What was supposed to be reality and.....
a dream? At the end?
I don't need no *beep* signature!
I came on here wondering the same thing! My thought was that him being off of his meds contributed to him dreaming up this new lady next door and her kid. But then I'm baffled about now years later why did his mom choose now to kill herself on the railroad. And was there really another woman his dad had because the pics now showed him as being alone in the pics. But the sheriff at the end does mention a woman lived in that house over 20-something years back. Maybe the husband never cheated with anyone but those darn cards that never lied convinced her that her husband cheated. Who knows?!
SC
I'm guessing he was being medicated for schizophrenia, and a lot of the things he saw / heard / felt / smelled / tasted were psychotic delusions or hallucinations of some sort. He thought they were very real, as they well might seem to him, but they were not. Some psychotics can realize that they are experiencing a hallucination, much like a person on hallucinogenic drugs generally know hallucinations from reality, but some patients cannot perceive the difference. The woman never existed, nor her child, nor the guys helping her move in. I'm no great expert on mental illness, nor were the writers, I suspect. That part of the story, the hallucinations (which he - and we - thought were very real at the time) was what I liked most.
The prescription he threw away just a short while after he picked up the two scrips at the pharmacy had fictional names for both the drug name and the trade name (and the use by date was in 2007, a year before the film was released, but that's probably a nitpick).
Mom was being medicated to (and washing whatever her scrip was down with maalox or pepto bismol, haha). She was also self-medicating with alcohol on top of that, which unfortunately isn't unusual in patients on psychiatric meds, if that's what meds she was on. Who knows, she might have just been taking meds for hypertension, but I suspect not, because she was definitely a few cans short of a case.
--
“There comes a point when seduction is over and force is actually being requested.”
-DD
LOL to "a few cans short of a case!" Very interesting points. It's one of those movies I'll need to watch again one day to see what I didn't pick up on the first time.
SC
I guess he was hallucinating. His painting of a box was in the house at the end.
Why with T.V. and all I keep in touch with everything.