Very Quickly Now

(Vague but major spoilers for Let the Right One In are contained within the first two paragraphs of this post)

Over the weekend, I finally got around to watching Let the Right One In, the Swedish vampire film, directed by Tomas Alfredson, that last year was hailed as one of the best movies of the year, one of the best horror films ever made, and possibly the best vampire film, period, full stop, the end. It's all a little too fresh for me to make any similar proclamations, but it is a damn good film, easily the best horror film I've seen in at least a few years. Last year, I wrote about the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist on which the film is based (don't click on that link if you don't happen to feel like it, because the post is nothing to get too worked up about), and the short version is that I wasn't too keen on it. Apart from problems with either the prose itself, or the translation, it's clear to me now that the novel's greatest problem was massive bloat: it's about 500 pages long, and truly didn't need to be more than 300. A film that clocks in at just under two hours is going to have needed to hack away at a lot of that, to carve away anything that wasn't essential. Sometimes, what's inessential to a novel is part of what makes it great, but in the case of Lindqvist's novel that which was intended to add color simply drained all the life out of the story. .

Not so the film, which is wonderfully moody and sad, and which preserves everything strong about the novel. Part of the genius of Lindqvist's story (and he wrote the screenplay) is that in rooting for Oskar -- the young boy who is relentlessly bullied at school, and who leads a largely friendless existence until he meets a young girl name Eli, a girl who treats him well, who likes him, and for whom he feels immediately protective -- the audience is basically rooting against themselves. Everyone -- everyone who's not a bully, at least -- wants the weak and bullied to finally lash out against their tormenters, and when we see it happen in movies, when the asshole at the summer camp finally gets knocked into the lake, our impulse is to cheer. But in reality, when the tormented strike back, it's not always the bullies who get lashed. Let the Right One In, it seems to me, without ever mentioning it, is based on this idea. At the end, Oskar and Eli are on their own, traveling who knows where, to live their lives together. But we know what it takes for Eli to stay alive, and so does Oskar. Eli will take what she needs from whoever she can find, and if Oskar becomes like Hakan, Eli's previous keeper, he will provide for her at the expense of the first person he can lure.

Root for Oskar and Eli if you want to -- I did -- but you do so at your own peril.

* * * *

I just finished watching Erik Nelson's documentary about science fiction, horror, and etc. writer Harlan Ellison, Dreams with Sharp Teeth. It was more or less what I expected it to be, except maybe a little bit better. Clearly, Larson came to the project as an acolyte, and Ellison is his altar. The only words spoken against Ellison -- this man who has amassed such an array of enemies that at one point they formed a club -- in the entire film are those uttered gently and with love by his friends and admirers. Ellison himself has claimed that Larson should have interviewed some of the many people who hate him, but Larson's excuse is that Ellison is his own worst enemy. True enough, and up to a point, but believing that does not make the film more interesting.

But I grew up reading Ellison, and though I now find him to be an obnoxious, insufferable egomaniac, he can still be a darned entertaining one (his rant about writers getting paid is a highlight of the film). If you've read enough of Ellison over the years, especially his autobiographical essays (all of his essays are finally about him, no matter what his ostensible subject is), then you've heard all this before, so it probably helps if you have some distance from that part of your reading history, as I do, before checking this out. It's a hagiography, but I can't find it within myself to get too worked up about that. Ellison's an old guy now, and he's written some terrific fiction, and he got kicked around a lot when he was a kid. Let him have his movie.

* * * *

Speaking of documentaries with which Harlan Ellison has some involvement, when is this thing coming out?
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I can't pretend to be any kind of expert on the bizarre work and life (presumably also bizarre) of Brother Theodore, but what small taste I've had over the years -- on Letterman, in films, now in internet clips -- really makes me want to be an expert. Singular, hilarious and disturbing, Brother Theodore has been a background fascination of mine for years. How could I get my hands on his albums? Is it possible I could ever see him perform live? The answer to the second question is now, of course, "No", and the first one is "Probably not", due to the steep prices at which used copies are currently selling. And knowing just enough about some obscure artist to make me want to know more, only to have a full understanding and appreciation of the art thwarted by that very obscurity, until finally I have to settle for scraps and biographies or documentaries, is not a fate with which I'm unfamiliar. So I'm used to it. Once again, you've defeated me, The Universe. Now at least let me see this goddamn documentary.

"Originality" has become a meaningless word. The loss -- not physically, which is inevitable, but in terms of cultural memory -- of people like Brother Theodore is the reason -- the entire reason -- for that. Far too often, true originality gets buried with the body. If no one tells you, or shows you, what the word means, how will you ever know? That's why I want to see the film: to remind myself what genuine, mad innovation really is.

Timing is Everything

You plan and you plan, and what you plan is to watch Let the Right One In this weekend, both because you've been wanting to see it for months, and so you'll have something fresh to write about today. And besides, it feels like it's been a good long while since you're written a serious post about the horror genre. But your "planning" has actually consisted entirely of assuming that the film was available On Demand. Which, you found out yesterday, is not the case. So fine, go rent the damn thing. Okay, I will. Or rather, my wife says she'll pick it up on the way back from an errand she has to run. But our local video store is all out. There has, apparently, been a run on moody Swedish vampire films. As a result, I have no Let the Right One In to write about, but have learned, instead, a valuable lesson: planning gets you nowhere!

I'll watch some other movie soon and write that up instead, but, in the meantime, anybody else surprised about this?
I haven't seen the film yet, and therefore have no opinion, but I do know that it's hardly being heralded as a major triumph for David Fincher. Criterion has done this before, though, albeit some years after the film's release, with Ang Lee's The Ice Storm*. Maybe I'm just oblivious to the high regard with which Lee's film is held, but that one I have seen, and it didn't strike me as any kind of modern classic (or important, either). It seemed too scrubbed clean and proud of itself. But it was based on a novel by Rick Moody, so the being-proud-of-itself thing was probably built in. Anyway, I could more easily see a Criterion release for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Or Hulk, for that matter.


*Of course, Criterion also has Chasing Amy, Armageddon and The Rock under their belt, but I always hoped that was just a phase they were going through.

Has He Hurt You? Are You Sad?

Spoilers for the novel Let the Right One In are to be found below!! BE WARNED!!

Where do I begin? The problem with beginning this particular post is that I, quite frankly, don't really feel like jumping headlong into a critique and analysis of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Let the Right One In, which has recently been turned into a very highly acclaimed film by Thomas Alfredson and Lindqvist, a movie which everybody in the world seems to have seen, except me. No, I decided to read the novel first -- which is my usual way of doing these things, if it's a novel I especially want to read -- and will now most likely have to wait until the film comes out on DVD to find out how in the sweet name of crap they crammed all 472 pages of this bloated mess of a novel into 114 minutes of screen time.

Okay, I'm being unfair to the novel, and to Lindqvist. One of the ways in which I'm being unfair is that, by saying the above, some might think that I'm implying that Lindqvist isn't at least trying to do something interesting within the sections of the novel that I believe contribute to the bloat and the mess. But he is. He's trying to bring in, and flesh out, the kinds of characters you rarely see in horror novels, such as Stockholm's unemployed and alcoholic fringe dwellers. He wants these characters, and the more stock ones, to live, and he doesn't want their every action to further the main engine of his (admittedly interesting...for a while) vampire story. All well and good, and in fact I wish more horror writers would try this. But damn it, much of it, especially in the last half, is just not very good, and the elements that are relatively new to the genre that Lindqvist is bringing in are simply not very interesting. These fringe dwellers only take on life when they become part of the plot, and even then it gets dicey.

Before going too much farther, I suppose I should write up a brief synopsis of the story. Okay, so, Oskar is an overweight Swedish kid who is mercilessly bullied on a daily basis. Living next door to him is Eli, a twelve year-old girl who he runs into one night in their apartment complex's playground (he had been stabbing a tree, imagining that the tree was one of his bullies). She's quite friendly, and Oskar sees in her the possibility of a sort of emotional freedom. Unbeknownst to him, at first, is the fact that Eli is a vampire, and living with her is a middle-aged pedophile named Hakan, who murders people in order to supply her with blood. Although Hakan does many terrible things, and some unforgivable appetites, he does feel a great deal of remorse, and is beginning to psychologically break down...or, well, break down more, I guess.

So that's the important stuff, story-wise. Part of the problem with the novel must be the translation, by Ebba Segeberg. I don't want to come down too hard on Segeberg, because the art of translation is largely ignored, and I would guess it is also immensely difficult. But there are long stretches of this book where Segeberg simply seems to be unable to find any interesting or evocative English equivelant to what Lindqvist has written (so, actually, maybe it is Lindqvist's fault. Anyway, it's the fault of one of them). Surprisingly, to me at least, Segeberg is able to best find her (his?) stride in some of the novel's humor, such as in this passage, where Lacke, the primary alcoholic fringer dweller, is wondering about the practical aspect of sterilizing the apparently dozens of cats owned by Gosta, the most pathetic alcoholic fringe dweller:

Lacke imagined Gosta getting on the subway with maybe...twenty-five cats. In one box. No, in a bag, a sack. Go to the vet and just pour out all the cats. "Castration, please."

Segerberg can also occasionally nail some of the novel's more poignant moments, such as this bit taken from a note left for Oskar by Eli:

Sorry I broke your music machine. Take the money if you want. I have a lot. Don't be afraid of me. There's no reason for you to be. Maybe you know that. I hope you know that. I like you so very much.

The passages where Segerberg and/or Lindqvist do not nail it are harder to quote, because it has less to do with flat-out bad writing (although there is some of that) as it does an accumulation of teeth-grinding flatness. And this can often come at the worst times, such as in one of the major suspense sections towards the end. But the section I'm thinking of, which deals with one of probably half a dozen returns by Hakan, is so standard issue and over-the-top -- a very bad combination -- that I'm not sure top-notch writing could have really saved it.

Which brings up another point. I haven't seen the film, as I mentioned, but having finished the novel I decided to read two reviews of it, by my good pals Fox and Marilyn. First of all, I'd like to digress briefly and say that Marilyn's review has really renewed my interest in seeing the film, something that reading the novel had dimmed considerably. Second, Fox's review -- which is less enthusiastic than Marilyn's, but still positive -- focuses on an element of the story that I think should have been focused on more in the novel, which is not just the relationship between Oskar and Eli, but the motives of Eli. But that's neither here nor there, because that's still one of the novel's stronger elements. No, what both reviews indicated to me is that many of the novel's particularly ludicrous plot elements appear to have been completely excised from the film (except for, if I'm understanding Fox's review correctly, the stuff about the cats...), such as -- and here are my big SPOILERS -- the nonsensical and unexplained "zombification" of Hakan, and the utterly baffling and pointless revelation that, before she got vampirized, Eli used to be a boy. Whose name was Elias, don't you know, and whose dad(?) de-manned him for what would appear to be purely sadistic reasons, leaving Elias looking like a girl, but also leaving his genital area (that would be the crotch) completely smooth, like, I don't know...a robot.

What in the world is the point of this? Is it simply Lindqvist's way of playing around with the (to me utterly boring) idea that a vampire's sexuality is ambiguous? If so, that's a damn stupid way of going about it, and it also doesn't make any sense because, in the novel at least, any sort of sexual involvement between Oskar and Eli seems off the table due to the complete indifference of both.

Anyhow. I'm still looking forward to the film, because it sounds as though everything that should have been toned down in the novel has been toned down in the film, and everything that should have been cut from the novel has been cut from the film. And there truly is a good story buried somewhere in Lindqvist's book. I just hope the film found it.

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UPDATE: On reflection, I'm thinking this post is probably very disjointed. I wrote it way too fast, and had no clear idea of how I wanted to progress from one paragraph to the next. Right now, I'm too tired, hungry and lazy to proof-read and see if I'm correct, so if you read this and agree with me....then I'm sorry, I guess. It's not like I'm charging you money, or anything. Although I probably should.

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UPDATE UPDATE: I just added an ending. Of sorts.