"Stranger Than Fiction"

I think the key to the film is disclosed when Harold goes to the guitar store and buys the seafoam green Stratocaster. That guitar became the object that allowed him to express his passion, and eventually the thing that built the bridge to Ana, with whom he fell in love.

Notice, though, that in the very next scene (after the guitar shop), author Karen is in the emergency ward of a hospital, whose walls are all seafoam green. She goes there looking for inspiration on how to kill her character. Notice how weirdly disconnected she is from the suffering she sees: she doesn't want to see the people who might live; she wants to see those who are going to die.

In the end, it takes her meeting Harold in the flesh for her to truly enter into his life imaginatively. That is, to enter into his suffering. She knows that she has the power to end his life, and she also knows that if she is to create a great work of art, she must make him suffer the ultimate punishment. But having met him, having entered into his flesh-and-blood life, however tenuously, she can't do it. He is not just a character; he is a person. Just as Harold's seafoam green Stratocaster allowed him to use art (music) to escape his own isolation, and to live a more fully human life, so too did entering into human suffering allow Karen to break out of her isolation -- though in the end, it cost her her masterpiece.

The film made me think about how easy it is to construct routines to keep us isolated from real life -- to wall off passion, and suffering. Harold's routine at the office. Karen's constant smoking symbolized her compulsive narrowness (that, and the fact that all her previous novels end with the protagonist's death); same with Prof. Hilbert and his constant coffee-drinking. But this gets us into ruts in which we fail to see the freedom that always exists for us. We are not fated to live lives of quiet desperation.

The film also raises the point, which Karen got at the end, that human life is at its core redeemed not through art -- Karen sacrifices her perfect ending for the sake of sparing Harold -- but through love. Notice in the final narration, she talks about the importance of art in showing us how to live well, not how to die beautifully. I'm reminded of a point Philip Rieff apparently made in his final book (which I have not read), "My Life Among the Deathworks," summed up here by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, reviewing it in The New Republic:

For Rieff, a deathwork is "an all-out assault upon something vital to the established culture." Much of today's cultural expression, in his view, consists of deathworks aimed at destroying not just an older traditional culture, but also the foundation of culture itself. Rieff's complaints are very large. He believes that in America transgression has now replaced creation as a cultural ideal; that creativity in our time has more to do with the urge to destroy.

Rieff's criticism is extremely serious, and I don't know that it's fair to call what the author in "Stranger than Fiction" was doing a "deathwork" in the Rieffan sense. But the broader point Rieff seems to be making about the proper role of art -- to nurture life -- seems valid here. If a work of art is judged only by aesthetic criteria, it can end up praising death, which is to say, the negation of life. Karen, the author, has gotten so fixated on death as the resolution to the complications in her protagonists' lives that she cannot conceive of any other way of dealing with difficulty -- this, to the point where her own creative blockage is pushing her to contemplate suicide. The film is not arguing that authors shouldn't kill off their characters. What it is saying, though, is that art cannot be divorced from lived experience, that it doesn't live in a vacuum, that you cannot separate it from morality.

What do you think?