Stranger than Fiction...a review

I did not edit the following text, just so you know, oh, and...fuck the fuckers.

A pre-post on hollywood: if one is to get the most out of any movie, particularly any hollywood movie one needs to understand a first primary fact--it is propaganda.

Now to Stranger than Fiction, a Will Ferrell comedy that tracks the life of a IRS agent who realizes that he is the character in a story and that he is about to die, whereby he proceeds to learn to play guitar (a lifelong dream), fall in love, and, eventually find the author of his story and... yeah. All of this takes place with a Douglas Adam's/Hitchhiker's Guide vibe, and Harold Crick, the main character, is constantly counting and calculating, his steps, his toothbrush strokes, his time to get from place A to place B.

The plot unfolds rather slowly, taking full advantage of Howard's mathy-ness, his screaming at the narrator which no one else can hear, and the comedy of self-consciousness, i.e. narration while events happen, along with the trademark Ferrell flatness that is either boring or hilarious. The movie revolves around three pairs of relationships and the question of life/death: Howard and points of interest in the entire movie, and it is around these points that the movie revolves: 1) the love story between Harold and Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal) which begins when Harold audits her bakery, 2) the relationships between Harold and the doddling English professor who repeatedly consults him concerning his fate (Dustin Hoffman), 3) the relationship between the author and her publishing assistant who is trying to make sure she finishes (Emma Thompson and Queen Latifah). The question of life and death is littered with a perhaps charming literary-ness and centers around both Harold's coming to live, including most centrally the love story, after 12 years of comic, and therefore not horrid, monotony, and also concerning how the author is to finish the book, as the author and assistant visit various scenes to imagine the characters death (the last event necessary to finish the novel), and more crucially once Howard tracks her down and they meet, much to the horror of the novelist, who always writes tragedies (this question is underlined by the distinction between comedies and tragedies, whether the book will be about death or the carrying on of life, yay sex!).

The love story attempts to escape cliché through its use of a women who is an anarchist, has arm and other tattoos (yet is a sweetie), a baker/harvard law drop out, and the love story, an obvious setup is predicated on its being unbelievable from the start...and because we remain completely in Harold's mind (trying to imagine what Ana sees in him is like trying to imagine a way to escape the movie's ideology, which is after all a brick wall). This love therefore serves as the cement that maintains the movie, pulls us through, and as love always does in Hollywood (see my previous post on A History of Violence), make us accept the way we are being sold the world. In fact, the entire message of the movie seems to be live your life now because you know, you can, and if you do lots of little things, remember your dreams, find some gorgeous, wonderful, caring, makes cookies and does the dishes, and has good politics type woman then, shit everything will be sweet, besides of course you might die...especially if your narrator always kills her characters.

And thus we are given the ultimate self-referential moment where, our hero reads the tragedy that is his life, after being assured by his English professor expert that it can't happen any other way, that the book is a masterpiece with his death and it shouldn't be otherwise. And, he reads it on the bus, and proceeds to agree, giving the draft of the book back to the author. We then proceed to watch his death, find him help fulfilling his co-worker's dream, preventing his love from not going to jail for taxes by getting write offs for the goods she donates (even though the point was not to pay taxes, but no, she shouldn't go to jail, he loves her, therefore! again, love is the antidote for the socially unacceptable), and, in the final hurrah saving a boy from being hit by a bus by diving in, throwing the boy away and...getting hit by the bus. Of course, the movie doesn't end there, once again proving the power that love plays in cementing its message. Instead he breaks many bones, etc, is fine, gets a kiss, we hear the book's new ending, all about getting the most out of the little things that saves lives, as in this case, and we see that perhaps the author and english teacher too, might soon be having some great sex (which btw in movies is very rarely about the sex but about the relationship it signifies, thus preventing the possible mind/body split which it is in this case made explicit between narrator and character).

In any case, the final interesting part of the movie is the question of death, and the notion that if one lives as if one is going to die, then one lives better, but also, that in this case if one accepts one's death, as a good and worthy one, then one is worth keeping around...that is in this case not being killed off but miraculously saved and, therefore, living happily ever after. Of course, this therefore shatters the connection to death and ends with a yay. In any case, the whole question of death, while conceivably extremely intense, is downplayed by literary necessity, the brief period of time allotted to it, and the dual falseness of the story (both a story and a movie).

But primarily, death is equated to living well, which is equated to finding happiness in the little pieces of the status quo, or in the ideology capable of justifying anything, that is...love. So death, which used for rhetorical effect does not take on its full power, nor is any ethical statement brought forward. We remain in our awful capitalist monotony, which, miraculously, and unbelievably, is a paradise. And that my friends, is called propaganda.

love and solidarity,

db

p.s-this is not to say that love is not something we want, or should partake in. however, all you need is love is obviously not the case, and letting ourselves swallow a ton of shit in service of this idea is not only pathetic but morally unacceptable, though perhaps such a viewpoint as a temporary measure will allow us to find love, and building upon it, move beyond it. movies, however, stop at love as the solution, and therefore don't change anything else, which is precisely why they are propaganda for the awful status quo.