Stranger Than Fiction Analysis

   Stranger Than Fiction is a film about a man named Harold Crick (Will Ferrel) who shows signs of OCD. He has a certain number of brush strokes he must make while brushing his teeth. He has to tie his tie a certain way every morning. And, his watch has his whole life perfectly timed to a T. One morning, a voice is heard in his head that screws up his entire morning ritual. An author named Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) is heard by Harold. She is indeed narrarating his life and all he actions and choices he makes. And although no one else around him can, Harold hears her. It begins to drive him insanely, naturally.
   Throughout the film, Harold is helped by an English Major (Dustin Hoffman) to figure out what is going on. Together, they are on a mission to figure out why Harold hears this narrarator's voice. On the other side of the storyline, Karen is trying to figure out a way to get past her writer's block and come up with a way to kill Harold Crick, being that to her, he is just a character. Turns out in the film though, that they realize they're in the same "dimension", if you will. Although her ending calls for Harold to die, she ends up rewriting the ending and of course, all ends well and happy.
    In class, the reason we watched this film is because it's consider "post-modern". Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism. To dumb that down, it's pretty much a literary choice that messes with the "normal" storyline. Like the whole he said she said happily ever after. Stranger Than Fiction is considered a piece od postmodernism art because of the fact that it's unlike most films/stories.
     I consider this film "story-ception" because it's literally a story about a story. It's so hard to wrap your mind around. But if you really think about it, this man was trying to control his fate that an author was writing and we were hearing! Usually when we watch films or read books, we don't see or hear the work or thinking that goes into it from the writers. Also, in most films, characters don't hear the narrarator, only we do. But this entire film was based on the fact that Harold Crick COULD hear his narrarator.