Introduction

Over recent years a growing body of evidence has demonstrated that it is more accurate to talk of ‘childhoods’ rather than ‘childhood’; that the realities of children's lives are complex, multiple and varied and, therefore, ‘childhood’, as both a discursive construct and a corporeal reality, resists easy categorization. However, despite this realization, the cultural meanings ascribed to childhood and popular representations of ‘the child’ frequently portray a universal and normative model predicated on developmental assumptions about who children are (or ought to be) and who they should become. These developmental discourses portray the movement from childhood to adulthood as unidirectional, linear and progressive and constitute childhood as a distinct and ontologically separate category to adulthood and youth as a transition or stage that must be traversed on the path to adulthood.

Filmic images of childhood (re)present and (re)construct these discourses insofar as they present a version of reality that ‘relies to a larger extent on familiar or dominant images and ideas’. Indeed, it might be argued that it is only through the use of familiar, commonsensical and stereotypical narratives that the viewer is able to make sense of and interpret an image. This leads Holland to suggest that

Such images frequently deny or marginalize the possibility of children's agency and are discursive insofar as they construct and reconstruct knowledge about children and childhood and present a limited ‘pictorial vocabulary’ to signify the status and category of the child. This chapter will argue that Thomas Alfredson's (2008) film adaption of John Ajvide Lindqvist's bestselling and internationally acclaimed novel Låt den rätte komma in/Let the Right One In (2007) troubles and destabilizes the dominant constructions of childhood, especially through the central child characters, Oskar and Eli. The film tells the story of two outsiders, alone and isolated from the world around them. Oskar is a 12-year-old boy, who is relentlessly bullied at school. He lives with his mother but has a distant relationship with both his parents, who separated when he was younger.