Keep On Keeping On

I told myself when I started this blog that I wouldn't use it to talk about movies--a writer should talk about writing, I reasoned, and I still believe this; however I find I must make an exception for I Heart Huckabees.  I watched it twice today, once through and then again while listening to the director's (David O. Russell's)commentary.

I was particularly struck by how the movie touches on what I've been reading and thinking about lately--the meaning of life.  Even as I write this--the meaning of life--I realize how trite and self-absorbed it sounds.  Because I believe as Joseph Campbell does, that there is no "meaning" to life--there's just life.  As Campbell says, if you hold up a flower, you don't ask, "What's the meaning of a flower?"  And in considering the flea, you don't ask, "Or of a flea?"  What art gives us is not the "meaning" of life but the "experience of being alive."

What I love about Huckabees is that it deals with the "meaning of life" dilemma in a truly humorous way and at the same time touches on the hard truth about our existence.  Life isn't fair; it's brutal and often nasty--and, perhaps even more to the point, temporary--and we can't change that.  But in the face of that knowledge, we can be heroic by doing the best we can. 

This idea of being heroic in the face of our mortality is essentially the thesis of Ernest Becker in his excellent book Denial of Death.  Becker says that we must accept our "creatureliness," which is the fact that our body, just like that of all animals, will decay and die. Joseph Campbell, too, makes this assertion.  He talks of how "terrible" life is, given the fact that we must live it by killing and by eating, eating, eating.  Until we face up to this fact, Becker  says, we aren't really living.

I was intrigued to hear Russell mention Joseph Campbell during his commentary, repeating Campbell's thoughts on life, suffering, and Christ.  Christ's acceptance of his brutal fate should act as a prototype, Russell pointed out, for our own acceptance.  Once we accept the world for what it is, we can learn to function within it without becoming paralyzed by our insecurities.

Russell also mentions that an early influence for him was J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey.  (I did my Master's thesis on Salinger).  My point is that as I was watching I Heart Huckabees, I felt a deep affinity with the writer-director.  I felt we were looking at life through the same lens.  Listening to the commentary just confirmed it.

The way this entry connects to our art is that the creative life requires intense concentration and a huge leap into the unknown, a leap of faith that what we are doing is somehow worthwhile.  Does the world really need one more story?  Does it need another novel?  Or painting? 

If we give in completely to the "meaningless of life" belief, we lose the impetus to create.  If, on the other hand, we give ourselves completely to the "art as immortality" argument, we run the risk of giving in to our human ego, an idea illustrated so well in the movie when the "poet" plants photographs of himself inside a store and dreams of recognition and maybe a little Bob-Dylan-fame.

I love this movie because it reminds me not to take myself--or my art--too seriously.  It also reinforces that there is a reason and a way to keep on keeping on.