Stories in Big Fish

On the exterior, Tim Burton’s 2003 fantasy film Big Fish seems detail a young man’s journey to sift through his father’s tall tales, in a seeming effort to find the truth. In the film, Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) explores his father Edward Bloom’s (Albert Finney/Ewan McGregor) past through the retelling of stories he has heard over and over again as a child. Throughout the film, Will discovers that there is indeed a line between fact and truth, and the film’s conclusive scene where Will finishes his father’s story is critical in the fact that it supports a constructivist version of self, where one’s self is the presented identity, and there is no essentialist version of self. Thus it seems that the film’s final concluding point is that all we are is the story we tell about ourselves and that the self-conscious individual defines themselves, rather than letting the environment define them.
In examining the overarching role of Big Fish in fleshing out and supporting the constructivist version of self, the concept of social constructionism and essentialism must be broken down. In social constructionism, the construction of individual reality is an ongoing, dynamic process that is reproduced by people acting on their interpretations and their knowledge of the events that occur in their lives. Thus in this case, while identity is shaped by events and occurrences, the individual plays a huge factor in determining their identity because they choose how to interpret and remember such events. Meanwhile, in essentialism, for any specific individual, there is a set of unique characteristics or traits at the core which the individual possesses. Therefore, all things in terms of traits and the “inner self” can be precisely defined or described. In this case, it is up to the individual to uncover “who they are” through the events that occur in their life. While events play a big