He Becomes the Stories: Big Fish and Narrative Identity

“A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal.” — Big Fish (2003)

“This was a story about a girl who could find infinite beauty in anything, any little thing, and even love the person she was trapped with. And I told myself this story until it became true. Now, did doing this help me escape a wasted life? Or did it blind me so I didn’t want to escape it? I don’t know, but either way I was the one telling my own story…” — The Brothers Bloom (2008)

I am not the greatest Tim Burton fan. While I think he has a distinct and even sometimes unforgettable style and grace (see, for example, Edward Scissorhands), I have also found that, to my mind, that style tends to wear thin rather quickly. (NOTE: There will be spoilers ahead).

However, I had the immense joy of seeing Burton’s 2003 film Big Fish for the first time a few nights ago, and was deeply impressed not only by the consistently lovely imagery but also by the substance, the ideas that it (intentionally or not — though I suspect intentionally) surfaced in my mind about life and narrativity. This topic is near and dear to me and occupied a lot of my time at college, so this seems like an appropriate place to kick off the conversations about art and ideas that I hope to have here.

So what do I mean by narrativity? Loosely defined, narrativity simply means the attribute of having or being a narrative. For now, I want to define this as simply “having the quality of a story.” This is a woefully inadequate definition that I want to remedy sometime soon with a post talking more directly about “story” and what that is, but that is a longer conversation for a later time.

For now, the point is this: Big Fish is a film about stories. Specifically, it is a film about the stories we tell to other people about our lives. The film is about an estranged son whose father, a man legendary for his tall tales, is dying. Finally returning home for the last days of his father’s life, the son desperately wants to “know” his father — that is, to know the facts about his life and about what kind of man he is, not just the fiction. Throughout the film, the audience gets to experience the father’s stories, to be a part of the world of his imagined past, a world in which good triumphs over evil, in which love conquers all, in which a traveling salesman can become wealthy selling one gimmicky trinket, and desert his post as a soldier to secretly return home to his beloved without any negative consequences.

This world, the world of whimsy that Burton loves so much, is sharply contrasted with the son’s world, in which facts only have meaning as long as they remain unembellished, uncolored. And this is the question that Big Fish wants to ask: Is a person defined by the sum of the facts that make up his or her life? Or are we instead defined by the way we narrate our lives, the way we tell our own stories, to ourselves and to other people?

Burton falls into the latter camp (as do I). Ultimately, while the film plays for a while with the tension between these two methods of constructing the self, it comes down resoundingly on the side of narrative identity: as the father is about to die, he asks his son to narrate the events of his death. While at first the son is reluctant, he respects his father’s dying wish and spins what turns out to be a beautiful conclusion to all of his father’s stories, tying elements from every part of his father’s life together into a joyful sendoff. This last story culminates in a gathering of every significant character from the dying man’s self-narrated past; in the son’s story, all of these colorful people come together for one final goodbye: a celebration of the whole story of the old man’s life.

This, then, is what comes to define the life of this man renowned for his stories: not the facts, but the sum total of the stories he has told. Of course, as Burton reminds us in the movie’s conclusion, once the old man has passed on: stories tend to contain truths. The man’s “real” funeral, a time of grief and mourning, gradually turns into an echo of the son’s story as, bit by bit, the real people from the man’s past, the people who became the characters in his stories, show up to celebrate his life. For the first time we (and the son) see them as real people, not just as the whimsical characters who comprise the cast of an old storyteller’s tableau. These people are not always as fanciful as they appeared in the stories; they have aged with the passage of years, and they are real, not just caricatures. But we see that the stories have captured not only the essence of the old man’s life but the truth about these peoples’ lives as well: we know who they are because the stories, all of them, are true in a way that transcends the the cold world of facts and dates and statistics.