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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kahuna Burger" data-source="post: 1323990" data-attributes="member: 8439">I thought about contributing to the old thread, but since my entire post practically would have to ben blacked out it didn't seem worth it.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> I loved Specter. Though the father represents it as a mythical, magic town, sort of a heaven, the truth is just as lovely. One thing I haven't seen anyone comment on is that the same fantastic, romantic attitude that makes him tell the stories he does was what caused him to dedicate a huge amount of time, money and effort to saving the town, just so it would exist as something special again. The real effects of that romanticism I think are what the son starts to understand at the end, that his father's passion for life and the impossible touched people in real ways. The father comments on specter, as does the girl that he came once too early and once too late. The first time the girl he could love was still a child, and he was too full of life to enjoy the peace. The second time, his heart was already taken, and the peace was gone. While his wife was the only woman he would ever love, I sort of got the feeling that that was as much a function of the fathers romantic nature as their particular relationship. If he hadn't been too early and too late, the girl in Specter might have been his one and only, but by his nature, his one love was it.While I have some minor extenuating circumstance, I'll say without shame that I cried like a baby at the ending... The son's willingness to enter his father's world and help him see the ending of his life in the same romantic light that he had lived it was beautiful, and showed more simple love than anything else he could have done or said at that point. That some parts of the story were then reflected in the funeral was even better. Yes, the truth is that his father died in a hospital bed of inoperable cancer... and the truth is that his father escaped from the hopsital at the end and swam off to become a legend. I liked the funeral as well - seeing the real life versions of his father's fantastic characters and at the same time realizing that the truth really had been more fantastic than he would have credited even if his father told it straight. Even a few days before, he might have gone to those people and interrogated them on the absolute facts of his father as they knew him... by the end though he had accepted the romantic blend as a truth of its own. Does it matter if the Korean twins used to do a stage act where they contorted themselves to look cojoined, or if they were just twin singers who were very close emotionaly and in their joint career? Do we need to know what gesture of goodwill and friendship the father really offered to his ringmaster boss to turn the defensive and outwardly angry man into his friend? I don't think so. The son came to realize that while he had no idea on the details, he did know his father as a man if he just paid attention to what he was being told. I honestly feel bad for the veiwer whose take on the ending was that the son just "accepted his father was a liar". I think what he leanrned and accepted about his father was a lot more wonderful than that...Kahuna Burger</blockquote>

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