Stranger Than Fiction: The Human Condition

 

Stranger Than Fiction Movie; Will Ferrell; Psychology of Stranger than Fiction; Psychoanalysis of Stranger than Fiction; Meaning of Stranger than Fiction

 

Stranger Than Fiction has been recommended to us so many times that when the Reluctant Wife and I talked about watching it, we assumed we had.  It is Will Ferrell’s “serious” movie and many many have suggested it is worth viewing.  The particular suggestion this time came from a patient who was noticing the ways in which episodes in his life kept repeating themselves with variations and suggested it as a work that played with the issues that are part and parcel of time travel.  A quick read of the plot synopsis clarified that we hadn't, in fact, watched it.  Intrigued, we decided to enter the world of Harold Crick (Ferrell).

Harold Crick is an IRS agent.  He is meticulous, organized and bland.  He has no significant attachments to anything or anyone except, Emma Thompson’s narrating voice-over seems to intimate, his watch.  That this mechanical man should be connected to a mechanism makes sense in a sort of sterile and reductive way.  Is he really this bland?

By the way, I used to live across the street from an IRS agent.  She was anything but bland – and her husband – OMG – he was brilliant – he had written some amazing books – and tempestuous.  He would fly into a rage on regular occasions when people would turn around in his driveway (we lived at the end of a dead end with no turn around).  While the agent was not as volatile as her husband, she was not nearly as bland as Harold – they were an intriguing, vibrant and slightly scary couple.

The odd thing about the narration of Harold’s life is that not only can we hear it, he can, too.  When he stops the actions that are being narrated (like brushing his teeth while he counts the brushstrokes), the narration stops, too.  This is, not surprisingly, eerie and more than a bit distracting.

Wanting to get at the basis of what is going on, Harold consults with a psychiatrist.  She, rather flat-footedly, diagnoses him as schizophrenic and wants to prescribe anti-psychotics to make the voice stop.  Harold, to his credit, does not agree with this diagnosis.  She, somewhat oddly, then suggests that he consult with a literary maven (though I am a psychologist, I would have talked to the guy.  Was this a commentary on the state of psychiatry where, if I don’t have a pill to help you, I can’t be of use?  I know that some psychiatrists are much more versatile than that, but I do think this may be a common perception of the field at this point…).

Thank goodness, for the sake of the movie, Harold finds Jules Hibert (perfectly played by Dustin Hoffman), a professor of English Literature.  They engage in a conversation and matter of factly conclude that Harold is a character in a novel – and that he should find the novelist in order to find out what his fate will be.

Meanwhile, Harold has been assigned to the case of Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a quirky baker who, on a variation of Thoreau’s moral rejection of the government, has intentionally not paid her entire tax bill because she only wants to support a portion of what the government is doing (though I think she significantly understates the portion of the federal budget that is related to the armed services).  The mechanical Harold is, of course, taken with the do-gooding Ana and, this being Hollywood, the do gooding, vivacious and attractive Ana is curious about what sort of heart beats in the breast of this mechanical man.

Harold’s research with Hibert, meanwhile, takes a dark turn.  As he tries to determine whether he is in a comedy or a tragedy – and sees signs of both (e.g. this must be a comedy because he is smitten with Ana and she might be with him), Hibert delivers the judgement, once they determine that the author is Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson, of course), that he will die – soon – as all of her characters die at the end of her books.  Hibert enjoins Harold to live the remainder of his life as fully as he can, Crick proceeds to do this – while also setting off to be in touch with his author.

We, of course, have been following the author, Eiffel, as she tries to figure out how best to kill her character.  This dilemma has caused her to miss deadlines that the publisher has imposed and so they have sent out Penny Escher (Queen Latifah) to help her finish the book.  Eiffel has the elements – there is a little boy, and a bus driver, and a concerned father – and there is an apple, but how these elements come together is escaping her – tormenting her even.  Escher doesn’t care about art or hang ups – she is a midwife and works to get the baby delivered.

Just as the ending has fallen into place, and as Eiffel is writing it out, Crick calls.  Unnerved, but convinced that she is actually talking to her character, Eiffel gives him the manuscript.  Crick, unable to read it himself, delivers it to Hibert. 

Hibert, with a straight face, pronounces it Eiffel’s masterpiece and he clarifies to Crick that he must accept his fate, which is to die, because to do otherwise would interfere with the artistic integrity of Eiffel’s work.  In order to create an immortal version of himself, Crick must die.  And, by the way, he will die anyway – so why not die heroically?

Meanwhile, Crick has stated his desire for Pascal.  He has also played the guitar and sung for her – and Pascal has discovered that his heart is not just interesting but desirable, and they have become lovers.

Crick, by virtue of having set his watch wrong, arrives at the bus stop early, in time to be able to save a boy from being run over, but puts himself in harm’s way in the process.

This should, of course, be the end of the film and we should get a voice over from Eiffel that will wrap this up and we will understand something about the human character that will, from the perspective of Hibert, be masterful.  But that is not what occurs.  Eiffel is impressed that her character, despite knowing his fate, has accepted it.  She has a crisis of confidence. 

How many other characters has she killed?  What has been the cost of that?  But more, centrally, who is this character named Crick.  As she was narrating his life, he was an automaton.  He brushed his teeth 37 (or was it 87?) times on each side.  He was as mechanical as his watch.  Or was he?  Did he not fall in love?  And, more centrally, did he not embrace his fate – not simply have it happen to him?

The questions in the last paragraph are mine.  What occurs onscreen is that Crick wakes up in a hospital bed (improbably but quite beautifully looking down on the Wrigley building in Chicago).  He has been saved by his watch which has miraculously broken apart and inserted itself into the severed artery that was to have killed him but, thanks to its intervention, his life was spared, though he will now have to be nursed back to health by Pascal.  We are left to puzzle over this turn of events.

Hibert reads the book that includes Crick’s survival, and Eiffel asks his opinion.  He deems it a good effort – but it is clearly not the masterpiece that it would have been.  Eiffel acknowledges that she has discovered that Crick was more than she had measured him to be, and sparing his life and ruining the masterpiece became necessary.

Btw, before turning to an understanding of the film, we were very glad to have watched it.  I think it, like the book, is not a masterpiece (and I will get to the virtues of that in a second), but it is a deeply textured film and the characters are quite delightful.  But the reluctant wife and I agreed that the best part about it is that it is layered – and that the pleasure of watching it is going back over those layers to think about and discuss them.  In what follows, and in what I hope to be the spirit of the movie, I hope to get at a few of those layers, but implore you to enjoy experiencing the layers that I have not included, have missed, or that you experienced differently from me.

The character names to this story are, I think, important.  They are all famous scientists.  Eiffel is the author – or chief engineer.  She would create a monument – austere in its perfection.  Hibert is the mathematicians who posed 23 problems at the beginning of the twentieth century, most of which were solved, but some still await a solution.  Can Eiffel prove what she sets out to?  Pascal is the father of modern science and sets it all in motion, but I am struck by his wager – that it is better to bet on God existing, for if he does, you will profit in the afterlife and, if not, you have not lost a great deal.  Escher, of course, creates (resolves?) paradoxical images, and Crick discovers the blueprint of being human.

If Eiffel’s vision of Humanity is that it is a mechanism – one where we run like clockwork - Crick proves her wrong – destroying the symmetrical and therefore beautiful elaboration of the human condition.  The way that he does this involves embracing his fate – saving the boy at the risk of his own life – not reflexively and thoughtlessly, but knowingly.  He knows that he will die, but chooses to save the life of the child anyway.  Not because he is programmed to do this by his reflexes, but by something that lies much deeper in the DNA of his character – valuing human life.

Eiffel’s vision, then, must be one that Crick, the character in the novel and in the film, fits perfectly.  We are pre-programmed to function in the ways that we do.  Indeed, Crick seems to be a cyborg – he can perform mathematical feats without batting an eye, routinely solving complex multiplication and division problems for his fellow auditors – but only until he begins to worry about his fate.  As he discovers his humanity, he becomes distractible and distracted.  He no longer runs as smoothly as he was before.

Was it just me, or was the intimacy between Crick and Pascal improbably comfortable?  Even as he was portraying a man who was awkward, the time spent with Pascal became increasing natural.  Will Ferrell, the comic actor who plays absurd situations with a dead pan normalcy, seemed in his element here; unfazed by the improbability of the love that emerged from within him – but also that emanated from Pascal.  Doing his job, which he did with a kind of arch disregard for the characters that he caught cheating the government, led him into a warm haven – the baker provided the cookies and milk that his mother never had – and he blossomed.  It was as if a natural developmental path that had been blocked by an impersonal world had created an attachment in a person who had been devoid of an awareness that attachment was of value.

I think that the underlying theme of this film (and many others) is that it is attachment that makes us human.  Eiffel is moved – she becomes attached to her character – by his heroism.  We know even less about her back story than we knew about Crick, but she is clearly wrestling with the inevitability of death – in her characters’ lives, but also, we assume, in her own.  She chain smokes throughout the film, something that is no longer chic in the movies and looks, in her character, to be a driven need – a deeply felt addiction – rather than a tool to elongate a scene or to enhance the mystery of a character, as was the case in Hollywood of old.

Eiffel resolves the dilemma of death much as Hibert does, by thinking about it as an inevitability and one that forms the structure of our life.  Crick’s DNA, which leads him, with the help of Pascal, to a different conclusion.  This means that Eiffel has to restructure her understanding of the human condition (Hibert seems less convinced), and so we are left to wonder, how much does Eiffel rewrite her character so that he becomes worthy of saving?  This is the time travel wrinkle that my patient was referring to.  But that opens up a whole new door.

The patient was experiencing aspects of his life as he has experienced them before, but he was getting a second chance at them, or a third or fourth or fifth.  Partly we re-experience our lives through transference – we recognize in our current relationships aspects of previous relationships.  And in this déjà vu, we get a second chance to work through what we have done before.  We count on this in therapy, where the patient experiences the therapist as a person from their past, and the therapist teaches them new dance steps, or they figure them out together, as Eiffel and her character seem to do.  Couldn’t this dance end in a different way than all the previous ones?

But we also get a chance to rework those steps within the relationships that we are lucky enough (or cursed enough) to experience across the span of our lifetime.  A parent or a spouse or a child can be re-experienced and known in a new way for the first time.  I had this opportunity recently with my mother – whose character I thought I knew well, but in a conversation, one like many many we have had before, I heard her describe herself in a new and different way, and this helped me appreciate her in new and different ways, and this required that I rewrite the ways in which I had been characterizing her at various significant moments in our shared lives.

So, in this way, Eiffel, who is worrying over her character throughout the film, would have had to rewrite her character once having met him.  She would have had to have him meet Pascal, perhaps for the first time, and realized that he was capable of much more than she had given him credit for.  And she would have, in the process, provided him with the kind of person who could care for him, who could nurse him back to health after having been injured by Eiffel. 

So, did Eiffel discover Crick’s humanity not from his interaction with Pascal, but from his decision to follow through with his death – with his fate – knowing that this was what Eiffel had in mind for him and doing it anyway?  Was it Eiffel’s becoming attached to her character that led her to fail to produce the great novel and movie, but that humanized her instead – and she thus ended up being able to be generous with him because, after all, we do die, but it is how we live that is the measure of our character, not how we die. 

So, if this is the case, this is, indeed, a comedy.  It is a celebration of what life has to offer – not a tying together or our fate, death, with the failures in our character.  Yes, we will die.  Yes, we have flaws, including humming through life mechanically, not noticing the loveliness that is all around us.  None of us can escape our fate.  And our fate – death – can be associated with our flaws.  And we can celebrate life – though this is messier, and the symmetry is out of balance, it is lighter – it is a comedy.

But just because it is a comedy – just because a little bit of therapy has helped us avert a lonelier and more noble end, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be complex and filled with twists and turns that fold back on themselves and that have both a certain symmetry and a certain pleasure to discovering their nooks and crannies, even if they don’t have the catharsis of the discovery of our limits.

OK.  That should be a wrap, but I have to confess to something.  Writing this piece in the second summer of Black Lives Matter going mainstream, waiting for the other shoe to drop on COVID with its delta variant, and watching the world rev up to reanimate our self-destructive plunge into global warming, I had an inkling, as I started this post, that there was something off about it.  That it was out of step with where I am, and where we are.  That we are, or should be, in a place of disruption – moving from something that is broken to something that is fixed.  This movie provides what is, in many ways, the same old fix.  We need more loving.  Don’t we need a new paradigm is what I think I was feeling as I started into this.

Having arrived at the end, I’m not sure that there is another one that will work for us.  We are mammals.  We are pack animals.  If we can learn that we are all of the same species, if we can move away from thinking of ourselves as divided into races and sexes and diagnoses (if this film had been made now, Crick might have carried a diagnosis of or might have had more aspects that suggested he was on the autistic spectrum), and we include each other in our definition of who should be loved – is that enough?  Shouldn’t we have to wrestle with the demons that have put us in this place? 

Of course we have to wrestle with our demons to achieve a new ending.  We have to engage in the dance again – and again.  But we also have to have a sense of why we are engaging in that dance again – and why we keep trying to figure out how to learn new steps.  We need to know that there is a space – an imaginary hospital be in the old building across the street from the gleaming white Wrigley building – where we can convalesce and discover within ourselves a new life, where we can transform our mangled but heroic selves into the people that we were meant to be.

 

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.