Movie Night Narratives

Yesterday was Movie Night again, so John picked us up at 4 PM (a couple of hours later than we’ve been leaving lately) and we picked up a box of 25 tenders at Chicken Express. Once settled in at Babeloth we began watching two DVDs of my choosing. They were a little quieter than our usual fare, perhaps, but I think they still engaged the boys. There was enough action and oddity for that.

First up was Big Fish (2003) directed by Tim Burton. Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) is dying, an outsize storyteller famous for spinning outlandish yarns about his life. His son William (Billy Crudup) who has grown disenchanted with his father’s tales (which has led to a falling out and a separation of three years) is soon to be a father himself. He and his wife return to Alabama, where Will hopes to finally learn the truth of his father’s life and come to some terms before he passes away.

Edward’s life is told in a series of fantastic flashbacks, involving witches, a giant, a lost town, a circus, a heroic army career, but most of all a romantic quest for the love of his life, Sandra (Jessica Lange). Will desperately struggles with trying to find the truth, but finds odd, ambiguous, conflicting accounts from various sources including his mother.

Edward has a final stroke and is lying near to death. Will takes up a final vigil in the hospital. When everyone leaves, Edward wakes up, obviously struggling. He has lived all his life by stories; now he requests his son to tell him a story to help him die, to ‘tell me how I go.’ In desperation Will weaves a final fantasy, a somehow joyous reunion of Edward with all the figures of his life story. In the end, he does not really perish. ‘You become what you always were, a really Big Fish.’ Edward breathes out his last word, ‘Exactly,’ and satisfied, passes away.

At the funeral, Will is astonished to see figures from his father’s tales turn up to pay tribute. There is a giant, but not as huge as Edward had him; there is a pair of twins from his army stories, but not conjoined. It seems there was truth in all his stories, mythicized, but true. Finally seeing that his father was not simply a liar, Bill becomes a happier man when his son is born, passing on Edward’s tales.  ‘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.’

Our second movie was The Wind Rises (2013) from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.  It was one of Miyazaki's several farewell films. It tells the story of Jiro Horikoshi, who dreams of flying. Because of his nearsightedness he can never be a pilot, so he becomes an aeronautical engineer. He is spurred on by the thought of his idol, Count Caproni, an Italian airplane designer, whom he meets several times in his dreams. The dream Count tells him ‘The wind is rising. How will you live?’ Jiro knows that all his work on airplanes will be used by the government for military purposes, but what can he do? They are the only people who have the resources to fulfill his dream of beautiful flight.

Jiro is a student in Tokyo when he saves Nahoko Satomi from the Great Kanto Earthquake. But in the aftermath, he loses track of her. He struggles with designing planes after graduation; Japan’s ‘allies,’ the Germans, refuse to share technology. His project fails testing and is rejected. For a rest, Jiro goes to a summer resort, where he is accidentally reunited with Nahoko. She has been searching for him all these years. A German tourist, Castorp, witnesses their growing romance and warns Jiro of Hitler’s plans for another world war.  In the end, Castorp flees from the ‘Special Higher Police’. ‘The wind rises.’

Jiro wants to marry Nahoko, even though she has been diagnosed with tuberculosis. Their love is a beautiful dream, that, if undertaken in reality, comes with tragic consequences. ‘How will you live?’ Jiro accepts that love, and Nahoko goes to a sanitorium to try to recover a little, and Jiro, because he is wanted as an associate of Castorp, goes into hiding at his boss’s house. From there, he can still work on planes. When Nahoko suffers a ruptured lung, they decide to go ahead and get married and enjoy the fleeting time they have together.

As Jiro goes to the final test of his prototype, Nahoko quietly tries to return to the sanitorium. At the height of his plane’s success, his spirit is suddenly darkened by a premonition of Nahoko’s death, a rising wind.

After Japan has lost the war, Jiro again dreams of Caproni. He laments that his work was used for so much war and death; Caproni comforts him with the thought that at least he finally fulfilled his dream of a beautiful plane. Nahoko’s spirit also appears, urging him to live on. Jiro and Caproni walk off into their shared dream of beauty and flight.

Once again, a bonus feature of our viewing was Actor ID; in Big Fish, Ewan McGregor, Helena Bonham Carter, Robert Guillaume, Steve Buscemi, Danny DeVito, and Deep Roy; in The Wind Rises (English dub), Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Martin Short, Werner Herzog, Stanley Tucci, William H. Macy, and Mandy Patinkin. And (we learned later) Elijah Wood and Ronan Farrow, though we didn’t identify them while we were watching and only learned later.

I only thought later that there was a sort of connecting theme between such diverse films: the thought that dreams and narratives give shape and meaning to our lives, beyond mundane and observable facts, beyond compromises with the world.