‘Big Fish’

There are days — and honestly, some weeks and months and years — when I really wish I could wake up and be 5 years old with glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling and an orca whale painted on my bedroom wall again. This is one of those weeks. No, months. Quite possibly, it’s one of those years. And so when I sat down to write this week, I started thinking about what I really loved when I was 5 and if any of it would be relevant to write about… I liked horses, dinosaurs, hunting newts in the creek and playing pretend in the woods all by myself until dusk. I liked rewinding the original “Jurassic Park” to the climactic scene with the T-rex more times than any parent should be made to withstand. I liked old westerns. I liked “Tom and Jerry” and “Yogi Bear,” and when I couldn’t sleep, I begged my mom to let me watch gallbladder surgery on the Discovery Channel at 4 a.m. I also loved “Beetlejuice” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” and whatever other Tim Burton movie my mom deemed at least mildly age appropriate.
Somehow, despite that, I didn’t see “Big Fish” until I was 19. My college boyfriend loved movies and we often spent Friday nights together watching classics or picking out movies we individually adored and wanted to share with each other. I fell asleep during “The Big Lebowski” and we argued a lot about “Old Boy,” but I have to say, even now, he really got me with “Big Fish.” Burton is one of my favorite directors, but I actually didn’t know anything about “Big Fish” — even that it existed — until my ex asked one night over dinner if I’d watched it before and, when I said no, proceeded to tell me it was one of “like, five movies that could make [him] cry.” And that’s how we both ended up crying on the sofa in his apartment the following Friday.
It’s a frame story, which is a bit like a Russian nesting doll. There’s the main narrative, which concerns a man who returns home to care for his ailing father, and then a series of stories set within that narrative, which are the tall tales the man’s father has told him over the course of his life, alienating him and leaving him confused and lonely, wondering if anything his father has ever told him was true. But it’s a Tim Burton movie, so of course all of the spectacular feats are true — or at least, they sort of are, because the movie is also a love letter to the art of storytelling itself.
One of the primary reasons we tell stories is to comfort ourselves. It’s certainly why I started telling them. By the time I was 10, I’d begun writing relentlessly and it was objectively garbage, but I loved it and the feeling of pulling at my own threads and following them down, working out a mental knot until I could better understand myself and the state I was in. We also tell stories because they help us to make sense of our world and things we can’t necessarily explain. When we cultivate metaphors and give ourselves over to imaginary people we’ve created from nothing, or assign meaning to coincidence or events, we give ourselves some measure of security, a sense of rightness, perhaps even a way to survive.
All of this to say, I wasn’t close to my father, which is maybe part of the reason “Big Fish” landed the way that it did back then. We had a complex relationship when I was growing up: sometimes he chose to be a dad and other times he resented it. A lot of my own early garbage writing was a way for me to make sense of the hurt that caused and, at 19, I was just beginning to grapple with that and what I wanted in life. It took me another six years to come to terms with the fact that he just wasn’t the right person to be someone’s dad, which may sound mean to some of you, but I think it more compassionately than critically.
At 19, I think I envied Will, the son in “Big Fish,” for the catharsis he ultimately achieves. But I also completely understood Edward, his father, and his impulse to dream and spin yarns because that was something I wanted. But upon further reflection, with more time under my belt, there was something else, too — it’s a story that presented something I was actively learning then, which is that your parents are imperfect people, too.
And while no true 5 year old reads this column, I do think every person that’s tired of being an adult and facing life’s worst truths still has a 5 year old inside of them. And to them I say this: please be nice to yourself today.