Summary
Harold asks Ana when she discovered baking, and she tells him that while she was at Harvard Law, she was a very bad student, but she wanted to give back to her hardworking classmates by making baked goods. Her passion for baking turned into a business, and she dropped out of Harvard Law because she had a D average. Harold thanks her for forcing him to eat the cookies, and they stare at each other for a moment. She sends him home with a box of cookies, but he insists on buying them rather than accepting them as a gift. Ana gets annoyed and tells him to go home. “You baked those cookies for me, didn’t you?” he says, realizing how rude he’s been. “I think I’m in a tragedy,” he says, leaving.
The next day, Harold meets Jules at the locker room at the college and tells him that his life has turned into a tragedy. “It may be that you yourself are perpetuating the story,” Jules tells him, suggesting that Harold try doing nothing for awhile and seeing if that affects his story. The professor explains: “Some plots are moved forward by external events and crises. Others are moved by the characters themselves. If I go through that door, the plot continues…If I stay here, the plot can’t move forward, the story ends.” Jules goes to the pool and tells Harold not to do anything tomorrow, to “see if the plot finds you.”
We see Harold waking up the next day. He sits on the couch and pees into a bottle so he doesn’t have to go to the bathroom. On the television, there is a nature show about fiddler crabs going after wounded birds. Harold wants to change the channel, as the narrator of the show talks about “the hopelessness” of the wounded bird, but he stops himself, knowing that if he changes the channel, he will be changing the course of his day. The phone rings, but Harold stays seated on the couch, watching the disturbing animal shows. Mail comes through the mail slot, the phone rings again, and Harold’s watch begins to beep, but he is powerless to stop any of it.
Suddenly, a giant construction claw breaks through the wall of Harold’s apartment and scoops up a part of the room. Harold stays on the couch, before standing and yelling, trying to figure out what’s going on. He calls down to the construction men who are assembled outside his apartment building, and they tell him they’re demolishing the building.
The scene shifts and we see Harold in Jules’ classroom, discussing the fact that his apartment was demolished on the day he stayed home and did nothing. “Harold, you don’t control your fate,” Jules tells him, as students file into the classroom. Outside on the quad, Jules tells Harold that the narrator will likely kill him one day, and that it’s best for him to continue living his life and not worry too much about it. Harold is upset, but Jules advises him that he should live life to the fullest and do whatever he wants. “I wanna live!” Harold says, suggesting that it’s his life they’re talking about, not a philosophy or a story. Jules walks away, encouraging Harold to live the life he’s always wanted.
Harold goes to Ana’s bakery and watches her engaging with a customer. He moves in with his coworker, Dave, while he looks for a new apartment. That night, as they sit at the table, Harold asks Dave what he would do if he knew that he was going to die soon. Dave asks if he can have a super power, and Harold tells him that he can be very good at math. “That’s not a power, that’s a skill!” Dave laughs, and Harold tells him he can be invisible. Dave tells him he’d go to Space Camp, a camp where kids learn to be astronauts.
As Harold brushes his teeth that night, he experiments with brushing them in a new way, not the uniform way that he’s used to. We hear Karen’s narration, as Harold visits a guitar store. “Here Harold stood, face to face with his oldest desire,” she says, as Harold considers his options, none of which are quite right. Then he spots a seafoam green Fender, and buys it.
We see Karen and Penny visiting a hospital for research, but Karen seems uninspired. She asks a nurse where the “dying people” are, and the nurse looks at her suspiciously. “I’d like to see, if at all possible, the ones who aren’t going to make it,” Karen says to the nurse, who gets more and more confused.
Harold practices the guitar at Dave’s house, and Karen narrates that his connection to the guitar brought him closer to understanding why he was alive. We see him eating with Dave, a change from his usual habit of eating alone, and we see Harold no longer counting his toothbrush strokes, and no longer wearing a necktie. Finally, as Karen explicates with her narration, Harold is living his life.
One evening, Harold goes to visit Ana and gives her a boxful of gifts. She mocks him for giving her a gift, but not being able to accept her cookies that night, and offers to pay him. When he tells her he brought her “flours,” she is disarmed by his charming gesture. Harold apologizes for being “odd” and tells Ana that he wants her. After questioning his sudden change in temperament, Ana invites Harold to carry the flours to her house with her.
When they arrive at her house, Ana invites Harold in. She tells him, “I think I like you, and before I do anything rash, I’d like to make sure.” They go inside and sit at her table to eat. When she clears the table, Ana tells Harold to sit on the couch, which he does. He notices a guitar and asks her if she plays. She tells him she plays badly and asks him if he does. “Not really, I only know one song,” he tells her, and she excitedly asks him to play it. As she goes to do the dishes, he begins to play the song. Ana comes out of the kitchen and watches him play “Whole Wide World” by Wreckless Eric.
Analysis
In this section of the film, Harold is determined to take control of his own narrative. While he has been a victim of Karen’s depiction of his life up until this point, after meeting with Jules and discussing his predicament, Harold realizes that fitting his life into a genre will help him gain a foothold in his disorienting situation. Since Jules tells him that his life can go the way of either comedy or tragedy (comedy ending in marriage and tragedy ending in death), Harold chooses comedy and sets to work trying to sweeten his relationship with the cantankerous and alluring Ana Pascal. No longer an aimless character in someone else’s brain (Karen’s), Harold decides that he will write his own story. Part of taking control of his story means changing his attitude towards his own circumstance and determining to find joy in his otherwise blasé life.
In order to make his life a comedy, Harold begins to get closer to Ana and tries to charm her. Even though they are somewhat intrigued by each other, Ana feels antagonistic towards him because of his role as a “tax man.” Nevertheless, Harold tries his best to make jokes when he can and to show Ana that he is an understanding and likable man. He asks Ana about his life, and learns about her journey to becoming a baker, but his inability to live in the moment and charm her as a warm human being make the evening a tragic one. Ana offers him a box of cookies as a gift, but he refuses them, wanting to stick to the professional protocol of their relationships to one another. Try though he might, Harold is unable to break out of the clinical and pedantic cycle of his life in order to find a more playful way of relating to his situation.
The premise of the film itself—a man who finds himself in the novel version of his own life—allows for the characters to grapple with some complex philosophical questions. These questions come up most explicitly in the conversations between Harold and the English professor Jules. After the failure of his interaction with Ana, Harold asks Jules what he might do in order to break the tragic cycle of his life. This gives Jules an opportunity to wax poetic on the nature of a character’s relationship to their own fate. He conceives of each action a person takes as a continuation of a plot—using the example of walking through a door at the gym. In lieu of moving his own plot forward, Jules recommends that Harold try and see if anything happens to him when he is doing nothing. This way, he can determine if the narrative being spun by Karen Eiffel is one that he is in control of or one that is happening to him. In this way, the film engages the philosophical question of free will: whether people have it, or whether their actions are predetermined by an unseen author or divine power.
After doing nothing for a day and realizing that he has almost no control over his own narrative, whether he likes it or not, Harold begins to realize that he has to start living life to the fullest. As Jules poses it to him, the only correct response to realizing that he has no power over his fate is to “live the life [he] wants to live.” After years of going through the motions and doing only what’s expected of him, the philosophical conundrum of being a character in a story and thus ceding his free will to some higher force or fate convinces Harold that he ought to start doing things he wants to do, without worrying about what he should do. If his actions do not necessarily control his destiny, Harold reasons, he ought to begin acting in alignment with his desires.
With the blessing of fate, Harold loosens up and begins to “carpe diem.” He stops wearing ties, stops being so precise about time, and purchases a guitar, his lifelong dream. As he begins to loosen up, Harold becomes more aligned with his own dreams and desires, and is able to pursue them with a greater sense of freedom and excitement. This includes his pursuit of Ana, whom he is able to court with greater ease once he is more aware of his own desires. He brings her a whimsical gift of “flours,” a playful baker-themed riff on the typical date offering of “flowers,” and he even plays a song for her on the guitar. By relinquishing some control, Harold feels liberated and is able to live more in the moment, which seems to help him achieve his goals more than his tight precision and attention to order ever did.
