Undoing Let The Right One In

I suspect most people opted to skip this week's post given that Joe provided the opportunity to anybody who attended the last lecture, but I missed my chance to talk about O and thus need to play catch-up. In any case, I've got quite a bit to say about Let The Right One In and guest-professor Jonathan Hough's interesting lecture, so I don't feel too bad about sitting down to get this done.

Jonathan's lecture described the history of sexual discourse across the four major theorists—Freud, Kinsey, Foucault, and Butler—recognized as having the most significant contribution to contemporary understandings of human sexuality. I have a fairly extensive background in philosophy and theory and have thus studied most of these names at some length, but it was good to have a succinct general overview of each thinker in relation to historical understandings of the subject. I imagine most people are at least vaguely familiar with the Freud and his work on psychoanalysis, particularly anybody's who's taken courses in psychology or film/literary theory, but Jonathan ran through the basic stages of Freud's developmental psychoanalysis for anybody who needed a quick refresher. I am, to be honest, a little less familiar with the work of Kinsey, although I know all about his scale of sexual preference and the cultural importance of his work in terms of explicitly dealing with sexuality (although, as Foucault will argue later, the persisting idea that society silences discussions of sex and sexuality is largely illusory and problematic, but whatever). Who I am intimately familiar with is Foucault (I think I've read all of his primary texts and a handful of essay and interview collections), and so it was a pretty fun getting the opportunity to go through his terrific History Of Sexuality in the lecture. Butler, too, whose work is borne from the groundwork established by Foucault, is a fun read and a good topic of discussion, particularly with regards to gender, sexuality, and performativity.

Let The Right One In is a movie I'd seen late last year and loved immediately, but though I'd not thought of it very deeply in the context of sexuality and gender, watching it again made me realize just how much there is going on in the film implicitly and explicitly as far as both of those subjects are concerned. It's interesting to consider not only the actions and behaviors of our two dramatic leads, Eli and Oskar, in relation to gender performativity and dichotomous sexuality, but also the implications of their (arguably non-sexualized) relationship. As Jonathan discussed at length in his lecture, vampires as a cultural phenomenon have always been ensconsed in charged sexual discourse, and their function in film and literature is traditionally tied to sexual behaviour, and especially deviance, both explicitly and implicitly. The vampire's bite has obvious sexual/phallic overtones (especially w/r/t penetration, notions of dominance and rape, and the intimate nature of the mouth and neck connection), yes, but even the genre's traditional narrative conventions set demure/"innocent"/virginal protagonists against a backdrop of sexually charged and implicitly "active" or predacious vampires. Take the most banal, mainstream vampire flick you can think of—Twilight doesn't count because it's primarily an allegory for mormonism, so let's say Queen Of The Damned or something—and the overwhelming tone is one of lust and deviant passion.

Let The Right One In approaches sexual relationships in two very different ways: the film retains the traditional sexualization of the vampire's bite by investing Eli's infrequent feeding with a sense of criminality and deviance—she avoids killing to feed where possible, and is striken with intense guilt when she finds that she must. But the sexual nature of the attacks is subverted by film's end, when Eli slaughters Oskar's tormentors in order to literally save his life, thereby strengthening their personal bond and bringing their relationship closer to its ideal form: Oskar as giving caretaker and Eli as sheltered deviant. Much has been said about the nature of the relationship between Eli and her elder caretaker, with some critics citing potential pedophilia, but their relationship seems more complex: given the nature of the conclusion, the film seems to suggest that Oskar is taking over the position once held by Eli's previous man, and, more depressingly, that Oskar is headed toward a similar fate. Recall that Eli does not age; it seems likely that her older partner was not so old when they initially found one another. An even more disconcerting reading establishes Eli as a user who replaces her caretaker with a younger model when he continues to prove himself incapable of functioning as her help—when Eli finally climbs into Oskar's bed, agreeing to be his partner, she has just returned from witnessing the end of her former lover's life (and, thus, the end of his function to her).

More interesting still is the sense in which Eli has been conspicuously de-gendered and de-sexualized. On numerous occassions she tells Oskar that she is "not a girl", and when Oskar dares to spy on Eli as she changes into some of his mother's clothes, we're given a brief glimpse of some ambiguous sexual organs and something which looks strikingly like scarring or mutilation. In the novel on which this film is based, Eli's character is explicitly described as a male eunich castrated generations prior—the film seems to divert somewhat from such an extreme revelation, but it remains true that Eli never embraces or fully embodies feminity (or, really, any gender at all). Considered in light of Oskar's relative androgeny (his delicate features, undeveloped body, etc.), the relationship between these children rejects traditional heteronormative readings in favor of something a little more ambiguous.