"What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole": Marlee Matlin, some theoretical physics and a load of bull-pucky by Andrew O'Hehir
I come not to bury the "What the Bleep!?" franchise, but sure as hell not to praise it either. I'd have no problem with the element of rampant, half-wacky speculation at the outer edges of physics in these movies if they came labeled as such. It's perfectly legitimate for ordinary folks to grapple, as best we can, with the mysteries of subatomic physics. And even to observe that the quandaries and paradoxes found down there among the teensiest particles (or waves, or whatever they are) seem to engage hoary philosophical dilemmas about the Nature of Everything and the relationship between Mind and World.
Frankly, I don't even care much that the entire package is brought to us (as John Gorenfeld reported on Salon) by some cuckoo-bird outfit called the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. This is located in Yelm, Wash., and is presided over by a woman named JZ Knight who claims to be channeling an entity called Ramtha, who is 35,000 years old and delivers incomprehensible addresses in a dubious Middle European accent. Or rather, I wouldn't care if the films weren't constructed as rather crude infomercials that try to make it look like the various scientists gathered here endorse Ramtha's views of the universe, whatever they may be.
"Down the Rabbit Hole" assembles approximately the same material as the first "Bleep!?" film, but at greater length (a truly daunting 156 minutes!) and in more detail. This makes it simultaneously more interesting (and in parts more substantive) and more tedious. You can divide this film approximately into quartiles. One quarter of it offers a fascinating survey of bite-size information, mostly legitimate, from the genuinely puzzling world of quantum physics and quantum mechanics. One quarter is speculation, much of it by genuine scientists, about the possible implications of this work for the study of human consciousness and the universe. One quarter is rampant pseudoscience and quackery: the Transcendental Meditation devotees who think they can change the pH of water, or the Japanese doctor who says he can influence the shape of ice crystals by sticking loving or hateful phrases on petri dishes. And then there's the "plot" about the pill-popping photographer (Marlee Matlin) who gets her priorities rearranged by various encounters with the infinite, or something. The less said about that, the better.
I'd like to believe that anyone with an ounce of critical ability can see what's going on here. We go rapidly from the eminent physicist Fred Alan Wolf, or philosopher of science David Albert, discussing the inconvenient fact that the laws of physics seem to operate differently at the microscopic scale, or that subatomic experiments appear to turn out differently depending on how they are observed and recorded, to the dude who can make ice crystals beautiful by loving them. And thence of course to Ramtha, looking like Mrs. Claus gone Nevada bordello madam in her jolly red sweater, explaining how our selfishness is preventing us from, I guess, remaking the universe with our brains.
There's no question that one of the major sea-changes of our era is coming at the outer edge of science, where research is yielding many more questions than can now be answered, and a certain epistemological humility about the nature of reality (undeniably gratifying to non-scientists) has set in. But here's the thing: The New Age acolytes behind this movie, and similar popularizations, share none of that humility. They congratulate themselves for having glimpsed a "new paradigm" of Universal Oneness, which simplifies both science and spirituality down to fuzzy abstractions, and argue -- OK, what do they argue, exactly?
I'm not quite sure, but I think it has something to do with living an extremely comfortable life on the West Coast, and feeling convinced that you're changing the world by giving money to some weirdo while remaining totally aloof from any boring details of social and political reality. Is that in the ballpark? Again, don't get me wrong: I suspect the New Agers are partly right, and that these scientific frontier zones have profound philosophical implications. But will that make any difference to human life on a starved, overpopulated, depleted and homogenized planet? Maybe if we stick labels with pretty Japanese calligraphy on the people in Darfur, they'll die happy. http://salon.com/ent/movies/review/2...tm/index3.html |
.
