Stranger Than Fiction and Over-Coding

Movies that prominently feature English professors are always good, even when they're not. But Stranger Than Fiction--like I Heart Huckabees--is one of those movies that is more inspired than its reviews suggest. The film is almost Godard-like in the way it acknowledges its own narrative artifice. Plus, how many mainstream, Hollywood films actually reference the author Italo Calvino or feature images of the literary academic journal College Literature?

Here are some screenshots--mostly featuring English professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) and Harold Crick (Will Farrell):

Quote from Frame 1: "So you're the young gentleman who called me about the narrator."

Quote from Frame 2: "Dramatic irony: it will fu** with you every time."

Quote from Frame 3: "I've written papers on 'Little did he know . . .' I used to teach a class based on 'Little did he know . . .'"

Literary theory's migration to Hollywood films is not new: since the beginning, films have displayed traces of the theory and the material production that lurks behind them. In a sense, all art is a story of how it is made. The difference is that, today, theory is laid bare in dialog, and in the very interfaces to films themselves, which on DVD and the Internet almost demand that we acknowledge that yes, after all, there are no more illusions worth believing in.

The saddest thing about Stranger Than Fiction is that it wants us to confess that none of it is real, even as it asks us to pretend it is. The problem today is not that we are mystified or seduced by the tyranny of images, but rather that we don't believe in them any more. Everything is over-coded with irony, with a sort of manic self-awareness that promotes theory from the dusty confines of obscure professors' offices to the bright lights of the Image Machines.

Comments

[Chuck]

I've been planning to watch that film for a while. It disappeared from theaters before I had a chance to see it, but it looked better than the ad campaign based around Will Ferrell suggested.

[Erik]

I found this film enchanting. One of the things I found interesting regarding the image is the graphical overlays of numbers, lines and other illustrations, particularly at the beginning of the film. Not only do we no longer believe in the recorded image, but we need enhancements, pointers, additional graphical illustrations.