If He Wasnt A Paedophile?

I am afraid from the movie you can never know why he had pictures of the girls who were murdered. It is quite a coincidence, though. He was into photography, true, but to have taken photos of two girls killed in two different areas is quite ironic.

He definitely liked young girls. This did not mean he raped them, though. It is insinuated that he was involved with his current wife when she was merely 14. He definitely had more than a little interest in young girls, but he did not forcibly rape or molest them.

he didn't say young girls he said "Young women" which i thought to mean young women of legal age...say 18 year old girls or 19 year old girls....if we're talking about teenagers....or women in their 20s....belucci was 20 i think when he married her..and it can simply mean like he said when he clicked on the links in the spam emails he got and went to one of those "barely legal" sites

throughout the whole movie and at the end of it i don't think that gene hackman was ever a pedophile or did anything that a pedophile does...or ever molested any girls.....i think that gene hackman just has photography as a hobby...and wished he could have children...with monica...and took pictures of allsorts of things say in the neighbourhood including the smiles of children and things like that....if it was a woman taking pictures of smiling girls say on a swing would people think that that woman was a pedophile? lol funny thing huh...but if it's a man...then i guess people "like" to think for whatever reasons of their own..that there's something "dodgy" going on there...just one of those things

When they search his darkroom you can clearly see that he has many, many pictures of both men and women, both young and old. Remember, he wanted to make a 'photographic history' of the island, so naturally he has taken many pictures in many places. The girls were amongst them because they were beautiful and attractive. That is also the reason they were murdered. The real murderer raped them, Henry photographed them. In that sense it is no coincidence that they caught the eye of both men.

When he says that he likes young girls/women he states only a 'biological' fact. Almost everybody will feel more attraction to younger members of the species. From a Darwinian point of view this is logical because it promotes the survival of the species. But feeling a certain attraction and giving in to it in an inappropriate way are two different things. I think his situation is still more complicated: in young girls he sees also the children he doesn't have and would have loved (as a father) to bits. When his wife denies him sex, he seeks it with young prostitutes in a swift an angry way. His unfulfilled love for children is a separate emotion that eventually becomes mixed up with all the rest. I know, but life can be complicated.

So, was he actually a pedophile? He certainly loved children. So do most parents and so did Jesus. Did he have sex with persons under the culturally determined acceptable age? Almost certainly not: for that purpose he uses prostitutes.

His tragedy is that he is not a criminal but just a weak man and that he is needlessly frustrated in his deepest longings by his wife whom he nevertheless loves.