Life lessons from Buckaroo Banzai

"The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension", commonly referred to as just "Buckaroo Banzai" is a cult American science fiction film from 1984. It is one of my favourite movies, mainly because it's pretty weird and contains a lot of throwaway jokes and quotable lines. My friends and I in college watched it obsessively. I highly recommend it if you are in the mood for a silly and fun science fiction adventure.

For all of its loopiness, there are some valuable life lessons that I have taken away from the film. Buckaroo Banzai, played by Peter Weller, has a most famous line: "No matter where you go, there you are." As much as this is written to be absurd, the point that I take away from it is that you have to deal with the situation that you find yourself in -- there you are. There's no point in moaning or blaming other people (blaming other people never solves a problem), you have to take responsibility for making bad situations better, and you have to take responsibility for whatever actions of yours have put you in the situation in the first place. If your train is late, there's nothing you can do about it, and whining about it or worrying about it is not going to change the situation -- there you are. If you burn the toast, you can either make more toast, or eat the burnt toast, and beating yourself up about it solves nothing -- there you are. Buckaroo Banzai finds himself in a lot of perilous conditions, and he calmly works his way out of them when he can, without complaining about how unfair life is.

In another memorable scene, two characters are moving through Buckaroo Banzai's laboratory, and one (played by Jeff Goldblum) sees a watermelon in a pressure-testing vice, the kind of machine used to test how well materials can withstand loads. Jeff Goldblum's character asks "why is there a watermelon there?" The other character replies "I'll explain later." Of course, it is never explained. It's a great example to me about how there are things in life that we can't make sense of, and if they are not important (the watermelon in the vice does not miraculously become a key plot point later on), then we can just ignore them. People seem to have different thresholds of what pisses them off, and the happy people I know have the highest thresholds. We don't know why the watermelon is there, but more importantly, it doesn't matter.

A final memorable line is spoken by the villain, Lord John Whorfin, hilariously played by John Lithgow. In one of his ranting speeches, delivered in a comic-book Italian accent, he says "character is what you are in the dark!" This barely needs explaining, I think. Your integrity is best tested when no one will know what choice you have made.