I watched Big Fish again last night. I disliked the first two thirds of the movie even more than I did the first time I watched it. I wondered why I even went. I didn’t want to see it again. I only went because my friends invited me, but I don’t think that’s a good enough reason most of the time. However, I did get more out of the last portion of the movie than I did the first time. I’m not sure that I would be able to sit through it again though. Perhaps if I am in the right mood some day.

I noticed that I didn’t find it funny. Even the parts that I knew should be funny, weren’t. Maybe Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself really was a comedy, and I just didn’t see it. There was only one line that I found memorable this time. I seem to remember thinking last time that there were several good lines.

Ostensibly Big Fish is a movie about a man’s life, and adventures. However, it is really about that man’s relationship with his son. The main character is actually the son, with the father playing a relatively minor role (despite the fact that he spends much more time on camera). I might even go so far as to say that the father is mostly irrelevant. The true story deals with the son’s struggle to come to terms with his father, and more specifically, his father’s stories. For his entire life he has heard nothing but impossibly fanciful stories of his father’s life. When he realizes that all the stories are false, despite his father maintaining their truth, he becomes disillusioned. Perhaps there is even some jealousy because everyone likes his father, even though he lies all the time. I know that I couldn’t help but feeling a bit resentful.

The last time I watched Big Fish I thought that I couldn’t relate to the main character because my father doesn’t tell whoppers. At least he doesn’t insist that they are true. But I don’t think that is the point of the movie. The deeper lesson is that we all tell whoppers. Everything we say is tainted by how we view the world. There is no way to escape it. Some might contend that my religious beliefs are nothing more than a tall tale. But they’re not. At least not to me, and for that reason everything that I say is filtered through those beliefs, just as everything is I say tinged with my belief that the earth is round. The stories that my father tells of his childhood (and other things) are necessarily biased, just as those that I will tell to my children will be.

The quote that I like was the main character, speaking of his relationship with his father said, “We were like strangers who knew each other very well.” I’m not sure that describes my relationship with my father, but it sounds a lot better than “We were like friends who didn’t know each other,” which might be how I would describe my relationship with my parents. In a sense I think the quote is true as well, though I’m not sure I can describe how..

At the end of the story the son recognizes that his father has lived the stories so thoroughly that he has actually become the stories. It left me with the question of whether it is better to accept the person for the way he/she appears, or to attempt to learn the “truth”. It is certainly impossible to learn the truth completely in this life. We usually give up after we find a version that we are comfortable with. Once we have found it we are unwilling, even resistant, to looking further. If the father had told more reasonable stories the son would have been content, and never have searched for the truth. This would have been a travesty (beside the fact that there wouldn’t have been a movie made). Whether the son learned anything about the truth of his father’s stories doesn’t matter much. What mattered was the search for truth, and that he came to understand his father. Came to understand why his father told the stories. Came to understand that the stories were actually how his father perceived reality. Learned that although they were patently false, they were nevertheless real. Real in much the same way that the stories I tell are real. Real and not likely to change.

Or perhaps he learned to just accept his father without understanding exactly why he did things.