I *Heart* Huckabees

I *Heart* Huckabees: though peculiarly hilarious, it is truly a movie for the philosopher. A desperate man looks for significance, seeks to find the answers that comprise life and human existence. He looks for hidden meaning in random coincidences. Are they a part of fate, all connected in the infinity of life, or are they merely disconnected holes in the fabric of the world. Two camps, one praising the virtues of interconnectedness, holding out hope and faith in a strange and bent world; the other disregarding the universe itself as a heartless, hopeless, disconnected place, with no meaning and no reason. What he finds is a life of interconnected peace built only from the wreckage and waste of human pain.

Is such a balance truly necessary in this life? Regardless, this movie tells the story of people, creatures of habit, who live endless cycles of repetition, telling the same stories over and over. Discontent, the ravaging plague in todays world, eats away at them all the time. Snipets of their unhappiness only reach the surface in poems and the occasional fistfights. But it broods there endlessly. Do they really ever escape that pattern? In the movie, they do so when they find the how the interconnected nature of the universe brings them round to the issues they need to deal with, and an acceptance of the pain as well as the hope of a happy ending frees them from shaping themselves after the patterns forced on them by humanity.

The true question posed to us in the movie is "How am I not myself?"

I don't really know if there's a load of essential truths in this film or if it's all a bunch of malarky. Either way, it makes one consider the pain in the world as well as the meaning of life. In that, at least, I'd recommend it to anyone who is in need of thinking of such things, which I believe to be a lot of people.