\u201clove it or leave it\u201d<\/span> proposition.<\/p>\nAs you might already know, \u201cWhat The Bleep\u201d<\/span> is a New Age Buddhist manifesto. It\u2019s sort of a call to faith, in some ways like Mel Gibson\u2019s \u201cThe Passion of Christ\u201d. Either you buy into the underlying doctrine or you don\u2019t. What The Bleep\u2019s doctrine of faith is a m\u00e9lange of quantum physics, pop psychology, brain chemistry, Kantian philosophy, and free agent spirituality (not attached to any institutional religion).<\/p>\nMy response to \u201cWhat The Bleep\u201d is something like the quantum \u201csuperposition state\u201d that the movie tries to explain (not very well, incidentally — the basketball court scene was more confusing than anything else). I give it both an A and an F at the same time. No, I don\u2019t average them out to a C or B minus. The movie has turned me into a victim of quantum weirdness<\/span>. I both love it and hate it at the same time. There are some incredible truths being conveyed, and at the same time some terrible distortions of what life is about.<\/p>\nSince your act of reading this blog is an observation of my quantum state, and since according to physics an act of observation must collapse the two potential quantum outcomes into a single position, my love-it-and-hate-it probability function will now collapse into a definite opinion. OK, it just collapsed into a negative viewpoint. Here\u2019s what I really didn\u2019t like<\/span> about What The Bleep.<\/p>\nThe core story behind Bleep (which probably didn\u2019t even occupy half of the film\u2019s running time) was about a deaf photographer named Amanda. Amanda, played of course by Marlee Matlin, wasn\u2019t very happy with her life; she was always popping some kind of anti-depressant, and took too many liberties at an open bar during a wedding she was working. In the end, though, the wisdom of the \u201cnew faith\u201d that was being discussed by a group of scientists and mystics (think of a PBS documentary like Nova) finally seeped its way into her world. Before you know it, she was overcoming her addictions and drawing hearts on her skin with a make-up pencil, showing that she had overcome her poor self image and was now on the path to healing and restoration.<\/p>\n
Can I present a somewhat old-fashioned<\/span> alternative view of what was wrong with Amanda\u2019s life? It\u2019s pretty clear that she was lonely and didn\u2019t have any real friends. She had people all around her, but she didn\u2019t really click with any of them. Her marriage had just ended. She met a halfway decent guy at the afore-mentioned wedding, but she just couldn\u2019t follow-up on it. The girl was in a tailspin, with no real friends and not in a good place to make new ones. Sure, Paxil and Four Roses (it was a Polish wedding) are clearly not the answer; but I have my doubts as to whether breathing techniques and finding one\u2019s inner light are going to cut it either.<\/p>\n\u201cWhat The Bleep\u201d says that you and you alone are responsible for your fate. One of the talking heads even suggested that old age is caused by bad self-image and negative thoughts. As if it is your own fault if you are weak and creaky at the age of 80. Sure, negativity and stress and loneliness surely accelerate the gray hairs . . . . but come on, get real. This is Planet Earth. You\u2019re never going to escape negativity and stress and loneliness, although you admittedly can (and should) try to control them and deal with them.<\/p>\n
What Amanda truly needed was some community<\/span>; some understanding and caring from the people who were around her. She needed affirmation from others that she was having some tough luck and going through hard times. She needed some reassurance that we all take that lonely walk though \u201cthe valley of the shadow\u201d at times in our life. The pop psychologists implied that it was Amanda\u2019s fault that she didn\u2019t have any real friends, and that as soon as the \u201cquantum\u201d negativity was purged from her soul she would start to make some.<\/p>\nI question that. Sometimes in life, you could throw a spitball in any direction and hit a person who you can really relate to. Other times, you go for months and even years without any soul mates in sight (despite being surrounded by people). Even if you\u2019re a bit down about things, you\u2019re gonna have friends when you\u2019re around people you can vibe with. When you\u2019re not, well . . . . . . at least you can expect some sympathy. And not some quasi-guru spouting quasi-science in your face about the effects of focused thoughts on ice crystals.<\/p>\n
Final note about What The Bleep: this film is not exactly about entertainment as we usually define it, but there are in fact some entertaining moments. The Polish wedding scenes weren\u2019t bad, at least until the psychedelic polka begins. And the depictions of the internal workings of the brain and the body\u2019s reactions to chemical signals were right up there with the best instructional film that you ever saw in high school biology. Actually, even that stuff got humorous during the part about sex. It all came together (the Polish wedding and the endocrine system response) during a take-off on one of those videos made by the late, great Robert Palmer<\/span>, to the music of \u201cAddicted to Love\u201d. Yea, even if you could care less about all the quantum hubris and psycho-philosophical babble, the Robert Palmer reference was probably worth the price of admission. It brought back some good memories of pop videos from the 80s. If nothing else, at least the New Age Buddhist types who wrote and filmed \u201cWhat The Bleep\u201d know a classic video when they see one!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"THIS WE DO KNOW: I don\u2019t see many movies these days, as most of them just don\u2019t interest me. Back during my younger days, while participating in the male-female courting rituals, I generally kept abreast of popular cinema (and even the not-so-popular \u201cfilm noire\u201d showings in Manhattan; my ex-wife was quite in tune with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}