Dir. William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark vicente, 2004, USA, 111 min
Cast: Elaine Hendrix, Marlee Matlin, Barry Newman
Review by Miguel Sopena
Before you go on reading, take a good look around: What’s reality made of? Those tiny weeny things atoms, isn’t it? Minute electrons speeding around those big protons in the core, all crackling with the electric charges that hold them together tightly enough for us not to melt into a zillion pieces faster than you can say chemical bonding. Easy peasy right? Once seen, always remembered. At last something we can all agree on.
Or can we?
Well maybe not. Because, starting in the early decades of the 20th century, our understanding of the subatomic world has moved further and further on from the cosy notions most of us got used to at school. Forget the clean orbits and the little beads with a plus or minus sign on; With their birth in the last heroic age of modern physics, quantum mechanics and special and general relativity turned the subatomic realm into an increasingly abstract and blurry territory where you can’t even stick your ruler next to a physical property and obtain the same measurement twice in a row. Laws like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle established that it’s the intervention of an outside observer that assigns fixed values to particle properties such as position or velocity, according to probability distributions that vary with the state of the particle.
Confusing? You bet. So much so that the broader implications of the quantum theory, including the question of what kind of universe do we really live in, continue to be fiercely debated both within and outside the scientific community.
Step forward What The Bleep Do We Know?, the intriguing, self-styled ‘documentary on quantum physics’ which, having done the rounds in the US for over a year, opens on UK screens on 20 May 2005.
By no means a conventional scientific documentary, What The Bleep…? is broadly an examination of the very basics of the human condition, from our perception of reality to the nature of emotion and the motivations that guide us through our daily existence. The movie makes much of the principle that ‘the observer determines reality’, understood not as a scientific statement meant to hold true in carefully defined conditions, as put forward by the quantum theory, but as a much larger proposition with, according to the filmmakers, potentially revolutionary implications. In a nutshell, the movie proposes that we all see life, in a deep sense, through tinted spectacles, so that our previously established personal and emotional make-up determines our reaction to new occurrences. Throw any of us in the middle of a new situation and, out of the masses of available stimuli, we’ll all select a few ingredients with which to build our personal picture of what’s going on, in a way that will tally with our own preconceptions about the world. The principle does not just apply to superficial perceptions but also to deep emotional connections and to our common search for meaning in our lives. The things we keenly love and hate about ourselves and other people can be presented, as What The Bleep…? does, as the accumulation of layer after layer of associations which, in principle, we are free to unravel.
If the filmmakers’ central argument (exemplified by the adventures of a female photographer undergoing a series of personal crises) is clear enough, What The Bleep…? is largely made up of interventions by a large number of contributors who take the film’s main ideas into new (and often controversial) territory. This is probably the area in which the film leaves itself most open to criticism. The accumulation of claims regarding the power of will to affect reality, presented with scant evidence and peppered with vague references to the quantum theory, is likely to awaken an audience’s scepticism. Part of the problem is that the film makes no effort to clarify whether the various contributors are in agreement with the filmmakers or among themselves or rather speak as individual voices (as it turns out the latter is the case and the participants don’t necessarily support each other’s views). Also, and puzzlingly, the film contains no references to the actual contents of the quantum theory and how they connect with the filmmakers’ ideas.
That said, the array of subjects explored in What The Bleep…? is genuinely riveting and, at the very least, the film has more than enough power to prompt a good look at the assumptions that get most of us through our daily lives. No doubt a highly original movie bound to generate a good deal of healthy controversy.
