Recently, I was fortunate enough to attend an early screening of the film, Stranger than Fiction. The film stars the well-known comedic talent, Will Farrell, who portrays Harold Crick, an agent of the Internal Revenue Service. While Stranger than Fiction will certainly get a few laughs out of you, the movie relies more on its clever plot, unique characters, and a meaningful message than it does on slapstick comedy. As we find out early on in the film, “Harold Crick was a man of infinite numbers, endless calculations and remarkably few words.” But for all the stereotypical monotony that one would expect to surround the life of an IRS agent, there is something special about Harold Crick that sets him apart from the rest.
One morning, as Harold counts the individual brush strokes of all 32 teeth, just as he’s done every morning for the past 12 years, he hears the voice of Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a novelist, one of whose character creations is Harold and who she intends to kill. From this point, the film takes off into a whirlwind of a plot that touches on everything from tragedy to comedy, the idea of fate, and which finally questions our very existence as human beings here on Earth.
I can confidently say that just about every person who walked out of the theatre that night enjoyed this movie for its excellent scriptwriting, talented cast, and a satisfying resolution that comes along only once in a long while, but that alone wasn’t enough to warrant a written response from a guy like me who does everything he can to avoid writing. No, what truly left an impression on me was how Stranger than Fiction was able to personify something that every college student, professor, and everyone who has ever taken pen to paper has battled at some point in their life—writer’s block.
I can’t count the number of ideas, good starts, or valiant efforts that I’ve left stranded on some top shelf in the back of my mind, telling myself that one day I’ll come back to them once this “writer’s block” goes away. But Harold Crick is an exception. Harold Crick leaps off that top shelf and continues—or better yet, begins—to live the life that was truly meant for him. He resiliently pushes onward even when the author Karen Eiffel, his own creator, has all but given up on him. In fact, Karen reaches the point where she is so frustrated with the lack of her own progress that she searches for a way to kill off Harold for good. Yet the foundation upon which she built Harold was so fervently placed, so meticulously thought out, that a character of such potential simply refuses to go down without a fight.
Somehow I think we’ve all convinced ourselves at one time or another to kill off a character, idea, or concept that, deep down, we really know should live on and be shared with the world. The English majors, journalists, and scriptwriters of our time have surely felt the pain of writer’s block, and perhaps even come to recognize and avoid its symptoms. But sadly, the majority of us, myself included, live most of our lives unaware that we are in a perpetual state of writer’s block, unable to convince ourselves that perhaps even our own ideas, our own stories, might be worth telling.
This revelation may be disturbing to those who feel our generation has lost the will to write, and indeed, it worries me as well. At the same time, I have a high hope that we’ve all got that Harold Crick, that idea worth hanging on to, living somewhere in the back of our minds, still developing even though we think we forgot about him. On that day when Harold comes knocking on your door, and you must choose for yourself once and for all between his life and his death—please, choose life. After all, you deserve it, and Harold does, too.
Kevin Hoffman is a sophomore majoring in Digital Media with a concentration in 3-D animation. He is also ASK's web developer and graphic designer.
Stranger than Fiction and related images © 2006 Sony Pictures Digital Inc. All rights reserved.