HW 9 - I <3 Huckabees (Final)

Do we live in a world that is meaningful and make sense?

I am staring at this question that we supposed to answer for homework, and I felt like the question makes no sense to me. How do we suppose to consider something make sense or vice versa? Judging whether the world make sense to me or not, it is kind of frustrating, and meaningless to answer. However, I have to keep this assignment going, “no less than 400 words”, so I’ll just trigger my thoughts out as I am typing.

I remember one time when I was arguing with my brother about he doesn’t have any common sense; and he told me that there is no such thing called common sense. Common sense is really being interpreted as different cultures and values. Moreover, it really depends on how that person perceives. Using chop sticks might make sense to me, but it will make no sense to most of the Americans. Why using something so complicated to eat while you can just use a fork and pick up the food faster? This is similar to Banach’s lecture that we read from last unit. Everybody perceives differently, and how do we expect others to have common sense as us? A guy wearing a dress as a fashion view makes sense to me, but it makes completely no sense to my mom because we view things differently.

If everybody values different senses, how are we suppose to know whether the world make sense or not? By thinking about this, I reverse it and asked, what doesn’t make sense? By thinking it this way, I think everything make sense depending on the person’s point of view. But whether what make sense to me will make sense to the other that is another question.

With that being said, I think this idea is parallel with the movie I Heart Huckabees. The movie starts out that Tommy and Albert were struggling about the meaning of life and trying to figure out the “ultimate truth about reality”. While Tommy believe everything is disconnected, he starts to bond with Albert pretty fast throughout the movie with the helped of Caterine, just that they did not realized it. Then when at the end of the movie, they found out that everything is connected and it is made with the “two overlapping, fractured philosophies”. They soon realized that everything in this world is connected, and like Tommy said, “it is not special”. This whole idea about the meaning of life is that, if life doesn’t mean anything, what is. Or the other way around, if life is meaningful, what isn’t?

I totally agreed with what Bernard said in the beginning of the movie that “everything is the same, even if it’s different”. The sentence seems contradicts itself, but it makes sense. Just like how Caterine goes the extreme of nothing matters, and Bernard and Vivian goes to another that everything is connected, at the end, they do intersect each other, and that point is the ultimate truth about life is that everything does matter. Tommy starts off believe that nothing matters, and soon bond with Catherine and Albert. What he doesn’t realize is that they are different, but they are all in the same “blanket”, which at the end, when Tommy and Albert sat on the rock and said to each other, “it looks like you saw some truth”.

Similarly, when Caterine took a picture of Albert being upset on the elevator, the picture is just the same as the one that she took at last of Brad. The “tiny cracks” and small connections that hold us together in this universe, they are different person, but overall they are just one as a whole. We all suffer and go through difficult times, but the difference is that they are being play out in varies of ways.

I believe this is the meaning of life. The feeling of being connected, how one from far south could affect me in the north, that there is something we do not see, but only be able to feel. This is the ultimate truth about human life and this makes sense, and it is meaningful.

i ♥ huckabees