Kisses girl


I was half watching this film and was wondering why Clint kisses the 12 year
old girl. Was he hallucinating or was he really attracted to her?

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I took it that IF the soldiers passing DID see them there they would just dismiss it as a couple of lovers.
Marianne

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It also kept her from calling out to the passing soldiers. He was a Yank soldier and she was a Southern young lady.

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The kiss silences the girl. It also shows us from the very start that McB is a character willing to manipulate any female in whatever way possible to achieve his ends.

We are supposed to feel uneasy that he kisses a 12 year old in this way.

The unpleasantness of his character deliberately tempers the misogyny of the piece.

Excellent film.

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[deleted]

Ooh...she wasn't really 12, right? I mean the actress? Cuz that's just wrong.

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Yeah, the actress (Pamelyn Ferdin) was actually eleven during the shooting.

Also, Eastwood and Siegel didn't inform her of the forthcoming kiss, so her reaction was "pure."

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Isn't that kinda...illegal?

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Sex with a girl that young is illegal; a kiss (especially for movie purposes) is fair game.

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[deleted]

Yes, he is manipulative from the start. That's the lovely thing about the title of this movie. First you think it's the ladies who are beguiled, but in the end, it's him. Think about it.

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best line of the movie " 12, then youre old enouch for kissing!"

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the irony: back in those days, girls of 12 and 13 got married. so in modern standards, that kiss was a shock. but back then: amy and clint (with the turtle as a witness) could have wed. remember, this was the 1800s.

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by SampanMassacre (Fri Feb 25 2011 09:21:17)

the irony: back in those days, girls of 12 and 13 got married. so in modern standards, that kiss was a shock. but back then: amy and clint (with the turtle as a witness) could have wed. remember, this was the 1800s



Ugh, I have enough of this male erotic fantasy that young girls were "fair game" back then in the goode olde days. Which also implies that the age of consent is arbitrary and actually neglectable.

Really the same argument comes from weird peadophilc pick up artists and men's rights activists: " back in middle age/stone age/ 1800, girls were married as young as.. ..so why are young girls off limts? not in my book they arent "


So after a bit of internet research:
the average age of marriage, taken from birthdates of women and marriage certificates reveals mean marriage ages of women to have been as follows:
1770-1837 25.1 years

during the 1500's the avg age for men was 26.1 and women 22.0 and during the 1900's the avg age for men was 25.9 and women 21.9


So yes, someone's grandparents might have married very young, but young marriages were probably on one end of the bell curve.


source:
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/family/marriage .html;jsessionid=E8C911E675B8229A8D139157A4B98090

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You are completely not getting it. There is nothing courtly going on here, and you should read the book to understand the villainy McB is working, here.

As for 'young girls' being fair game, just consider the US African American community, where 9 year old girls are sexually active. And the Latino community, where you have 34 year-old grandmothers, and 14 year-olds with 30 year-old boyfriends (the men consider the young teens "limpia" meaning "clean"). There is no fantasy for any normal man here, it is creepy and everyone on the board says so.

Save your outrage for an issue that actually needs some outrage, nobody is for pedophilia except pedophiles.

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6 Years late or not: Bravo!

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In the Muslim world, an unmarried girl of 12 is considered an old maid.:-)

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Your wit is astonishing in it's complexity and intelligence.
If only.


Glitter on the mattress, glitter on the highway...

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[deleted]

Not in 1864.
She could marry him too.

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[deleted]

I think he does this to illustrate what a cad this character is--how he will manipulate, charm and use anyone--how he has no scruples.

No he was not hallucinating, and no I do not think he was really attracted to her.

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I THOUGHT SHE WAS 6 OR SOMETHING COS SHE LOOKS TOO YOUNG 2B 12.

Jared Padalecki's mine and nobody else's

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[deleted]

[deleted]

Man why did he stop there he totally could have gotten to second base.

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Brad Pitt did the same with Kristen Dunst in Interview with Vampire. Its just a movie.

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He kisssed the girl solely to stop her possibly calling out to the Confederate soldiers. It could not have been sop that if they were seen they looked live a couple of lovers because (apart from her obvious age) he was dressed in his Union uniform

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My primary reaction is that he's been through a war and may not have seen a female in a long long time. Often I think we extrapolate that a kiss is representative of the sex we're not shown but here I'm not sure. "Old enough for kissing" may also mean "but not old enough for sex." And the girls are afraid of the Confederate soldiers as well. Like McBee, they may not have been with a woman in a long time. War reduces people to baser instincts, survival mode kicks in, and so on.

Not saying that other theories aren't plausible. He kissed her to keep from being detected, ok. Twelve wasn't that young in that era, ok. He's trying to form an alliance, sure. To me it's a *fantastic* moment of ambiguity that leaves you wondering if he's a good guy or a bad guy, and that's mirrored so many places in the film. Union good, confederate bad, or vice-versa? Man good and girls bad or vice-versa?

It's a real hodgepodge, and there are no straw men. That's what makes it great.


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[deleted]

I took it as he was trying the old distraction bit as a way to have he soldiers dismiss him as they pass. It was a little shocking, considering the girls age, but he did ask. Maybe if she had said ten, he wouldn’t have done anything at all, but it was more of desperation move (and she couldn’t yell). There was a similar scene in High Anxiety when Madelyn Khan grabbed Mel Brooks and kissed him to get the maid out of her room.

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Great shocking moment. He was manipulating her. She had saved his life and he was in it to save his life. It shows what he is about. It is Amy, the sweet little seeming innocent, who turns out not to be the sweetness and innocence that she projects at the beginning.

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It's not a big difference, but doesn't she tell him that she's 13? He says that's old enough to kiss, which, for the time period, would be true. Courting started very early. (I'm not sure if she says she's going to be that age, but she does say 13, not 12.)

However, for modern audiences, that was a great way to show his "snake-in-the-grass" nature, along with those flashbacks.

My maternal grandfather's mother was barely 13 when she got married and had 15 children. Since lifespans were much shorter back then, marriage and children had to be part of life much sooner. Also, people had larger families then because children often didn't survive till adulthood. A man sometimes married several times because a wife would be lost to childbirth/childbed fever or other illness, explaining why fairytales/folk stories often have motherless children. (For certain theorists: Disney is not out to get mothers. The stories started out that way.)

~~MystMoonstruck~~

"You must have rooster blood in you."

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Finally Mystmoonstruck,the voice of reality.

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