Did his wife really wake up?

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I think it can be viewed either way and works. Either she remained alive for a few minutes after being shot in the head, not unheard of or what you saw was his imagination living the last few moments of her. She had a complete blank stare and never blinked during that sequence and I took it as she was dead and he imagined the spoken words. But that's just what works better for me.

Yeah guys, but there was NO wound on ANY part of her head, even when he hugged her at the end of the scene, her head is clean. So it had to be symbolic. The blood is shown dripping from her head, as he clearly remembers it (referenced in the beer sequence at the beginning of the film), yet no wound whatsoever is shown. had to be symbolic...but, you never know. the filmmakers forgot to put a puncture wound in Val's chest when he was on the stretcher at the end of the film, so maybe they forgot to add a gaping hole in his wife's head too..lol..

I've got a friend that just got a degree in neuroscience, and he constantly complains whenever someone gets shot in the head on film- they ALWAYS die immediately. Apparently a fatal head shot (not that its uncommon)is far, far, far from a definite thing. Not to mention the fact that a few miles from me, some guy got robbed at an ATM, was shot in the head three times, and is now perfectly fine.

I just watched this the other night and, although I can't be certain, I don't remember any symbolic scenes. That is to say, no scenes that showed events that we are meant to believe take place outside of reality. People do survive gunshots to the head and it isn't unreasonable to think that it took his wife a minute to die.

My interpretation of the scene with Kujo's heist is that they wanted to show the difference between how Kujo imagined it would go and how it actually went. It's a realist's approach to a Hollywood cliche, cutting between the plan in action and the character explaining it. Kujo has what he thinks is a foolproof plan but gets taken down by Murphy's Law at every step. It's the film's own version of "the best laid plans of mice and men".

During WW2 a Japanese pilot named Saburo Sakai was shot through his skull with an American pilot's .50 cal bullet in a dogfight. He somehow managed to regain control of his severely damaged Zero and while blinded in one eye and with the left side of his body paralyzed flew almost five hours back to a Japanese airfield.

He never regained vision in his eye but recovered enough to go on to fly again in more combat missions. He was a national treasure and hero and died at age eighty five. I believe gunshot wounds to the head have about a three percent survival rate in trauma wards but there are incredible stories out there.

" Don't that picture look dusty?"

well shot in the head is really a nasty thing. your skull gets imploded into your brains, so itsp retty much instant-death. the only way people ahve suvived gunshots was when bulelts bounced off their skull, which is extremely rare and never have happened from close distance (over long distance bullets loose a lot of inertial and thus bounce back is more possible)

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"Common sense is not so common."
- Voltaire

It probably was meant to appear like it really did happen. You could see blood drip off her hair as she "regained consciousness" (as you phrased it, I personally dont think she ever lost it)