i was watching “stranger than fiction” again last night. i love that movie. it’s very similar to the charlie kaufman genre of films (”being john malkovich”, “adaptation” and “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”), all of which i love as well. existential comedies, i’ve learned they are called – movies where preposterous deus-ex-machina devices are employed to the purpose of illuminating life’s meta-plot.
and it’s this bit that i love, the combination of the ridiculous and the sublime. in “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”, the writer uses an absurd scenario (the ability to selectively obliterate memories) to tacitly posit the age old question: is it better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all? if you could only take the good along with the bad, would it be better to have never had the good *or* the bad? can there be pleasure without pain? is the essential nature of love always double-sided? the answer to all of these has, throughout history, always been a resounding yes – yet our reflection on this theme in the movie demonstrates how all too often we are quick to chuck it all in when things get difficult, treating love as a disposable commodity like so much else in our modern lives. that we treat each other’s feelings so callously, when there is so much beauty to be found even in the midst of personal pain.
as another example, in the movie “adaptation”, the film is about a writer who is unsuccessfully trying to adapt a book into a screenplay – but the film *is* in fact the unsuccessful screenplay that subject is trying to adapt. thus, what starts out as a clever, sophisticated movie, descends into the stereotypical hollywood madness of sex, drugs and violence and the film fails spectacularly by design. it uses this manufactured chaos to elucidate a point about having the courage to let go and follow your dreams. in spite of stating within the movie that the character wants to avoid a screeplay which relies on “sex or guns or car chases or characters learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like each other or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end”, in the end it does just exactly that. the screenplay becomes a failure because the writer is unable to set aside his fear of success, hammering home the exact message it purports to be avoiding. try wrapping your brian around that one.
then of course, there is the classic (and some would say the originator of the genre) “being john malkovich”, where the bizarre notion of entering someone else’s brain and body is used to illustrate the importance of being true to ones self by asking: how is it that playing at being someone else, allows us to discover who we really are? what roles do we play in our lives that are stifling our most authentic selves? and in what ways do we lose our own identities by trying to live vicariously through others?
in “stranger than fiction”, the protagonist discovers that he’s actually a character in a novel, and further finds out that the novel is meant to end with his imminent demise. the overarching question being: if you knew you were going to die, how would you live your life differently? what is worth dying for, and what makes life worth living? and the point, of course, is that we *all* know we are going to die, yet we are content, as the main character is, to live our lives in a circumscribed known comfort zone, lives of quiet desperation. but in stepping out of that rut and risking something small of ourselves, our lives suddenly become so much more – become, in fact, something worth risking it all for. like the other movies in this class, it does so with humour and poignancy that just makes you ache inside.
this is the type of movie i just can’t seem to get enough of – something smart, original, and thought-provoking. something entertaining and wholly unique on its own, but with a bonus take home essay question. the best of these kinds of movies make me laugh, make me pensive, make me take pause, make me examine my own life. the best of these leave a lasting imprint as i reluctantly walk away.
the best of these kinds of movies make me want to sit down and write blogs about them. 
okkervil river – our life is not a movie or maybe
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Like this post
