Manifisto posted:
Uno: the original or the remake? Dos: what do people seem to take away from it? |
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Oct 22, 2018 00:11
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 20:42 |
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| Oh, yeah, your take is right and those people are loving nuts. | |
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Oct 22, 2018 02:23
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| The point of the movie is that Oskar ends up completely committed to evil, and the hosed up thing is you can see exactly why he makes the choice. | |
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Oct 22, 2018 02:34
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Manifisto posted:that's good, I hadn't thought of it quite that way but that's a far more coherent take than most of what I've encountered. oskar's arc is certainly not a positive one, and that's part of why I found the movie offputting. I guess my impression was along the lines that oskar tried to stand up to his bullies but lacked the strength to defeat them, which cements his allegiance to an older powerful entity that does have this strength and speaks kind words to him. but this is a lie; oskar will most likely be cared for and protected only as long as he is useful, and then discarded. like håkan. oskar's physical and emotional vulnerability is exploited throughout, first by the bullies and then by eli. and that's depressing. Yes, absolutely. Vulnerability is a major theme of that movie. In particular, there's a critique of masculinity going on that might complicate the idea of Oskar "lacking the strength to defeat" his bullies. I think the reason there might be so many off-base readings of the movie are because people buy into the idea that the bullies deserve what they get at the end. Oskar is a child. He doesn't need to have strength. What he needs is support. That's what he lacks, and he never gets it. His choice is to be alone and vulnerable, or to accept a version of "strength" which is nothing but an acceptance of the inevitability of violence. That the bestower of this "strength" appears to be a little white girl presents many complexities, but one way of reading it is: that's how it actually works in our modern construction of masculinity. The defense of the white girl facilitates a displacement of male anger, which is occasioned by a terrifying recognition of male vulnerability, into violence which is supposedly protective. Women are the medium through which men find excuses to hurt each other to distract from their own pain. If people think that's romantic, well, I guess that's exactly how romance has been understood for hundreds of years, but clearly the movie is intended as a critique of that position, not as an endorsement of it. I'm sure I'm not the first person to make this distinction, but there are scary movies, and there are disturbing movies. Obviously a movie can be both, but I don't like scary movies, and I often really like disturbing movies. I don't think Let the Right One In is very scary, but it's disturbing. It sticks with you because it illuminates the dynamics of abuse so well. A lot of scary movies aren't disturbing because, although they might present disturbing ideas, the endings uphold the possibility of escape from the disturbing world they've created, even if it's only a temporary reprieve. Let the Right One In isn't like that; there's no escape from the vampires. The choice you have is to be destroyed, or to serve. ---------------- |
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Oct 22, 2018 12:48
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