Big Fish Movie (2003) defies the very well-known fact that every work of fiction is inspired by reality, and points out that there are some unusual occasions when fiction becomes the source of inspiration for reality. This movie is one of those unusual occasions.
Watching Tim Burton‘s Big Fish 2003 is like being transported to when we were children. It’s inevitable to be full of curiosity and eagerness for all the wonders this movie has to offer. He achieves this not just by telling us a story, but because he manages to portray a depiction of how fictional stories are not just for entertaining kid’s imagination. It is a statement of how stories serve a higher purpose.
You might ask what that higher purpose might be?
Before answering this question I must warn you, we must be prepared to go to the outskirts of what we may consider as logical, and be willing to cross the border that separates fiction from reality.
The Conflict between Fiction and Reality
“We were like strangers that knew each other very well”
As kids, we were constantly mixing reality with fiction and making great adventures from the most common things. We got the certainty those were the prelude to the amazing story of our lives. But as we get old we somehow grow tired, we start to think of life as it were the same story told over and over again.
That’s what William Bloom (Billy Crudup) represents in Big Fish Movie 2003. A man likes anyone else that grows tired of his father’s stories (Albert Finney). Their relationship is framed by the conflict between fiction and reality.
On one side, the stories of William’s father present a young Edward Bloom (Ewan McGregor) that faced every challenge of life with audacity, who always preferred the long way full of adventures and wonders that defied logic, over the short but sure way to a normal life.
On the other side, to William, those amazing stories were just a veil that conceals who his father really was from him. Also, these stories overshadowed the normal life he was living. Seeing himself no more than just a footnote in his father’s life.
This conflict between the fictional stories and the reality he was living, leads William to reject his father. Instead, he dedicates his life to the search for facts and presents them as they are. That’s what represents his work in an international press journal.
Nonetheless, it does not matter how much we try to turn our backs to fictional stories and stay only with facts, those stories are part of our lives too and they will always be calling us for one more adventure. William received that call and must face the end of his father’s stories.
The Truth about Fiction
“In telling the story of my father is impossible to separate fact from fiction”
The last moments of his father’s story are depicted as of little interest to William. For him, the main endeavor when meeting his father again is to search for the truth. Since the very first moment, he states his main goal is to separate the man from the myth.
The problem with William’s endeavor lies not in what he’s looking for, but in what he’s refusing to see. His search for the truth neglects the stories because he thinks there must be a truth separated from fiction. He’s sure the man that is his father must be completely different from that one represented in the stories.
As William’s quest for the truth progress, we see these stories are in a place between fiction and reality. Partly because Edward Bloom sees no difference between his stories and his life. And also because these stories cannot be entirely categorized as fiction or reality.
Stories in Big Fish Movie 2013
To explain how stories are neither fiction nor reality might be too difficult a task for this humble writer. I need the help of a great philosopher like Tzvetan Todorov. With him, I may be able to get to something close to an explanation. In one of his works about nature fiction he wrote:
“Supernatural fiction contains its own generic borderland: a neutral territory…’ the fantastic,’ between ‘the marvelous’ and ‘the uncanny.’…The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event. Once the event is satisfactorily explained…, we have left the fantastic for an adjacent genre – either ‘the uncanny,’ where the apparently supernatural is revealed as illusory, or ‘the marvelous,’ where the laws of ordinary reality must be revised to incorporate the supernatural. As long as uncertainty reigns, however, we are in the ambiguous realm of the fantastic.”
-Todorov, T. (2013) Introduction à la littérature fantastique.
The moment of revelation for William comes when he confronts someone that was part of his father’s stories, Jennifer Hill (Helena Bonham Carter). He asks her to explain the nature of his relationship with his father as a way to distinguish truth from fiction. Thinking she would reveal the illusion behind the stories, he finds that his father’s life was indeed a marvelous story. She explained to him that his father’s life could not be understood with common logic.
This finding placed William into that uncertainty which Tzvetan Todorov considers is the realm of the fantastic. Edward Bloom’s life proved to be not an uncanny illusion as William was expecting. Instead, it was a marvelous reality that couldn’t be comprehended with ordinary logic.
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The Higher Purpose of Stories
A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal.
The revelation compels William to incorporate the marvelous into what he considers reality and allows the reconciliation between truth and fiction.
That reconciliation between truth and fiction ultimately allowed him to tell the story his father never told him: The end. At that last moment, his father saw how William finally understood the meaning of the stories. Hearing his son telling the story of his life gave him all the peace he needed to go at ease. Like if somehow he knew that now he would live on through his son.
As we see, we are born and live within stories. Sadly, as we get through life, we might lose along the way the capacity to be amazed by it. We might start to think everything is common, but living is no such thing as a common thing. On the contrary, living in is the most amazing and exciting adventure we will ever have.
The stories we hear and tell are reminders of that fact. A movie like Big Fish 2003 is one of the most beautiful reminders of that very truth. As long as we keep stories like this one with us, we won’t forget why we laugh and cry.
