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1931-2008
FILM AS TEXT
Narrator (V/O): When others' minds would fantasize about their upcoming day, or even try to grip onto the final moments of their dreams ... Harold just counted brush strokes.
C/U Harold brushing his teeth. Cut to a reverse angle M/S. Harold spits into the basin.
Harold: All right. Who just said 'Harold just counted brush strokes'? And how do you know I'm counting brush strokes? Hello?
Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster, 2006) follows a pivotal period in the life of Harold Crick (Will Ferrell). Harold is an average kind of a man, and has a particular talent for calculating averages. Not quite an anti-hero, he is a rather dreary, introverted character. He works as an auditor for the IRS at the start of the film, but begins to engage with life when he is faced with his own mortality. He runs the gamut of emotions: fear, sympathy, love and hope. What is peculiar about this narrative is that it quite deliberately interrupts the audience's willing suspension of disbelief through the consistent and humorous breaking of the fourth wall. Harold begins to hear the voice of narrator Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), an eccentric author who is fixated on the deaths of her characters. When Harold learns he is in fact a character in a novel, he seeks the help of Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) to better understand his fate. Harold is confronted with the fact that he is caught in a tragic archetypal narrative and seeks out Eiffel in an effort to change the unhappy ending. Harold's love for feisty and tax-defying baker Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal) gives him hope and a desire to live.
Metafictional elements, or breaking the fourth wall
Harold breaks the fourth wall as part of the narrative (the novel) within the narrative (the film itself). At no point does he actually address the film's audience; rather he seeks out his creator, the omniscient narrator. The film audience comes to understand that Eiffel is not the film's narrator but the author of the novel. According to Patricia Waugh:
Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing [or other modes of expression] which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order...