Weirdly, angst over the platonic bed scene featuring Ponyboy and Sodapop still persists. “What would 2021 social media make of two brothers snuggling in bed together? I’m thinking nothing good,” Amy Amatangelo wrote in Paste’s review of the restored “Complete Novel.” Still, the writer reasonably concludes that “there’s such a pure innocence to that scene.” Macchio seemingly agreed, telling EW, “My brother and I are a couple of years apart. There was some form of affectionate comfort.”
As Macchio put it, “I did not find that scene out of the realm of reality.” Frankly, the idea that anyone would be perturbed by the scene, in the ’80s or today, seems to say more about the people watching it and the cultural fears of the era than it does about the story itself. It’s a sweet, brief scene shot in near-darkness that can’t be mistaken for anything but a moment of brotherly mentorship and closeness. Though actress Diane Lane says she thinks Warner Bros. trimmed the movie to 90 minutes to allow for more theatrical showings, Coppola ultimately concedes that the exclusion of the late night chat scene, in particular, is his bad. “I, as well as everybody else in the world, had a lot to learn about the beauty and complexity of the human heart,” he concluded in 2021.
