We are all the mythical fish of some one else

Rating: 10/10 (9 November 2008)

The film is well done and we can see here and there some images that are recalling elements of other films by Tim Burton, like an image resembling the basic image of The Nightmare Before Christmas. There are many more, well, at least a few. That's the sign of a man who wants to build a complete set of films, that is able to connect his films with some bonds and strings to make them a whole and not just isolated tit bits. But more than that the film also uses allusions to works that are not Tim Burton's. We definitely cannot miss the allusion to Twilight Zone in that village lost in the forest and we automatically think it must be a village beyond life, hence the hero must have died along the way, maybe with the jumping spiders. We will only know it is not the case at the very end of the film.
The first problem touched by Tim Burton is the absence of relation between a son and a father because the father always told stories and after the happy age of six or seven children know what a story is and that it is not true. But the father was always telling his own story of what had happened to him though it was wrapped up in such a bazaar of useless things, useless because unreal but essential because the father lived in them, such a bazaar of strange things that the son came to the point of being embarrassed by the stories because he could not believe in them and was ashamed by his father telling what he considered lies. They were lies for him and in fact they were stories for everyone else and the father was a story teller, a man who was able to provide others with dreams. It took the son quite a few days visiting his father after several years of complete non-communication, when the father was in the process of dying, for the son to understand that in fact the father was happy and made people around him happy, including himself and his son, by telling these "false stories" that were true to ,his heart, to his mind, to his being himself even if it is in a field of daffodils, thousands and thousands of daffodils, which is the purest lie you can imagine, especially on the quadrangle of a college campus.
The lesson for the son is that he was embarrassed because HE was seeing these stories as lies, because he considered he could not know his father, reach out to him.
But the lesson about the father is a lot more interesting. It is a lesson for everyone. It is what Tim Burton is doing all the time to us. The stories are absolutely true, including in the impossible elements because they reveal the man who is telling them. Tim Burton is his films and we have the right to consider that his films are transparent loincloths of various colors that reveal all that should be hidden, at least in public. The stories a man, a film maker is telling are the blood and flesh and some other fluids of the man and the film maker.
This is a crazy idea but a beautiful consideration. One cannot tell one's private activities in bed, in the bedroom or wherever. But One can always tell some stories about some events that happened to him that are a metaphor of his most intimate and perverse and masochistic and sadistic impulses he cannot satisfy in any way. Here the Circus master is a werewolf. How silly, but how true about a man who is an exploiter of people right down and through till he gets to their life itself and who can set up the death of a small circus person so that it becomes a reason for the circus to be famous or infamous. What about putting your head in a lion's mouth? Courage? For sure. But the master is going to save some money if the lion bites because he has insurance and the circus will be more than famous. So a werewolf or not?
The son will understand that so well in the last minutes of his father's life that he will tell his father what will happen after his death but just five minutes before, as a story of his escape and rejuvenation, renascence, salvation: in the story he will become the legendary big fish he has never been able to catch. A man is the stories he tells. A woman maybe too, but Tim Burton hardly deals with women, hardly knows women, hardly dares to say anything about women, or so little, so far at least.
That's what makes this film touching and sensitive but is that a philosophy, a catharsis, a sublimation of one's evil or is it a lie, a pure lie, an illusion thrown to the masses to be their new opium?
I will not choose and be sure I consider opium as a respectable means to meditate on one's alienation by hooking up on this addictive habit. It is a real choice and so many people get into alcoholism or drug addiction just not to have to choose between sublimation and meditation, catharsis and lying.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU