Cacophony Review: Characters in search of an author

I saw Stranger than Fiction recently and it was sensational. It had enough tragedy to make it fly as a comedy and it engaged on all sorts of levels. If you haven’t seen it, you probably want to stop reading right here.

I was a tad skeptical that Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Dustin Hoffman could appear in the same film and pull off such a coup. We won’t talk about Queen Latifah...

The film tells the story of Harold Crick (Ferrell), a methodical IRS agent who might have a touch of ye ole OCD. His world starts to fall apart when he's ambushed by a voice in his head, a woman's voice that's narrating his life. Turns out that voice belongs to Kay Eiffel (Thompson), a novelist who hasn’t published in a while and who really needs to kill off her latest protagonist, who happens to be an IRS agent named Harold Crick.


Through a sequence of events Harold hears Kay’s voice and sets out to track her down. In the process of that search Harold changes, embracing the life that’s always been his to pick up and run with. He fights for it. He fights against the cliché that’s been written prescriptively for him. He meets Ana (Gyllenhaal) and fights for her. He fights for other people around him. He learns guitar. And he sets out to figure out what’s going on with the narration in his head. He eventually chases down Kay, the author / narrator, and she is changed because of who Harold is and the trajectory of the story changes. Everyone changes. It’s a change-fest!

Even a couple weeks later I’m still mulling the storyline over in my head. I like a film like that – a persistent one. The biggest deal for me is how Harold’s life changes when he realises that if he cowers passively his life will be narrated to death. It’s when he comes to grips with the reality that his role in this story is crucial, that he needs to get to the author to have any hope of changing things. As a character in search of an author Harold is changed and he lives.

There’s something benign about a death-by-narration, it's so resigned and passive. As banal as Harold’s life seems at first his instinct is not to take his beating he enacts his agency to participate, to co-author his own life. Meditating on your own death helps greatly to pull your finger out and get on with really living your life. I once had a lecturer who encouraged us to pray that God would be glorified in our lives and in our deaths. There’s something so fundamentally challenging and right about such a prayer. It calls into question who you are, who Jesus is and what life on earth is all about. Try it.

Living a cliché is easy, it’s the line of least resistance. But once you see things can be different it’s pretty hard to derive the meaning from whatever it was you used to call living. Existence. Treading water. That’s not to say life isn’t monotonous and we should live on some fist-pumping AWESOME!-high all the time but that even the quotidian is infused with meaning once we know the Story and the Author. In fact the adventure of our lives takes place as we seek to know the Story is about our search for the Author. We hear Him in the tragedy and the comedy and the monotony alike. If we listen.

I’d love to give credit to whoever came up with this quote but I can’t remember where I picked it up. It goes a little something like this: Our task is to tell Jesus’ story with our lives and His resources. That, to me, sums up what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Living the gospel is not telling a new story – it’s telling a story that’s as old as history. It’s telling a whole story as well: with our bodies, minds, emotions in the comedic and tragic. It’s collaborating to tell a story – there’s no sense of white-knuckling it as we’re using Jesus’ resources.

Our key responsibility is to be a character in search of the Author. In that journey we’re changed and we impact those around us. It's in a Story that's bigger than us that we find freedom to live beyond ourselves. And when you get a community of people who together want to search out the Author... Well, that's just crazy talk! And the best part? The Author speaks.