Something unusual hit the world running this past
spring. Opening at art-house theaters across the western U.S.,
and winning every independent film festival award it was
nominated for, an effects-laden docudrama began stunning viewers
everywhere with its creative confluence of science and
spirituality—and subverting common notions of reality
along the way. “Once in a while a film comes out that can
change the world, and this is one of those films,” avowed
one fan on the film's website. Said another: “I started
crying in the middle of this movie because it was the first time
in my life I had proof that there were lots of people
who believe like I do.” And its impact is continuing to
spread, as word-of-mouth acclaim brings the movie to new
theaters across the country every week, with an even wider
release slated for this fall. Called What the #$*! Do We
Know!? (aka What the BLEEP Do We Know!?), this
feature-length film is an ambitious and entertaining attempt to
turn such heady subjects as quantum physics, the nature of God,
and neurochemistry into fun and easily digestible concepts. It
does so through a cleverly edited blend of interview clips, a
dramatic fictional narrative, animated CGI (computer-generated
image) “characters,” and perhaps even more
space-time-warping visual effects than most major Hollywood
blockbusters manage to conjure up.
Starring Oscar-winning actress Marlee Matlin (Children
of a Lesser God) as Amanda, a professional photographer
whose unfortunate favorite pastime seems to be chain-popping
antidepressants, What the Bleep's story line is a
simple tale of personal transformation—from self-hatred to
self-acceptance—with some unusual characters offering the
protagonist helpful information along the way. What isn't simple
about this hybrid documentary's narrative element is the way
it's presented: peeking out here and there between bursts of
interview footage and grand CGI tours of quantum and cellular
realms, the plot is initially hard to figure out. Indeed, for at
least the first half hour, the drama may even seem unnecessary
and vaguely reminiscent of a PBS after-school special. The
longer you watch, however, the more What the Bleep's
complex docudrama blend starts to make sense, and Amanda's
transformative journey is recognized as the essential meandering
line connecting all the other dots.
Walking through downtown Portland, Oregon, taking pictures
and looking alternately anxious and despondent, the deaf but
lip-reading Amanda finds herself in a number of odd situations
and interacting with some unusual characters. For example,
there's the basketball-playing, reality-bending whiz kid Duke
Reginald, who comes off as a twelve-year-old version of The
Matrix's earnest prophet Morpheus, only funnier. He
challenges Amanda to a game of basketball on his “court of
unending possibilities” while explaining to her some
far-out physics facts, such as the notion that material objects
(like her hands and the ball she's holding) never actually
touch, because nonbonded atoms energetically repel each other
and don't make physical contact. Indeed, how
“physical” is anything, anyway? When the whiz kid
launches his basketball into the sky, we're drawn along with it
into outer space where the scene opens onto stunning cosmic
vistas before diving deep into impressive computer-generated
sequences of molecular, atomic, and subatomic realms. Here a
disembodied commentator explains that what we perceive as solid
matter is really composed almost entirely of empty space and is
ultimately—proceeding down to the quantum level where
energy bits phase in and out of existence—completely
insubstantial. “The most solid thing you can say about all
this insubstantial matter,” the narrator tells us,
“is that it's more like a thought—it's like
a concentrated bit of information.”
Soon after her strange encounter with young Duke Reginald,
Amanda is looking at a subway-platform presentation of the work
of Japan's Dr. Masaru Emoto, whose experiments purport to
demonstrate the effects of positive or negative thinking on the
formation of either beautiful or unsightly ice crystals in
water, when she meets a mysterious man. “Makes you wonder,
doesn't it?” he intones. “If thoughts can do that to
water, imagine what our thoughts can do to us.”
That sentence replays itself in Amanda's mind more than once as
the film progresses, and it turns out to hold the key to her
eventual psychological breakthrough. In fact, the idea that
you create your own reality is the New Age notion lying
at the heart of What the Bleep, the fundamental concept
upon which all its other ideas thrive.
However, before Amanda gains the mental clarity to recreate
her reality, she must contend with a chaotic Polish wedding that
she's been hired to photograph. Here the film delves into the
mysteries and mechanics of the human mind, explaining the
function of neurotransmitters through stunning visual effects.
The main focus is the way in which we become chemically
“addicted” to certain varieties of neurotransmitters
based on the emotional experiences they're associated with.
“If you can't control your emotional state, you must be
addicted to it,” says one of the frequently shown
interviewees, Dr. Joe Dispenza. Through an entertaining and
sexually charged twenty-three-minute scene, Amanda mingles
clumsily with the wedding guests, taking pictures, having
flashbacks to her own ill-fated marriage, and experiencing
further hallucinatory visions of CGI marvels. This time, rather
than the electric-blue energies of the quantum realm, she sees
multicolored dancing gumdrops—human cells under the
influence of various neurotransmitters. Amanda begins seeing
them at work in everybody, including herself: a room full of
biochemically conditioned people, absorbed by lust, hunger,
rage, and shyness, while apparently oblivious to the impersonal
interplay that's actually happening between them all on the
deeper level of animated chemicals. Despite its cartoonish feel,
this is perhaps What the Bleep's most implicating and
thought-provoking scene, confronting viewers with questions
like: Are we really just biological puppets controlled by a
slough of chemicals? And if so, how do we cut the strings?
In the midst of all this activity, popping up constantly to
offer choice commentary on the physics or metaphysics that
parallel whatever situation Amanda finds herself in, are the
medical doctors and scientists, not to mention a 35,000-year-old
channeled entity, who have been interviewed for the
film—and, indeed, are most of the film. Through
the insights of fourteen personalities in total, nearly all of
whom are authors of books with such titles as The Quantum
Brain and Conscious Acts of Creation, Amanda is
fed a wealth of paradigm-shattering information, being somehow
mysteriously attuned to whatever frequency they're broadcasting
on and subconsciously picking up on their pithy profundities.
“We're living in a world where all we see is the tip of
the iceberg—the classical tip of an immense quantum
mechanical iceberg,” says physicist John Hagelin of
Maharishi University. Former University of Oregon physics
professor Amit Goswami adds, “You really have to recognize
that even the material world around us—the chairs, the
tables, the rooms, the carpet, camera included—all of
these are nothing but possible movements of
consciousness.”
What all of this eventually leads Amanda to is the
realization that in order to change her life, she needs to
change the way she thinks about it. She needs to
embrace a new worldview, a new paradigm—one in which
quantum physics, biochemistry, mind, emotions, God, and
everything in between are interconnected in a seamless matrix of
infinite potentials that is capable of being radically altered
by thought alone.
As mentioned earlier, What the Bleep has been
very successful for an independent film, and its popularity only
seems to be growing. But why are people converging on
theaters to see it? Why are so many Americans, from Gen-Y teens
to boomers in their late fifties, finding a rather peculiar
documentary that explores the intersection of science and
spirituality so compelling? Could it be simply the fact that
there even is a film depicting the peaceful coexistence
of these typically antithetical worlds?
What the Bleep was written, produced, and directed
over a period of three years by a trio of filmmakers from Yelm,
Washington. William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vicente came
together in 2001, convinced that the Hollywood standard of
“rape, pillage, and plunder” as entertainment wasn't
the only way to go about pleasing moviegoers. They wanted to
make a spiritually uplifting and scientifically educational
film—one that would appeal to mainstream audiences while
also managing to convey a few key concepts from quantum physics
and biology. “Science has been saying the mind affects
reality for quite some time,” Arntz has said. “This
is the first non-fantasy film that not only says this, but shows
mind/matter interaction, and it does it in a thoroughly
entertaining way.” What the Bleep is undoubtedly
entertaining, and by all accounts it is affecting audiences
profoundly. Yet it is the matter of what exactly “science
has been saying” that many reviewers, myself included,
find questionably represented by the film. And this seems
indicative of a larger confusion in our culture regarding the
actual connections between science and spirituality—a
confusion that has been rampant within the domain of pop
spirituality for over two decades.
All three of What the Bleep's producers
are students at Ramtha's School of Enlightenment (RSE). For
those who aren't up on the Who's Who of the New Age,
Ramtha is the aforementioned 35,000-year-old channeled entity
who speaks frequently throughout What the Bleep.
Channeled by former Tacoma, Washington, soccer mom J.Z. Knight
since 1978 (a year after Ramtha first appeared to Knight in her
kitchen one Sunday afternoon), Ramtha—described by his
students as a “master teacher” and
“hierophant,” and always referred to as
“he” despite the gender of his channel—has
been teaching people for over two decades about such classic
subjects as the true history of Atlantis, the nature of reality,
God, past lives, and how to take charge of one's personal
destiny. But perhaps more than any other New Age authority,
Ramtha has used the hallowed clout of science to support his
spiritual teachings—particularly when it comes to the idea
that we “create our own reality.” This is where
Ramtha sees quantum physics seamlessly merging with his brand of
metaphysics, and he definitely isn't the only one.