The Grand Orchestra
Hi, kiddies. Today I want to talk about a masterful film I recently saw, and then saw again, and then saw again. And then again, and again, and again and again. This monsoon of greatness is called I Heart Huckabees, and it was showered upon the world by David O. Russell, the guy who made Three Kings and Flirting With Disaster.
The wonderful thing about this film is that it pulls a neat little conceptual hat trick I’ve never seen pulled before. Before we delve into that, though, let’s have a few words about the movie’s principal trappings. Right here, incidentally, is the end of the line for you if you haven’t seen it - I’m about to spoil stuff. Besides, if you haven’t seen this film yet, you shouldn’t be reading this or anything else. The only place for you right now is on a breathless sprint for the video store, currency extending from your outstretched hand in a supplicating manner, last night’s dinner barely contained within your quivering bowels.
So, okay. For the sake of brevity, I’m gonna drop the standard film-criticism parentheses and just lay out the bare-bones version, like so: A pair of young men facing separate but similar existential crises are torn between two ideologies, one a new-agey mysticism, the other a bleak nihilism. These ideologies’ representatives chase our hapless heroes through a distinctly 21st-century landscape filled with suburban sprawl, corporate mindlessness and the kind of sneering simplism peculiar to the offspring of consumerist societies. By the end, through the machinations of its screenplay, the film has managed, gently but effectively, to reconcile the two opposing philosophies. In doing so, it comes to a realization about the nature of ultimate truth, as far as such a thing can be confidently defined. Truth about truth. How post-modernistically post-modern.
I love this movie as much as I do because through this hat trick, it illustrates something I find myself in absolute agreement with but rarely see expressed: that ultimate truth (again, with the aforementioned proviso), as a destination, is achievable by many paths. Whichever path you choose, it will eventually lead you to the same place as all the other ones. Some paths are winding, others have great big detours, yet others are relatively straight. What the film’s two apparently opposite philosophical blocs are doing is merely taking different paths; in essence, their philosophies share the truth at the end of the rainbow. It’s not even that the scenery on their respective roads is different; all that sets them apart are the thoughts they have about the journey and the words they use to describe it. Like Pac-Man, they need only move an inch off the left side to suddenly find themselves on the right side.
Nothing matters, so everything matters. Strip all the layers off your ego and you have absolute emptiness, a.k.a. divine bliss. Life is transitory and unpredictable, yet bestowed its meaning and beauty by these very things. From whichever side you look at it, truth is truth.
The world’s religions and philosophies are all strumming the same piece on different instruments, and it would do us a world of good to remember that more often. As an astute fellow once observed, the things that unite us are greater than the things that divide us.
And if you think I’m full of shit, then here’s me waving to you across the fork in the path. We’ll see each other again sometime.
The wonderful thing about this film is that it pulls a neat little conceptual hat trick I’ve never seen pulled before. Before we delve into that, though, let’s have a few words about the movie’s principal trappings. Right here, incidentally, is the end of the line for you if you haven’t seen it - I’m about to spoil stuff. Besides, if you haven’t seen this film yet, you shouldn’t be reading this or anything else. The only place for you right now is on a breathless sprint for the video store, currency extending from your outstretched hand in a supplicating manner, last night’s dinner barely contained within your quivering bowels.
So, okay. For the sake of brevity, I’m gonna drop the standard film-criticism parentheses and just lay out the bare-bones version, like so: A pair of young men facing separate but similar existential crises are torn between two ideologies, one a new-agey mysticism, the other a bleak nihilism. These ideologies’ representatives chase our hapless heroes through a distinctly 21st-century landscape filled with suburban sprawl, corporate mindlessness and the kind of sneering simplism peculiar to the offspring of consumerist societies. By the end, through the machinations of its screenplay, the film has managed, gently but effectively, to reconcile the two opposing philosophies. In doing so, it comes to a realization about the nature of ultimate truth, as far as such a thing can be confidently defined. Truth about truth. How post-modernistically post-modern.
I love this movie as much as I do because through this hat trick, it illustrates something I find myself in absolute agreement with but rarely see expressed: that ultimate truth (again, with the aforementioned proviso), as a destination, is achievable by many paths. Whichever path you choose, it will eventually lead you to the same place as all the other ones. Some paths are winding, others have great big detours, yet others are relatively straight. What the film’s two apparently opposite philosophical blocs are doing is merely taking different paths; in essence, their philosophies share the truth at the end of the rainbow. It’s not even that the scenery on their respective roads is different; all that sets them apart are the thoughts they have about the journey and the words they use to describe it. Like Pac-Man, they need only move an inch off the left side to suddenly find themselves on the right side.
Nothing matters, so everything matters. Strip all the layers off your ego and you have absolute emptiness, a.k.a. divine bliss. Life is transitory and unpredictable, yet bestowed its meaning and beauty by these very things. From whichever side you look at it, truth is truth.
The world’s religions and philosophies are all strumming the same piece on different instruments, and it would do us a world of good to remember that more often. As an astute fellow once observed, the things that unite us are greater than the things that divide us.
And if you think I’m full of shit, then here’s me waving to you across the fork in the path. We’ll see each other again sometime.
posted by fnoonf at 16:23
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