Blast from the Past 12 - Stranger Than Fiction

This series consists of notes that I wrote on facebook in the past. Enjoy reading my thoughts during my college years. Please comment but please be nice! Also please feel free to check out my other Blast from the Past Posts.


From November 2006


Stranger Than Fiction

I watched the movie Stranger than Fiction a couple of weeks ago. It was an interesting movie, but a little weird. The basic story is that this guy, who is a tax man, is going through his regular life, which is really boring because he is too organized; he even counts how many steps there are to the bus stop. Anyways, as he is going about his regular life he starts hearing a voice. It only comes every once in a while, and only when he is doing something completely normal for him. And the strangest thing is that no one else can hear it but him. As he starts listening to the voice, he realizes that it is narrating his life. He learns to live with the voice until he hears it foretell his imminent death. This of course freaks him out and he immediately starts trying to find a way to stop his death. Along the way he befriends a Literature teacher, who helps him find the author, and a woman named Ana whose bakery he is auditing.
One major issue that the movie brings up is the inevitability of death. Yes everybody is going to die at some point in their life, that is a given, I don’t think that anyone would dispute that. But if you knew how you were going to die and you had a chance to change it would you? He eventually finds out how the book is going to end and he has a chance to stop it from being written. He has a chance to stop himself from dying in that way. But the way he was going to die was very poetic and meaningful. Given this choice would you choose to allow yourself to die like that knowing your death would be meaningful? I don’t think that I would. I don’t want my death dictated by anyone but God. I think that we should live life to the fullest knowing that we could die at any moment, but not looking for or expecting it.




This next section is questions for people who have seen the movie. You can read them if you haven’t seen the movie, but they might give away the ending, and they probably wouldn’t make sense.
If the lady hadn’t been writing the book, would the events have happened to Harold anyways? I said no, because she changed the ending … or did she?
Could he have not gone to the bus stop? What would have happened if he didn’t? I mean if the lady kept writing the book, but he didn’t go to the bus stop. If he wasn’t there would the kid have gotten hit by the bus?
Were the people in her other stories real too? All the characters in this one were real.
After she wrote the ending, leaving him alive, she told the professor that she would go back and rewrite the book. When she rewrote the book would that have changed his life at all? Would it change his memories?
When he called her, the author wrote herself into the story. How could she do that? And who did she think that he was calling in the book?