1 Little did he know. Review of Stranger than Fiction (2006) dir. Marc Forster in PsycCRITIQUES. 52 (12) 2007, [np.] Little did he know A review of the film Stranger than fiction (2006). USA. Directed by Marc Forster. Review by Keith Oatley Stranger than fiction, written by Zach Helm and directed by Marc Forster, is about consciousness, as it starts to dawn on the film’s protagonist Harold Crick (played by Will Ferrell). Harold is an agent for the Internal Revenue Service. His life is solitary and obsessional: he counts things and turns ordinary observations into arithmetical calculations. The film starts on a Wednesday, which to Harold seems like any other day, except that a voice starts up that says: “He began it the same way he always did.” The voice describes everything Harold does— brushing his teeth, running to the bus stop—immediately he does it, as in a novel. It is not just we, members of the audience, who hear the voice. With a certain apprehension, Harold hears it: the voice of consciousness. Is a narrator determining the course of a man’s life? Or are a man’s actions giving rise to a narration? A bit further into the movie we, the audience members, meet the novelist Karen Eiffel (played by Emma Thompson). She is writing a story about Harold Crick, and it is her voice we and Harold hear. We meet her in the middle of a bout of writer’s block. With Penny Escher (Queen Latifah) whom her publishers have sent as an assistant to hurry her along, she is trying to think of what will happen to Harold. Helm and Forster’s thought-experiment is to have agent and novelist embodied in different people. For psychologists the premise of the movie might seem merely cute were it not for the fact that Daniel Dennett—that well-known philosopher of mind— has written on this very subject (e.g. Dennett, 1991). Consciousness, Dennett contends, is such a voice, which describes what we’ve just done: … we are virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behavior, more or less unified, but sometimes disunified … We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the center of that autobiography is one's self (Dennett, 1992, p. 114). For Dennett, the conscious self that makes decisions and organizes a life is as much a fiction as a character in a novel. With 150 years of psychology and neurophysiology behind us, we know that behavior is caused by nerve cells and muscle fibers, not some post-hoc factitious process of which we happen to be consciously aware. We are impressed by our own consciousness because it is salient, but it’s like noise made by an engine. We should not mistake noise for causation. As a topic, consciousness has recently started to fizz, and a good introduction is Susan Blackmore’s (2006) conversations on the subject with 20 thinkers (who include Dennett, as well as one called Crick). Blackmore is particularly fond of asking about the philosophical conundrum of the zombie who has agency just like a normal person, but has no consciousness. Stranger than fiction, engages these issues directly. Good natured, and with fine actors, this is

2 one of the most thoughtful psychological films of recent years. In it, the matter is more urgent than it is for many of the thinkers Blackmore interviews, because Harold is a sympathetic character. What if the poor chap has just been going through the motions but without being conscious at all? Now here he is, on a certain Wednesday, with the voice of consciousness coming to him for the very first time. Harold’s job that Wednesday takes him to audit a young woman, Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who bakes cookies and runs a small café. “Taxman!” she yells at him, with all the contempt she can command. This year, she has withheld 22% of her tax. It was not a mistake: she approves of fixing potholes and putting up swings for children, but not of defense policy or corporate bailouts. Harold says he will return to do the audit next day. Still worried about the voice, he goes to someone in the human relations department, who suggests that he takes some of the large backlog of vacation he has earned. On his way home from work the voice starts up again and says: “Why did Ms Pascal make his fingertips quiver and his lips go numb?” Then Harold’s wristwatch stops. He asks someone the time and resets his watch. “Little did he know,” says the voice, “that this seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death.” Now Harold is really alarmed. Consciousness is all very well, and a quivering of the fingertips can be shrugged off, but imminent death! As we psychologists would advise, Harold consults a mental health professional: she diagnoses schizophrenia and recommends medication. But—with his newly burgeoning consciousness—Harold demurs. If this really were a narrative, might there be another possibility? The mental health professional says: “I would send you to see someone who knows about literature.” This someone is Professor Jules Hilbert, played by Dustin Hoffman. Harold tells Hilbert about the voice, and as we might anticipate from certain professors we have known, Hilbert tries to be polite but wants to get rid of his visitor: perhaps Harold should keep a journal. Then comes one of the film’s great moments. Harold tells him that the voice said: “Little did he know.” Suddenly Hilbert is excited: “I’ve written papers on ‘Little did he know.’ I’ve taught a course on it.” With Hilbert now fully engaged, the investigation is joined. Hilbert works with Harold to find whether he is in a known story. No, it seems not. Well: is the story at any rate a tragedy or a comedy? In tragedy, the protagonist dies. In comedy, he gets hitched, usually to someone who starts off hating him. At last Karen Eiffel, musing on a sidewalk, has the perfect idea for how to kill Harold. She hand-writes it immediately on yellow legal paper, and goes back to her apartment to type it out. Is this typing the definitive act that will determine Harold’s life? Can Harold, a growingly autonomous agent, find her in time, meet her face to face, and persuade her not to type the fateful words? As we get into the film, we identify with Harold. We wonder whether, if someone were largely mindless, would this be like being a character in a story written by someone else. Now Harold has started to be conscious, he starts to experience things. He feels moved by Ms Pascal. When he sees her unexpectedly on the bus, he begins shyly to chat with her, though now he starts to be afraid that he will make a fool of himself, so he gets off the bus 27 blocks before his stop. If we were to follow existential philosophers (those of a different bent than Dennett) we might not be surprised that consciousness brings not just awareness of death, but fear of the implications of everyday things. Mindfulness is not just

3 having stuff in one’s mind. Harold had plenty of that: numbers, plans, procedures. Many people suffer from comparable stuff, in processions of anxieties. The trouble with such routines is that they are routine. A Wednesday, however fateful, is only another day. Conscious mindfulness, of the kind discussed by Langer (e.g. 2005) or in a therapeutic context by Segal, Williams, and Teasdale (2002), involves first becoming aware of routines, then finding courage to give up their protection. As Vygotsky’s (1930/1978) colleague R. E. Levina discovered, when children acquire narrative language they start to speak to themselves. The voice of their conscious thoughts can occur before they act, and they can instruct themselves in what to do in the way they have been instructed by parents and others. Then, as Vygotsky explains, they can gain access to the resources of a culture, and even some autonomy. Dennett is wrong in his assertion that consciously related narrative occurs only after the fact. A mental process that is capable of forming narratives is capable, too, of directing action (Oatley, 2007). The question put to us by this film is whether, when we start to become aware of our narrative, it might be possible to start to write a least a bit of it ourselves. Acknowledgement. I am warmly grateful to Ryan Niemiec, who put me onto the line of thought about mindlessness and mindfulness. References Blackmore, S. (2006). Conversations on consciousness: What the best minds think about the brain, free will, and what it means to be human. New York: Oxford University Press. Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. Dennett, D. C. (1992). The self as a center of narrative gravity. In F. S. Kessel, P. M. Cole & D. L. Johnson (Eds.), Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives (pp. 103-115). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Langer, E. (2005). On becoming an artist: Reinventing yourself through mindful creativity. New York: Random House. Oatley, K. (2007). Narrative modes of consciousness and selfhood. In P. D. Zelazo, M. Moscovitch & E. Thompson (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of consciousness (pp. 275-402). New York: Cambridge University Press. Segal, Z. V., Williams, J. M. G., & Teasdale, J. D. (2002). Mindfulness based cognitive therapy for depression: A new approach to preventing relapse. New York: Guilford. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Tool and symbol in child development. In M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner & E. Souberman (Eds.), Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes (pp. 19-30). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Original publication 1930).