Campus CrossWalk Magazine: 2005 Summer Issue -- Movie Review: I Heart Huckabees

I Heart Huckabees is a movie about perspective. It asks the question what is real?

Can we ever know what is real and what isn’t?

According to the pop culture of this movie, the real world is defined by individual perspective and existence in a cruel joke. In the movie, Albert, an aspiring environmental activist, is loosing control of his world. The environmental coalition Albert started is being taken over by his confidant nemesis Brad, and he is disturbed by several seemingly coincidental encounters with a tall African youth. Attempting to sort through the things troubling him, Albert turns to an existential detective agency. The detectives try to help Albert discover a world of interconnectedness. They profess to Albert that the real world is a blanket. Our lives, according to the detectives, are a blanket where everything is connected at some point.

Dustin Hoffman plays one of the detectives. He visualizes the movie screen into squares that break apart and flow indiscriminately across the picture. This is what he sees as the real world; that we are all just parts of everything else and there is some point where all the pieces are indiscernible from the others.

It is at this point where the interconnectedness of existence can be grasped. Unfortunately, the interconnected thing doesn’t help Albert, and his life continues to get worse. He finally hits bottom when Brad hires the detectives and, to add insult to injury, Albert is voted out of the coalition and Brad is selected as the new leader.

As the story continues to get more complex Albert meets Tommy who is another client of the existential detectives. Albert and Tommy decide to forsake the teaching of the detectives and ride with Caterine, a rival existentialist. According to Caterine, rather than everything being connected, everything is meaningless. She preaches that the only thing that has meaning is inexistence. Nothing is important and none of it matters.

Still with me?

At the climax of the movie Albert and Tommy come to an epiphany. They are sitting at a picnic table and hitting each other with a ball in an attempt to experience nothingness. When they are hit in the face with a ball enough times, they discover that they can focus solely on the ball and on nothing else. According to Albert this is the answer.

Albert exclaims “It’s like I’m a rock, or I’m a dish of mold. I’m whatever else is around so I’m free to just exist. It’s like I’m here but I’m not, so I’m not here. We just have to be this all day every day.”

However, our two searchers are disappointed to discover that this is not reality. Caterine applauds them for learning the technique of becoming nothingness, but she also declares to them, “It is inevitable that you a drawn back into human drama, desire, suffering--everything that exists in this imperfect world: An absurd theatrical we must play out back and forth from pure being to human suffering.”

The dilemma is that “pure being” as Caterine calls it, does not make human suffering any easier. The real world, according to her, is characterized by cruelty, manipulation, and meaninglessness. It is inevitable that we as people are drawn into the drama of human life.

Albert and Tommy go through the rest of the movie experiencing this human drama to discover that what Caterine has told them has some degree of truth. At the end of the film, Tommy and Albert say to each other, “Looks like you saw some truth.” They put the two philosophies together and declare that the interconnection is for real, but it’s nothing special because it grows from the manure of human trouble.

The movie ends (here’s your chance to tune out if you don’t want to know)with Albert and Tommy sitting on a bench hitting one another with a ball. They blur into nothingness as the movie credits roll.

What is your real world? Do you want to live in a world where the only thing that is good is feeling like an ashtray? Is the real world a world of cruelty, manipulation and meaninglessness? Paul’s letter to the Ephesians proclaims a world of equality, love and meaning. Ultimate meaning is rooted in Christ’s death on the cross. Truth does not come from escaping from this world but from the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus.

We see truth when we see God for who he truly is. God came to earth in the form of a man to experience human suffering to its fullest extent. That’s the real world. God desires to be in relationship with people. This means experiencing pain with us. Read the book of Psalms and you’ll discover that God’s people suffer. Yet, in the midst of suffering, God is there.

Psalm 23 speaks of walking through “the valley of the shadow of death. Yet, God is present! God is there in the desperate deep. We endure suffering with God in our midst and His blessings reach us in our anguish because He also suffers. We can come together in equality, love and meaning because God meets us in our worst suffering.

Mark Carver puts it well, “This is our calling. We are called to form communities where suffering is recognized as a part of life, not something to be avoided or denied. We are called to provide a place where suffering--especially unmerited suffering--is met with unmerited grace extended by the Suffering Servant who invited us into the suffering of others and promises to meet us there.” *

: * From We believe therefore we speak, doctoral dissertation by Mark Love.

Mike Wood serves as Campus Minister at Virginia Tech with the Blacksburg Church of Christ. His B.S. in parks & recreation is from the University of Idaho. His M.S. in ministry is from Pepperdine University. He and his lovely wife, Cindy, have been married for just under 10 years and they have two adorable (they take after her) children; one of each flavor.