"Vampires!" I said, almost shouting in the din of the train.
The man sitting next to me looked at me with a blank expression. I tried to repeat myself, "It's about vampires."
He half-nodded. Maybe he hadn't understood me and was just being polite.
I had been minding my own business as the train rumbled through Cambridge when he had turned to me and opened the conversation. "So you all set for New Year's Eve?"
He was short, aged, with unkempt hair and wearing a parka jacket. He looked to have but a few teeth remaining in his mouth. He spoke with a thick Boston accent.
The old me would have avoided making any conversation, but I had resolved to be less grumpy and more friendly. What would Poppy do? (I mean, of course, the character from Happy-Go-Lucky. You thought I meant someone else?).
He asked if I was going to First Night, and I told him no, since I was living out in the countryside. When I didn't get off at Porter Square, he got concerned that I had missed my stop. I told him I was going to Davis Square instead. Why? To see a movie, I replied patiently. He asked which one. I told him: Let the Right one.
"Is that a Christmas movie?" He asked. I told him no. "It's about vampires," I said. He didn't seem to understand, so I had to repeat myself twice until I was almost shouting.
It was dark by the time I popped up above ground in Sommerville at Davis Square (map). The marquee for the Sommerville Theater was sparkling bright and obvious just outside the front door of subway station---my second easy find of the day. It's always easy on foot.
It was getting even colder, so wasted no time but went inside and bought a ticket. Like the Coolidge Corner, it was a hip renovated multiplex in a hip youth-driven neighborhood not far from Tufts University. But it was in a completely different style, the walls and staircases decorated with metal cut in oblique postmodern angles. The auditorium for my movie was down in the basement.
Most of the things I had read about this movie online had centered on a basic premise: Twilight was a teenage vampire movie for stupid losers, whereas Let the Right One Come In was a teenage vampire movie for sophisticated hipsters (like this). The latter was just such a superior movie, the orthodoxy went, that there could be no bridging the gap.
I detest this kind of pre-ordained rigidity of taste, and so I went into the theater with the intention of finding a way to appreciate it without it being at the expense of Twilight. By the end of the movie, I had discovered how to do it.
As a vampire movie, Let the Right One is certainly superior in many levels, but it is simply a different genre of movie in many ways. Yet both are vampire movies. What makes them similar?
I pondered this and arrived at a theory of narrative in vampire movies that suited me, namely that one can interpret vampires as a a projective fantasy of power which springs from an inherent weakness in the human protagonist. The vampires are, in a sense, an external manifestation of that fantasy, their characteristics being defined in opposition to the particular weaknesses of the human.
In Twilight, the weakness of the female teenage high schooler is her awkward loneliness at being thrust into a new school in a new town. The fantasy, externalized as an attractive male of the same age, embodies the seductive social aspects of vampirism, that of being "super cool," having one's own secret clique of beautiful people and being beyond the need to be popular. It is the ability to have all this and still remained an unspotted virgin.
In Let the Right One In, the weakness of the young male protagonist comes from being a victim of school bullies, and being ignored and neglected by his parents. The fantasy of power, manifest by a young woman of exactly the same age, shows up in the brutal and violent aspects of vampirism. It is a fantasy of blood-filled revenge, in the human protagonist learns to "acquire a taste for blood" that is mirrored by the literalness of the hunger of his vampire playmate.
If anything, this movie reminded me most not of other vampire movies, but of Taxi Driver, which embodies similar violent revenge fantasies by a helpless and weak individual. There's even a "You talking to me?" kind of scene involving a pocket knife instead of a pistol.
I once read that Roger Ebert viewed the entire epilogue of Scorcese's film as possibly the dying fantasy of the Travis Bickle character, who in his mind is redeemed for his actions. One could interpret the final scenes of Let the Right One In with the same eye, as the vengeance fantasies of a child being brutally murdered by children his own age.
Or you could look at it as a cool Swedish vampire movie. Take your pick. It works well in both cases.
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