MovieChat Forums > Densha otoko (2005) Discussion > *Contain's Spoiler* Significance of scen...

*Contain's Spoiler* Significance of scene near ending.


Just like to ask for those of you that have seen the movie, about the scene near the ending.

It's about 1hr 35min into the film right after Densha tells Hermes that he wants to tell her about his friends. The scene then cuts back to an earlier scene when he still looks geeky in his green jacket and a young school girl is sleeping on his shoulder.

Densha looks down and sees a train pass (?) that he thinks belongs to the sleeping school girl and picks it up and puts it on her lap. The girl wakes up and Densha rushes away to the doors.

The only difference here now is that the school girl gives the train pass(?) to the lady sitting next to her (implying that it belonged to the lady) and the lady in actual fact is Hermes. Hermes thanks the girl and then looks up towards the train door and I guess catches a glimpse of geeky Densha. She continues to go back to her reading as if she hasn't seen anything.

The movie ends with Densha walking down the train platform and the train leaving the station.

My question is, what's the significance of having such a scene to end the movie?? Is it to say that Hermes would only care/look at Densha only after his make over??
Anybody have any idea??

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I think it's to show that they were meant to be together. Like even before the train incident, they already had some sort of link together.. I dunno i think it's an asian thing. we asians believes in destiny, there's a saying called "love a thousand miles away is linked by a thin thread" It's like love could just happen no matter if you intend to look for it or not... ooops i think i am babbling now :P hope you know what i mean :P

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I agree. The last few minutes were a flashback showing that they were destined to meet. :)

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At first, I thought the whole movie was only a daydream by Densha. But then, I agree with tickle-3, I think it's a destiny kind of thing, like they're meant to be or something.

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A good parallel that easily comes to mind is male and female leads of "My Sassy Girl" unknowingly encountering each other in the train.

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Could also be that she knew he was there and planted it to see if him being nice was just a one time thing, though that could be too simple, but it's one interpretation.

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[deleted]

hey have you guys watched past the credits, if you have seen the tv series, the after-credits of the movie is really cool.

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I hate to be cynical, but I see it as saying that everything was something he made up in the chatroom. An otaku fantasy rather than a real life story. The
Hermes character also lacks any actual personality traits. She is only a projection of his imagination. He see women on the train, but he can only dream about them and write about his fantasies on the internet. That seen is also much more realistic than all the other scenes where he is dating her and other "otaku overcomes" scenes. Take for example also the scene where the hikikomori gets on a bus with the sakura trees in bloom and everything is rosy. The movie also plays with fantasy and dreamlike elements a lot which sort of understates this view.

I'm sure you will all disapprove of this way of seeing this movie, but I suspect that the filmmaker actually intended to add this sort of ambiguity to underscore the actual fact that most people like denshaotoko just dream about romance without actually experiencing it. For every otaku who succeeds (as the real life denshaotoko actually did) there are hundreds of thousands who do not.

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The dream was actually of little girls not Densha's.
She was sleeping leaning on his shoulder and whole film was just a dream of hers. The ending is important because it shows him walking away from the train not doing anything...

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Actually, if you watch the scene after the credits, you will see that it was not a dream, and he has in fact succeeded.

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I have a different interpretation. For those of you who didn't stay all the way to the end of the credits, there is a crucial short scene after all the credits have rolled. We cut back to the train in the same setting as when he first met "Hermes". She is sitting there being accosted by the drunk man, just as before. But the shy, geeky guy is played by a different actor and looks different. He stands up to stop the drunk, just as before and the drunk turns on him, very belligerently. As the drunk is about to hit the young geeky guy, he is stopped by a calm, confident, well dressed young man. It is the actor from the main movie with his stylish haircut, suit, and no glasses! He winks at the shy geeky guy and says "It's okay. Don't worry." (or something like that) as the train pulls into a station and he hustles the drunk out the door without much fuss.

Again, for those who don't know the origins of this story line, it was written up in an Internet chat room as a first-hand account of a shy geek's blossoming self-worth and first love. It caught the attention and interest first of other members of the chat community and then the general public as the media picked up the story.

However there is no way of knowing whether the autobiographical account in the chat room was real or just a piece of creative writing by an anonymous author (for a more recent example, think of the LonelyGirl15 hoax on YouTube that caught on like wildfire as supposedly real musings of some young lady and then turned out to be a scripted fiction).

So you can watch the story play out as a real development, with the boy finding himself and his love (ie: The Internet story was a true autobiographical diary). Or you can theorize that the whole thing was a fantasy of that shy boy, based on his own musings about the people he saw on the train one day (the end of the movie before the credits, where he gets off the train and never meets the girl). Everything we just saw was his own "What if?" scenario.

Or you can view the Internet story as a piece of fiction made up by a much more confident, outgoing sort of person who would want to exercise his storytelling prowess on an anonymous community. He saw this geeky young man grappling with a drunk on the train one day and stepped in to resolve things quickly and quietly. But what if he hadn't been there? What was that shy boy like? How could his story have played out? The rest of the movie is his fiction about the train incident and these people he never really met.

The filmmaker, like the rest of us except the original Internet author, doesn't know which answer is true. So he gives us all three possibilities. We don't even have to choose one as the truth. It's enough to be able to think about them and wonder.

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The scene at the END of the credits was a preview of sorts for the Train Man TV series. In other words -- it was NOT a dream. The original Train Man DID succeed.

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Yes, za_kannushi, I think you are a little cynical. I saw that scene suggesting that all this wonderful stuff had not yet happened, but Trainman could now envision it as achievable. The girlfriend-to-be is seated on the other side of the schoolgirl, and she notices him and looks interested. Now it will be up to our protagonist to make it real.

Very charming movie and a nice way to spend a couple of hours.

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I was a little confused by that scene as well. My first thought was similar to yours, za kannushi. I was a little unsatisfied with that thought, so I went and watched the first showing of that incident (at the beginning of the film). The way I see it, that incident clearly happens BEFORE the drunk-man incident.

I have to agree with some of the others here...that there was some sort of destiny involved between these two.

While your concluding comments are probably correct, I don't think this was what the director was intending to say here.

Also, someone mentioned that it was the school-girl's dream. That really can't be because there are too many layers involved. It seems unlikely that she would dream about all of the other characters in such detail: the nurse, the couple, the three geeks. (Anyone notice that the school girl was played by the little girl in NOBODY KNOWS?) A great film - btw.

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Correct.
Sad, but correct.
We all want a happy Hollywood ending to the film (and our lives).
But we all (at least all the people I ever personally knew) don't get it.
We all are terrified.
(If I do not speak for you, please ignore this as the ravings of an inferior man.)
Some use drugs to escape the fear, or alcohol,
others use religion, education, sex, abuse, capitalism, murder, war, therapy,
(and)/or computers, animé, sports, working out, fame, books, acting, directing.
We are all so fragile, sweet, and gentle...like the Japanese, like George Bush.
It's only a movie. An interesting movie, not a great movie.
But it's a documentary.

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It was a pleasure watching this movie. Its pleasantness (or Japaneseness) was a journey of niceties. Having being gently whisked in the bowl of love, however the ending made me drop the dish almost. 'Could this really have been a dream?' i thought. And you start hurling abuse at the editors of the movie. However once you roll past the end credits you see our otaku in his designer hair cut once again, and you can finally exhale. The significance is probably a low jab to your abdomen just to shake off that lovenest that being growing on your shoulder during the film and wake you up and to realise it all may have been Fate playing a diamond hand to our sweet couple.

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I believe it is to show that Hermes has been chasing Train Man in the same way that he has been lusting after her.

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The final scene in this movie bothered me terribly. It was as if the screenwriters were saying that the entire movie you had just become so immersed in for the past hour and a half was nothing more than a dream. The after-credits scene seemed like nothing more than an intentional "outtake".

My roommate is a fan of Japanese cinema. When I told him about the ending, he said that these sorts of left-field twist endings are very common.

Oh, well... if it was intended to be a flashback and a post-foreshadowing of fate, cool. Either way, I thought the entire movie, minus the ending, was phenomenal!

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You see this sort of thing in a lot of Asian films. Honestly, I felt it was just trying to be clever for clever's sake.

Expecting a "true" meaning or for everything to make sense is a Western movie-goer's viewpoint. In my experience, most Asian filmmakers assume their audience will accept what is happening without the need to ask why it is happening.

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