Trying to escape the crowds at the Lafayette-Lehigh football game, I went to see "Stranger Than Fiction" this afternoon. It's a flawed movie, but it resonates with so many themes that I've been thinking about recently that it's hard for me to be absolutely objective about it. This entry, therefore, will be even more of a work in progress than many of the others; I'm afraid I'm using this venue to work through my thoughts -- both on the movie and on the questions upon which it impinges.
For example, I recently had occasion to note in an e-mail that I sometimes feel as if I'm a minor character in a play, under the false impression that the dramatic action revolves around him. Having read Stoppard, I recognize my mistake; nevertheless, I'm often powerless to alter my perceptions.
While watching the movie, I was immediately mindful of that feeling of mine. Then, researching reviews in order to write this entry, I noted that, in his review of the film in the Chicago Tribune, Michael Phillips writes that the movie's screenwriter, Zach Helm, cites Stoppard as an influence:
When screenwriter Zach Helm was a young man--younger, anyway; he's now 31--he gravitated to the impishly articulate works of Tom Stoppard, as so many young writers do. In particular he fell for the early Stoppard play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," in which a couple of minor characters from Shakespeare's "Hamlet" mull their roles in someone else's tragedy, which unfolds at the whim of an unseen but all-powerful writer.
For those who don't know the plot of the film, here's Phillips's useful summary:
The best scenes in director Marc Forster's picture are those between Ferrell, playing a fellow who hears a strange voice narrating in his head, and Dustin Hoffman, portraying a literature professor who appears to exist on a diet of coffee and tight-lipped inquiry. Ferrell's Harold Crick lives a deeply routinized existence as an Internal Revenue Service auditor. One day he realizes that the female voice in his head commenting on his workaday habits is actually a novelist, narrating Crick's life story. Crick is a character in a book being written by reclusive author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson).
Shadowed by a publisher-appointed adviser (Queen Latifah), Eiffel cannot find a fulfilling way to eliminate Crick. The auditor, who is smitten with [Ana Pascal,] the kind-hearted baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal) whose tax returns he is studying, gleans advice from the professor (Hoffman) about how to avoid death by literary execution. Crick needs to know: Is he in a tragedy or a comedy? Can he alter his own literary fate?
Most reviewers, like Phillips, seem to focus on the themes of free will and determinism that the movie raises. I, however, was struck by a different set of themes: the question of who is responsible for one's becoming the person one is and the question of whether the achievement of narrative unity within one's life could be a way to give value to one's life. I'll deal here with the first theme and save the second one for a later post.
I recently had occasion to discuss with a friend whether one could become the person one is due, in some large measure, to another's influence. My friend argued against it, for two reasons. First, explaining the transformation in that way would ascribe a degree of influence to the putative cause of the transformation that no real person could actually have. And second, such an explanation would involve selling the transformed person short. Rather, we should understand all of that person's qualities as being in place with or without the influence of another.
The film, however, very nicely illustrates the ways in which our interactions with others can cause us to alter our understanding of who we are -- without having to ascribe undue influence to those others or to sell ourselves short. I accepted the narrative premise of the film that Harold Crick was inspired to grow in certain ways -- to "make his life musical," for example -- due to Ana Pascal's influence. However, accepting this requires, I believe, accepting that it was not simply Harold's mere impressions of Ana character -- some mere image in the love-besotted Harold's mind -- that caused these changes. Rather, those changes were a response to real qualities of the Ana's -- her openness, her kindness, her generosity -- sparking corresponding, and complementary, changes in Harold.
Similarly, though Harold would not have succeeded in changing himself were it not for the role played by the Gyllenhaal character in sparking his transformation, nor would he have succeeded in becoming who, at the end of the film, he is, without his already possessing the qualities necessary for his becoming that person. In Harold's genuineness, his sweetness and innocence, we see the seeds for the person he becomes.
How did Elizabeth Bishop put it? "Yes, perhaps/ there was a secret, powerful crystal at work inside."
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