Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt. 6 (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Humor is often seen as a defense mechanism of the terminally negative. Whimsy however is a much more rare and assertively positive attribute. While humor takes a narrow slice of reality and subverts it for comic effect, whimsy takes on the whole sweep of existence and chooses to treat it as merely absurd and benign, rather than malevolent, despite all evidence to the contrary.
         
It is possible to suppose that the British invented this point of view as a culturally relevant option and not just a sign of madness. What cultural item before Lawrence Stern’s Tristram Shandy showed such lucid distaste for both structure and a world motivated by discernible sense? This mode of self-righteous joshing, ultimately canonized in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, that could only have arisen from self-aware colonialists who felt they had flown so high that all that was left was to recognize the absurdity of existence. These stories take the view that the materials of everyday life and perception can be handled like pastry dough, roughly pounded and shaped into light confectionery, edifying and delightful, yet resolutely empty of nutrition. Add to this tradition Douglas Adams.

A simple synopsis of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy might mistakenly peg it as cynical. The Earth is destroyed by an intergalactic bureaucracy. A human survives only to be buffeted about an enormous, indifferent, and absurd universe seemingly intent on driving him out of his mind. But to actually dig in and move about within the story reveals a view of existence as being richly various and exquisitely fun.
                   
The film version necessarily streamlined much of Douglas Adams’s story and introduced some convenient plot devices so that the film could keep [barely] under two hours and not balloon beyond containment. It was always a pleasure of the books that any minor item might well be expounded upon for pages in utterly mad and maddening detail, only narrowly swerving back into stream with the plot after a slew of satiric and/or nonsensical punch lines. This quality long made the idea of a movie version  seem impossible. The film, ultimately made in 2005, manages to import the breathless pace of Adams’s sense of invention and brings terrific visualization to creatures like Vogons and conceits like the super computer Deep Thought.

The film is as light an entertainment as can be imagined and it even manages to wring a pat love story out of the unwieldy interpersonal webbing of the books. But hidden beneath the books’ heaping up of wry invention and the movie’s single-minded stream lining of the plot is a story of the blessed insignificance of humans, of a universe big enough to move around in, and fun enough to really enjoy if you have the chance.