by Matt Kirby
Metaphilm
Daniel Duane of the New York Times Magazine paraphrases America’s most commercially successful philosophical counselor, Lou Marinoff, thus:
“Americans are tired of psychologists dwelling on our every painful feeling, we’re sick of psychiatrists prescribing a new drug every time we feel confused, and many of our most pressing problems aren’t even emotional or chemical to begin with—they’re philosophical.”
Marinoff, whose slogan and book is Plato, not Prozac!, is suing his employer, the City University of New York, over lost revenue resulting from a since-lifted ban on his campus practice. He complains, “These people just can’t tell the difference between psychology and philosophy.”
Unfortunately, the manner in which philosophical counseling generally proceeds—a series of one-on-one conversations between philosopher and “philosophand”—does nothing to dissuade such a comparison. The format of psychoanalysis—paid consultation with a professionally distanced expert wherein the subject’s life is recounted in isolation from the world—has come to dominate our understanding of how a person “gets help.”
A notable element of David Russell’s I ♥ Huckabees is that it takes philosophical counseling and replaces the psychoanalytical method with the tactics of the investigator to yield a new trope: the “existential detective.”
Unlike the analyst, who uses the narratives of psychoanalysis to explain the phenomenal world, the traditional gumshoe detective interprets the phenomenal world, employing mundane objects and occurrences as clues in the construction of a narrative of heightened meaning—how a crime was committed. This requires him to reconstruct events by walking the same route, handling the same objects, and confronting the same enemies as the subject. In part, he shares the fate of the person he helps. Likewise in Huckabees, ordinary details in the life of the person being investigated—tensions in the workplace, the loss of a family cat, a (planted) Kafka title in the trash—are transformed into crucial signifiers in a larger story.
By combining the trope of the risk-taking investigator with that of the philosopher—someone willing to peer into grand, abstract questions of meaning and existence, I ♥ Huckabees has recreated, in modern language, a pre-modern problem solving form. Russell’s existential detective is a distinctly Western figure employing the methods of a shaman.
A shamanistic process
One problem with the word “shaman,” which traces its origins to the Siberian steppe, is that it is popularly employed by people more interested in fantasizing about some alternate reality than squaring their shoulders to bear the mundane burdens of this one. However, in cultures where such an office exists, the job of the shaman is primarily to foster the interrelation of two groups or positions that have hardened into such stubborn opposition that the survival of the society is at risk. For life to go on, the two camps must overcome their polemic, and the shaman acts by throwing himself into the fray—mentally, bodily, and emotionally, sometimes at personal risk. The result of his labors typically constitutes a paradigm shift rather than a compromise: the rules, though not necessarily undone, are re-contextualized and the system changes, including the position of the shaman himself.
The Existential Detectives in Huckabees, including their dissenting French faction, are essentially concerned with one thing—conflict—and not, as protagonist Albert Markovski initially supposes, with understanding coincidence in itself. Ideas, for the detectives, are clues that reveal human soul-sickness or tools that can correct it. Their explanations of how the universe works—a unified “blanket” on one hand and a meaningless void on the other—tend to be goofy or oversimplified. But this is somewhat beside the point, for their aim is action rather than analysis. They are working toward the creation and resolution of conflict—achieving a moment of crisis in order to shift an entire system.
On the surface, the schism at hand is the irreconcilability of the worldviews of bleeding-heart poet Markovski and junior executive Brad Stand. The solution of Markovski’s case requires the simultaneous solution of Stand’s. Isolated growth is not an option. The solution of both cases further depends on the solution of Tommy Corn’s and Dawn Campbell’s cases—and ultimately on the reorganization of the detectives themselves into winking compatriots rather than rivals in a zero-sum philosophical game.
This is the most startling characteristic of what, for lack of a better word, we can call the shamanistic process: to resolve one problem the entire system must be reordered. The universe is momentarily flattened so that Saint Anthony really is concerned with where you left your car keys and talk of deep things versus mundane matters is irrelevant because everything is both. The film expresses this by linking several of America’s currently raging polemics with the lives of individual agents: religion, oil, sprawl, the African crisis, and that incident in September all have something do with why Albert Markovski simply cannot stand Brad Stand and vice versa.
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