little did she know....

How much did I love Stranger than Fiction?

Very much.

Oodles and oodles of much.

"Little did he know...that's 3rd-person omniscient," says Harold Crick.

I've been obsessed of late with Arlie Russell Hochschild's concept of "feeling rules." "We feel. We try to feel. We want to try to feel" (Commercialization 97). We manage our feelings, and when those feelings are managed in an effort to profit in some way, our feelings become commodified. What I so loved about this movie is the way it plays around with this concept of managing feelings. Who manages them when we've got a narrator in our head doing a play-by-play of what we're doing and what we're feeling? How does that change the way we articulate what we're feeling or what we're doing when we're managing feeling? And that voice in our heads? It's there for all of us and it's called dominant ideology. When Crick at the end of the movie decides to face his fate with a kind of calm acceptance, we want him to challenge it. We want him to say no, this is not how I want to die. But instead his narrator, understanding that the type of person who knows he's going to die, has the power to change things, but doesn't, is the type of person we want to keep alive. Problematic on many levels, of course, but I'm interested in the way that Crick's character understands what he's supposed to feel, reconciles that with what he does feel, and as a result of his proper emotion management, gets to live and feel gratitude.

And how much do I love Dustin Hoffman's character? Oodles of muchness. This semester he's teaching 5 classes, working with 2 dissertators, and is lifeguard for the faculty pool. Lordy. And reading mysteries wrapped in plastic as he performs this last duty. Too much.

One more thing: Are any of your parts not your own? Funny you should ask. Schmoozin and I were just talking about what might happen if our arms weren't our own.