Existential Nihilism In I Heart Huckabees

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I Heart Huckabees is a film that discusses existential and philosophical themes throughout the movie. It is extremely rare for a movie to directly discuss existentialist themes in the manner that it is done in I Heart Huckabees. It is important to analyze these types of movies in order to achieve a greater understanding of the concepts they discuss. The premise of the movie is that Albert, played by Jason Schwartzman, enlists the help of two existential detectives in order to help him solve a set of coincidences involving an African refugee. These two detectives follow Albert around and document his life. Albert originally intended to hire the existential detectives only to investigate the coincidences however, as the movie progresses, we …show more content…

Once this happened, she accepted nihilism as the answer to existential questions. She directly opposes the idea that the universe is interconnected and believes that life is meaningless. She uses her beliefs in nihilism to explain to Albert that the reason for his questions is that he was “orphaned by indifference” (I Heart Huckabees). This causes Albert to accept nihilism and believe that things are meaningless. Albert and Tommy display the absurdity of nihilism by comparing it to hitting each other in the face with a ball. Being hit in the face allows them to understand the meaninglessness of the world and they desire to hit each other “all day every day” (I Heart Huckabees). Caterine explains to them that it is not possible to do this all day and that have you to “get drawn back into human drama” (I Heart Huckabees). This is similar to the criticism of nihilism we learned in class that if you are truly nihilistic then you should not do anything and just embrace the meaninglessness of the world. There is a scene in the movie before Albert accepts nihilism where he is eating dinner with a Christian family. He seems to reject their beliefs and ends up getting into an argument with the family. This is interesting because according to Nietzsche, Christianity and nihilism share the same metaphysic. In the end though, Albert rejects nihilism because he views it as too

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