Remember the 1970s? Lots of people don’t, of course, but those
of us who do can tell you that there was a time for which
existential heroes like Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide
to the Galaxy were invented. Arthur’s inventor was the late
Douglas Adams whose franchise, sometimes nicknamed H2G2,
began as a BBC radio series in 1978. This quickly achieved cult
status and was turned into several money spinning books and a TV
show in 1981. Adams was also closely involved in the new film
version of the story, directed by Garth Jennings, until his sudden
death from a heart attack at the age of 49 in 2001. He gets a
posthumous co-screenwriter’s credit along with Karey
Kirkpatrick.
But a quarter of a century later the concept has grown a bit
stale, and I think that’s why, though at times quite enjoyable, the
film is a disappointment. Hitchhikers, of course, have all but
vanished from our modern superhighways and most of their
expressways and by-passes, the things that figured so largely in
Adams’s 1970s imagination have been long-since built. These may
seem like trivial considerations to you, but they had a particular
resonance for the original audience. For one of the things that
made the original Hitchhiker so popular was that it was
not just the collection of interplanetary grotesques it has since
become but at least a partly serious tale of an individual battling
bureaucracy. Back then, everyone could immediately understand what
was implied by its memorable beginning in which a hitchhiker
escapes to wander the interstellar wastes alone after the earth is
destroyed by a bureaucratically minded race called the Vogons in
order to make way for a hyper-space expressway through our star
system.
The film tries to re-create this resonance by showing at the
beginning Arthur’s confrontation with the local council who are
intent on destroying his house for the construction of a by-pass.
“It’s got to be built,” says the foreman of the work crew.
“Why has it got to be built?” asks Arthur.
“It’s a by-pass!” says the man, exasperatedly.
“By-passes have got to be built.”
Accustomed to today’s traffic snarls, we’d probably agree with
that. In any case, most people’s anxieties about the government
today have to do not with the fact that it cares too little about
us but that it cares too much, constantly involving itself in our
lives with the excuse that it is protecting us from dangers —
including tobacco and excess flab — that we used to be free to
risk without any advice from a nanny state. But the 1970s were full
of local and national governments notoriously remote from their
constituents and engaged in what they laughably called “urban
renewal” projects. These involved tearing down whole neighborhoods
of once-thriving but increasingly uninhabitable cities for little
or no apparent reason. Sometimes, indeed, for by-passes or
expressways.
In such an era, hitchhiker Arthur Dent, played by Martin Freeman
in the new film, was a natural hero. A classic “little guy” by no
means particularly brave or heroic, he watches helplessly as first
his house is demolished by the council and then his planet is
demolished by the Vogons. He is only saved by the fact that his
friend, Ford Prefect (Mos Def), turns out to be an alien living on
earth while working on a new edition of the eponymous
Guide. Most Americans, by the way, will not get the joke
of Mr. Prefect’s name. The Ford Prefect was an underpowered little
British-made car from the 1960s that had become a joke by the
1970s. It was a sort of British Yugo.
Arthur is a perfect parody of the existential hero. He is
apparently the last human being in existence — though he later
meets up again with Trillian (Zooey Deschanel), an old girlfriend
now cruising the hyper-space expressways of the universe as the
companion of galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell) —
and he confronts the infinite spaces of the universe with nothing
but his little guidebook. Sample advice from the guidebook: “It’s a
tough galaxy. If you want to survive out here you have got to know
where your towel is.” Again and again Arthur and Trillian survive
the aggressive indifference of the universe by the merest chance,
all the while on a quest not of their own choosing. Nor are they in
search of “the answer to the ultimate question of life, the
universe and everything” — that has already been determined by a
supercomputer called Deep Thought (voice of Helen Mirren) to be 42
— but to the question which fits such an enigmatical answer. “Only
when you know the question will you know what the answer
means.”
And so he encounters the multiple absurdities of the universe as
an unconsidered passenger on the spaceships of its moronic power
elites — the two-headed Zaphod, who affects a George W. Bush
accent, being the most moronic of them all. “You can’t be president
with a whole brain,” says Zaphod cheerfully. Most absurd of all is
the story’s God-figure, Slartibartfast (Bill Nighy). Only God is
just another working stiff employed by a faceless, multi-galactic
corporation engaged in designing and building custom-made planets,
even though the collapse of the galactic economy — another echo of
the '70s — has hit such luxury items particularly hard.
Slartibartfast is making a replica of the earth and is particularly
proud of his work on the Norwegian fjords. “I won an award for
those,” he explains proudly.
It’s a good joke. Or it was 25 years ago. But the very idea of
absurdity depends on an expectation of meaning and coherence. In
the same way, the idea of the malign indifference of the cosmic
spaces depends on lingering expectations of God’s paternal
solicitude left over from the era of religious belief. We still had
these things back in the '70s. Or we were closer to them than we
are now. Though of course many people are still believers,
culturally we have moved on. Questions about and questing after the
meaning of life, the universe and everything now seem as quaint as
God did back then. When no one expects the universe to make sense,
there is not much artistic juice in its portrayal as a grotesque,
gigantic absurdity.
Indeed, there is something slightly frantic about the pace with
which Adams’s ideas of the world’s crazinesses are trotted out for
our admiration, always in the syrupy tones of Stephen Fry’s
voiceover narration. The film begins with the one about the
dolphins being the second-most intelligent creatures on the planet,
beating the human race into third place, and clearing out when they
hear of its impending destruction. They sing a catchy tune called
“So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish” while executing Sea
World-type acrobatics like an aquatic chorus-line. Then a moment on
Planet Earth, as Arthur vainly tries to prevent the demolition of
his house, is succeeded by a kind of variety show that presents us
with one essay in the weird and the grotesque after another.
In other words, the movie is not about the hope and the tragedy
of man’s search for meaning in the incomprehensible reaches of
interstellar space — not even, as Adams’s original creations were,
at one remove. Instead it is about the remarkably fertile
imagination — Coleridge would have called it the fancy — of
Douglas Adams himself. There’s more than just a tribute to the
deceased in the final dedication, “For Douglas.” His inventions
have given much pleasure to millions of people, but I doubt whether
even he, now cruising the interstellar spaces himself — reportedly
he was cremated with his towel — would have been quite pleased at
the absence from them even of God’s absence.
