Significance of Oskar & Eli Wearing Red Sweater & Shirt?

[sauvin]

I've speculated on this somewhere else a while ago and can't quite shake the impression even though others here have poo-poo'ed the idea. The scene I'm thinking of specifically is just after Eli has let Oskar into her apartment and they're talking about her egg.

She struck me as being a bit bride-like, even though almost everything about the word "bride" seems contrary to what's going on. A bride usually wears enough cloth to cover half an acre, where Eli is wearing barely enough to cover half a pint-sized body. There's no father around to give the daughter away, and no minister, priest or pastor to officiate, and the table in the middle of the living room is nobody's idea of an altar. [deleted], most brides are actual women, and even if Eli had been a real girl, she's not even fully that yet, just a vaguely girl-shaped stick figure.

The oversized shirt she's sorta wearing like a dress and sorta just swimming in is the color of blood, but surely not in this context meant to imply any kind of passion. It just struck me as "truth in advertising"; if you are what you eat, what she's wearing is the colour of what she is. Death wears a red shirt, maybe so the stains it accumulates while Death dines won't be so obvious.

But under that shirt, hidden from Oskar's view, is a pair of whitish panties, a colour we usually associate with innocence - or maybe just naivete and vulnerability.

Here is the inverted bride. The usual bride wears white on the outside, openly proclaiming virginal "innocence" and "purity" while concealing goodness-knows-what underneath (but probably something meant to provoke passion). Eli is hiding hers, but not necessarily denying it. She's indirectly wearing war paint consonant with the truth of what she's claiming to be, and maybe hiding her more sensitive self away.

She's not offering herself to Oskar for nights and decades of hot wild monkey [CENSORED], and may in fact outright reject the very idea of it, but everything that Eli has admitted so far, and everything that she stands still ready to admit to Oskar is very definitely prologue to the commitment she already has to offer him, commitment similar to what a more normal bride formalises in a more normal ceremony. Eli's slow, stately march to the table to join him, also unlike a more normal bride, isn't to the expectation eight-room houses filled with the patter of tiny feet and the smell of cinnamon toast fresh out of the toaster, but to the fear of rejection you'd expect in any rational, self-respecting messenger of death and disease.

This is just how it strikes me, and I believe I've cheerfully enough admitted before I could just need my medications adjusted.

Edit: 5 Novembre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.

[drakkar]

I might add: When separated from Oskar by the glass door, Eli still has Virginia's blood under her nails - she hasn't washed since Oskar left. By the table, with Oskar, she is spotlessly clean. So I too tend to see heavy symbolism in this scene, although you (as usual) are a bit more detailed about it than I am.

[a_contemplative_life]

Let us not forget the symbolism of the two arms & fingers proceeding downward toward the top of the egg. Or of the egg itself, breaking. And something else, which I have now forgotten!

[drakkar]

..Eli's heart of gold.. ..and now you're govong me a headache again...

[gattoparde59]

I like sauvin's idea of a wedding in Eli's room with the egg. The director is telling us that something important is happening. I don't think the idea of wedding quite fits. I have always seen Oskar and Eli as too lost children from very dysfunctional families. (If you accept that Eli and Hakan were a family of some sort). They are both looking for something to replace their broken family. Both characters are looking for commitment.

Up to the egg scene it is Oskar that is looking for commitment from Eli. He obtains a promise that he will get the cube back. He asks Eli to "go steady" and then we have the whole palm slashing disaster.

Oskar seeks this commitment from Eli up to the point when he touches the egg. Oskar at this moment solves the puzzle that is Eli and realizes, maybe for the first time, that it is Eli who is seeking a commitment from Oskar. Once Oskar realizes that Eli is looking for an commitment from him he quite naturally hesitates and backs away from what Eli is looking for. The red shirt is there as a reminder of Hakan. The shirt reminds us of the potential tragedy that is involved for anyone who commits themselves to Eli.

[thestich]

...The red shirt is there as a reminder of Hakan. The shirt reminds us of the potential tragedy that is involved for anyone who commits themselves to Eli.

I like this view a lot. I never thought of Oskar being the one to "back out". I thought that he was getting mad as Eli's untruth about the money. Oskar could also be thinking about what Eli is and his commitment to her in the back of his mind also.

Very nice!

[sauvin]

The director is telling us that something important is happening. I don't think the idea of wedding quite fits.

No, it doesn't, not perfectly. Not even as an inversion. That was just one of the first and most tenacious impressions I got as I considered the scene at more than just the "he said, she said" level ...

Once Oskar realizes that Eli is looking for an commitment from him he quite naturally hesitates and backs away from what Eli is looking for. The red shirt is there as a reminder of Hakan. The shirt reminds us of the potential tragedy that is involved for anyone who commits themselves to Eli.

(THIS never occurred to me, not quite in these terms. Did Eli do this on purpose? I wonder.)

Let us not forget the symbolism of the two arms & fingers proceeding downward toward the top of the egg. Or of the egg itself, breaking. And something else, which I have now forgotten!

... the the two children's fingers pointing at the egg at the same time forming a V that I once jokingly drew a parallel to Dan Brown's "Sacred Feminine"? The symbolism of the egg itself has been covered elsewhere (short story: she was "saying" the shell she'd been living in has crumbled, and she's showing Oskar her golden core), but here's where the "wedding ceremony" has ended and the "honeymoon" has begun: I've also jokingly skated kinda close to the ROAD CLOSED sign, close enough to wipe the dust off it, when I flippantly said "she told him to put his finger in her egg, so, he did!"

Salacity aside, the egg's crumbling does represent a kind of consummation. She has been "consumed" to an degree that may well be unique to her experience. How many other times in her long past has she been willing to risk entering a residence uninvited? Has she ever trusted to this extent before? Nothing in Canon suggests it (or flatly denies it, either), and we're left with a strong feeling that she hasn't. This degree of trust is reflected (for me) after Owen asks the questions Oskar didn't: "What would have happened if I hadn't let you in? Would you have died?", and Abby responded with conviction "I knew you wouldn't let me [die]". I could see this exact exchange happening between Oskar and Eli unchanged.

I found it just a bit amusing that Oskar got the willies after realising the degree of commitment he'd just bargained himself into. Yea, he ran away, and we could extend the "post-honeymoon" metaphor in all sorts of amusing ways (and probably contrary to forum policy) as Oskar also suddenly realises he's just sacrificed some of his "freedom", but that wouldn't fit in terribly well with my Oskar's grappling more with the demons of dishonesty and insincerity brought to him by life with an alcoholic parent and a broken home as he fears that Eli is also lying to him.

[Wolfchild]

How many other times in her long past has she been willing to risk entering a residence uninvited? Has she ever trusted to this extent before? Nothing in Canon suggests it (or flatly denies it, either), and we're left with a strong feeling that she hasn't.

Since this is the film section, I take "Canon" to mean "what we were shown on the screen" and in that case I agree. However, if "Canon" were to include the novel, then you would be incorrect. In the novel, Eli says flat out that he hasn't had a normal friendship in two hundred years.

However, in the film, Lina's portrayal of Eli strongly hints that Eli is unsure of what to do with this relationship with Oskar. When she comes back from taking a shower, she seems very obviously to not know what to do next. She is not used to visiting someone else's home. This would imply what Eli states explicitly in the novel: Eli is not at accustomed to having friends. I would say that no friends = no trust.

This may be a stretch, but I would aver that the film shows Eli trusting Oskar more than she trusted Håkan. When Eli travels with Håkan, it is at night when she can sit beside him in the cab. However, she trusts Oskar enough that she is willing to travel with him during the day, even though it forces her to hide helplessly in the box. For Eli, that must feel precarious in the extreme.

[a_contemplative_life]

I don't see Oskar "running away" from commitment. What I see is an person who is uncomfortable grappling with the notion that his new friend is a murderer, and probably a thief to boot.

[gattoparde59]

I don't see Oskar "running away" from commitment. What I see is an person who is uncomfortable grappling with the notion that his new friend is a murderer, and probably a thief to boot.

I never said "run away." There is no running away from Eli. I deliberately used the term "backing away" in the sense of balking or hesitating. He asks to leave Eli's apartment when it begins to dawn on him what making a commitment to this creature actually entails. Eli's offer of money is part of this, and Oskar's pointed rejection of the money is an effort to distance himself from Eli. The shirt is there for us to think about. I don't think Oskar realizes who the shirt belongs to.

The idea that the two characters switch roles with each other interests me quite a bit. Maybe it is not as neat and symmetrical as I have described above, but I think it does happen.