Mike and I saw I Heart Huckabees on Saturday. Some disconnected thoughts:

It takes a light touch, and classically a French one, to make a film that can portray something as both absurd and deeply meaningful (think Amelie). Huckabees, which is solidly American, takes on Walmart, hippies, suburban attitudes towards global politics, marketing and sales types, homecoming queens, and California metaphysics without missing a beat. Yet with the possible exception of Walmart, it manages to redeem all these bits of Americana without patronizing them, and what’s more, it shows a serious sensibility to the hidden needs of its characters.

I suppose the film studies majors already have a name for the school of films that are coming from the minds and talents of Wes Anderson, Jason Schwartzman, and the Wilson brothers (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, etc). Superficially absurdist, visually striking, and verbally witty, their underlying sensitivity, I think, is to the process by which a person becomes a part of the world of other people. It’s a process which children (particularly boys) who grew up in the eighties and nineties find particularly difficult: these are the times when, for the first time in history, physical intermediaries like the telephone and the Internet gained the uppper hand over face-to-face contact. At the same time, the remnants of American culture had more or less disintegrated in the seventies, leaving us with no social norms, or worse, conflicting ones.

A culture, for all its faults, provides a context in which we can understand what other people mean by their behavior. Without it, we are deeply isolated from strangers. In Huckabees, for example, ecologist-poet Albert Markovski (Schwartzman) is completely incapable of empathizing with marketing executive Brad Stand (Jude Law) even though they are both driven by the same need for approval. Albert is put off by Brad’s ingratiating charm, indolent wealth, and trophy girlfriend; Brad, in turn, thinks Albert is an ineffectual wimp who takes refuge in poetry and refuses to make necessary compromises. Their identities – largely self-constructed – are all they can see of each other, and the only possible dialogue is in fact no dialogue at all, but argument about the meaning of (similarly self-constructed) words like “coalition” and “charter”.

Wittgenstein, I believe, makes the argument that we know about our own internal states not from an abstract process of self-examination, but by observing other people display emotions and learning how to imitate them. In other words, it is impossible for me to sympathize with my self – to understand the meaning of my own emotions – until I can also sympathize with other people. Albert’s hatred of Brad so completely occupies his mind that he is unable to see himself and deal with his own desires.

One of the peculiar ironies of psychology is that as often as not we’d prefer to ignore our desires. To paraphrase Nelson Mandela, we’re afraid of our strengths more than our weaknesses. This self-negation is the basis of addiction, both to external chemicals and to the chemicals we produce ourselves. Emotional states result in the release of powerful neurotransmitters that can remap our neural circuitry (What the Bleep Do We Know is worth seeing for its very funny middle segment about emotional addiction), and it often takes a catastrophe to disrupt the entrenched patterns of thought that are associated with addiction. In the quiet aftermath of the catastrophe it is not unusual to find that we can finally see ourselves and other people clearly.

A lesser director than David Russell might leave us with the feeling that the solution to this existential problem lies somewhere in the metaphysics Dustin Hoffman provides such a copious stream of. Indeed, after Three Kings and its forthright examination of petroleum politics, Russell has a reputation as a bit of a missionary. But Huckabees is delightfully tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating, and the real message of the film is not in the way in which Albert and Brad learn to sympathize with each other, but in the way in which the audience itself is taught to sympathize with the characters.

G.K. Chesterton once said that if we are having trouble loving our enemies we should try imagining them as children. That kind of imagination is tough to learn, but I Heart Huckabees is a wonderful first lesson. Highly reccomended.