Normally, I’m not a fan of Will Ferrell. The most charitable adjective I can use to describe his chosen roles to date is ‘painful’. So, it was with a sense of real trepidation that I agreed to watch Ferrell’s new movie, “Stranger than Fiction”. Here’s the blurb from the back of the case:
“…Harold Crick [is] a lonely IRS agent whose mundane existence is transformed when he hears a mysterious voice narrating his life. With the help of Professor Jules Hilbert, Harold discovers he’s the main character in a novel-in-progress and that the voice belongs to Karen Eiffel, an eccentric author famous for killing her main characters in creative ways. Harold must quickly track down Eiffel and stop her before she conjures up a way to finish him off.”
When Harold begins hearing Eiffel’s voice narrating his life, it quickly drives him to distraction. He consults with a psychiatrist, who diagnoses schizophrenia and recommends medication. Harold refuses the meds, but asks the shrink what she would do if she actually were hearing a narration and wasn’t crazy. “Well, I suppose one would consult with a professor of literature,” she opines.
So Hilbert, the literature professor, rather than the shrink, becomes Harold’s mentor as he tries to negotiate through his ordeal. The implicit message is that Psychiatry doesn’t have the answers. Our lives are mytho-poetic, not medical in nature. Therefore, we need wisdom, not pills to guide us. It’s reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’ old professor in his Chronicles of Narnia series.
At any rate, author Karen Eiffel narrates Harold out of his obsessive compulsive lifestyle and into a love affair with a hostile but attractive young woman he is sent to audit. While finding love Harold also finds Eiffel and reads her novel about his life. Everything she has typed has come to pass. The ending, however, is handwritten and has not yet happened. Harold discovers how he will die and much to Eiffel’s surprise and consternation comes back to her saying that he loves her book. He even agrees that there is no other way for it to end.
Fearfully, Eiffel types in the ending, except for the word ‘dead’. She has consigned Harold to dashing in front of a bus in order to save a young boy who has wandered into the path of the oncoming vehicle. Harold is hit by the bus, and lies there suspended between life and death while Eiffel agonizes over what she has done. She decides to forego killing Harold, later explaining to Professor Hilbert that she just couldn’t do it. All her other characters, she says, die without knowing their fate. Harold, by contrast, knows his fate, but walks into it willingly. “We kind of need more men like that…” she says.
As far as I can tell, this is the first real Post-Feminist movie. The Feminist project started out with rejecting the power of white males, especially dead white male authors (including God). It continued with exorcising men out of women’s lives and thrust women into all the power positions that men have traditionally occupied. In the process, women were forced to ‘do it all’: have a career, be a wife and a mother, keep house, and be sexy to boot. The only problem was that it all got too overwhelming, and men didn’t respond as much as they should have. They kept on being men! And women kept on wanting them despite their recalcitrance! It seemed like a hopeless muddle.
But in this movie, the whole dilemma is resolved and women discover what kind of man they want to have around – one who willingly sacrifices himself for the life of others. The author, Karen Eiffel, is impressed enough to let Harold live, and Harold’s girlfriend is ecstatic when she learns what he has done. The implication is that if a man will sacrifice himself for a total stranger, a woman can trust him to provide for her and be a good father. This is the key to successful family life and the roles men and women play within it.
A man must be strong enough to become a successful provider. But without love, his whole life becomes a string of obsessive-compulsive rituals. In discovering love, a man ties his labor to the success of the family, not just his own glory, and thus redeems or justifies his striving to succeed in the world. A woman who believes her man is both strong and self-sacrificing is willing to entrust herself to her husband and give of herself to bear progeny. Both woman and man may enter the marketplace to obtain income and meaningful work, but what ties their efforts together and helps them live together constructively is their mutual love and willingness to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the family.
I think the makers of this movie have unconsciously stumbled on to a message of hope. Unsurprisingly, it’s also the biblical pattern for family life. The only thing missing from Stranger than Fiction is the realization that even with mutual love and self-sacrifice, a lifestyle devoid of commitment to God is incomplete. I am hopeful, however, that Ferrell et al have found the way back from the Precipice and that pop culture may rediscover that God, Family and Country are in fact primal values that work for both men and women.
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