On Friday we began the movie Big Fish. It is a movie, ultimately, about storytelling, and because of that, we are watching it to provide a visual example of Postmodernism. There are many stories told in this movie, and many of them have a number of fantastic, or unbelievable, elements to them.
The central conflict is between the father (Albert Finney; played by Ewan McGregor in the flashback scenes) and his son (Billy Crudup). The father, Ed Bloom, is renown for telling big fish stories -- the type of stories where the actual facts are exaggerated to enhance the importance and entertainment of the tale. The son, Will, works as a journalist. The conflict between father and son is also a conflict between two different philosophies of storytelling: the oral and the journalistic. The father is an oral storyteller. He believes that the facts of the story can get in the way of depicting the emotional and deeper truth -- this is a view, by the way that Tim O'Brien, the author of The Things They Carried, ascribes to. The son, as a journalist, is more concerned with the cold facts, and thinks that the father's tall tales are just a narcissistic twist to what would otherwise be a ordinary life. There is a worksheet that goes along with the movie, more of a summary exercise, relating asking the students to relate moments of the movie to elements of Postmodernism.
The central conflict is between the father (Albert Finney; played by Ewan McGregor in the flashback scenes) and his son (Billy Crudup). The father, Ed Bloom, is renown for telling big fish stories -- the type of stories where the actual facts are exaggerated to enhance the importance and entertainment of the tale. The son, Will, works as a journalist. The conflict between father and son is also a conflict between two different philosophies of storytelling: the oral and the journalistic. The father is an oral storyteller. He believes that the facts of the story can get in the way of depicting the emotional and deeper truth -- this is a view, by the way that Tim O'Brien, the author of The Things They Carried, ascribes to. The son, as a journalist, is more concerned with the cold facts, and thinks that the father's tall tales are just a narcissistic twist to what would otherwise be a ordinary life. There is a worksheet that goes along with the movie, more of a summary exercise, relating asking the students to relate moments of the movie to elements of Postmodernism.