“I’m twelve. But I’ve been twelve for a long time.”
Eli is a vampire. Or, as she admits to Oskar, she does live off blood. She is a bit fuzzier on the circumstances of whether she is alive or dead. Then there is the matter of her age. She looks like a twelve-year-old girl, but doesn’t really act much like even your non-typical twelve-year-old girl. She is willing, at least, to go so far as letting him know that she has been stuck in a twelve-year-old girl’s body for a long time. (Actually, even this is ambiguous, but more on that later.) The thing is that Eli is a complicated portrait of a vampire. And by complicated is meant a more realistic picture. Like that little girl who isn’t so young in Interview with the Vampire, Eli is an affirmative statement on the nature of being such a creature: it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Imagine being stuck in your child’s body for centuries and knowing things adult knows, and feeling the weight of being ten or twenty times older than you look and yet you are still treated like a kid. Now add being a vampire on top of that. Not fun at all.
“If I wasn’t a girl…would you like me anyway?”
Oskar has grown closer and closer to Eli and though there are admittedly some problems—on top of just being generally weird, she smells bad—but she is the first girl to ever pay him any attention and, besides, she’s got those great big luminous eyes and…something about her. He wants her to be his girlfriend, but Eli is strangely reluctant considering that Oskar is the literally the only kid she ever spends any time with. But, as indicated, she’s not really a kid. And, as it turns out, she’s not really a girl, either. Or, to be more precise: Eli’s gender is complicated. This difference is directly explained in the novel, blasting all the ambiguity from the situation. There is no flashback in the film to offer an explanation for why Eli asks this nor does she herself provide any backstory or explanation. There is instead just one very brief—and entirely non-erotic—shot of Eli’s nude crotch area that reveals an incision which implicitly hints as the explicit explanation of total genital emasculation which Eli suffered long ago. Eli is thus presented as non-binary with no fully determinant gender, but instead as a someone both male and female.
“Hit harder than you dare, then they’ll stop.”
On one level, this is just a movie about bullying. Take the vampire quotient out, turn Eli into an assault rifle that Oskar has personified into his mind and it is a metaphorical story about America’s school shooting epidemic. Eli is not the fragile tween girl she appears to be from outside. She is definitely the type of friend you would like to have if you have been bullied. But let’s just say for a moment that Eli as presented doesn’t exist and is instead an actual assault rifle that Oskar—in his mind that has been brutalized by constant bullying that goes unpunished by school authorities—decides to take to school one day exact revenge for his suffering. The bullying doesn’t justify Oskar’s violent vengeance, but it suddenly does become more explicable. Eli is even more powerful than a gun because Oskar doesn’t need to get involved personally. When the revenge comes, he literally has the best possible alibi in the world—he is underwater just seconds away from being drowned. Eli’s advice is good, but she’s wrong. The bullies stop, but the bullies have family members and so the film becomes a harshly vigilant critique of the failure of the educational system to address bullying.
