Dave:
I don't think anyone is trying to insult anyone else, or say that there is something "wrong" with those who (mis)remember seeing the item in question. I've seen the film numerous times on cable, VHS and broadcast and have
never seen this item. I have seen the text coda every single time. I suspect that said coda calls up a
mental image, and that is what everyone "recalls". That more than one person has this recollection is not evidence that it is true. I can think of two examples right off the top of my head in which
numerous people recalled something that was simply, factually, incorrect, and all remembered it the same way.
Famous example first: nearly half the survivors of the
Titanic sinking gave sworn testimony that the ship sank in one piece. The others all swore that it broke in two, with the stern sinking after the rest of the ship. Which group was right couldn't be determined until Ballard's expedition finally found the shipwreck. Nearly all of the contemporary "artist's conceptions" of the disaster showed the ship going down intact - which is why all films prior to Cameron's showed the ship sinking in one piece.
Silly example, but closer to the present case: TNT picked up the reruns of
Babylon 5 in 1998. When they reached a particular episode in the fourth season, which had only run once in first-run syndication, dozens of messages appeared on the TNT
B5 Forum protesting cuts the network had made. Everyone was very upset that they had excised a scene depicting the wedding of two of the characters.
That scene never existed. It was never shot, it was never even written. The executive producer deliberately had it take place off-screen rather than devote an entire episode to it (as he inevitably would have had to.) He discussed this decision in a moderated usenet group devoted to the show
at the time the episode originally aired.
And yet there were arguments for
days, with people swearing left, right and center that they had seen this wedding, many of them even describing the scene in detail. (The fact that no two of the descriptions matched up was further evidence that it was a false memory.) In the present case we're dealing with a single image, and no one has attempted to describe anything (clothing, for instance) in any detail, so I wouldn't expect similar evidence to emerge from this thread.
But this business of our minds "filling in the blanks" is a well-known and well-documented phenomenon. It is one of the reasons that eye-witness testimony in court is often unreliable. I would not be at all surprised to learn that many people had constructed the same false memory based on the content of the film and that last title card.
Warning: Spoiler! (Click to show)(Our minds could easily reconstruct a believable "image" just from our knowledge of what old photographs look like, and how the characters involved appeared in the movie. If I had to guess the "template" most people unconciously used for this, I'd suggest Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid rather than anything from TAT or other films involving McDowell and Steenburgen.)
Given that as many people seem
never to have seen the item in question as did in this thread, and that it does not exist on the DVD or VHS versions, I'd say the "burden of proof" is on those who saw it (or think they did), and that evidence of its existance needs to be produced to settle the argument in favor of "it was there." Absent that the default position should be "it wasn't". Because it is often impossible to
prove a negative (can you
prove that Mars isn't inhabited by intelligent, cave-dwelling psychic frogs who breath carbon dioxide?) those who are making the positive assertion need to provide the proof. Those taking the other side
can't, because their position is based on the
lack of evidence.
Regards,
Joe
