Grabs hi power cable, gets shot with electricity, screams his head off (mostly gone anyway) and then he...VANISHES???? Are they saying he disintegrated? That's a lot of stuff to evaporate using just electricity.
shareJust imagine the smell! :) but your observation is correct, it struck me as odd to.
shareWhen I was a kid watching the movie, I thought that maybe he shrunk back to normal size after he died.
www.zazzle.com/suburban_arts
This is probably not the answer you were looking for, but here's what I think.
The film starts with the disappearance of Swanson's truck (following pursuit by an unseen force); it ends with Manning's vanishing, following his disappearance after the first picture (Swanson also disappears from the narrative not far in); along the way his sister Joyce, whom the first film asserts does not exist, appears to "drive" the inquiry, as the truck is seen driven by teenage Miguel. The whole movie is about the missing and the unseen.
In between Miguel and Joyce is hotheaded middle-ager Swanson, who wants to know where this teenager made off with his "goods." Ask any middle aged man (as was screenwriter George Worthing Yates, 57 at the time) what that might mean. (HINT: The cure now comes in the form of a thing called Viagra.) The context is postwar masculinity. The subtext is loss of virility (Manning referred to almost exclusively as the Colossal Man rather than by name throughout the picture). I'm not sure either Yates or Gordon are saying this is a bad thing.
Post-WWII (think the atom-bomb blast that kicked the Colossal duology into being), men found themselves questioning their position in the world and where their masculinity had gotten it and them. The Incredible Shrinking Man (and remember, "I'm not growing -- you're shrinking") was his reaction to the horror he had seen and, for our soldiers, been part of: taking himself out of the picture, leaving room for the emergence of headstrong women like Joyce Manning (who interestingly and for no reason shuts down one soldier's advances, as does the heroine of Gordon's BEGINNING OF THE END; Manning's fiancee in the original film is similarly unreachable). Just as Manning's grabbing the power lines that killed him in the climax was an act of suicide, Colossal Man's disappearance is an act of will, making way for the materialization of modern women.
Could it have something to do with the radioactive substance he was full of, making him disintegrate? Not trying to be funny at all, because the ending was sad, but his disintegrating was better than having him die by his bursting into flames.
shareI thought he just fell down but censors back then wouldn't allow them to show the big body lying on the ground.
share