How does revealing everything make it 'all okay'?

you're completely right. it was nothing like that in the book. the climax of the book was tom talkin about luke's death. thankyou barbara streisand for conveniently leaving that out. savannah didn't automatically heal in the book, it was just around that time that she was coming out of her psychotic interlude and starting to get back on track. since lowenstein had more knowledge about who savannah really was and her backround, she was ready to start helping her. i'm sorry but after what babs has done to my fave book ever i've lost respect for her.

freakin' idiot! napolen dynamite

I realize it's been a while since you posted this question, but it seems like an answer to your question got lost in the discussion about the screenplay vs. the book. It doesn't seem to me that the revelations that Tom made about their childhood "fixed" everything. Tom didn't seem as deeply wounded by those events as Savannah, what he was involved wasn't therapy nearly as much as it was simply providing background for Savannah's problems. She's by no means cured of her emotional problems at the end of the film, but she's passed the immediate crisis. As someone else pointed out, Lowenstein now has crucial information to help Savannah begin to heal. Tom certainly had his own problems with suppression and depression, and he gained some insights into his own problems by helping reveal Savannah's. It's been much too long since I read the book, but in the film, while Tom was wounded by the traumas he faced as a child, his adult life seems to have been mostly affected by his brother Luke's death. At one point, his wife tells him that he has shut off his feelings for two years, since his brother's death. He turned off his ability to love and replaced it with anger. It wasn't therapy with Lowenstein that helped Tom start to heal, it was the love he felt for her. When his love opened up, he realized he had to start to get his life back together. The time frame between his leaving New York and the final moments isn't clear, so it still could have taken some time for him to come to the peace he speaks of at the end. Or at least that's how I saw it.

One thing vampire children have to learn early on is don't run with a wooden stake

I think its the Freudian model of psychological cure based on the fact that most of the patients he worked with repressed their fears.
For example, the girl that was hydro-phobic. Freud helped her uncover an incident where she saw a dog lick a water glass and was too embarrassed to mention it to the host. They were a tad bit uptight socially back in those days so the girl repressed the whole incident. Once she remembered it, she was cured.
Freud provided a "talking" cure where talking would lead to revelation of repressed memories. Only problem is it can take years and years to get to the heart of the problem.

when you have a cool name like tom wingo anything is possible. espcially if you're like him & are jogging apparently 40% of the time. everything just moves faster!





You stay classy, San Diego.

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And so we meet again, Fiatlux-1!! xD I just saw this on Netflix :) ANyway, to answer your question, in my opinion:

Realistically, it doesn't fix all their problems.

For Tom, it gets him to face it- to admit that it really happened. It puts him back in touch with his emotions and enable him to move into new ones like love and actual happiness.

For both Susan and Tom, talking about it could validate their emotions. (This really happened, and I'm actually feeling this way about it, and it wasn't our fault so we don't have to lie about it or hide from it, or lock it up.) That sort of thing.

They would probably have a few other things to work through in order to get their lives on track to where they want them to be, but that was a huge hurdle to pass, and a great start!


I LOVE it when it's hamburger day!- Romy White

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