It was a strange moment, but I felt similarly- even on a simpler level though. She’s his mom and as Feego said he’s always felt that connection with her. It ultimately leaves a strange option open that it doesn’t matter within the context of their relationship who she
really is because she’s his mother, not only an alien sleeper agent who’s been triggered by these events as our perspective has been in the last act. The look brings us back to the start and with a wider scope, and makes us consider that relativism which also contributes to the ideas raised by zedz in his initial post:
zedz wrote: ↑Thu Jan 23, 2020 3:33 pm
If there's actually no real difference between 'Us' and 'Them' (and note that the film is pointedly coy about how it identifies the two groups - e.g. "we're Americans"), and subordination is kind of random and situational, this is presumably why the grand experiment failed and was abandoned.
That idea that they’re all “Americans” spins a weird kind of humanist yarn in valuing all worth while contrasting for the already created dissonance and conflict amongst the separation of privilege/class within the narrative, as well as the separation of protagonists/antagonists on a viewer-friendly level in our standard relationship with such a narrative wearing the cap of an audience’s role. This final glance shakes the audience awake from those artificial filmic, and ideological real-world, layers to the truth of that ambiguous assignment of righteousness and also undercuts it as irrelevant when we are left with a familial bond between a mother and son.