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Mayfly December Romance
- Okay, so if John laments having to always eventually leave his partners and the children he's fathered, why does he keep doing it?
- It gets lonely... and he has normal urges like everyone else.
- He's a person. Every now and again he's going to do things that he knows might not be wise, like we all do, and he has a lot of time to do them in.
- Because in between marrying them and leaving them, he gets a few years at least of happiness, companionship and family.
- In regards to why John would have children he knows he will outlive and have to leave, it’s worth noting that protection (condoms) didn’t exist until the mid 19th century and so John would’t have been able to prevent unintentionally impregnating his partners until that point in history unless he chose to be celibate.
- Frankly, what everybody forgets when they talk about MayflyDecemberRomances is the fact that the immortal partner isn't sprinting through eternity, they just never stop walking. They wake up and experience every day in Real Time. Why wouldn't they want to experience love and happiness during some 60+ years of those days?
- It's worth noting that for maybe the first time in is life, he won't have to leave Sandy for that particular reason since she already knows that he doesn't age. She will, however, have to follow him in changing indentity and location every ten or so years if they stay together as a couple.
Why did Will Gruber have an unloaded gun in his pocket?
It doesn't seem plausible he had any notion of testing John's claims when he first showed up.
- There are many possible reasons. Some people carry guns for protection. As he said, "People do go around armed these days." In some cases, people will prefer to keep them unloaded since the idea is to act as a deterrent, not actually to be fired. Alternatively, his wife had just died and he may have been depressed. It's possible he was contemplating suicide and had acquired the gun for that reason (but not loaded it yet).
John’s Accent
John claims to have moved to the United States from France in 1890 shortly after Van Gogh’s death, that would mean that by the events of the film he has been in the United States just shy of 120 years. If we assume he already knew English in 1890 is 120 years enough time for him to develop a perfect American accent?, shouldn’t he still at least have a little bit of his French accent left?
- Given that real-life actors can learn accents in a matter of weeks, John likely wouldn't have much trouble, especially since by that point he'd already been very familiar with moving to new places and adapting his "cover."
- Getting rid of a non-native speaker's accent is completely different than a native speaker learning to imitate a regional or non-native accent. Arnold Schwarzenegger has lived in America for 40+ years and famously hasn't put much of a dent in his Austrian accent. But we have no way of knowing how proficient a person can get in mastering new languages after thousands of years of practice, or how well they'd be able to keep up with language drift for that matter.
- People also adjust their accent to their environment to fit in naturally. John would start pronouncing words like everyone else. Over time, he would shift as language does normally.
- Given that real-life actors can learn accents in a matter of weeks, John likely wouldn't have much trouble, especially since by that point he'd already been very familiar with moving to new places and adapting his "cover."
