Summary
Edward encourages the giant to try going to a city, where maybe he won't feel so big and out of place. The giant is intrigued, but also suspicious that Edward is just trying to get him to leave the town. Edward admits that he does want the giant to leave, but he tells him that he wants to leave as well. "You think this town is too small for you?" the giant asks, to which Edward responds, "Well, it's too small for a man of my ambition." The giant, who introduces himself as Karl, agrees to leave the town with Edward.
After giving him a haircut and cleaning him up a bit, Edward brings Karl into town, where Edward is awarded with a key to the city to commemorate his brave act. Edward and Karl leave town, accompanied by a parade, and everyone in the town yells advice to Edward as he goes. Suddenly, he sees the witch sitting beside the parade, and goes over to talk to her. She whispers in his ear, "The biggest fish in the river gets that way by never being caught." He smiles and continues on his way with Karl.
A little ways out of town, Edward tells Karl that they ought to go in separate directions, but Karl is suspicious that Edward wants to be getting rid of him. To reassure him, Edward gives him his pack to carry while they are apart. Edward wanders through a misty forest, and at one point, a crow steals his hat. When he picks up a rock and throws it at the crow, he accidentally hits a beehive and a swarm of bees begin flying at him.
He manages to get away and finds a sign on the ground that reads, "Warning, Jumping Spiders." Smiling, he keeps walking through the forest, running through large spider webs and throwing giant spiders off his body as he goes. Eventually, he reaches a clearing, where he sees a small pristine village. At one end a line is strung up with shoes hanging from it. A man sits on his porch and plays the banjo watching Edward walk through the town, when a man comes out of a building and asks for Edward's name, before identifying it on a sign-in sheet of some kind, as if his arrival was anticipated.
"We weren't expecting you," the man adds, clarifying that while his arrival was anticipated, it was expected to happen at a later date. The man, whose name is Beaman, identifies the town as "Spectre," in Alabama, and offers to buy him a drink, and Edward goes to meet a poet from his town, Norther Winslow, who has settled in Spectre. Edward, Norther, and Beaman sit around a table in silence.
Beaman's daughter climbs under the table and begins to steal Edward's shoes without his noticing, as Beaman praises the pie his wife made the men. Suddenly, the girl runs off with his shoes, much to Edward's surprise, and throws them over the line in the town square. "There is no softer ground than town," says Norther, and all of the townspeople welcome Edward with open arms.
We see Norther and Edward sitting next to a pond in the evening, and Norther tells him he's been working on a poem for 12 years. Edward asks to read it, and when Norther hands it over, he looks down at the page to read, "The grass is green/Skies so blue/Spectre is really great!" Edward looks at it skeptically, which displeases Norther, who sits back down and looks over it again. Later on, Edward is alone and washes his feet in the pond, when suddenly he sees a naked woman bathing nearby, just as a snake is swimming towards her. He runs into the water and chases the snake to save her, but as he grabs the snake, the woman dives in the water and out of sight.
When he comes out of the water, Edward sees Beaman's daughter, who asks him what he was chasing. When he describes the woman, she assures him that it was not a woman, but a fish. "Fish looks different to different people," she tells him. As they walk through the forest, the girl asks Edward his age—18—and tells him that she's 8. "That's not much difference at all," she tells him, pondering their age difference when she is older. When they reach the town, a party of some kind is taking place and throngs of white people dance to bluegrass music.
Edward dances with Beaman's wife, and she tells him that her daughter, Jenny thinks he's "quite a catch," and tells him that she agrees. Edward dances in a circle with Beaman and his daughter, getting more and more freaked out. Abruptly, Edward tells them that he has to leave that night, that he's not ready to end up anywhere yet. Beaman is indignant, insisting that "no one's ever left," and Jenny challenges him that he won't be able to make it without his shoes. Apologizing, Edward leaves the town, shoeless, and as he leaves, Jenny asks him to promise to come back. He does, and leaves.
Edward gets lost in the dark forest. Suddenly, the trees come to life and begin grabbing at him with their branches. He manages to free himself and keeps going down the road, where he runs into the giant, Karl. Karl asks him where his shoes are, and they continue on their way.
Back in the present, Will, Josephine, Sandra, and Edward eat dinner together. Breaking an awkward silence, Will tells his parents that Josephine recently had some photographs she took in Morocco featured in Newsweek. Sandra is impressed, but Edward says nothing, before telling her that African parrots in the Congo speak only French, and that they talk about everything from politics to fashion, only not religion, because "it's rude to talk about religion."
That night, Josephine cleans up around Edward's bed as he wakes up from a dream. He tells Josephine that he has had prophetic dreams in the past; for instance, he dreamt that his Aunt Stacy would die when he was child, and she did. As Josephine goes into the other room for a moment, Edward is overtaken with a pang of pain. He covers it up when she comes back and asks him to see pictures from his wedding to Sandra. "...We didn't have a proper wedding. Your mother-in-law was never supposed to marry me, she was engaged to somebody else," he tells her.
Edward tells the story of meeting Sandra. We are once again transported back in time and see Edward at a circus, watching a cat jump from a great height onto a pillow. Then, a ringmaster, Amos Calloway, comes out and introduces an act called "Colossus," a fire-swallowing giant. Unimpressed, Edward whistles to a man operating a spotlight and signals for him to point the light at a nearby wing, out of which Karl emerges, to great alarm and excitement. Suddenly, across the room, Edward sees young Sandra and falls instantly in love.
Analysis
In this section of the film, we are transported into Edward's mythic past. For a long uninterrupted period, we are swept up in the fable of his life, complete with neurotic giants, haunting forests, and magical utopian townships. Edward is ever the wide-eyed protagonist, wandering through challenges and curiosities with an earnest excitement and a heroic bravery. The story within the story of Will's relationship to his father, the fable of his father's life, takes center stage in this portion of the film.
Edward leaves his small town, a place that was too small to contain him, and ends up in an even more isolated community, Spectre, where time seems to stop and the scope of experience doesn't extend far beyond the perimeter of the town center. While it is a beautiful and pristine community, there is something uncanny about it. Edward sees that it in its preserved-ness, it is suspended from the world around it, and it exists in a place out of time or context. The greatest poet in the town can barely write, and people cannot think of much to talk about. Spectre is an unusual, completely white South, a pleasant place, but one that lacks diversity on many fronts.
The "fish" of Edward's fantasies and at the thematic center of the film, comes in a new form once Edward reaches Spectre. After he goes to save a beautiful naked woman from getting attacked by a water snake, Beaman's daughter tells him that the beautiful woman in the water was actually a fish, and that "Fish looks different to different people." In this moment, the film shows that the fantastical elements in the narrative are symbolic and projective for the person experiencing them, even if the events themselves feel real. The world of fantasy is real for the people experiencing it, but it also represents a kind of psychological extension of self, a projection of desire and the unconscious.
Another central theme in the film is death. For all his wide-eyed wonder and bushy-tailed sense of whimsy, Edward has an intimate understanding of death and its inevitability, from an early age. As a child he receives the prophecy from the witch that gives him foresight. Then later, as an old man, he tells Josephine the story of how he prophesied his aunt's death. In the way that death is central in Edward's mind, he is not very frightened of it, and he faces its promise with a wry humor that gives him strength and bravery.
Josephine, Will's kind and understanding wife, is the best suited to listening to Edward's "tall tales" in his illness. She still has the patience and the sense of wonder required to be taken in by his fantastical rendering of things. More than anything, Edward craves a curious and willing audience for his stories, and Josephine, more than his son or wife, is open to hearing his wild tales for the first time.
