writing to/at/for/on/about/in/from the ether
In my life at present I have many things I had long hoped for: a little home with cats and my boy, a place in my dream course, a clothes shop with an ethical focus.
I have some sense of belonging in my suburb- which would be hard to avoid since I barely leave it.
A lot of indigenous Australians speak about belonging to their land rather than the other way around. There is a humility and responsibility in that, which is entirely lacking in traditional western capitalist thought. What a strange thing to have stolen from people. "Spinifex Man" on the ABC last night said that traditionally after birth the child's ubilical cord is wrapped around them and allowed to drop off naturally. Where it falls is the land they belong to- a part of them. In a hospital it is cut and probably burnt injuring early on one's sense of belonging.
The week I pretty successfully made a potato and leek soup to rival my mothers. I less successfully tried to recreate Ying Chow's Salt and Pepper Bean Curd-so desperate is my craving for it. I got the texture and the topping pretty spot on -I was proud for my first deep frying attempt- but the salt content was through the roof and we couldn't even finish our servings. Next time though....so close.
Finances and grades could use some raising and wednesday afternoon is my only free day time. I miss weekends but not as much as I thought I would. I am clucky but childbearing seems a more distant reality than ever before. I have some caterpillars in jars that picked off my food plants- I hope they dookay or I'llhave to release them in a park or something even before they are butterflies in a flash back of 6 year old guilt when that kid brett with the rat eyes and stick out ears told me it was cruel to keep them. This was quite the young life crisis for an already vegetarian child whose primary creative excercise was upcycling packaging into (what I thought were) elaborate insect fun parks.
I filled a whole mini moleskine with book-writing even filling in holes. I have been swimming in a sea of fiction.
I read Wicked and then Let the Right One in. I am not yet enough of a bookster to have read things that don't relate to some movie of play or aren't by an author I already like or aren't 'classics'. Give me time.
Wicked
I have a soft spot for order-to-chaos narratives. I am also quite partial to knowing the way something ends and being compelled to read to learn how it came to that. I like books that reimagine popular works. So wicked had all of that going for it before I even began reading. I usually prefer to read/view a primary text before seeing it's adaptation and in this case I feel oddly dissatisfied with both. I wanted to smoosh the two together somehow.In the musical even is you strip of the musical cheese Elphaba is kept pretty much good just misunderstood,a scapegoat, a malcontent. The book is more of a descent into wickedness for Elphaba -or madness? I didn't find this journey to be a particularly engaging one and the pacing didn't help. As soon as I became interested in a conflict or a relationship between characters it felt rushed over while other parts dragged and dragged. The dialogue was awkward because some parts especially with swearing felt quite contemporary and then during conversations in the college period the students often spoke beyond their years and quite old-worldly. The romance with Fiyero was arbitrary, the mysterious undercover work she was part of during that time would have been more successful if it had ever been explained. Since when was this feisty activist likely to undertake something under someone elses secret command? I didn't buy it. After this time she becomes jaded and incredibly cold. It covers such a long period of time that the character has moved on from things long before the reader has. The Elphaba who is finally destroyed bears little resemblance to the sympathetic character of the earlier part of the book. Why would she decide that gruesome monkey surgery helped the cause of the Animals? The musical for all it's kitsch and bad music was much better at linking plotlines and, most importantly, resolving them. The book left me wondering what the point of it all was. It does deal with the way good and evil and magic and sacred are matters of perception. The anti elphaba propoganda which was quite powerful in the stage show was almost absent from the book. There were hints of ancient female power that kept looking like they might be explored in the book but nothing very much came of them. Book version Elphaba had very limited if any magical power. In fact for feminist message I was more impressed by the sisterhood of the stage show, there two friends didn't let men or politics or power come between them in the end- they valued each other for what they were and accepted that they didn't have to be the same as each other. The book which turned the friendship into the starts of a romance left it rather more bitterly of Glinda appearing to become all the more giggly and superficial in Elphaba's absence. Elphaba became so clouded she couldn't even see or care for what other character traits remained in Glinda. Perhaps all my dissatifaction as a reader is partof the point; Elphaba's is a life of unfinished goals, unmet ends, unresolved tension. Increasingly this is a result of her own stubborness, coldness, arrogance or reclusiveness. One wonders what might have been if this or that hadn't happened to her but one always knew what the end would be after all: a life cut short. In the book it's a pretense that she is a witch in the play that she is wicked. If there's one thing the book does well it's create an atmosphere in which other children, people in power and the population at large who turn a blind eye seem ever crueller and more wicked than Elphaba almost until the bitter end.
True Blood
I watched True blood and found it truly awful. At least Meyers' maldeveloped paper dolls maintained believable bonds with each other. True blood had high production values and pretty decent performances but we still know almost nothing worth knowing about Sookie Stackhouse after 10 episodes. I suspect it's only popular for is sexual content. I, myself, was very much looking foward to a vampire romance in which the leads actually got to have sex without hangups! I was patently disappointed when I realised this freedom was meaningless without a compelling lead up. It probably didn't help that the leading lady was so absurdly happy about getting laid that she was all smiles only a day after he grandmothers brutal and unsolved murder in her own home. right. Lafayette was the only character worth watching and if rumours be true he's as good as dead already. The only novel idea was human's being much like vampires in their thirst for the drug-like Vampire blood. I wouldn't even pick up one of the books out of curiosity and I wont be watching the next season. boooo.
Big Love craps all over the rest of TV
Let the Right one In
Thank god for Let the right one in. The film. The book. What a lesson in great art being adapted successfully into great art! There is an innocence about the film that is in itself terrifying. The only characters that come across as willfully cruel are Oskar's schoolyard bullies. The lengths of torture they are willing to go to are scarier than any of Hakan's matter of fact murders for his hungry love or any of the supernatural horror of vampires. Virginia's reaction to being turned only strengthens the idea that Eli's childlike "age" probably meant that her will to live was stronger and more natural than her morality although she does show signs of remorse after killing in the film. You can't really blame her. What of the bullies? Do they psychologically need to feed of the fear of others in order to live - and are they still too young and selfish to empathise effectively? Can they be blamed any more than Eli for their actions. Can Oskar so withdrawn and alone be blamed from clinging to his unusual new friend, giving up his life for her in spite of moral misgivings? Given the quality of Oskars life preceeding Eli he too can hardly be blamed. Perhaps we barrack for oskar and eli rather than the bullies not just because they are the protagonists but because we Oskar's feelings towards eli and to a certain extent her reciprocation of these feeling are the most human relationship in the film. In cold and tiny world where nobody is blameless the simplicity of reciprocated human connection seems like the only salvation. We feel the relief, the justice, the freedom when Oskar is saved by his violent and bloody angel we are happy for them. Amid the bloodshed and the amorality they are sweet. They are innocent. It is a fitting ending and one of the best film endings in recent times! The film stays with you because after the ending you still have misgivings about what the future holds for the characters. What does Eli gain from continued static existence? Does she collect and discard helper people? You cannot help but doubt her feelings for Oskar when her need for help to survive is so strong....
Then I read the book and rewatched the movie half a dozen times. The movie has been very well adapted from the book the essence is translated so well visually that I can only imagine my expectations would have been surpassed if i'd viewed them in the reverse order. What has been left from the movie are things that -for a 2 hour film- would have only confused and spoiled the purity of the oskar eli bond journey or things that you just can't get away with showing on a big screen, and let's be honest all those disturbing images are seared well enough to my brain as it is. What you trade off is added trauma you gain in the breadth of characters that get coverage. Even the bullies home life gets a look in and oskar is from the get go a more disturbing character in and of himself with his murder fantasies and role-plays. Come to think of it book oskar is much more active and hardcore than movie oskar. Don't get me started on book Hakan! In the movie it reads as though Hakan has possibly been with eli since he too was as young as oskar- one of the more disturbing aspects of the movie for me was how by the end you are so enamoured with eli and her protection of Oskar that you have almost entirely forgotten how much of an abusive overlord she seems to be with Hakan. It makes you question if Oskar really is an exception with whom she has really found a connection or if Hakan is an oskar she has grown tired of.
Of course in the movie this fearis partly resolved because we see that Hakan is markedly different from Oskar having entered eli's life relatively recently and as a paedophile, Eli is Hakan's saving angel in that she is a child who needs him, who is timelessly a child and who having lived for a very long time he doesn't really have to feel guilty about his attraction for. His devotion and love for Eli is only superficially reciprocated, Eli seems not to understand what it really means and isn't sure she has it for hakan. She simply keeps him around because she needs someones help.
The question of whether Eli is a boy or a girl is largely irrelevent (I refer to eli as she in this journal entry for the sake of ease not accuracy and since the book does so at times also you can hardly fault me for it): in the book it is entirely and unquestionably resolved and in the movie I don't feel it does any good to argue that such a back story could possibly have been understood from a few assertions that she is "not a girl" and a few frames of indescernable crotch. The only thing those elements achieve in the movie is the sexlessness, asexuality of eli and of the childrens' relationship - of course Oskar probably has the starts of a conventional crush but he adjusts very quickly to the unconventionality of their relatonship because it's still the most real thing in his life and transcends his pre-latent sexuality.
I find it more interesting to question Eli's psychological age. In most ways she seems very much to be 12. Or rather like a 12 year old with only slightly more understanding. It is only when we observe her relationship with Hakan that we are given to wonder -she berrates him like someone rather older than 12 but perhaps that comes with the power of being loved but not loving, of needing and demanding. In the book Hakan observes that Eli begins to act or become MORE like a 12 year old child since spending time with Oskar which strengthens suspicion that she has just found a better companion to help her and is making way to replace her old one. There is another time when Oskar feels there is an older one watching him. This is sort of how I feel about the whole story. I want to believe in the pure bond between the children but a much older darker presence could be sitting just behind the curtains putting on a very good show and tricking us all out of desperate necessity.
We have not really got a great basis for comparison of Eli's kind togain more insight into this dark presence. For Virginia she feels that she now shares her mind and body once she is infected with another force or mind. She is so convinced of this fact that she believes she must be utterly detroyed or it could live on in her body even if her own soul or essence does not. But Virginia is very new and perhaps this way of understanding her affliction is specific to her. Eli on the other hand seems to be quite unified- except that at hunting or in hunger involuntary responses take over her and in the book it is even like something ghostly enters her and leaves afterwards. I think being so young and having so much taken from her probably gave her the strength of will to make this new kind of extended life her own. But perhaps the opposite is true and eli is quite overtaken by the dark presence but it is one that through experience has become very good at playing roles.
and then comes the question can an evil thing love? Pedophiles are without doubt the worst villian's in modern society. They want and take more from children than the children are mature enough to understand and should never have to give. We know deeply and instinctively why pedophiles are evil. That doesn't mean that they can't love or that they don't struggle with their dark impulses. As impossible as it is to understand their desire it is possible to imagine what you desire (men or women, redheads, musicians and so forth) and then imagine a world where it was extremely unethical to act upon that. The fact of your desire would not make an unethical thing ethical it would more likely wreak havoc with your own self image.
I think Hakan truly loves Eli, much more than eli loves him and to whatever extent you can truly love someone who does not love you in return. I believe his devotion to her goes beyond the convenience of her form to suit his "affliction" goes beyond what tokens of affections he can bargain from her to find peace. It is a case where they seem like a very good match for their uses for each other on the surface but when you get down to it -and especially true in the book- the reader has a strong urge to protect them from each other because on a deeper level they completely misunderstand each other, exist on manipulation and guilt and cannot provide each other with what they need without compromising themselves. To hakan it seems that if he can be there for Eli there is a reason for him to exist the way he is, there is a sort of amends that he can make- by doing evil things on behalf of a child to makeup for evil things he has made children do for him, and this was a frightening domineering child- even better he wasn't exploiting weakness he was the weak one the servant but his so called "beloved" had the physical appearance of his desire. Eli perhaps understood Hakan's affliction and saw this as a way to use him, perhaps eli was even charitable in this act since he had no other outlet whereby to make amends. It remains that Eli has a natural aversion to the sexual that a 12 year old has it is foggily beyond her so in this we see that she is hardly all that Hakan had hoped for so we want to protect her from his impulses just as we want to protect him from having to kill for her against what little moral instincts he has.
After he is undead Hakan has nothing human left in him, nothing of the love and only of the impulse, the darkness, the ego. That creature could not really even be described as evil it's an almost mindless lower life form, souless concienseless dumb and certainly unable to love. It was eli's final terrifying lesson that hakan had not been the right one to let into her life.
But back to the question of eli: ever the optimist, I tend to think Eli does love Oskar. She is natural and honest around him and on the flipside he is well within her understanding and comfort level: not beyond her like hakan's sexual impulses. He engages her interests like puzzles and games rather than just being interested in what she is (hakan's eternal (not)child). She put herself at risk by returning to rescue Oskar from his attackers and this is probabaly the greatest evidence for her affection for him- that it was stronger than her instinct forself preservation.
So in the end, for now oskar was the right one to let into her life a true companion who doesn't expect anything from her that she can't provide...yet. Oskar will grow up and if that doesn't put a dampener on things his mortality is bound to. For now though they are each the most real, honest and pure friends in each others life and doing the classic living-in-the-now thing of eloping (so to speak). Interestingly Lakke and Virginia, whose lives are utterly destroyed by Eli's existence, take each other for granted realising only to late how much the value and need each other.
It certainly seems to be about appreciating your really real loves while you can but if there were a part two and we got to see what happens to oskars life, to eli's would we still take this message? Have we already seen a mirror of oskar's demise in Hakan's or of eli's? When romeo and Juliet have such dark lives to lead, when they must do evil acts to merely survive how strange it is to see them getto ride off into the sunset, how bittersweet.
If you skipped that bit here's the summary: I recommend Let the right One In and Big Love and I un-recommend True Blood, rewatch buffy instead -that's what we're doing in our house.
I have been thinking a lot about equality of difference- allowing people to flourish on their own terms rather than meet some neutral standard. Strangely this was prompted by recent reality tv, vampire fictions and long ago readings of Irigaray. Now that I have written so much about all the fiction I had been indulging in Idon't have any energy left to write about these thought properly.
I'm imaging a fantasy day where I'm surrounded by cushy pillows and eat hot vegetable and legume soups and write and read and fall in an out of slumber. mmmmmm. that's what sick days used to be like these days I'm at work orat uni or doing some kind of homework the only opt-out-able pursuit was tonight's social engagement. A lonely night coughing and internet ranting in warmth was still better for my health than cold, energy requiring social stimulation...right? Anyhow the next best thing to the pillow fantasy might be to head to bed early. goodnight land of nod.
I have some sense of belonging in my suburb- which would be hard to avoid since I barely leave it.
A lot of indigenous Australians speak about belonging to their land rather than the other way around. There is a humility and responsibility in that, which is entirely lacking in traditional western capitalist thought. What a strange thing to have stolen from people. "Spinifex Man" on the ABC last night said that traditionally after birth the child's ubilical cord is wrapped around them and allowed to drop off naturally. Where it falls is the land they belong to- a part of them. In a hospital it is cut and probably burnt injuring early on one's sense of belonging.
The week I pretty successfully made a potato and leek soup to rival my mothers. I less successfully tried to recreate Ying Chow's Salt and Pepper Bean Curd-so desperate is my craving for it. I got the texture and the topping pretty spot on -I was proud for my first deep frying attempt- but the salt content was through the roof and we couldn't even finish our servings. Next time though....so close.
Finances and grades could use some raising and wednesday afternoon is my only free day time. I miss weekends but not as much as I thought I would. I am clucky but childbearing seems a more distant reality than ever before. I have some caterpillars in jars that picked off my food plants- I hope they dookay or I'llhave to release them in a park or something even before they are butterflies in a flash back of 6 year old guilt when that kid brett with the rat eyes and stick out ears told me it was cruel to keep them. This was quite the young life crisis for an already vegetarian child whose primary creative excercise was upcycling packaging into (what I thought were) elaborate insect fun parks.
I filled a whole mini moleskine with book-writing even filling in holes. I have been swimming in a sea of fiction.
I read Wicked and then Let the Right One in. I am not yet enough of a bookster to have read things that don't relate to some movie of play or aren't by an author I already like or aren't 'classics'. Give me time.
Wicked
I have a soft spot for order-to-chaos narratives. I am also quite partial to knowing the way something ends and being compelled to read to learn how it came to that. I like books that reimagine popular works. So wicked had all of that going for it before I even began reading. I usually prefer to read/view a primary text before seeing it's adaptation and in this case I feel oddly dissatisfied with both. I wanted to smoosh the two together somehow.In the musical even is you strip of the musical cheese Elphaba is kept pretty much good just misunderstood,a scapegoat, a malcontent. The book is more of a descent into wickedness for Elphaba -or madness? I didn't find this journey to be a particularly engaging one and the pacing didn't help. As soon as I became interested in a conflict or a relationship between characters it felt rushed over while other parts dragged and dragged. The dialogue was awkward because some parts especially with swearing felt quite contemporary and then during conversations in the college period the students often spoke beyond their years and quite old-worldly. The romance with Fiyero was arbitrary, the mysterious undercover work she was part of during that time would have been more successful if it had ever been explained. Since when was this feisty activist likely to undertake something under someone elses secret command? I didn't buy it. After this time she becomes jaded and incredibly cold. It covers such a long period of time that the character has moved on from things long before the reader has. The Elphaba who is finally destroyed bears little resemblance to the sympathetic character of the earlier part of the book. Why would she decide that gruesome monkey surgery helped the cause of the Animals? The musical for all it's kitsch and bad music was much better at linking plotlines and, most importantly, resolving them. The book left me wondering what the point of it all was. It does deal with the way good and evil and magic and sacred are matters of perception. The anti elphaba propoganda which was quite powerful in the stage show was almost absent from the book. There were hints of ancient female power that kept looking like they might be explored in the book but nothing very much came of them. Book version Elphaba had very limited if any magical power. In fact for feminist message I was more impressed by the sisterhood of the stage show, there two friends didn't let men or politics or power come between them in the end- they valued each other for what they were and accepted that they didn't have to be the same as each other. The book which turned the friendship into the starts of a romance left it rather more bitterly of Glinda appearing to become all the more giggly and superficial in Elphaba's absence. Elphaba became so clouded she couldn't even see or care for what other character traits remained in Glinda. Perhaps all my dissatifaction as a reader is partof the point; Elphaba's is a life of unfinished goals, unmet ends, unresolved tension. Increasingly this is a result of her own stubborness, coldness, arrogance or reclusiveness. One wonders what might have been if this or that hadn't happened to her but one always knew what the end would be after all: a life cut short. In the book it's a pretense that she is a witch in the play that she is wicked. If there's one thing the book does well it's create an atmosphere in which other children, people in power and the population at large who turn a blind eye seem ever crueller and more wicked than Elphaba almost until the bitter end.
True Blood
I watched True blood and found it truly awful. At least Meyers' maldeveloped paper dolls maintained believable bonds with each other. True blood had high production values and pretty decent performances but we still know almost nothing worth knowing about Sookie Stackhouse after 10 episodes. I suspect it's only popular for is sexual content. I, myself, was very much looking foward to a vampire romance in which the leads actually got to have sex without hangups! I was patently disappointed when I realised this freedom was meaningless without a compelling lead up. It probably didn't help that the leading lady was so absurdly happy about getting laid that she was all smiles only a day after he grandmothers brutal and unsolved murder in her own home. right. Lafayette was the only character worth watching and if rumours be true he's as good as dead already. The only novel idea was human's being much like vampires in their thirst for the drug-like Vampire blood. I wouldn't even pick up one of the books out of curiosity and I wont be watching the next season. boooo.
Big Love craps all over the rest of TV
Let the Right one In
Thank god for Let the right one in. The film. The book. What a lesson in great art being adapted successfully into great art! There is an innocence about the film that is in itself terrifying. The only characters that come across as willfully cruel are Oskar's schoolyard bullies. The lengths of torture they are willing to go to are scarier than any of Hakan's matter of fact murders for his hungry love or any of the supernatural horror of vampires. Virginia's reaction to being turned only strengthens the idea that Eli's childlike "age" probably meant that her will to live was stronger and more natural than her morality although she does show signs of remorse after killing in the film. You can't really blame her. What of the bullies? Do they psychologically need to feed of the fear of others in order to live - and are they still too young and selfish to empathise effectively? Can they be blamed any more than Eli for their actions. Can Oskar so withdrawn and alone be blamed from clinging to his unusual new friend, giving up his life for her in spite of moral misgivings? Given the quality of Oskars life preceeding Eli he too can hardly be blamed. Perhaps we barrack for oskar and eli rather than the bullies not just because they are the protagonists but because we Oskar's feelings towards eli and to a certain extent her reciprocation of these feeling are the most human relationship in the film. In cold and tiny world where nobody is blameless the simplicity of reciprocated human connection seems like the only salvation. We feel the relief, the justice, the freedom when Oskar is saved by his violent and bloody angel we are happy for them. Amid the bloodshed and the amorality they are sweet. They are innocent. It is a fitting ending and one of the best film endings in recent times! The film stays with you because after the ending you still have misgivings about what the future holds for the characters. What does Eli gain from continued static existence? Does she collect and discard helper people? You cannot help but doubt her feelings for Oskar when her need for help to survive is so strong....
Then I read the book and rewatched the movie half a dozen times. The movie has been very well adapted from the book the essence is translated so well visually that I can only imagine my expectations would have been surpassed if i'd viewed them in the reverse order. What has been left from the movie are things that -for a 2 hour film- would have only confused and spoiled the purity of the oskar eli bond journey or things that you just can't get away with showing on a big screen, and let's be honest all those disturbing images are seared well enough to my brain as it is. What you trade off is added trauma you gain in the breadth of characters that get coverage. Even the bullies home life gets a look in and oskar is from the get go a more disturbing character in and of himself with his murder fantasies and role-plays. Come to think of it book oskar is much more active and hardcore than movie oskar. Don't get me started on book Hakan! In the movie it reads as though Hakan has possibly been with eli since he too was as young as oskar- one of the more disturbing aspects of the movie for me was how by the end you are so enamoured with eli and her protection of Oskar that you have almost entirely forgotten how much of an abusive overlord she seems to be with Hakan. It makes you question if Oskar really is an exception with whom she has really found a connection or if Hakan is an oskar she has grown tired of.
Of course in the movie this fearis partly resolved because we see that Hakan is markedly different from Oskar having entered eli's life relatively recently and as a paedophile, Eli is Hakan's saving angel in that she is a child who needs him, who is timelessly a child and who having lived for a very long time he doesn't really have to feel guilty about his attraction for. His devotion and love for Eli is only superficially reciprocated, Eli seems not to understand what it really means and isn't sure she has it for hakan. She simply keeps him around because she needs someones help.
The question of whether Eli is a boy or a girl is largely irrelevent (I refer to eli as she in this journal entry for the sake of ease not accuracy and since the book does so at times also you can hardly fault me for it): in the book it is entirely and unquestionably resolved and in the movie I don't feel it does any good to argue that such a back story could possibly have been understood from a few assertions that she is "not a girl" and a few frames of indescernable crotch. The only thing those elements achieve in the movie is the sexlessness, asexuality of eli and of the childrens' relationship - of course Oskar probably has the starts of a conventional crush but he adjusts very quickly to the unconventionality of their relatonship because it's still the most real thing in his life and transcends his pre-latent sexuality.
I find it more interesting to question Eli's psychological age. In most ways she seems very much to be 12. Or rather like a 12 year old with only slightly more understanding. It is only when we observe her relationship with Hakan that we are given to wonder -she berrates him like someone rather older than 12 but perhaps that comes with the power of being loved but not loving, of needing and demanding. In the book Hakan observes that Eli begins to act or become MORE like a 12 year old child since spending time with Oskar which strengthens suspicion that she has just found a better companion to help her and is making way to replace her old one. There is another time when Oskar feels there is an older one watching him. This is sort of how I feel about the whole story. I want to believe in the pure bond between the children but a much older darker presence could be sitting just behind the curtains putting on a very good show and tricking us all out of desperate necessity.
We have not really got a great basis for comparison of Eli's kind togain more insight into this dark presence. For Virginia she feels that she now shares her mind and body once she is infected with another force or mind. She is so convinced of this fact that she believes she must be utterly detroyed or it could live on in her body even if her own soul or essence does not. But Virginia is very new and perhaps this way of understanding her affliction is specific to her. Eli on the other hand seems to be quite unified- except that at hunting or in hunger involuntary responses take over her and in the book it is even like something ghostly enters her and leaves afterwards. I think being so young and having so much taken from her probably gave her the strength of will to make this new kind of extended life her own. But perhaps the opposite is true and eli is quite overtaken by the dark presence but it is one that through experience has become very good at playing roles.
and then comes the question can an evil thing love? Pedophiles are without doubt the worst villian's in modern society. They want and take more from children than the children are mature enough to understand and should never have to give. We know deeply and instinctively why pedophiles are evil. That doesn't mean that they can't love or that they don't struggle with their dark impulses. As impossible as it is to understand their desire it is possible to imagine what you desire (men or women, redheads, musicians and so forth) and then imagine a world where it was extremely unethical to act upon that. The fact of your desire would not make an unethical thing ethical it would more likely wreak havoc with your own self image.
I think Hakan truly loves Eli, much more than eli loves him and to whatever extent you can truly love someone who does not love you in return. I believe his devotion to her goes beyond the convenience of her form to suit his "affliction" goes beyond what tokens of affections he can bargain from her to find peace. It is a case where they seem like a very good match for their uses for each other on the surface but when you get down to it -and especially true in the book- the reader has a strong urge to protect them from each other because on a deeper level they completely misunderstand each other, exist on manipulation and guilt and cannot provide each other with what they need without compromising themselves. To hakan it seems that if he can be there for Eli there is a reason for him to exist the way he is, there is a sort of amends that he can make- by doing evil things on behalf of a child to makeup for evil things he has made children do for him, and this was a frightening domineering child- even better he wasn't exploiting weakness he was the weak one the servant but his so called "beloved" had the physical appearance of his desire. Eli perhaps understood Hakan's affliction and saw this as a way to use him, perhaps eli was even charitable in this act since he had no other outlet whereby to make amends. It remains that Eli has a natural aversion to the sexual that a 12 year old has it is foggily beyond her so in this we see that she is hardly all that Hakan had hoped for so we want to protect her from his impulses just as we want to protect him from having to kill for her against what little moral instincts he has.
After he is undead Hakan has nothing human left in him, nothing of the love and only of the impulse, the darkness, the ego. That creature could not really even be described as evil it's an almost mindless lower life form, souless concienseless dumb and certainly unable to love. It was eli's final terrifying lesson that hakan had not been the right one to let into her life.
But back to the question of eli: ever the optimist, I tend to think Eli does love Oskar. She is natural and honest around him and on the flipside he is well within her understanding and comfort level: not beyond her like hakan's sexual impulses. He engages her interests like puzzles and games rather than just being interested in what she is (hakan's eternal (not)child). She put herself at risk by returning to rescue Oskar from his attackers and this is probabaly the greatest evidence for her affection for him- that it was stronger than her instinct forself preservation.
So in the end, for now oskar was the right one to let into her life a true companion who doesn't expect anything from her that she can't provide...yet. Oskar will grow up and if that doesn't put a dampener on things his mortality is bound to. For now though they are each the most real, honest and pure friends in each others life and doing the classic living-in-the-now thing of eloping (so to speak). Interestingly Lakke and Virginia, whose lives are utterly destroyed by Eli's existence, take each other for granted realising only to late how much the value and need each other.
It certainly seems to be about appreciating your really real loves while you can but if there were a part two and we got to see what happens to oskars life, to eli's would we still take this message? Have we already seen a mirror of oskar's demise in Hakan's or of eli's? When romeo and Juliet have such dark lives to lead, when they must do evil acts to merely survive how strange it is to see them getto ride off into the sunset, how bittersweet.
If you skipped that bit here's the summary: I recommend Let the right One In and Big Love and I un-recommend True Blood, rewatch buffy instead -that's what we're doing in our house.
I have been thinking a lot about equality of difference- allowing people to flourish on their own terms rather than meet some neutral standard. Strangely this was prompted by recent reality tv, vampire fictions and long ago readings of Irigaray. Now that I have written so much about all the fiction I had been indulging in Idon't have any energy left to write about these thought properly.
I'm imaging a fantasy day where I'm surrounded by cushy pillows and eat hot vegetable and legume soups and write and read and fall in an out of slumber. mmmmmm. that's what sick days used to be like these days I'm at work orat uni or doing some kind of homework the only opt-out-able pursuit was tonight's social engagement. A lonely night coughing and internet ranting in warmth was still better for my health than cold, energy requiring social stimulation...right? Anyhow the next best thing to the pillow fantasy might be to head to bed early. goodnight land of nod.