ICA
1 July, 2012
Screening Conditions
HORROR: THE DARK SIDE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
Let the Right One In
(Låt den rätte komma in)
Tomas Alfredson, 2008
Sweden, 110 min
“Horror movies in general, and vampire ones in particular”, writes psychoanalyst Isaac Tylim, “capitalize on the compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences in order to master them. Watching horror films may facilitate a working through of excitations awakened by the images presented. The spectator's association allows for a degree of control of the effect that the representations have on the psyche” (1998, pp. 282-283).
So: that’s what we have been letting ourselves in during this term with our series of films and discussion on Horror: The dark side of the Unconscious. We’ll conclude it today with a Swedish movie which has been a critical and commercial success all over the world: Let the Right One In, directed in 2008 by Tomas Alfredson and based on a vampire novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist’s, who also wrote the screenplay.
Let the Right One In (the title refers to the belief that vampires cannot enter a room unless invited) is set in the early 1980s in a working-class suburb of the Swedish capital. It is, at least at its most explicit level, a love story between a shy pre-adolescent boy and a somewhat depressed vampire girl - a version perhaps of the Romeo and Juliet romance, but with a very Nordic twist…
Both lead actors, Kåre Hadebrant and Lina Leandersson (who play Oskar and Eli, respectively) were 12-year-olds at the time of filming.
Stockholm, and this will come as no surprise to you, was covered in snow.
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The main literary sources of inspiration for many of the over three thousand films made about vampires, including Let the Right One In, are: Dracula, the Gothic novel by Irish writer Bram Stoker published in 1897, and the more recent The Vampire Chronicles (1976-2003) by American author Anne Rice. It’s worth mentioning at least the best ones among these movies: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and its 1979 remake by Werner Herzog, Nosferatu, The Vampyr, with Klaus Kinski; Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), with Bela Lugosi; Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932); Terence Fisher’s Dracula (1958) and its several Hammer sequences, with Christopher Lee; and Neil Jordan’s Interview With the Vampire (1994), starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.
In the classical story about these monstrous, yet still anthropomorphic, creatures of the imagination, as well as in the version of it portrayed in Let the Right One In, those unfortunate individuals whose necks are bitten by a vampire’s fangs either bleed to death, or become infected by the bite with the result that they are themselves turned into new vampires. In the former case they are mere victims of a bloody murderer, in the latter (as well as victims) they become potential perpetrators, and therefore responsible for spreading the contagion.
That such a contagion should concern in particular sexually transmitted diseases - with an associated covert warning of how dangerous it is to “play with fire” - is because in most of these films (though, to be fair, not in the one we have just watched) the phenomenon of vampirism is presented as having explicit sexual connotations: their focus when depicting the ultimate embrace between the (usually male) monster and its (usually female) victim is on an eroticized mixture of passion, terror and desire.
Another interesting connotation of the myth concerns the vampires’ alleged immortality. If they can’t really die (unless of course much garlic, bright sunlight, a crucifix and a wooden stake happen to be at hand) it is because, not unlike the zombies, vampires are already dead or, rather “undead”. When asked by Oskar about her age, Eli answers cryptically: “I am 12 years-old. More-or-less. I don’t know my birthday”. Immortality, or denial of our condition of mortal human beings, is a common unconscious fantasy in all of us, fuelled as it is by the persistence of our infantile narcissistic omnipotence. This, however, is a highly ambiguous state of affairs: if on the one hand most of us may dread death and therefore aspire to live forever in order not to have to confront it, this prospect also terrifies us, for, as soon as life becomes something we cannot end, it feels an intolerable prison. The stories set to music by Wagner in The Flying Dutchman or by Janácek in The Makropulos Case are powerful melodramatic illustrations of this predicament.
An aspect of Let the Right One In on which I would like to focus our attention concerns its attempt to inspire a certain amount of “sympathy for the Devil”, or more accurately “sympathy for the Vampire”. Despite her obvious cruelty, Eli is also a character with tragic features, often inspiring compassion in the spectators: “rather than being presented as the embodiment of forbidden sexuality or an angst-riddled soul crushed under a weight of guilt”, writes film critic James Berardinelli, “she resembles a hunted animal”. One of the film’s messages is perhaps that such monstrous individuals as blood-sucking vampires can themselves experience feelings of friendship, generosity, compassion and love.
In Let the Right One In the dividing line between good and evil is less clearly defined than it would be comfortable for us to believe. The film indirectly asks us to consider that abusers themselves, such as Eli, have been, and still are, also victims, trapped as they are inside a vicious circle from which they can find it impossible to disentangle themselves. In Tylim’s words, “malevolent, persecutory objects, the vampires may also appear as innocent victims, perennial mourners of eternal life, sufferers without relief, or neurotics with fangs” (op. cit., p. 281).
The point is not that their behaviour should therefore be justified, but that it can be explained. By the way, I was horrified a few weeks ago to read that Education Secretary Michael Gove objected to a GCSE exam question that asked students to explain “why some people are prejudiced against Jews”, because, Gove claimed, “to suggest that antisemitism can ever be explained, rather than condemned, is insensitive and frankly bizarre” - as if one couldn’t do both things. Indeed I think it would be quite bizarre to condemn something that we cannot explain…
To make some sense of Eli’s predicament, it may be helpful to differentiate between two related yet different kinds of intimate object relationships: the “symbiotic” (based on mutual emotional collusion) and the “parasitic” (based on exploitation). Alfredson’s film makes it quite clear that Eli, while parasitic on those she preys upon to feed herself by quite literally draining the life out of them, can also engage in a parallel symbiotic relationship of mutual dependence on Oskar, the young boy who, perhaps due to his own experience of being ignored at home and bullied at school, shows some tolerance for her predicament.
Ultimately, we are led to believe, Oskar and Eli are just two lonely kids seeking comfort from their unhappy existences in the relationship they somehow manage to develop with each other. “Let the Right One In”, comments Berardinelli, “isn't really a vampire story. Instead, it's a tale about the friendship and empathy that develops between two of society's misfits”.
Or is it? I would dare to suggest that perhaps Eli is, from her very first encounter with Oskar, deliberately “grooming” him as the one to replace Hakan, the bloody vicious but inefficient source of her nourishment ambiguously subservient to her. And that Oskar, and we the spectators of Alfredson’s film, naively fail to guess her cunning stratagem.
But maybe this is too cynical an interpretation. At one point Eli seems to express a genuine need to be understood by asking Oskar to identify with her: “Please be me for a little while!”. And when, in the swimming pool scene, he really needs her, she does come to his rescue by getting rid in no uncertain terms of his tormentors.
In the course of their developing friendship, Eli makes a number of statements which Oskar finds intriguing: “I can’t be your friend”, she claims without explaining why. Or: “I am not a girl” (is she a boy, then, or perhaps a hermaphrodite? Even after giving a furtive glance at her genital area, Oskar can only be left confused). It’s also worth noticing that we never have a chance to see Eli’s fangs - and this must be a first for a vampire film; instead, we feel amused to watch Oskar and his mother walking up and down the room brushing their teeth.
Oskar, on his part, is obsessed with revenge fantasies: he carries around with him a knife, he stabs a tree while shouting out the same words used against him by Conny and the other bullies, and he pastes newspaper cuttings about murders in a scrapbook. Perhaps, then, we should take the whole improbable story of his relationship with Eli as a figment of his vivid and perverse imagination…
Copyrights © Andrea SABBADINI, 2012
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Discussion of
Let the Right One In (2008)
1 July 2012 – ICA
Donald Campbell
Freud’s paper The Uncanny (1919) is often referred to by those who are interested in exploring horror films from a psychoanalytic point of view. In this paper Freud remarks that an uncanny experience occurs when infantile complexes, which have been repressed, are once more revived by some impression. As Freud reminds us, there are many more ways to create an uncanny effect in fiction than there are in real life. As soon as something actually happens in our psychic lives, like watching Let the Right One In, it can, if we allow it, confirm earlier long forgotten experiences.
At the beginning of our series featuring horror films we considered the way the Monster in Frankenstein offers graphic representation of the adolescent’s sense of alienation from and lack of integration of the various changes that are taking place internally and externally in their pubescent body. We could also vicariously experience the Monster’s feelings of rejection, helplessness, confusion, and rage. In my remarks about Ofelia, the 11-year-old girl in Pan’s Labyrinth, I described her experience of puberty as one of horror.
In considering what we can learn from Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In I would like to think with you about the film as the dream of Oskar who is twelve years, eight days and nine months old, and the nightmare of Eli who has been twelve for a long time.
Eli
Eli, the female vampire on the cusp of puberty created by Tomas Alfredson, goes against the grain of the traditional vampires of the past such as classic Nosferatu (1922), the Hammer film Dracula (1958) and Francis Ford Coppola’s highly successful Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which featured tall dark men stalking, seducing and biting the pearly white necks of beautiful women. The Hollywood formula of fusing terror with adult sexuality has drawn generations of cinema goers. If you hurry you can see the latest releases: Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows staring Johnny Depp.
The adults in Let the Right One In are seen as failures, clueless, and cowardly, or too late to intervene. As Alfredson put it,”I did not want the grown-ups to be actively mean or evil-minded. I wanted them to be uninterestred, floppy or ignorant, but always near by the nasty events. If they’d just turned their heads a little, if they just listened more acutely, if they asked one more time.” This has the effect of presenting us with children in a child’s world. The adults represent those aspects of ourselves that are out of touch with our childhood. In addition, Alfredson eschews adult sexuality, so we are more exposed to the adolescent’s world and the infantile roots of the myth of the vampire, and, in turn, our earliest struggles to survive. Eli’s nightmare is that she has to kill to survive.
The vampire monster is an enduring symbol of what analysts (Abraham 1916) regard as the cannibalistic nature of our earliest infantile life; the child who survives by sucking nutrition from its mother. Sucking occurs first and foremost for self-preservation. Sexual pleasure derived from sucking is secondary to the need for sustenance. If you have ever been starving, I mean really hungry, you will appreciate the power of the single-minded drive to feed, in which sex and the other person are irrelevant, unless they are the sources of nutrition, as they are for the vampire. Although most of us in the West have not personally faced the threat of extinction due to starvation, that anxiety is buried deep in our repressed unconscious childhood memory. It is that anxiety that motivates our identification with the vampire. Let the Right One In focuses on the parasitic nature of this early relationship and the consequence for later development when it persists beyond infancy.
Following the cannibalistic oral stage, dominated by the wish to incorporate the other, analysts recognise a sadistic oral stage introduced by the arrival of teeth and pleasure in biting. Teeth are our first weapons capable of inflicting pain and drawing blood. The baby can hurt the mother by biting the breast it is sucking on, much like the vampire bites the neck it is feeding on. (Blood may symbolise a transition from milk to meat as sources of nourishment.) And the mother is quick to stop the baby from biting her. Although that impulse to bite mother, directly related to the cannibalistic urge, is repressed and reinforced by a cultural taboo on eating human flesh, it finds expression in eating solid foods. However, the vestiges of that early oral sadistic stage, the pleasure derived from inflicting suffering on another person, is alive and well and exercised directly or indirectly in our daily interactions, in our laughter when a man slips on a banana peel, or in more unconscious pleasure as the vampire bites it’s victim.
In Let the Right One In Eli uses her teeth in acts of ruthless aggression to get the blood she needs in order to survive. However, Eli’s aggression is not sadistic. She is not interested in inflicting pain, although that will accompany her attacks. She is not interested in torturing the object, or making the other suffer in order to control it. Eli’s aggression is best described as a ruthless orality. She is only interested in feeding, and the consequence for the object is irrelevant. She holds no animosity towards the victim, but, like the lion in the bush, she is pleased, to find her prey and relieved when she has had a feed.
In ordinary development the hormonal and physiological changes initiated by puberty thrust the body’s sexuality and musculature to the centre of the psychic stage and create a conflict with earlier self-images. Eli is small, vulnerable, waif-like. She is without parents, without birthdays, without presents, a child without a childhood. She is stuck at a ruthless oral level of development; hunting at night, a time when most of us are asleep and dreaming, for the blood she needs to stay alive. Sadly, Eli is aware that she has not progressed from a sense of herself to a sense of her gender. As she says, “I’m not a girl. Could we just keep things the way they are?” “I guess.” replies Oskar. This lack of gender identity is graphically represented by a very quick shot of Oskar looking at a scar on Eli’s pubis. Does the scar represent the absence of a vagina or the castration of a penis?
There is another aspect of this earliest phase of development that analysts have referred to as infantile omnipotence; that is a time when the child is not bound by the constrains of reality because their parents overcome obstacles to feed and protect them. You will recognise that infantile omnipotence is something that monsters and superheroes share. This is dramatically enacted at the end of the film when Eli violently destroys the adolescent tormentors that Oskar was helpless to repel.
Oskar
Our first image of Oskar is through a window. He looks transluscent, ghost-like, bloodless. He may know exactly how old he is, and he think of himself as a male, but he does not know how to use his aggression and sexuality in relationships, which is one of the major tasks of adolescence. When Eli says that she is not a girl and asks if it OK to keep it that way, Oskar’s reply, “I guess”, conveys his own uncertainty about looking further for a fully feminine girl. Eli’s next question, “So everything’s the same?” is ambiguous. She implies that they wont think about distinctions between boys and girls, and Oskar says, “Yes.” When Eli says, “I’ll be you and you be me,” Oskar seems to confirm his labile gender identity when he adds, “Really? Good.” Throughout the film Oskar’s body remains without masculine definition. He looks more like a latency boy, not yet a young man.
Nevertheless when Oskar has to choose who to let in his mother or Eli and he chooses Eli, offers her his mother’s dress and keeps the mother out long enough for Eli to escape.
Oskar is unable to mobilise his own aggression. Other boys chronically bully him. He is not able to build on his moment of retaliation against his tormentor, Conny, or his weightlifting. He is unable to protect Eli, his steady girlfriend, from a male predator, the husband of the woman Eli had turned into a vampire. We are left wondering if Oskar’s yearning for his absent father may have contributed to his more passive feminine identification. He seems attracted to Eli’s athletic body and murderous aggression. When he tells Eli that unlike her he doesn’t kill, she replies, perhaps for the audience, as well, “But you’d like to be me for a while.”
By the end of the film Oskar has regressed and appears submissive to the other more sadistic males, totally unable to fight for his own survival. Oskar exchanges the potential of an adolescent’s independence for an infantile dependence on Eli to protect him. In the swimming pool Oskar seems to be in a dream-like state, passive and non-resistant. I thought of this as Oskar’s dream of Eli’s aggression that saves him from his failure to engage with the sexual and aggressive tasks of adolescence.
Let the Right One In contains an interesting twist on the traditional view of the vampire’s parasitic relationships by introducing the vampire’s anaclitic relationship, which involves the choice of someone who satisfies dependency needs, and thus represents a parent of childhood. Eli is portrayed as depending upon a human, not a vampire, to survive the day. She is angry and critical of Hakan’s failures, which jeopardise her safety.
The last scene of Oskar content on the train with Eli in the ‘coffin’ is, for me, the most chilling in the whole film as we see that Oskar has taken Hakan’s place as Eli’s daytime caretaker. We are left to assume that this is how Hakan and Eli found each other, perhaps 50 years ago; as pubertal 12 year olds who became best friends. Did Hakan, like Oskar, give up on ever becoming a sexual adult and choosing a partner with whom to have a family? Hakan aged and Eli did not. Did Eli seduce Oskar away from a generative developmental path in order to replace the aging, mistake prone Hakan with Oskar? A self-preservative act by Eli, but nevertheless monstrous.
© Donald Campbell
2 Provost Road
London NW3 4ST
dlcampbell4@gmail.com
) does not mean I want people to get cancer.