More about Let Me In

[cleolinda]

I have a bad habit, when writing about a movie, to pick an issue I think is interesting and then discuss that. The problem is, if it's a new movie that people haven't really seen yet, they end up thinking that that's all that's in the movie. This time around, I got a lot of "What about tenderness and longing and needing to be accepted!" Having not

Comments

[spinfrog]

In the original movie, there is a puzzle theme. Eli owns a complicated puzzle, and says to Oskar something like "I'm really good with puzzles".. and when the two of them end up on the train, in feels like the last piece of the puzzle falling into place. I left the theater 100% certain that Oskar was fated to grow up to serve Eli and die for him. That whole movie had such a feeling of hopelessness, "going nowhere", running through it, too.

[sarcasticwriter]

Oscar seems less obsessed with her gender, and after learning she's a boy still cares deeply for her.

Holy crap!

I've seen both movies but haven't read the book - and I would never have guessed this was a thing.

Although in my defense, I would say that LTROI doesn't do much, and LMI does nothing to present Eli as biologically male to the audience. LTROI has some room for ambiguity, but I'm pretty sure LMI just decided that "Abby" was female. It would be hard to mistake Chloe Moretz for a boy.

I do think that was a wise departure, though. There's enough going on in the movies that there's no reason to add gender identity as a theme. Room to stretch out in a novel, maybe, but not a film. Gender identity is a big, important subject, and in any other character, castration it would perhaps be a defining force in their personality. But it's kind of irrelevant here. The fact that Eli/Abby is, you know, a vampire vastly outweighs the character perhaps being biologically male