i think similar to this riddle:
A man and his son are driving in a car one day, when they get into a fatal accident. The man is killed instantly. The boy is knocked unconscious, but he is still alive. He is rushed to hospital, and will need immediate surgery. The doctor enters the emergency room, looks at the boy, and says...
"I can't operate on this boy, he is my son."
So, the question is, how is this possible? The answer is simple: the doctor is the boy's mother. This riddle has been told for a long time, to illustrate how common gender stereotypes are in our society. What's fun, is to tell this to closet feminists like my mother or sister, and watch them fail to get past the stereotype of thinking "doctor" implies "man".
Look at the words in the sentence "I can't operate on this boy, he is my son." We are being subconsciously cued into expecting a male. Try this riddle out but change the gender of the child. Use "I can't operate on this girl, she is my daughter", which should in theory introduce no additional expectation about the doctor's gender. It will however be much easier to work out. Or make it neutral, "I can't operate on this kid; this is my child".
Likewise with this movie, I think our minds all played tricks on us because the cop called in and said a male was in the trunk, so later on, when she said "daughter" we were all confused.
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infamousnfamous
16 years ago
Very good point...my mom told methat riddle when i waas little and i thought it was the smartest thign in the world once she gave me an explanation much like yours...but to answer everyone's question [again] it is 'child' being said and yes i was one of the hundreds of ppl who thought she said son too. i just has a wtf expression for the rest of the movie then when i finally saw it come on cable i taped it and rewinded and heard 'child'. Weird huh?
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CocktailQueen
16 years ago
That's a great riddle, I'd never heard it before. You're right, it is quite similar to what happened in this movie. I still am in awe that SO many people misheard "child" for "son". It wasn't just one person, or even a handful of people. So many threads have been created on this, so many people have responded to those threads saying they were confused too. I know it was why I originally came to this board, to see if my father and I were crazy or if others made the same mistake we had!
Don't mind me, I'm just really intrigued by the human mind. And that such a large amount of people jumped to the same conclusion, despite the line being uttered perfectly clearly and concisely... it's just astounding. It's a shame this movie is so small and relatively unknown, because it would be fantastic to have this little mind-game explored, explained and discussed in more detail. :)
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ziocantante
16 years ago
me too!!!
words are just words, we attach a meaning to them,
I have been living in France for a while, then in England for a while and I'm originally from Italy. Believe it or not, I can tell you whether I've watched a movie or I haven't, but I can't tell you in what language it was dubbed when I watched it (unless I can remember where I was when I watched it)
my brain just recorded the meaning, not the words themselves
in this movie we saw a male corpse, so we were expecting a male child
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kawnqra
16 years ago
"I can't operate on this boy, he is my son."
I just saw this movie again yesterday, and I came back to see if people were still talking about the child/son/daughter thing. I was one of the unlucky ones who just heard what she said, but many of the people I talk to didn't. It's neat.
Anyway, maybe a couple years ago, on a thread basically the same as this one (now washed away), I used the exact same riddle to explain this phenomenon. Weird, right? I wonder if this topic has been made over and over and over again by different people, always with a mention of that brain teaser.
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ashtontylo
15 years ago
Unless of course Cherie was a teenage pre-op transexual,all her boyfriends were trannie lovers,the pregnancy was "hysterical" because she really believed she was female so,yeah,Barbara Hershey could have said "son".At the same time she might have been molested by her father, hence her agressive behaviour towards him.A film can be read in a number of ways.
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bruce73
15 years ago
Nah, I just think Barbara Hershey needed new glasses...
Seriously, just watched this and, yes, I thought it was her son too. But I don't think it's due to "mishearing." It's how we process the information that is being presented to us, especially when events are happening fast and we are trying to keep up, put things in order, just make sense of what is going on. So we do probably hear "child," but immediately assume it's the dude on the road. So now "child" has become "son" in our minds, as if it's a fact. That's why we become confused when a daughter is mentioned, because it doesn't jibe with what we "know" as the facts.
I'm sure this is similar to many eye-witnesses being proven wrong, after they've claimed 100%, under oath in a courtroom, they saw what they saw. Once you "know" something is a fact, you seldom question it. Why should you?
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southpaw734
15 years ago
I think that the confusion might come from the guy's line right after that. When she says "I'll kill you for what you did to my daughter?," the guy is laying on the ground after falling over the bowling ball and says "Daughter?" before the scene changes.
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That-Writer-Girl
14 years ago
I know I'm late, but...
I just recently watched this movie on Netflix with my boyfriend. I heard her say "son" and he looked at me and said, "I thought she said 'child'."
But as far as the confusion with "Daughter?," I think that he said that because he knows that the body that he thought he hit was a male and as far as he knew, that was the only person hit by a car in their town.
When she said child, he assumed she meant the body that he thought he hit and it being male, he was confused when she said daughter and not son.
Took me a little while to gather all that, but in reading these posts, I think I figured it out.
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axy23
10 years ago
that seems like a rational explanation to me too. I also heard 'son', and actually came here to check why did she say son when she had only one daughter :D
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flynn-128-778191
9 years ago
Well it is 2015 and this movie is still tricking people into thinking she said son. A lot of it is due to the character's surprise that he expresses when she says "daughter". I wonder if the director deliberately incorporated this neat little psychological trick to make us feel like we were in a drunken state, like the character was at the time.
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paperdollz
8 years ago
When he is surprised by the word "Daughter" because when he put the body in the trunk he knew it was a guy . The face was messed up but it was a guy so he was extremely confused . Her daughter was hit by those dudes in the van.
She said my only child in the beginning then said daughter
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