I Heart Huckabees
is a unique and fascinating movie. It’s tough for a Christian to recommend
because, as is usual in the entertainment industry, its creators made sure to
include some gratuitous sex scenes and plenty of filthy language. But if you
can tolerate that then it’s worth watching. It is unique, as far as I know, in
depicting very successfully the thought processes of several character’s ‘existential
crises’. It also is well acted and thoroughly entertaining, especially if you’ve
ever been through such a crisis yourself.
There
are a few points that I’d like to pull out of the movie and attend to, because
they are useful for Christians to think about.
1.
Jude Law cannot pull off an American
accent. Truly, Jude Law’s inherent Englishness is overwhelming. He playing
an American business-shark is about as plausible as Sean Connery playing a
Russian submarine captain. Wait, that’s not my first point. Let’s try again.
1*.
The critique of the Church. The film
is about several characters going through what are commonly called ‘existential
crises’; basically, for various reasons they realize that the life they’ve been
living is meaningless or immoral and then try to understand what is the point
of it all and how they ought to live. It is to the film’s credit that the Church
shows up in one scene as a possible path. However, the Church is pretty harshly
and superficially dismissed in the same scene, on the usual ground of ‘hypocrisy’.
I
won’t take the self-flagellating route which is so popular among Christians
today and accept uncritically the film’s critique of the Church. It is quite
unfair, recapitulating as it does the usual trope that the families who appear
most good and wholesome are, under the surface, worse than anybody else. And
what is presented as so bad about them is basically that they are a suburban
middle-class Republican-voting (I presume) white household. So the Christian
family are shown to have adopted a young African and gotten him a job, for
which he is grateful, but they get no credit, essentially, because they would
vote Republican. Not a very substantial critique.
HOWEVER.
There is one thing worth taking away from this scene, and it is that the Church
(represented by this Christian family) does not get the existential crisis at all and in fact is represented as
trying to shut it back in its box. There is an exchange between the characters
that goes something like this:
Existential
seeker: Did you ever lie in a meadow at night?
Child:
What happens in a meadow at night?
Mother:
Nothing!—Seeker (simultaneously): Everything!
Mother
(louder): Nothing!—Seeker (louder): Everything!
In
actual fact this representation is so far from right that the precise opposite
is the truth: the Church is today the only ally
of meaning, of truth, of the moral life. BUT—I think this scene presents quite
accurately the way most people perceive the Church and one reason people do not
more readily turn to the Church when they enter an existential crisis. It’s
something we Christians should think about.
2.
The causes of the existential crises. The
four characters who go through these crises each embody a different Politically
Correct trope:
a)
The environmentalist (Jason Schwartzman). He is shocked and pained by the
destruction of nature in modern society and wants to protect forests and swamps
from being built over by a mall.
b)
The Noam Chomsky (Mark Wahlberg). He realizes that the USA’s need for oil is
driving its government to make all kinds of evil political decisions. It
provokes a moral crisis and he tries to stop everyone from using petroleum (he’s
a fireman, and he starts riding a bicycle to fires instead of riding the
truck).
c)
The hipster (Naomi Watts). She becomes disillusioned with advertising and
commercialism and starts wearing frumpy clothes instead.
d)
The unhappy businessman (Jude Law). He at first fakes an existential crisis in
order to advance his career, but it gets out of hand and he gradually realizes
that his whole life is a façade he puts on because he hates himself inside.
I
bring this up because Christians, especially politically conservative or
reactionary ones, tend to be utterly unsympathetic or even hostile to these
causes. And they have good reason to be. But there’s a big problem—
These
types of causes are, in fact, often the alarms that wake young people up to
morality and principles and a purpose in life. I Heart Huckabees presents a pretty accurate picture, in my
experience, of the way young people in our society first encounter the big
questions and first adopt a standard of virtue. They become vegetarians or stop
driving cars or stop buying from Wal-Mart...
And
Christians ought not to stamp out these little sparks of the moral life. Those
moments of existential crisis are precisely the points when conversion can
happen—and not just conversion in the sense of calling oneself a Christian, but
actual repentance and an attempt to amend
one’s life. (Some people raised as Christians their whole lives could be
improved by an existential crisis.) But Christians are often stonewalling on
the very questions that these seekers are trying to answer, and so the Faith
does not appear to them a live option.
I
have no solution to offer. The Church cannot sacrifice the truth in order to
win converts—it won’t work, and even if it did, it would be wrong. But at the
same time, for many people today the moral life is presented to them in these
types of PC pet causes. I have tried here to present this problem. Christians
ought to take it seriously.
And
now, some words from the Who:
I've looked under chairs
I've looked under tables
I've tried to find the key
To fifty million fables
They call me 'The Seeker'
I've been searching low and high
I won't get to get what I'm after
Till the day I die
I asked Bobby Dylan
I asked The Beatles
I asked Timothy Leary
But he couldn't help me either...
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