How Stranger than fiction is an existential movie

Harold Crick is an ordinary man who lives a very boring life full of repetitive routine gestures. He counts everything, the number of strokes of toothbrush, the number of steps he makes to go to the bus station. He always puts his tie on the same way. He always takes the same bus at the same hour. He goes to sleep everyday at exactly 9:30 pm. He has no friends, no ambition, no dreams he wants to fulfill. He is just living over and over the same things. He is alive, but he is not experiencing life.

His life changes when he hears the voice of a woman narrating his life. This voice knows everything about him and can predict what he is about to do, what he feels, what he thinks. It is narrating everything he is doing. And as this voice comments everything he is doing, Harold feels really disturbed. This is a symbolization of his progressive becoming aware, becoming self-conscious of his condition, of the absurdity of the life he is living. We can of course link this idea to Kierkegaard’s philosophy and the concept of progressive stages of despair associated to different stages of self-consciousness. Harold indeed feels desperate and lonely : nobody hears the voice but him, nobody understands him, not the psychologist, not his colleague, not the random woman who waits at the bus station. Confronted to this voice, he becomes aware of the absurdity of his life, but this is not enough to make him change.

The real turning point in his life occurs when the narrator announces his imminent death, without saying when or how. At that moment, Harold panics and anguishes. He feels upset about knowing his imminent but inevitable and unpredictable death, even though everybody knows that everyone will die eventually. Sooner or later, death will take us away from the living world. But many of us tend to forget this inevitable truth, to underestimate the fact that we might die in a near future because of an accident or a disease, even if we are young and in good health. In other words, human beings tend to live an inauthentic life. Heidegger’s philosophy can help to understand this notion of authenticity.

According to him, a Dasein, that is to say a self-conscious being, a being who knows and cares about his being, a Dasein who is inauthentic is hiding from itself, forgetting the very possibility that makes it human - death. The inauthentic Dasein is not living its life, it is hiding in the “they”, an impersonal way of living: it is not looking for its future, it is waiting for the world to give it one. It takes refuge in the present, without thinking about the future. Harold Crick was exactly living this way.

But in his struggle to fight his imminent death, he finally realizes that he has been living an inauthentic life. He wants to do something to stop this prediction, to find a way to stay alive. He desperately went to see a professor of literature, as it was about a narrator. The professor tried to find a solution, but eventually, when it seemed to him that nothing could save Harold, he just told him : “live your life, all of it. Make it the one you’ve always wanted”. Why not have an adventure, invent something, or just make pancakes if that is what has a meaning for him? But taken aback, Harold at first couldn’t understand this simply answer. He didn’t know what it meant, how could he just “live his life” while he knew he was going to die ? When he asked the question “What you would do if you knew you were going to die very soon ?” to his friend, the latter answered “go to space camp” because that is what he has always wanted since he was a kid. Harold didn’t understand either at that moment. What has he always wanted ? He couldn’t answer this question at the beginning, but then he thought about the guitar. He never thought he could one day be able to play the guitar, but eventually he tried, and succeeded.

In other words, he started to live an authentic life. He dared to do what terrified him before, he stopped counting everything, he did what he thought he was unable to do, he told the woman he loved that he wanted her. He became aware of all the possibilities around him, and he started to give a sense to his life, to looked for what he wants, instead of staying in passive way of waiting. He experienced life, he knew he was living significant moments such as when the woman he loves put her head on his shoulder on the morning, and when he realized that she was actually falling for him. As the narrator said, “he became stronger in who he was, in what he wanted, and why he was alive”. In Heidegger analysis of the authentic Dasein, the Dasein is living under the “I”, not the “they”. It owns its own possibilities. The Dasein is revealed to itself as the will to act according to its own conscience. It is living its own life, not waiting for the “they” to build its life.

There is a significant difference between the inauthentic Harold and the authentic Harold: they are not driven by the same thing. The inauthentic Harold is afraid of doing some things, he is driven by fear; whereas the authentic Harold isn’t afraid of anything but he is anguished. Angst, at the contrary of fear, drives our attention away from the everydayness to bring us back to the strangeness of ourselves. In other words, it bring us back to our ownmost possibility. The Dasein is no longer hiding itself from its situation. It makes its own choices. It’s only when the Dasein is lucidly thinking about its own death that it can grasp all of its existence and tear itself away from impersonality. As for Harold Crick, death has to be always present in our mind, we have to consider it as the possibility of every of our action, so that we’ll make them as if they were our last one.

In this film, other characters are also really interesting to analyse in an existential point of vue. Ana Pascale, the woman that Harold Crick loves, is quite the contrary of him. She is living an authentic life: she knows what she wants, she is willing to take risks to live according to her will. Even if this means to get into trouble because she refused to pay all the taxes. She wants to do something to make the world better, and she believes that she can do a little something just with cookies. As she said to Harold “If I was going to make the world a better place, I would do it with cookies”. She doesn’t only sell cookies, she gives heartwarming cookies with smile and joy.

Karen Eiffel, the writer which is narrating the story, is also a really interesting character. She is obsessed with the end of the story, that is to say the death of Harold Crick. She has to find the best way to kill her character, as it will determined if her novel becomes a masterpiece or not. Interesting is how she drives herself closer to her own death while doing so, as she can’t stop smoking cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes isn’t a problem for her as what she is doing, writing her novel, is what matters for her. This is her way to live her authentic life. There is a very significant moment in the film which illustrates this :

What should we remember of this film and Heidegger philosophy ? I agree with the end of the film. Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can be saved by a heartwarming cookie, a familiar hand on our skin, a kind and loving gesture, an encouragement, a loving embrace, an offer of comfort, soft spoken secrets, or even a piece of fiction.