Morale?

Morale or moral?

haven't watched this film in quite a while, but one moral could be...take everything with a pinch of salt ;)after all, reality is what you make of it

We are the sum of our experiences, our memories and our genetic make-up. As of today, you can't change your genes, probably not your past experiences. But memories? You can enlarge them, reduce them, modify them - and we all do it. When you relate your past experiences (from your memory) to your friends, your family, your children, you are telling stories. And who hasn't embellished the story even just a little to make it more interesting, or discarded parts that aren't particularly entertaining. To your children, your grandchildren, your early life is just that - stories. And like so many activities we participate in, some people are just better than others at different ones. Edward Bloom was a consummate story teller. And obviously from the movie, lots of people liked and appreciated his stories. Note that there were more people at his actual funeral service than in his son's imaginary one. Anyway, that's what we as humans do - we tell stories. Around the water cooler, over a beer, late a night, to whoever will listen. And the listener then knows just a little more about us. Edward Bloom's legacy was his story telling and he died peacefully because he had succeeded in passing that legacy to his son, who then started passing it to his own son. The moral? We are our stories. And nothing wrong with making who we are, into a good story.

Surely the moral of this is that there is a difference between a liar and a story teller! One is repugnant and to be avoided and the other is a joy and to be accepted. The story of Big Fish is the story of how the son realises his father is one and not the other.


Let's see if anyone tries to kill us and work backwards

Live YOUR fairy tale, not everybody else's boring lives!

I loved this movie and think there are a lot of different ideas and messages in it.

There's the acceptance of your parents for who they are rather than who you wanted them to be (son wasn't impressed with father's stories, wished he had a father who didn't tell such stories but he comes around to see how important the stories are in his life).

There's the idea that it is our attitude that affects our lives. Edward Bloom could have gone through life as a travelling salesman who struggled to make ends meet. In his stories though he was a hero, and don't we all want to be the hero of our own lives.

There's also the idea that we need our children to finish our stories. That's the one that struck me most firmly when I first saw the movie because he literally needs his son to help him finish the story of his life, and in finishing the story, the son comes to understand his father in a way he never allowed himself to before.

And the difference between a lie and a story is that a lie is told with the intent to deceive. A story, a tall tale, is told with a wink and a twinkle. The audience is in on the fiction of it.

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If you tell your kids Santa is real, they will grow up and try to drown you in a river.