Stranger Than Fiction
(Fiction Always Has a Happy Ending)

I just watched the movie “Stranger Than Fiction” on television and it got me to thinking how, in fictional works of art, the creators supposedly try to mirror reality.

Human to human interactions, the person’s psyche, inner thoughts, monologues and even the little quirks are all illustrated so we can relate to it. But the problem that these movies and books have is that they never finish the job. They take these relatable characters, suck you in and make you empathize but then veer wildly away from the “right” ending. Instead, they go for the happy ending. The guy gets the girl or the guy accomplishes the dream. This does happen in real life but not nearly as often as the movies portray. So, the question is: why does art successfully replicate human life and emotions yet falls short in wrapping it up?

In the movie, the main character (played by Will Ferrell) is a guy who leads a very mundane and empty existence as an IRS auditor. We learn that this solitary man’s life is also the plot for a book. Written by a wildly successful author famous for tragic stories in which the protagonist is human, loving and always dies at the end, she becomes inextricably twined with him. After hearing an inner voice that narrates his life, he goes through a series of changes and ends up learning to live his own life. Instead of counting each step in his walk and going by a routine, Ferrell’s character ends up pursing love, his dreams and his deepest goals. Of course, the problem is that in the author’s book, he is supposed to die. Decidedly upset by learning this, Ferrell meets with both the author and an English professor and all decide that the author should finish the book with his death. And, if he does in fact die, it will be more profound than if he continued to live.

The plot sort of steps around this. In what can be described as both removing the fourth wall while also constructing it, we find out that the author gets gripped in a crisis over “killing” someone she has met and instead of Ferrell dying (he would have died by being hit by a bus after saving a boy’s life), she rewrites the ending. She decides to have Ferrell only get severely hurt while saving the boy’s life. In a discussion with the professor, the author and the scholar decide that while the new ending makes the book quite less than a masterpiece (it ends up coming out of nowhere and not making sense), it was deemed better for all involved for Ferrell to live, be with his girl and continue to enjoy his newly discovered and fulfilling life.

It is extremely fascinating that the screenwriter and director plotted out a crisis to have a happy ending that doesn’t make sense in the movie while also doing the same in real life. It becomes apparent that, like the plot within the movie, the movie itself as a work of art cheapened the overall product by tacking on a happy ending. The movie itself was extremely well done and the ending disappointed me. It was apparent that Ferrell’s character should have died, to mirror the book and also make a statement concerning the abruptness of life and also the value of living every day to the fullest.

Instead, he lived. Possibly this ending is exactly what the director and writer sought to achieve but, by making the comment about ending the stories, they also screwed up their own story. It’s very linear of course, but also frustrating in that it made a great movie become just okay.

Maybe movie studios think of their art as just a release or an escape. The audience just wants to forget about their own maudlin life and go out for a couple of hours to watch something that they can relate to but also daydream about. I think we all wish for a happy ending to our own problems; we want a miracle in which everything works out and we don’t know how we got to the ending but we’re still happy to be there. This is understandable, but why can’t some movies be real? I believe it is okay to have something end on a sad note and for that to affect you. If anything, the fact that it isn’t real shows off both a confirmation of the creator’s talent but also a relief when you stop feeling malaise over it. Shouldn’t art sometimes not have the happy ending?