Let The Right One In

Let The Right One In: 12-year-old Oskar is white as death. . .as if all the blood has been drained from him. . .which is fitting, given the friend he’s about to make.

Oskar is a listless, scrawny lad. He’s bullied at school, and his home life, a lonely existence with his distracted mother in their drab suburban Stockholm apartment, isn’t much better. His chief joys seem to be working on his true crime scrap book and using his talismanic pocketknife in pretend acts of revenge against his schoolyard tormentors.

One cold night, friendless Oskar sits on the snow-covered jungle gym outside his apartment building, fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube. He attracts the attention of Eli, the new girl from the apartment next door. Eli appears to be 12-years-old, also. . .but, as Oskar eventually learns, Eli is a vampire, and, as she will say, she has been 12 for a very long time.

Vampires are *in* in Western culture. . .one out of every five books sold in the USA during the last holiday season was authored by Stephenie Meyer. Blood drinkers seem to hold a particular appeal for teen girls. What is it with this *Twilight* generation? What spell have Meyer, Rachel Caine, Ellen Schreiber and the rest of the daughters of Anne Rice cast over them?

One must view the mania for vampirism as a criticism of Western life. Superficial. Scientific. Electronic. Restless. Neurotic. The bland vulgarity of Western life. Narcotics and nudity. Insta-Fornication. The triumph of pornography. The stale degeneracy of Western life. Never have so many debased themselves so thoroughly, and enjoyed it so little.

There must be in the subconscious of teen girls, as the sacrificial lambs of our pornocracy, some sense that the *natural world,* the Western world, is ugly and dead. There is no sensation. There is only the overwhelming boredom of ceaseless debauchery. Thus the appeal of the supernatural. . .

It used to be the ritual of the church gave life to the Western world. . .the supernatural flesh and blood of Christ was given in the Eucharist, and it sustained the West for almost 2000 years.

But now we have the McChurch. . .and instead of serving the flesh and blood of Christ, the McChurch offers coffee and donuts. What is the Jesus of the McChurch, this Savior-as-Tim-Hortons, compared to the counter-culture vampire of Meyer? It is the vampire which appears to teen girls to make all things new.

It used to be that filthy men and women looked to Christ to redeem them and clothe them in clean white linen as His spotless bride. . .

Now, as our culture unselfconsciously wallows in the mire, vampires offer our sexually beat-up teens (they are worn-out before they even have any understanding of physical union, of what it means to leave father and mother and to become one flesh with another) the chance to *revirgin*. . .they can recycle their ravaged and over-exposed genitals. . .they can become innocent brides, not by being born again, but by being dead again, through a union with the living dead.

In the ritual existence of vampires, Western girls, sacrificed for the pornocracy, see life.

The church used to preach eternity, but now mimics the world and only offers a temporal material heaven on earth.

As eternity vanishes from the church, teens find it in the nocturnal rituals of the vampire. The appeal for the Western girl: to be Forever 21.

But this is only my cranky rambling on the church and our polluted culture. . .it has nothing to do with the very good Let The Right One In, which is not a Meyer-esque vampire story, nor a traditional vampire or horror movie. It really has more the spirit of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale.

Isolated Oskar’s initial attraction to Eli is that of infatuation. He crushes on Eli as *the girl next door,* and wishes they go steady. Eli cleverly indulges Oskar while gradually seducing him into violence.

When Eli first meets Oskar, she is living with an old man. . .an old man who kills and then drains the blood of his victims. The old man’s serial murders are less conspicuous than vampire attacks, and serve, in our world of murder, as a safer, less conspicuous route to obtain the blood Eli needs.

One gets the impression the old man has been with Eli for a very long time. . .that he started out much as Oskar did.

Seen together, the Forever 12 Eli and the old man look a couple shadowed by incest/pedophilia. . .but it is Eli who is much older than the man. And there is a real sense of the tragedy of this old man’s life as his luck finally runs out and he is caught in an attempted murder. His bond to Eli is so strong (a bond of unnatural love), he pours acid over his face, so he cannot be indentified as the old man who lived with her. Eli visits the horribly disfigured old man in the hospital, and he offers his neck to her in a final act of devotion.

Eli, of course, is the Hebrew word for *my God*. . .and any who would worship Eli must approach her through blood sacrifice.

With the old man dead, and needing a new human caretaker, Eli intensifies the seduction/manipulation of Oskar. The filmmakers do a credible job showing the evolution of Eli’s + Oskar’s relationship. . .it is not rushed and it is not psychologically illogical, as would be done if this were a Hollywood film.

Even though Oskar has violent fantasies prior to meeting Eli, he is initially repulsed by Eli’s blood-lust and the violence which supports it. However, Eli takes advantage of Oskar’s desire for revenge, and this is the catalyst for his submission to Eli’s will.

The film would have been a truly great modern fairy tale had it ended at its next-to-last scene, with Oskar ultimately rejecting Eli’s violence, and choosing to remain alone in the human world. However, the movie concludes with a rather vulgar orgy of violence, and a beaming Oskar happily consenting to step outside the human world to become Eli’s new partner. . .thus, the tragedy of both Eli’s and Oskar’s lives is cheapened by the triumph of the Satanic circle of violence.

Still, everything that precedes the unsatisfying ending is of a high standard in art, plot and character development. . .even the movie’s subplot, involving the intersecting lives of Eli and a handful of eccentric alcoholic suburban Stockholm losers, is first rate. A worthy alternative to Hollywood’s lifeless drivel.