I Heart Huckabees is a mediocre movie. The plot isn’t compelling and the actors aren’t engaging. The one highlight of the movie is its premise: two existential detectives, played by Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin, help a despairing young environmentalist, played by Jason Schwartzman, come to terms with his place in the world. Similar to the memory-deletion clinic in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Huckabee’s existential detective agency is an extraordinary gem embedded in the blandness of the suburbs. In the midst of nondescript suburban office parks, these two businesses provide fantastical services to help John Doe suburbanites cope with their trivial problems.

The memory-deletion clinic and the detective agency provide both the movies with a way to externalize the inner life of their characters. The existential detectives, for example, serve the function of hyperactive psychologists, constantly trailing the despairing, young environmentalist, gleaning “clues” from his seemingly meaningless day-to-day activities, and eventually concluding that his unhappiness stems from his parents’ neglect of him as a child. Devices for externalizing the characters’ psyches in plays or movies are nothing new - think of Hamlet’s soliloquies and of Macbeth’s phantom dagger – but they have seldom been so removed from reality.

In both Hamlet and Macbeth, Shakespeare manages to incorporate his devices externalizing characters’ thoughts into the ordinariness of his scenes – Hamlet’s soliloquies follow logically from his moments of anxiety, and Macbeth stabs King Duncan with his dagger. However, unlike Shakespeare’s devices, those of Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine) and David O. Russell (Huckabees) require a suspension of the conventional world; as much as the characters in the two movies try to make it seem so, the memory-deletion clinic and the detective agency represent a total removal from the otherwise ordinary worlds surrounding them.

The characters resort to using the extraordinary services of the agency and the clinic because they cannot, as MacBeth and Hamlet do, come to terms with their lives through reflection of the ordinary. Kate Winslet’s Clementine can’t reconcile her love for Jim Carey’s Joel with the failures of their relationship, so she takes the drastic measure of getting her memory of Joel deleted altogether; Schwartzman’s Albert can’t understand why he feels unfulfilled, so he hires existential detectives to investigate his case. These drastic steps of relying on quack clinicians and detectives are doubtlessly rooted in irresponsibility and laziness. Clementine and Albert have the same anxieties as Hamlet and Macbeth, yet lack their energy for contemplation.

At the same time as the two films condemn Clementine and Albert’s irresponsibility, Huckabees and Eternal Sunshine both subtly reproach the suburban ennui that lulls its inhabitants into unreflective angst. Kaufman meticulously chronicles the malaise of Long Island, from the Montauk weekends to the visits to Barnes and Noble; in its environment-destroying superstores, Russell similarly portrays Southern California. Though not as explicit as American Beauty, both Huckabees and Eternal Sunshine are attacks on this suburbia. This is perhaps the main function of Kaufman’s memory-deletion clinic and Russell’s detective agency: the vitality of their conception serves as a foil for the blandness of the suburbs, fully drawing out its reflection-crippling dullness.