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Man, what a steaming pantload.
Let’s leave aside the unbearable hokum of the “dramatic” sequences, except to say that I felt embarrassed for everyone involved. The film’s real failure is that its science and its philosophy are both hopelessly muddled and self-contradictory at once simplistic and needlessly complicated—and that it framed those ideas in a way that anyone with half a brain is going to find utterly unpersuasive.
Firstly: the use of QUANTUM PHYSICS! as the answer to every question. Why am I so miserable? QUANTUM PHYSICS! Why am I here? QUANTUM PHYSICS! Why is the world what it is? QUANTUM PHYSICS! Where does reality come from? QUANTUM PHYSICS!
Here’s the thing: if you’re going to use QUANTUM PHYSICS! as an argument-ender, you’d goddam well better make a better case for it than the film does, otherwise it’s just New Age-speak for “the Will of God,” which cannot be questioned. Indeed, the film spent more time bulletproofing its ideas (“Well, you really can’t understand it... It’s very mysterious... Nobody knows why it happens, but it does...” i.e., Just trust me and take this on faith, okay?) than it does actually explicating them—always a sign of a weak argument.
Now. One of the first things the film does is dismiss out-of-hand the materialistic, mechanistic electrochemical model of consciousness. All well and good. But then it goes into the mind-body connection, and starts undercutting its own argument.
“All it takes is one sexual fantasy to give a man a hard-on!” marvels Mumm-Ra, or Xenu, or whatever the 35,000 year old Atlantean dude is named, as if this were some huge revelation about how thought creates reality. The problem is, this phenomenon is easily explained by the electrochemical model of consciousness—in fact, more elegantly than by the quantum model the film espouses.
In the QUANTUM PHYSICS! model—if I understand this correctly—your disembodied, pure-spirit consciousness sends a message of desire out into the ether. Your message is picked up by subspace little elves that intersect with your body on a quantum level, and the elves respond to your desire by manipulating subatomic particles in and around your body, resulting in the externally visible effect of an erection.
In the mechanistic model, the sexual fantasy and the hard-on are made of the same stuff to begin with. The same hormonal rush that triggers the fantasy opens the floodgates for physical arousal, and Ockham’s Razor neatly cuts three layers out of your “four-layer full-body biosuit.”
Even more problematic is the film’s position that “addiction,” in its various forms, is responsible for most human misery. It’s not a surprising stance for the makers to take—New Age spirituality, remember, grew largely out of twelve-step recovery and self-help programs—and all the physiology-of-addiction stuff about rewiring the brain is, as far as I know, good science.
But it depends upon the very same electrochemical model of consciousness that the film has already explicitly rejected. There are other traditions of dealing with the same problems—the Buddhist concept of attachment, for instance—but which do so on a pure-spirit level. So why didn’t they lean on one of those instead? Because attachment isn’t a scientific concept, and addiction is. But therein lies the problem: instead of lending the rest of the film an authenticity-by-association, the good science of the addiction material only makes the rest of the film look weaker by comparison. They haven’t just shot themselves in the foot here: they’ve blown the leg clean off.
There’s a similar problem with the sequences on theology and religion. Again, I haven’t much of a disagreement with the material they’re presenting: it’s actually pretty mainstream stuff by now. And again, therein lies the problem. They don’t seem to have the confidence that the argument will stand on its own, so they wrap it in a series of cheap shots at organized religion—which they present as not having advanced since the Great Awakening. Now, no serious theological thinker has been selling the “big man in the sky meting out punishments and rewards in the afterlife” model for, say, the last 150 years or so. But to watch this film, you’d think we were still living in the fucking Burning Times.
And don’t get me started on the leaps of logic. To go from Heisenberg’s axiom that “the observer becomes part of the observed system,” to “Your thoughts create your physical reality” is a bit of a stretch. And it’s presented in such an obnoxious, triumph-of-the-will way—“Everyone is a god! Well, I am, anyway—me and the people who are clued in, who don’t buy into the paradigm propagated by the mediocracy, the ones who have the courage to stop being sheep and take the red pill!”
So. Messages of this film:
1. Solipsism is great! Everyone should try it!
2. Throw away your medications—anti-depressants are for the WEAK. So saith Kulan-Gath! Salvation lies not in medication, but in the power of QUANTUM PHYSICS!!1!
And that last, I think, moves the film out of the realms of the merely unpleasant and into the arena of the truly reprehensible. |
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