If you have the time, look up the 2003 flick, Big Fish. I believe you can find it streaming somewhere. As I watched it, it seemed like much more than a fish story. I imagined it as an allegory for the American journey---who we really are and what got us to this point. The film is based on the well-received debut novel written by Daniel Wallace which critics enjoyed in each of its versions as a novel, film, and stage production. The subtitle, A novel of mythic proportions, did not oversell.
The 2003 film version stars Albert Finney as Edward Bloom, a traveling salesman who was wont to describe events in his life using fantastical tales. His son Will played by Billy Crudup, has been estranged from his father for a few years and returns to see his dad on his death bed. He tries to reconcile truth from fiction in the tall tales told to him as a young boy. Will felt abandoned by Edward who was often on the road and believed that as a child his father’s outlandish tales were a silly pack of lies. The title is derived from a story told by Edward about a large catfish he caught on the day Will was born using his wedding ring as bait (trust me, the movie is way better than my synopsis).
Edward’s stories told in tales of witches, giants, and a small Alabama town called Spectre, are both mythical and magical to the young Will. It is only later as an adult that he became bored and embarrassed by Edward’s constant retelling of what were the bedtime stories of his youth. Relationships between dads and sons have soured for less. Reconciliations generally occur after animosities soften with the realization that given time we sometimes become our fathers—or better, come to understand them.
This all reminds me of the story of America from its founding. A story about outlandish promises that are so hard to keep because they are so valued and beyond our current understandings. Ours is a history made up of such promises that have yet to be kept. Much of what has been written about us has been massaged and elaborated while our shortcomings are trivialized or deferred. It is what we do with unkept promises. Wallace’s theme was one of reconciliation as has to learn to separate literal from figurative truth. I believe we are at that point in our relationship with our country. We are learning that some parts of our history as written are too good to be true—especially our creation story and the promises made but as yet unfulfilled. That America has achieved justice and freedoms for all is a distortion of the truth. Even our naming of ourselves as the USA—the United States— distorts our true history that is rife with evidence of our divisions. We are divided by race, gender, religious beliefs, and politics. Certainly, the primary histories written in textbooks in school, soften the more troubling failings---remnant inequalities and racism the worse among them. Our relationships with Blacks, Native Americans, women, and immigrants are painted in shades of reality. Similarly, we learn that Edward’s tall tales hold a bit more than kernels of truth.
The realization that I have come to is that there have been forces throughout our history that have served as a moral compass, who have helped to “bend our arc” toward justice. That is to say, there is within our DNA a determination to perfect this union and make it more just, more fair, and more aligned with the promises made but yet to be fulfilled. This is precisely what is at stake in our time. What we believe about ourselves is often told in our myths about ourselves. Some are more fanciful, others are rather lame. We have long thought of ourselves as a “melting pot” gaining our strength from the contributions of many who look to America as more than a place to settle, but as a place to prosper. Lady Liberty and Uncle Sam are personifications of our patriotism and our willingness to accept those who flee tyranny and political systems that play favorites among their citizens. Our wars are fought by ordinary men of character and values who go to war reluctantly, but who drop everything to fight not only for our freedom but freedom around the world. Our causes are always just. This is how we think of ourselves and how our leaders portray our nation. The truth is more nuanced.
The point is not that these stories are false or misleading, it is that at our best it is what we aspire to. It is what our system of government provides a platform for achieving. The current crises that are afflicting our nation argue otherwise, I know. We are at a moment in our history that tests the American mythos as it has been tested before in darker times. Like Edward Bloom, we repeat these stories to remind ourselves of the truths embedded in them. While cynics may argue that we are worse than we believe we are, the truth has finer distinctions. At various points in our history, we have been just as divided and just as dangerously illiberal as we seem to be now. The question will always be are we getting better? In evolutionary terms, are we thriving?
We are made up of both our present and our past and like our friend Edward Bloom, we look to our progeny to make us better. Our perfections are always a generation ahead. We tell our tales to stir the best of us in them. Big Fish was brought to the stage as a musical in 2013. It retells the tale but with the added dimension of music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa. I was never able to see the stage production but was attracted to Lippa’s interpretation of the original story about a father’s and son’s reconciliation with the truth. God bless youtube! The play opens with Edward exhorting his son Will on the day of his wedding to (listen) “Be the hero of your story if you can”. Will and his father are at odds over Edward’s preposterous tales that have embarrassed him—partially because he was captivated by them when he was a boy. In a lyric good fathers throughout the ages have at times employed, Edward explains his going on the road again in mythic terms (listen):
Then we fight the dragons and then storm the castles
And I do the best that I can
But everybody knows that's how the story goes
To turn each boy into a bigger man---
...So I'll fight the dragons 'til you can
And so we all have our roles to play in the drama. We pass on the responsibility to our successors, but first, we must inspire them with tales of our adventures so that they will be motivated to live their own.
America is in many ways is like an aging Edward Bloom who maintains the promises of the future with overblown tales of his own exceptionalism. As with Bloom, the real dragons are the forces within ourselves that hold us back because we are, in fact, imperfect. We pass them on to inspire the next generation to carry on the fight. The America that was promised in our founding and that has been passed on through the generations contains all the promise symbolized by Lady Liberty and Uncle Sam. They have not failed us, our human prejudices have.
At Edward’s funeral, Will learns that the truth even when it is embellished retains its clarity. His father’s outsized personality along with his outlandish “fish tales” need to be told or else their memory would die with him. To give away the ending of Big Fish would be unfair. It is most affecting and makes the point better than I could ever explain it. However, Wallace’s little masterpiece (my opinion) provides me the hope that what we are going through now is not necessarily a finale. We have been here before. The story of America is greater than its symbols and more enduring than its myths. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but our history is made of all of the good and all of the bad. In the end, we are no better, or worse, than the aspirations we pass on to our sons and daughters. There are dragons out there for them to fight--- the ones left after we have taken care of our own.