Burton Binge: Big Fish (2003)
by John Kenneth Muir
(LB’S NOTE: This is my second favorite film of all time, brilliantly explicated by my friend John Kenneth Muir. (We shared the same book agent many moons ago.)
“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.”– Big Fish (2003)
Tell me, which alternative fosters a better understanding of your life experience: the bare bones truth, or an embellished, “flavored” version of the truth that contextualizes you life as a great story, one with heroes and villains, winners and losers, and a beginning…and inevitable end?
Tim Burton’s 2003 fantasy masterpiece, Big Fish beautifully and emotionally makes the case for the latter option.
In real life, we’re each of us but a little fish (only 1 out of 7 billion…) swimming about in a global sea.
But in our imaginations — and in our private family circles — we’re all big fish: colorful personalities who loom large in the stories of our sons and daughters, and our Moms and Dads. In our private worlds, we’re important, nay the most important figures.
The first shots and compositions of Big Fish take the viewer down into the sun-drenched water of a fresh-water river as a big fish swims alone there, and this inaugural visual perfectly captures the movie’s most important conceit: the idea that we all make ourselves and our lives out to be “big.”
Sometimes we even do so at the expense of those we love, who risk becoming mere “context” in another person’s epic poem.
The big fish swims alone, after all…
Of all Tim Burton’s films, I readily confess that I find Big Fish the most emotional. Maybe because it’s a story of fathers and sons learning to understand one another.Perhaps because it concerns the inevitability of death, and the passing of the generations (as well as the storyteller torch).
Regardless, I do know that this film hits me on a very personal, very intimate level every time I see it. I had an important person in my life until about a year ago (2010) who was, like the movie’s Ed Bloom, a masterful and ridiculous storyteller….
