

Giving her every benefit of the doubt, Abby is still a terrible human being because of the way she treats Thomas. If she still loves him, her love is cheap because she doesn't even bother going with him when he is getting her food. It makes sense for Eli to boss Hakan around because those were the terms of their agreement. Reeves just transposed the same actions on Abby and Thomas with an entirely new history. If Thomas had been with Abby all his life, why was he hunting for Abby alone? She could have at least been a look-out, maybe hiding in a tree for victims/witnesses? They must have killed together at some point, but in the movie it seems like Abby had foisted all the disadvantages of being a vampire-the killing, the alienation-onto Thomas without any of the advantages-the immorality. This creates the impression that Abby doesn't want a partner, she wants her boyfriends to be temporary, disposable and probably Owen is headed for the same fate.

That's why I prefer to think of Abby as purely manipulative. She knows what she wants and how to get it. It's only "evil" if we still consider her human. A lion ambushing prey isn't evil, brood parasites aren't evil for taking advantage of others. Abby fails as a human but could be/is a great monster as LMI is more morality tale than LtROI is and that's why it lends itself to binary interpretations.
I just really love Eli and don't like Abby.
I think that’s why I never really warmed up to Abby and why I never warmed up to Let Me In. It tries so hard to blur the lines between good and evil, but it also inadvertently paints Abby as evil in her actions. In spelling it out to the audience, it ultimately just feels muddled in what it’s trying to say and shows a pure conflict between wanting to stay faithful to the original film while also trying to be its own thing. I kind of would rather they just became their own thing and had Abby be manipulative without trying to blur those lines.

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sauvin
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Re: Let Me In Ending Explained

Post by sauvin » Sat Aug 08, 2020 10:09 pm

danielmann861 wrote:
Sat Aug 08, 2020 11:26 am
cmfireflies wrote:
Sat May 23, 2020 8:43 pm
About a decade ago, I spent loads of time on the IMDb message boards of both Let the Right One In and Let Me In arguing that Eli is good and kind while Abby is evil. Mainly it was driven by my dislike of LMI and how Reeves copied 90% of the movie but completely changed Thomas's character and backstory, making-perhaps unintentionally-Abby a much less sympathetic character.

Giving her every benefit of the doubt, Abby is still a terrible human being because of the way she treats Thomas. If she still loves him, her love is cheap because she doesn't even bother going with him when he is getting her food. It makes sense for Eli to boss Hakan around because those were the terms of their agreement. Reeves just transposed the same actions on Abby and Thomas with an entirely new history. If Thomas had been with Abby all his life, why was he hunting for Abby alone? She could have at least been a look-out, maybe hiding in a tree for victims/witnesses? They must have killed together at some point, but in the movie it seems like Abby had foisted all the disadvantages of being a vampire-the killing, the alienation-onto Thomas without any of the advantages-the immorality. This creates the impression that Abby doesn't want a partner, she wants her boyfriends to be temporary, disposable and probably Owen is headed for the same fate.

That's why I prefer to think of Abby as purely manipulative. She knows what she wants and how to get it. It's only "evil" if we still consider her human. A lion ambushing prey isn't evil, brood parasites aren't evil for taking advantage of others. Abby fails as a human but could be/is a great monster as LMI is more morality tale than LtROI is and that's why it lends itself to binary interpretations.
I just really love Eli and don't like Abby.
I think that’s why I never really warmed up to Abby and why I never warmed up to Let Me In. It tries so hard to blur the lines between good and evil, but it also inadvertently paints Abby as evil in her actions. In spelling it out to the audience, it ultimately just feels muddled in what it’s trying to say and shows a pure conflict between wanting to stay faithful to the original film while also trying to be its own thing. I kind of would rather they just became their own thing and had Abby be manipulative without trying to blur those lines.
Maybe Thomas is her father figure, maybe he's her lover, maybe he is (or was) both and maybe he was never either, but unlike her, he's the guy who wears the pants in the family because his brains never froze at twelve. Eli herself remarks that after all this time, it's the only thing she still thinks is strange, that she never grows older in her head.

I think this is an easy point to miss when we're so fixated on her being a monster: she's also just a little girl. While she was still able to enjoy a bowl of curds and whey, it was the father or the older brother or the uncle or the boyfriend who brought home the bacon, and the kids and womenfolk stayed home where it was relatively safe from wild animals and hostile aboriginals.

And what do kids do? "Mom, my pants are ripped. I need new pants!" "Dad, I'm hungry. Get out of bed and fix me some pancakes!" "Mom, Dad, me and some friends were playing baseball and Bobby slammed one home and it went through the picture window." "Mom, Dad, I know it's 3 in the morning, but there's something under my bed that goes BUMP when the lights go out. Make it go away!" This is what kids do: they take, and they expect us to protect them.

Abby's got the wherewithal to turn a gang of bullies into hamburger in less time than it takes to scream three times, so you wouldn't think she'd be particularly afraid to wander out into the dark where other people can't even see, but she doesn't always know what's going on around her, and I'll bet she knows that. You just never know when you wander into a village that you've not been to in sixty or seventy years that somebody who'd been around then might recognise you and tell the neighbours "last time she was here, lots of people died in funny ways, and she's not changed one bit in all this time, and now people are dying in funny ways again. Scare up the pitchforks and axes and hammers and torches, people!" This might not be such a great danger these days, but I'm betting it would have been a lot more common in the early years of her career as a venipuncturist - before public education, radio, TV and newspapers - when people still believed in devils and witches and hair growing on your palms, especially in the more remote areas where change itself is feared and begrudged.

In this light, it shouldn't be too hard to cobble together a reasonably persuasive argument that the way she treats Thomas (e.g., not going food shopping together) is very child-like compounded by acculturation in a time and place that hasn't existed for ten generations and possibly exacerbated by some close calls of the kind laid out in the preceding paragraph.

Children are unrepentant takers... but are they evil?
Fais tomber les barrières entre nous qui sommes tous des frères

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cmfireflies
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Re: Let Me In Ending Explained

Post by cmfireflies » Sun Aug 09, 2020 4:13 am

sauvin wrote:
Sat Aug 08, 2020 10:09 pm
I think this is an easy point to miss when we're so fixated on her being a monster: she's also just a little girl. While she was still able to enjoy a bowl of curds and whey, it was the father or the older brother or the uncle or the boyfriend who brought home the bacon, and the kids and womenfolk stayed home where it was relatively safe from wild animals and hostile aboriginals.
I dunno about that. In times of crisis or disaster, or even now in places where the rule of law is wobbly to nonexistent, there are stories of 12 year old children taking tremondus responsibility, like going out to earn a livelihood when they should be in school or making sure their younger siblings stay alive when they should be playing with dolls. (I was going to google some examples, but then I realized having "famous 12 year olds" be in my search history would probably put me on some lists). The point is I don't think being a kid gives Abby carte blanche to take and take and take, especially from someone she purports to love. And I think the further back in history you go, the more responsibility "children" were expected to take to ensure their family's survival.

Children are unrepentant takers... but are they evil?
To clarify, when I use "evil" I don't mean in the religious sense like demons or whatever. To me, I think evil denotes extreme selfishness coupled with the power to actually follow through. By "extreme selfishness" I mean someone who places their own welfare above other considerations to the extreme. It's not necessarily the action which is evil, but the reason behind the act, like it's not evil to kill to survive, but it is evil to kill over five dollars. And the other part is power. Most children are super selfish, just because they don't know any better. What makes them not evil is that most children also have very little power to actually do anything. I think this explains why the "monstrous child" is a trope in horror. Think Children of the Corn or that episode of the Twilight Zone. Combining a child's utter disregard for anyone else with actual power equals evil, in my opinion.

Therefore, under my definition, Abby is evil. Eli isn't, because she's just better than Abby in every way and can do no wrong 8-)
"When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it."

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dongregg
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Re: Let Me In Ending Explained

Post by dongregg » Sun Aug 09, 2020 5:19 am

Both of you are right about 12-year-olds (and even younger). Depends on their milieu.

And right, too, that Eli is beyond reproach because we love her. :wub:
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

Jessy7217
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Re: Let Me In Ending Explained

Post by Jessy7217 » Tue Apr 04, 2023 11:27 pm

cmfireflies wrote:
Sat May 23, 2020 8:43 pm
I just really love Eli and don't like Abby.
I read the whole thing. Very good thoughts on Eli vs Abby.

As for this statement, I feel the same way. Eli kept his heart, and the ability to care for, and about, others.

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Re: Let Me In Ending Explained

Post by sauvin » Wed Apr 05, 2023 1:36 am

Jessy7217 wrote:
Tue Apr 04, 2023 11:27 pm
cmfireflies wrote:
Sat May 23, 2020 8:43 pm
I just really love Eli and don't like Abby.
I read the whole thing. Very good thoughts on Eli vs Abby.

As for this statement, I feel the same way. Eli kept his heart, and the ability to care for, and about, others.
And Abby didn't?
Fais tomber les barrières entre nous qui sommes tous des frères

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