Movies

A couple of weeks ago, Shelley and I watched The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. We had different reactions to it. Shelley rather enjoyed Douglas Adams' weird sense of humor while I found his existential philosophy disturbing. The movie made me kind of depressed. What a sad way of looking at life! While on our trip, Shelley decided to purchase the novels to read. Admittedly, they are pretty funny. Adams is a great author for all of his silliness.

Throughout the film, Adams ridicules the idea of God. He continually jokes about how God made a mistake in creating the universe and that everyone agrees that this was a bad idea. In one part of the movie, the folks on one planet ask a giant supercomputer about the meaning of life. After a million years of thinking about it, the computer absurdly responds, "Forty-two." To Adams, life has no meaning other than the one that you decide to make up. In the midst of all this humor, I couldn't help but feel sad about the consequences of such a worldview.

Another scene that stands out to me revolves around a torpedo that is transformed into a whale by the hitchhikers' spacecraft. The whale suddenly finds himself in the middle of atmosphere falling to his death. In the whale's short life, he has just enough time to ask the meaning of life before gravity sends him to his death. Life seems so futile.

Watching the movie was a bit like reading through Ecclesiastes. Death has a way of sobering us up. We need to ask why we exist. Until we know why we are here, we have no idea how we should live.