"Little did he know" is the new "Meanwhile"

Note: The following post, on the subject of narrative theory and the movie Stranger than Fiction, is contractually obligated for all English professors and members of book clubs. Baseball-related posts resume in March.

So, on a long-awaited, and belated, birthday outing, Peter and I went to the local coffee shop where a woman who appeared to be constructed out of the remnants of Natalie Merchant, the woman who sings that song "Kiss Me," and a long fuzzy scarf, sang a song. Then, we went to the movie theater where we saw the new blockbuster about narratology. (And, since this evening of entertainment was deemed not quite thrilling enough, we watched 2 episodes of Veronica Mars Season One when we got home. Yes, twenty-seven does seem awfully old for a high-school junior, but who cares! She's spunky!)

I don't exactly understand the general criticism of this movie, which was mostly along the lines of, well, it was sweet, but it really wasn't strange enough. It seems to me that there's nothing much stranger than being asked to care deeply in a Hollywood movie about an explicitly fictional character who not only openly accepts his fictionality, but musters up the strength to question, and then [YES, THIS IS A SPOILER] acquiesce to his own fictional death? Surely the logical gaps in the story mute this a little bit, but still. We are thumbing our nose at realism here; instead of the intimation that this could be happening right now, or might have happened in the past, or maybe would be happening to us if things had just gone differently, we understand from the get-go that this is could never have happened to us or anyone we know, because it's not about people at all, just the idea of people and, more than that, these idea-people's ideas.

I liked the movie fine--who wouldn't like a movie where Dustin Hoffman plays a lit professor who doubles as a faculty lifeguard--but I would've liked it more if the central idea person had been one we were a little more familiar with: James Bond, say, or Wolverine. Or, what the heck, the ultimate American idea person, Superman. If Stranger than Fiction has a blankness at its core, other than the empty spot where the chemistry between Maggie Gyllenhaal and Will Ferrell is supposed to go, this is because the fictional character it deconstructs isn't very cool. Intentionally so, of course, but it makes the pool of cultural mythology that the movie draws from rather shallow indeed. (Especially after Richard Ford drank up, like, 3/4 of it for that endless sportswriter series.) It's possible I feel this way because a) I continue to be obsessed with superheroes despite all self-admonition to the contrary and b) I am reading a lot of Alan Moore these days. (Or maybe c) I go to the movies so rarely that when I do I crankily demand lots of explosions and Dolby Digital sound). But if we're going to do narratology in a popular context, let's use the gosh-darnest most popular narratives we can find. Bang! Boom! Zowie!