Wow, I have such a different understanding of what that ending meant.
Remember what Christopher Walken's character said, "We can't die, we just have the pain" and "You can't kill what's already dead."
She didn't die. She already was dead. But she was trying to keep her life before. After the failure of doing that at her graduation party she has now let that old life die, easy enough for a vampire to do since she's already dead.
So she was dead and buried. But she is still an existing vampire, how she got out of the grave we don't need to know. When she laid the flower on her own, now empty, grave, she was saying goodbye to trying to be human.
She didn't get cured. She did the opposite. She embraced her true self and learned to live in the sunlight like Christopher Walken by only feeding her hunger rarely according to her now strong will that her addiction created.
How long will this new state last for her?
Well, the film tells us in the last lines of the film as the lyrics of the final song repeat over and over, "Forever is a long time."
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nvasapper
12 years ago
Very interesting posting. You make some cogent observations. A question if I might- if she was abandoning her human side and embracing her true vampiric self, why would she seek to only satisfy her blood addiction rarely? Why wouldn't she give in to the desire and kill whenever she got hungry? Wouldn't she be embracing her true self by avoiding self-abnegation?
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SweetHotAngel
12 years ago
Should have checked here a long time ago. Oh well.
She WAS embracing her true self by controlling her vampirism. That's the whole point of the Christopher Walken character. But she wasn't abandoning her human side, she was abandoning her human LIFE. By giving up on trying to live out her human life and instead living as a vampire, she then had the power to control her addiction, the same way as Walken did, and thus embrace her human side. By trying to remain in her human life she was denying her addiction instead of controlling it, so it controlled her.
"Is it bright where you are? Have the people changed? Does it make you happy you're so strange?"
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MerovingianGoddess
10 years ago
I think H.S. Angel has a very accurate grasp on the concept of accepting the "new true self" and in actuality, she got a grip quite quickly! There is always a larger dog in a bigger yard and they will teach the naive confident young pup very quickly how it really is...
Delinquent Nancy*
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
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