did he commit suicide and saw his life flash infront of him
or foresee the consequences of the school massacre and pussied out..
Neither.
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities. Voltaire
at the start you hear what sounds like the police interviewing him so....but then theres a gunshot in the last school scene but the girl comes out alive....then the rabbit says something like this were it ends ? so itsleft open
No to all of these. He has a very realistic dream about the massacre which reveals to him it's not going to solve anything and he never wanted to be a murderer even as the child forced to kill the white rabbit. Then he wakes up in his car and never goes in to the school with his gun.
sharehis is a story about a teen having an internal battle inside him between good and evil, while influenced by being a bully victim, loneliness and childhood guilt for killing a rabbit.
The film focuses immensely on turning to faith and turning one's life around - Harlan's dad Darrell becomes a born again Christian, his girl crush Julie rehabs and starts attending church and his high school enemy Dayton changes his ways and begins going to church too.
Near the beginning when Harlan attends church, he comments that he wants God to talk to him but feels like God isn't. With the fact that he is an outcast, he turns to much needed company and direction from those dark magazines he reads.
In the end, it looks like Harlan went in for therapy. The voice interviewing him in the beginning sounds like a therapist too and not an interrogator. This leads to the belief that Harlan did not carry through with the massacre after all and that the white rabbit (God) spoke to him.
Thanks, Mgillock and tristanp25. I felt as though I had lost the thread right at the end. Your posts together explained everything in a way that made sense.
sharetristan and MG have the same interpretation that i had. very deep movie. the very last scene was with him still in the car so i dont think he did those things. had it not ended with him in the car and just ended with him talking to the rabbit watching his life go by, i then would have thought that he did it.
shareThe very last scene is in the woods with the rabbit who tells him it is time to go. I thought that was a weird line considering the voiceover at the beginning of the movie sounds like he was talking to a therapist. The rabbit line sounds like Harlon would kill himself so it's really kind of ambiguous to me.
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The ending is ambiguous, and leaves the viewer to come up with his/her own conclusion on what happen after he wakes up. The dream was more like a life-review and his consciousness (the white rabbit, who is almost like Jiminy Cricket) foreshadows what will happen if he went threw with the shooting. The question remains: did he or didn't he. Personally, I think it could go either way... his disadvantage on changing his life (compared to the others in his life) was that he was extremely mentally ill, and treatment for his condition went uncared for for years. He could end up like his father and Julie, turning their lives around, or like his best friend and kill himself... in the end, the answer lies in the viewer's interpretation.
shareWell I think the shooting sequence seemed to be pretty surreal, so I'd go with interpretations on the side that he didn't actually go through with it.
shareI listened to the DVD commentary with the director and he said at first that he didn't want the ending to be ambiguous so originally the last scene wasn't in there and he really fought for it not to be added, but once it was shown to the test audience and they loved it he decided to keep it in. He said that people could still decide if he went through with the shooting after having the vision of it.
share