In Sidney’s estimation, poetry is superior to the “serving
sciences”; it accomplishes its end goal, “to teach and delight,” by creating a
better nature and a better man. Sidney
states, “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have
done, neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers,
nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely.” This concept of an improved, ideal world puts
Edward Bloom and his son Will at odds with each other. A master storyteller, Ed serves up
exaggerated accounts of his past that satisfy and delight his audiences. Even Will, as a young boy, delights in the
stories his father tells at his bedside, shadow puppets or no. As Will grows up, though, a combination of
his father’s perpetual absence and the repetition of these tall tales force him
to question their validity; father and son become estranged due to
Will’s disbelief and Ed’s insistence.
Ed’s debilitating sickness eventually brings a skeptical Will back home. In a reversal, Will, now sitting at his father’s
beside, tells Ed he wants “[to] know the true versions of things…events…stories…you.” Ed responds by changing the subject.
By refusing
to answer Will’s question directly, Ed ends the first meeting with his son in
three years as one would expect of Sidney’s poets: “[I] nothing affirm, and
therefore never lieth.” Ed is not afraid
of mixing and matching stories if it helps him make sense of his past or if he
can use his creations didactically. To
what extent, though, can someone imaginatively idealize his or her own
story—i.e., make it delightful—without claiming truth? Conversely, to disavow the truth would be to
un-claim the story as one’s own. Will’s
struggle to know his father rests on
Ed’s dilemma of telling his story how he has presumably reimagined it and
retold it (and the lessons he has learned as a result) versus the way things
actually happened, “all the facts, none of the flavor.” A big part of Ed’s difficulty in distinguishing
between the concrete and the exaggerated, the mundane and delightful, is that,
unbeknownst to Will, Ed does not have dual memories, one original and one
re-written. By the end of the film, Will
realizes his father has not created a retrospectively delightful life; his
memories are larger than life because he has chosen to live delightfully.
Recognizing
how delight is portrayed in Big Fish
is important in understanding the divide between Ed and Will. In true Tim Burton fashion, Ed’s memories
contain plenty of macabre figures and details, such as the witch with a
fortune-telling eye. Alongside the darkness,
however, is an incredible brightness.
“The grass is always greener on the other side,” an adage often used in
the idealization of one’s past, is true in Ed’s memories. The grass is literally very, very green. The young Sandra Bloom, played by Alison
Lohman, appears angelic, with soft light shrouding her in whiteness.
The quirky and strange are also represented:
Ed’s giant is not merely a large person but a literal giant; the singing twins
are conjoined in an arguably unrealistic fashion.
Ed’s stories,
through repetition and a seemingly exaggerated nature, have become shared
memories. Whenever Ed begins to tell a
story, his narrative voice eventually gives way to a delightful scene. One of Ed’s first stories in Big Fish, the witch with the evil eye,
comes from Will’s memory of Ed telling him a bedtime story. Will’s imaginings of the stories are exactly
the same as Ed’s, which ultimately becomes a source of frustration for
Will. Though he claims to dislike the
stories because he has heard them too many times and he wants to know his real dad, the one who worked and
travelled too much, the real reason he falls out with Ed is the disparity of
his and his father’s worldview. Where Ed
gives us extremes—dark colors and bright colors, larger-than-life people and
experiences—Will gives us the mundane.
His drab life pales in comparison to Ed’s. Early in the film, Will voices his
frustration to Ed, who has just finished telling a story at a large
gathering. “The world doesn’t revolve
around Edward Bloom,” says Will, an accusation directed as much at the
smallness of his own life as at the grandiosity of his father’s purported
experiences.
What Will finally
realizes during Ed’s final minutes (and later at his funeral) is the role
delight played in his father’s life. His
“poet” father was not a liar; in fact, when Will arrives at the funeral, he
sees in the attendants the same cast of characters that populated his father’s fabrications. His father’s conception of the truth, as told
through his stories, was much closer to the “Truth” than Will’s suspicions of
the absent, adulterer-father. Throughout
the film, Will errs in believing the stories are meant to cover something
up. Like those contending against Sidney
and his claims on poetry, he considers Ed “the [father] (in this case) of lies.” As an undeclared defender of Sidney, Ed
proves, “no learning is so good as that which teacheth and moveth to virtue” by
living a poetic life—he creates the delightful circumstances that dictate his
experiences.
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