Huckabees Blog Post Assignment

Do we live in a world that is meaningful and makes sense?

One day your life is going along the way it always does so you have no reason to question it, and the next day something happens to turn it upside down, and suddenly it feels like you have lost your place in the universe. This is the start of your existential crisis, and the first stage is disbelief followed closely by fear. For example Albert Markovski, a good guy environmental activist whose company “Open Spaces” tries to preserve natural habitats suddenly finds himself out of a job when his enemy Brad, boss of the Huckabees megastore (“the everything store”) takes over. There is even a literature angle to the takeover. Brad’s stories, not to mention his good looks, impress the older females at Open Spaces who have grown tired of Albert’s boring “save the environment” poems. Albert then goes to existential detectives Bernard and Vivian Jaffe and asks them to uncover the meaning of his life, which has just fallen apart. Unfortunately, their advice, “Everything is the same, even if it’s different,” does not give him any enlightenment, and so he goes to Caterine, a “dark existentialist.” She tells him to stop thinking and get into a state of “pure being” by smacking a ball in his face, and he ends up setting Brad’s house on fire.
This is not exactly the act of freedom that Sartre or Camus had in mind, something that would reflect well on humanity. When Sisyphus, a clever king, fooled the gods one too many times when he captured Hades so no one could die, his own death ended in an eternal punishment of having to push a boulder up a hill that would just fall down again just as it reached the top. In this absurd situation, Sisyphus found satisfaction in the struggle to keep trying with the boulder, and this was Camus’ point. Sisyphus had to look within himself to find some meaning in his life since there was no outside power that was going to help him. Albert was no Sisyphus.
Albert was also not like a Dorothy, who was one day in her comfy farmhouse and the next traveling by tornado to the Land of Oz, where a wicked witch was out to kill her.
When she discovered there was no outside power to help her because the Wizard of Oz was a fraud, she found the strength inside herself to help her friends and herself.
In spite of the fact that Albert’s act of burning down Brad’s house was not a redeeming one, Albert discovers a sort of existential sympathy for Brad, who loses his beautiful house to the fire and his wife to the fireman. There is a happy ending with Albert back in his own job. Getting even by arson does not give meaning to life, but then “I Love Huckabees” is a comedy, and we do not have to try to make sense of it the way we do with our own lives. In my life if my world suddenly goes upside down, which it did two years ago when a new coach started benching his strongest players. I had to decide between saying, “Everything sucks” and riding it out continuing to do my best.
What was happening had nothing to do with me and so my world made no sense. The only way to give the experience meaning was to find it in me, and I think that is what the existentialists, Sartre and Camus, as opposed to Bernard and Vivian, are trying to tell us. The meaning in the universe has to come from inside ourselves.