You know the feeling...

[lombano]

The phrase "low lifes" I took from a book review and I think it fairly describes Eli's victims, except, of course, the three boys in the pool scene. This is in fact one example of the predictability of the story. We are introduced to the victims early on and we know they are going to be the victims and we are not really going to cry after them.
We know that Eli is not going to feed on a 5 year old girl playing outside her house, or the mother of two small kids who had just gone out shopping, even though such people also no doubt live in Blackberg. In principle, Eli chooses her victims at random, but we we know perfectly well the kind she will choose. Lindqvist, of course, could have made Eli choose her victims deliberately, for example make clear she avoids 5 year olds, but that would actually cause different kind of problems for him. So he makes it look like it all happens by accident - but the accidents are all very predictable.

In all fairness, the only victims in the film that Eli can be said to choose are Jocke and Virginia. The boy is chosen by Hakan, not Eli. This I would say is handled better in the book, in which Virginia isn't nearly as much of a low life as the rest of the drunks, and Jocke is at least considering trying to turn his life around, and the cancerous woman Eli kills can't be described as a low life.

[Lacenaire]

The phrase "low lifes" I took from a book review and I think it fairly describes Eli's victims, except, of course, the three boys in the pool scene. This is in fact one example of the predictability of the story. We are introduced to the victims early on and we know they are going to be the victims and we are not really going to cry after them.
We know that Eli is not going to feed on a 5 year old girl playing outside her house, or the mother of two small kids who had just gone out shopping, even though such people also no doubt live in Blackberg. In principle, Eli chooses her victims at random, but we we know perfectly well the kind she will choose. Lindqvist, of course, could have made Eli choose her victims deliberately, for example make clear she avoids 5 year olds, but that would actually cause different kind of problems for him. So he makes it look like it all happens by accident - but the accidents are all very predictable.

In all fairness, the only victims in the film that Eli can be said to choose are Jocke and Virginia. The boy is chosen by Hakan, not Eli. This I would say is handled better in the book, in which Virginia isn't nearly as much of a low life as the rest of the drunks, and Jocke is at least considering trying to turn his life around, and the cancerous woman Eli kills can't be described as a low life.

I think you misunderstood my point. The point is that she does not "choose" them at all, they just happen "by accident" but all "these accidents" are designed so as to make sure we do not stop sympathising with her.
This is of course the sort of thing that would certainly be criticised in a serious film. In principle, Eli can murder a 5 year old, but we know for sure she will never do so, and there are lots more things that we know will not happen, even though in real life we could never be so sure.

It feels like the author is not willing to take full responsibility for the character he created so he just makes use of his control of "fate" in his book (where he is a kind of God), to make sure that she can at the same time not have to make choices and that all the accidental choices that will happen will be palatable to the reader/viewer.

If he made Eli make her own choices and not rely on accident, he would have changed her character in a way that would make him or his audience more uncomfortable (for example, if Eli were do decide herself whose life is less valuable and whose more). So Lindqvist makes these decisions for her but makes it look like pure chance.

[sauvin]

I think you misunderstood my point. The point is that she does not "choose" them at all, they just happen "by accident" but all "these accidents" are designed so as to make sure we do not stop sympathising with her.
This is of course the sort of thing that would certainly be criticised in a serious film. In principle, Eli can murder a 5 year old, but we know for sure she will never do so, and there are lots more things that we know will not happen, even though in real life we could never be so sure.

It feels like the author is not willing to take full responsibility for the character he created so he just makes use of his control of "fate" in his book (where he is a kind of God), to make sure that she can at the same time not have to make choices and that all the accidental choices that will happen will be palatable to the reader/viewer.

If he made Eli make her own choices and not rely on accident, he would have changed her character in a way that would make him or his audience more uncomfortable (for example, if Eli were do decide herself whose life is less valuable and whose more). So Lindqvist makes these decisions for her but makes it look like pure chance.

It feels to me like Lacenaire is uncomfortably close to pointing out to me the central internal conundrum I am myself having with Eli :\

[Wolfchild]

It feels like the author is not willing to take full responsibility for the character he created so he just makes use of his control of "fate" in his book (where he is a kind of God), to make sure that she can at the same time not have to make choices and that all the accidental choices that will happen will be palatable to the reader/viewer.

If he made Eli make her own choices and not rely on accident, he would have changed her character in a way that would make him or his audience more uncomfortable (for example, if Eli were do decide herself whose life is less valuable and whose more). So Lindqvist makes these decisions for her but makes it look like pure chance.

But JAL specifically eschewed that romantic, traditional view of the vampire: self-confident and in control of his situation. Eli's control of her fate was tenuous at best. JAL portrayed this by forcing Eli to be opportunistic. Yes, he controlled who his world presented to Eli as those opportunities, but if he manipulated her world and made it look like pure chance, well... isn't that the task of an author?

However, JAL seemed to want to portray Oskar's escape from Blackeberg. If he didn't manipulate our feelings such that Eli didn't end up just on the sympathetic side of ambivalent, it wouldn't have been the story that he set out to tell. An Eli in control of her circumstances would have equaled an Eli who was manipulating Oskar.

In any case he did have Eli twice decide that Oskar's life was more valuable than that of the victims she eventually found: Jocke and Virginia.

Or have I misunderstood what you were trying to say?

[cmfireflies]

It feels like the author is not willing to take full responsibility for the character he created so he just makes use of his control of "fate" in his book (where he is a kind of God), to make sure that she can at the same time not have to make choices and that all the accidental choices that will happen will be palatable to the reader/viewer.

One thing that reminded me that a was watching a non-U.S. film was that Jocke was set up as an innocent guy when he was nommed by Eli. I'm thinking that the essential difference between Eli's victims and the main characters is the amount of screen time given. It's not that Eli's victims deserve to die or are all sad sacks with nothing to live for, just that as an audience we're given so little time with the side characters that we can't relate to them. Lacke's death was the most close up and personal one and almost every discussion about that revolves around "How does that affect Oskar?" Maybe if we followed Jocke throughout his day, see him as a caring parent, etc we'd see Eli as the villain, but that raises complex moral questions of its own, like is a person's life worth more just b/c he had a family? Can't you argue that it's more of a tragedy for someone like Lacke to die b/c he never had the chance to settle down w/ Virginia?

I'm also reminded of a clip in the media section where 3 or 4 critics were talking about LTROI v. Twilight v. some other book. IIRC, only the middle-aged man seemed to have a problem with Eli killing the drunks. I guess it's all about who you identify with. (I mean that he was probably closer in age to Lacke and company, not that he's a drunk )

If I understand your point correctly, are you asking what would happen if Eli kills a more sympathetic character? Given what type of movie LtROI is, Eli probably has earned enough karma among fans to get away with killing a random child or (as JAL says a busload of preschoolers.) To have the audience see the harsh consequences of Eli taking a life, he'll probably have to kill off Oskar's mom, but then it'll be a completely different movie.

Ultimately it can't be entirely realistic, and still retain the qualities that make me like LtROI. It's escapism in that it depicts the finding and triumph of ideal love and unconditional acceptance. The horror part comes from flirting with the other side of love. That's why I said that the type of love LtROI shows is selfish. Not b/c Oskar will use Eli or vice versa but in choosing to love Eli Oskar is tacitly accepting the deaths of future victims. The main characters VALUE THEIR LOVE ABOVE THE LIVES OF STRANGERS AND WE ROOT THEM ON. That's why it may be easier to accept that Eli was manipulating Oskar, b/c people feel more comfortable with the idea that a character like Eli who chooses to kill to prolong her own life should be incapable of selflessly loving someone else.

Oh I ramble, TLDR version:
I don't actually think that changing the quality of Eli's victims would change the story, unless one of the victims was someone close to Oskar. In any story, the audience or reader chooses a side and barring a I didn't know character A was this kind of person moment, we suspend our disbelief and go along with it.

I think you're thinking too hard to apply real life morality to what is essentially a fairy tale.

[sauvin]

(snip)

Ultimately it can't be entirely realistic, and still retain the qualities that make me like LtROI. It's escapism in that it depicts the finding and triumph of ideal love and unconditional acceptance. The horror part comes from flirting with the other side of love. That's why I said that the type of love LtROI shows is selfish. Not b/c Oskar will use Eli or vice versa but in choosing to love Eli Oskar is tacitly accepting the deaths of future victims. The main characters VALUE THEIR LOVE ABOVE THE LIVES OF STRANGERS AND WE ROOT THEM ON. That's why it may be easier to accept that Eli was manipulating Oskar, b/c people feel more comfortable with the idea that a character like Eli who chooses to kill to prolong her own life should be incapable of selflessly loving someone else.

(snip)

I think you're thinking too hard to apply real life morality to what is essentially a fairy tale.

Don't know about "applying" a real life morality to what is now a static piece of history, be the history fiction or not. Eli doesn't give a d%#n what we think, and neither does Oskar. This has more to do with trying to figure out how the story fits in with or what it seems to tell us about our own perceptions.

There's a difference, even if I can't express it properly at the moment, and perhaps even a critical one as I continue to maintain that the movie's profound impact on many of us is indicative of questions we see or sense raised that have relevance to our personal lives, perhaps even relevant to practical concerns.

This is what art does, no?

[Struan]

I think the key thing here is plausibility, as Mono suggested earlier.

Eli's "choice" of victims is believable. She starts with Jocke and thus begins the chain of causality that leads to her third victim, Lacke. You could say that's precisely the hand of the author arranging the pieces to make her sympathetic, but the fact is that there's nothing there that really crosses the probability boundary of mere happenstance. The only "coincidence" is that two of the killed characters, Jocke & Virginia, are close to Lacke. But then again, all of them hang around Eli's feeding ground at night (and precious few else, apparently).

That doesn't mean that there isn't a clear intention in the movie of showing the sympathetic side of Eli, hence the shot of her agonizing over her first kill. What I don't see is anything that could count as clear "manipulation" from the author.

[Aurora]

I think it's worth remembering that Eli is essentially a nocturnal opportunistic predator, that fact alone means means that potential victims are limited. Also it's worth remembering that during the period of time that the book was set the fact that a local boy (Hakan's first victim) had been killed nearby was widely known by the locals. Oscar's mum told him that he wasn't allowed outside the courtyard at night, many parents wouldn't let their kids out at all.

[Lacenaire]

It feels like the author is not willing to take full responsibility for the character he created so he just makes use of his control of "fate" in his book (where he is a kind of God), to make sure that she can at the same time not have to make choices and that all the accidental choices that will happen will be palatable to the reader/viewer.

If he made Eli make her own choices and not rely on accident, he would have changed her character in a way that would make him or his audience more uncomfortable (for example, if Eli were do decide herself whose life is less valuable and whose more). So Lindqvist makes these decisions for her but makes it look like pure chance.

But JAL specifically eschewed that romantic, traditional view of the vampire: self-confident and in control of his situation. Eli's control of her fate was tenuous at best. JAL portrayed this by forcing Eli to be opportunistic. Yes, he controlled who his world presented to Eli as those opportunities, but if he manipulated her world and made it look like pure chance, well... isn't that the task of an author?

Not really, or perhaps it depends on what we expect of literature. Lindqvist makes things happen seemingly by chance but in a way that is extremly unlikely to happen in the real world and which is designed to manipulate our emotions, so that we feel exactly the way he wants us to feel. But this is not such a great achievement as it seems, because he does it by sort of putting us in a world quite different from the one we really live in. So the emotions that he creates in us are not at all like our real emotions, they arise because we willingly allow ourselves to enter into the world of his fable and because we never forget it is not the real world.

Exaggerating a little: imagine a monster who kills anyone who comes across his path at random, but the only people that happen to come across his path are people you hate. You will root for the monster, just like Oskar does for the killers in his scrapbook, whom he imagines will kill off only the people he hates and not his father and mother. But that is just a self-delusion. It’s not what great writers do. In Lindqvist’s novel nobody that you seriously care about ever gets hurt. In real life it is precisely this that it the cause of our deepest emotions. There are no such emotions in this film.

However, JAL seemed to want to portray Oskar's escape from Blackeberg. If he didn't manipulate our feelings such that Eli didn't end up just on the sympathetic side of ambivalent, it wouldn't have been the story that he set out to tell. An Eli in control of her circumstances would have equaled an Eli who was manipulating Oskar.

Well, first of all I am not a writer I only play one on TV, as they once used to say in Britain. Or more accurately, I play a critic. Now a critic can criticise an artist quite honestly without being able to answer the question of “how would you then do it better?”. A critic need not have any artistic talents and I do not claim to be a better writer than Lindqvist. I only say I have read better ones.

But more seriously, JAL wants to achieve two things. He wants Eli to remain sympathetic so he won’t let her kill anyone who would seriously engage our emotions. But he is afraid to give let her make her own moral choices for, I think a variety of reasons. One of them, is that if she were to do so she would appear far more mature and hence less innocent. Secondly, because he would himself have to answer the horrible question: if you must kill someone who should you kill? That’s a very tricky question, it reminds me of a clever Swiss film “The Swiss-makers” (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Faiseurs_de_Suisses). In the film an Italian worker applying for Swiss nationality is asked essentially this question, and its very tricky because if he gives a wrong answer it will be the end of his dream of becoming Swiss. But he finds a clever way of dealing with this, better than Lindqvist's way.

Now, quite honestly, if I found myself a vampire and unlike Virginia, decided to go on living, of course I would have to ask myself this question. But there is no way of answering it without upsetting a lot of people. I think it is also one of the reasons why JAL can’t permit Eli to try to answer it.

In any case he did have Eli twice decide that Oskar's life was more valuable than that of the victims she eventually found: Jocke and Virginia.

Yes, you are right. I noticed that too. And she also, I think, decided that Oskar’s mother life and Tommy’s (in the book) are more valuable than other lives. JAL allows her to do that because these are particular individuals, connected with Oskar so making such decisions is not nearly as controversial than having her decide that “low life” has less value than the other kind of life. Actually, when I first watched the film I thought that she was the kind of vampire that would not kill children, because she identified with them - or at least children that she thought “were like her”. Of course there were the bullies, but then it seemed they were exceptions and she left Andreas alive. I soon understood that I had been wrong, Lindqvist never meant it this way. She does not kill loveable children like Oskar only because purely by chance they never happened to come her way. Which is why we can love her. But this is a very artificial love - it would not stand up to any real life test.

It feels like the author is not willing to take full responsibility for the character he created so he just makes use of his control of "fate" in his book (where he is a kind of God), to make sure that she can at the same time not have to make choices and that all the accidental choices that will happen will be palatable to the reader/viewer.

One thing that reminded me that a was watching a non-U.S. film was that Jocke was set up as an innocent guy when he was nommed by Eli. I'm thinking that the essential difference between Eli's victims and the main characters is the amount of screen time given. It's not that Eli's victims deserve to die or are all sad sacks with nothing to live for, just that as an audience we're given so little time with the side characters that we can't relate to them. Lacke's death was the most close up and personal one and almost every discussion about that revolves around "How does that affect Oskar?" Maybe if we followed Jocke throughout his day, see him as a caring parent, etc we'd see Eli as the villain, but that raises complex moral questions of its own, like is a person's life worth more just b/c he had a family? Can't you argue that it's more of a tragedy for someone like Lacke to die b/c he never had the chance to settle down w/ Virginia?

Yes, I completely agree with that. We are purposefully not given the chance to identify with Eli’s victims too much.

I'm also reminded of a clip in the media section where 3 or 4 critics were talking about LTROI v. Twilight v. some other book. IIRC, only the middle-aged man seemed to have a problem with Eli killing the drunks. I guess it's all about who you identify with. (I mean that he was probably closer in age to Lacke and company, not that he's a drunk )

I also agree with that too. The reason why Eli never gets the chance to feed on the easiest of targets, small children, that almost everyone who has had one of hi/her own identifies with them.

If I understand your point correctly, are you asking what would happen if Eli kills a more sympathetic character? Given what type of movie LtROI is, Eli probably has earned enough karma among fans to get away with killing a random child or (as JAL says a busload of preschoolers.)

Of course he does not really mean it. Only some hardened viewers of horror films might let Eli get away with killing a busload of preschoolers provided
1. they don’t get any close ups
2. they don’t look like their own kids
3. most importantly, they keep reminding themselves “this is only a film”.
But this sort of “love for Eli” has nothing at all in common with any real love. In other words, they would only let her get away with it in the film.

Ultimately it can't be entirely realistic, and still retain the qualities that make me like LtROI. It's escapism in that it depicts the finding and triumph of ideal love and unconditional acceptance. The horror part comes from flirting with the other side of love. That's why I said that the type of love LtROI shows is selfish. Not b/c Oskar will use Eli or vice versa but in choosing to love Eli Oskar is tacitly accepting the deaths of future victims. The main characters VALUE THEIR LOVE ABOVE THE LIVES OF STRANGERS AND WE ROOT THEM ON. That's why it may be easier to accept that Eli was manipulating Oskar, b/c people feel more comfortable with the idea that a character like Eli who chooses to kill to prolong her own life should be incapable of selflessly loving someone else.

Oh I ramble, TLDR version:
I don't actually think that changing the quality of Eli's victims would change the story, unless one of the victims was someone close to Oskar. In any story, the audience or reader chooses a side and barring a I didn't know character A was this kind of person moment, we suspend our disbelief and go along with it.

I think you're thinking too hard to apply real life morality to what is essentially a fairy tale.

Yes, to some extent I agree with this (except the last sentence - I think one does apply real life morality to art - and I have been trying to see LTROI as art). The only thing I wanted to say was that really great literature or film never does this sort of thing, because of course serious art is not escapism. The feelings we experience in watching this film require the special license we give ourselves when watching horror films: it based on repeatedly reminding ourselves “it's only a film”. This is not true of real art - the feelings real art awakes in us are indistinguishable in kind from those we experience in real life and do not require any license(though they may be sublimated - but that's a complicated topic).
Fairy tales are a more border-line case, and LTROI could indeed pass for a Grimm brothers fable. But the best ones (in my opinion), like many of Andersen’s,, I think the feelings we experience to not require the sort of "self-deception" that we need to engage in to "love" Eli in LTROI.

[gattoparde59]

Virginia should be included in the issue of choosing victims. She does so explicitly in the novel. In the film version she follows the "blood trail" from her bandage, to Jocke's blood and then to Gosta. She chose Gosta, and she was not expecting to find Lacke there, nor was she expecting the cat army defending both of them. Eventually Gina goes for suicide rather than have to make these kinds of decisions.