i didnt get the movie? someone explain

He was not dead. The Strawberry thing has confused many, I think it's because he's allergies wasen't as big as it was and he could eat a couple of strawberries before anything happened. Kinda like if small dogs eat too much chocolate they die. But a little bit now and then is ok.

STAY TROMATIZED!

if you ask me, i think the allergy was a metaphore, and a foreshadowing device more than anything. it was his little test to himself that he must keep the feeling of being alive, just as throught the movie in every situation where he begins to let the mundane aspects of life in he must prove to himself he is living.
the examples: when he is being confornted by the media and everyone is calling him a hero, he wasnt a hero in his own eyes he didnt want to lie nor live up to expectations other people made for him, so he exploits his vulnerability in a death defying action by crossing a street without looking. when he is asked to lie he jumps up on the building trembling in fear at first he couldnt give in he overcomes his fear and lives and embraces it. when carla is drown once again by her shame of letting go of her baby he brings her into his world by showing her to embrace life by defying death, and also the its not her fault she cant carry that weight.
the strawberries are like little tests, just as he, 3 times, put him self at the face of death in larger ways and overcame them. he overcame the allergy in more of a metaphorical way, almost like a precursor to his larger events. and the last time, after he lets go of carla (who has been saved, and who cannot save him)he asks his wife to save him and he found his catalyst to what will give her that chance, and this time its real because he either needed to let go of the life he began living by defying death or embrace life in a more human way. if you voluntarily put yourself at the face of constant vulnerability you are bound to succumb to death sooner or later. living life isnt about defying death, its about everything, love and family and even the mundane little things of the everyday, because we are always vulnerable it doesnt mean you have to walk through traffic, or stand on a ledge, or crash your car willingly to see the beauty of it. you dont have to take everything in this film, in a literal sense, its one of those broad strokes.

the strawberries - I think they were a literary device much more than a literal one. Let me backtrack.

Max didn't come out of the crash the way the other survivors did - they all desperately wanted to live. He utterly accepted death, his fate and life, and was not prepared to go on living. Thus after the crash there came an asynchronicity between his physical being and his spiritual being. A great confusion indeed, so, despite what others here have suggested (that he had a continuous need to feel alive), in his moments of greatest confusion, he felt a desperate need to PROVE he's alive because he DOESN'T feel alive. The feelings these events engender - on the roof, crashing his car, eating strawberries, are temporary anchors to his physical being, his life, but do not alleviate the underlying confusion. It's why he says to carla they're dead, why he refers to themselves as ghosts. Their souls, their consciences, haven't accepted that they're alive. yet.

To go back to the strawberries - his eating them is indicative of his ghostly state. afterall, you can't die if you're already dead. I believe there is a deeper allegory here to the story of christ, but I haven't decided yet if it was a central tenet thematically, or just a subtext used to allude to the things I've pointed out. anyhoo, he doesn't begin to revive from his state till carla comes to him at the hospital. his crashing the car alleviated her guilt and she was ready to live again. in essence he saved her soul (more christlike allusions). but then he was left behind, alone as a ghost, and that's when he begins to realize that he's still alive, seeing her come to life before his eyes, at his hands. He asks his wife to save him, still feeling dead but wanting desperately to awaken, as carla did. It's only then that the last strawberry can kill him, reviving from his ghostliness. That final brush with death only cements in him how very much alive he is; no truly dead thing could choke on a strawberry, could lie on the floor looking into his wife's eyes, gasping, and in that moment want to live so much. That, finally, is why it's so moving that he cries out, "I'M ALIVE," rather than saying I love you to his wife or something similar. That is the moment his soul fully reawakens to this world.

On a somewhat similar vein, There is the following zen story

"One day while walking through the wilderness a man stumbled upon a vicious tiger. He ran but soon came to the edge of a high cliff. Desperate to save himself, he climbed down a vine and dangled over the fatal precipice. As he hung there, two mice appeared from a hole in the cliff and began gnawing on the vine. Suddenly, he noticed on the vine a plump wild strawberry. He paused for an instant, but then plucked it and popped it in his mouth. It was the most delicious food he ever tasted in his whole life!"

The movies point (in my opinion) is how an ordinary man realizes that the like that forbidden strawberry, the ephermeral nature of life is part of the reason for its profound sweetness - Max doesn't want to leave that new found appreaciation and thus courts death at every turn -to feel alive- and tries not to be forced to return to the mundane reality of his past life - but at the end he comes to see that it is this life not death -the last breath literally the breath of life as his wife preforms cpr on him where his realization -that love lies in that mundane life that he comes to understand the truth about the duality of life and to reconcile his new insight with the power of his families love

it is a beautifully poetic and spiritual film - one of my favourites

I could say his ability to eat strawberries at various points meant he was symbolically the walking dead, which I suspect is what Weir intended, but you probably could have the same thing in real life by hypnotizing someone. When you hypnotize people, you can stick them with big fat hat pins all day long and they won';t feel a thing if you tell not to, for example.

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