Ash wrote:If Eli has the ability to project her thoughts into other people's minds she obviously has some power of telepathy. As shown in both the novel and film at the hospital reception and with Oskar. The issue as to why she didn't or chose not to act on this power at other times in the film is moot.
But I can't buy the idea that Eli simply stumbled across Oskar at precisely the right time in precisely the right place. For me that takes a far greater leap of logic than recognising the psychic ability she demonstrably possesses.
Telepathy doesn't necessarily imply precognition.
Some people have big brains, others not so much; some people have muscles on top of their muscles, where others barely have enough muscle to roll out of bed and stand up straight. If there really is such a thing as telepathy, I'd expect something similar to be true. Again with the "been around two centuries" assertion, if she possesses this ability, she's long ago mastered its use and come to know when and how to use it. The only time I remember it being suggested in the movie is where she asks the nurse-receptionist where her "papa" is because "he's sick" - and she's asking this of somebody who's already predisposed to helping as much as possible.
The implication I'm getting is that her telepathic ability, if it exists, isn't very powerful. It can only be used to give people a tiny little push, just to help get them over mild concerns or slight reluctance.
And again, she tried to
buy something from Oskar in her kitchen after admitting she's a vampire, and that didn't turn out well at all from her perspective. I imagine that whole scene was a novel experience for her; she had little or no relevant prior experience, no idea what the rules of conduct are, or what forces might be present and how they might behave. To say the least, she probably felt a bit unsettled. Under these circumstances, if she could, might not a feral child vampire tend to take the smash-and-bash, fight-or-flight Gordian Knot approach, seize him by the shoulders and say "
look into my eye..."?
The movie doesn't contain the passages in the novel where she communicates her life story to him through a kiss, and where she shows Oskar what she really thinks of him, "bigger, stronger than he really is, seen with love". This might be something akin to telepathy, but there's no "tele" involved: apparently, she can really only get graphic with a liplock. For a very short while afterwards, Oskar had trouble disentangling his natural self from the parts of herself that communicated through that kiss, very strongly implying that during that kiss, the two were literally as one, with little to nothing to set the two selves apart. She used this kind of communication to convey what she couldn't convey with words, or found too painful to try to articulate, which means she can use this kind of communication to share experience and emotional weather and to convey matters of fact, but even in the novel, it's very far from established that she has any great ability to impose her will.
In the novel, her interactions with Haakan would seem to suggest otherwise. He's a paedophile, and she has his undivided attention, and she
still has to do the song-and-dance thing to persuade him to run out and get her a jug of tomato juice. Here, too, if she had a strong ability to impose will, you'd think she'd just tell him "here, look into my eye" or "kiss me", rather than grudgingly bartering her body for food.
Wild leaps of logic are often what powers the various kinds of romance. If there were suddenly to be some kind of law that everything in fiction be well-ordered, neat, uncluttered, logical and consistent, horror would disappear overnight: the Alien franchise would gather up Jason, Freddie and Jennifer Aniston all in some huge boat, stock it with the collected works of Poe, Lovecraft, King, Koontz and Lindqvist, and they'd all go sailing off into the sunset to join all the long-forgotten gods of times gone byebye.
How did that song go... a dream is a wish the heart makes?
