Stranger Than Fiction

Did you see the movie?

Did you love Maggie Gyllenhaal in a full-sleeve tattoo as much as Will Ferrell and I did?

She worked in a bakery, and the dweeby Ferrell was able to go everyday and buy a bread and see her, and cultivate his love for her crumb by crumb. She plays the part perfectly: engaging yet aloof, caring yet too busy to really care, a little tough (huge tat) and wistful. With her kerchief and half-smile, she makes anybody just feel like, "I KNOW her, man." Cuz we've all had that coffeeshop girl crush, whether she's the hipster behind the counter or the cutie on the laptop alone at the two-top.

The coffeeshop is an interesting place, because it is luring, but it's not quite intimate. Borges would show that a coffeeshop is a hall of mirrors. It's not exactly what it seems to be. It feels like your living room, but really it's not. It feels like "your place" but really you're just there buying the product. That person behind the counter says hello every day, smiles, gives you something delicious. You have a little ten-second relationship every day. But they're not
really your friend. You don't know anything about them. You can make hundreds of assumptions about who they are, and you do, but only because of the mirrors. It's a trick of the eye.

A coffeeshop is a reflection of the world. And Maggie Gyllenhaal isn't really a baker or a barista, because she's and actor, and movies are another reflection of the world. Its about mirrors. Borges said that basically all literature comes down to four central metaphors. Infinity and zero, knowledge and ignorance, language, and mirrors.

In this case, we have two instances of mirrors. 1) the coffeeshop as a mirror of the world. 2) Movies as a mirror on reality. Now, if you remember the movie Stranger than Fiction, our analysis can go leagues deeper, because it was a Borges-like story of a man living his "non-fiction" life, while a narrator who was creating "fiction" was actually dictating everything he did and everything that was done to him. So now we play on language, because language has the ability to create worlds, to define reality, and to destroy it. The narrator, remember, was famous for always killing her main characters, therefore Ferrel was on a quest to find her and convince her not to kill him.

Back to the issue at hand: Maggie Gyllenhaal. I was just enamored by her in that movie. Perhaps her character was influential in encouraging me to get a job as a barista. And since I've been working at Blue Marble, I've seen it happen: I've watched girls crush on me over that counter. I'm there serving coffee or ice cream, and they don't know anything about me, but the assumptions made in that mirror are strong, and somehow build a shortcut to amor. So when Maggie Gyllenhaal came in for ice cream today, I felt like I was looking into mirrors in a hotel bathroom, where you can see hundreds or thousands of yourself expanding to infinity in either direction. She got frozen yogurt and blackberry, and I looked her in her green eyes, and she paused looking into mine, and I wondered if she was falling in love with me. I saw her as a tattooed baker, but I wasn't a heartsore accountant. And she was just a lady who lives in New York, and I was the one behind the counter. The arching corridors of repeating images gave an illusion of infinite space, even though it's just two mirrors in parallel.

Borges is wonderful. He wrote short stories, and also poems. He claims that "I never have been much of a writer, but I'd like to think that I was a formidable reader." He is being ridiculous, because he was a fantastic writer, but he also was arguably the most prolific reader to have ever lived. He read everything, and memorized much of it. He's like Chomsky; you are left feeling like, "is there anything this guy doesn't know?"