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gde061 (2)
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In interest of up front disclosure, the only reason I joined this site was to reply to this 13 year old thread with my own thoughts on the matter. BTW so nice to find a site that doesn't achieve stuff that is worth discussing. But about the post length limit...?!
I watched this film last night for the first time since it came out in the 80s. Back then, it was so much consensus that they lived, for the reasons mentioned above: Paddy was wrong/lying, but mainly the crewman's statement that they are "just asleep". But as an older, wiser, and more appreciative of the many religious metaphors in the film, version of myself watched the film last night, I felt that it had to be more than a mere coincidence that at various points in the film, characters use being asleep as a euphemism for death. Actually more than a euphamism, it's used in a religious sense in that the body is asleep but the person's spirit is alive in heaven. So, as their father had previously discussed with the children (and maybe even the members of the crew who find the dingy in the end with him) that dying is going to sleep, when they find the people they've been looking for for a decade, and they are both dead, would you expect "yup, dead as a doornail?" Remember, in the time the books were written, the entire Western audience for those books would have believed in heaven and the afterlife as firmly as they would believe that grasping a hot iron would burn your hand. That's how real it was to them. So in my opinion, and as supported by the unambiguous opening of the second book, the author intends them to mortally perish. It fits the plot arc where Eden is found by children ignorant of sin, but they cannot exist in the universe of Adam and Eve which contains the knowledge of sin. The trouble is in the way the line is delivered. And in that, I say that the director and/or studio "doctored it" to suit a 1980s audience that would not have found "sleeping with God" a happy ending.
The people writing that "consensus" are self-absorbed repeaters of conventional wisdom.
We are living in an age of neo-puritanism. Part of the ever present virtue signaling framework adopted by Hollywood. We are also living in a narrow-minded age of revisionist judgementalism. Just like folks cannot comprehend the compassion and intentions of remarks by leaders that are today considered racist, these same self-proclaimed intellectuals cannot adopt the perspective of someone living in 1980, on the heals of the free-love, burn-your-brassier, let your "flower children" run around in the warm sunshine naked. Many of the things seen in this film were sights you might see in the real world. Toddlers ran around in people's yards naked all the time. There was no obsession with sun-screen. There was no "baby Gap" to swaddle your kids in conspicuous consumerism.
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