WTF do they know?

"As Deepak Chopra taught us, quantum physics means anything can happen at any time for no reason."
-- Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth

My fiancee and I watched What the Bleep Do We Know? Why? Because it was there. By reputation it is a terrible new-age movie that claims to be about science. The film makers attempt to explain quantum mechanics and neurochemistry, in the service of a general squishy feel-good message similar to "The Secret" implying that if you send positive energy to the universe, good things will happen to you.

Some of the movie kind of, sort of, almost conveys some important ideas of science successfully. They describe the double slit experiment; they take a stab at chaos theory, in which small random interactions affect macroscopic objects. They also, unfortunately, attempt to have a plot. I want to focus in on that, since it doesn't seem to be discussed in many reviews.

Early in the movie they introduce a lady who is a deaf magazine photographer. She is portrayed as a severe grouch, so I pegged what this character was for right away. "Aha," I said. "I'll bet this character is going to be initially skeptical of whatever claims the movie is trying to make, and then she will be won over in the end."

It's a lazy technique that yields a required character in many styles of evangelistic tract: the converted skeptic proxy. It operates under the same principle as the old "I used to be an atheist" claim. The message is: "This character is you, skeptic. She has been where you've been, and she was convinced. If you are reasonable like her, you will be convinced too."

I say it's a lazy technique because the writers are not attempting to win you over through the legitimate strength of their arguments; instead, they want to lower your defenses by getting you to identify with their position. Last week on the show I mentioned that it's like a car salesman telling you "I've driven every car, and this one's the best." Oh, okay! No need for me to do my own comparison shopping then. This salesman seems like a reasonable and completely unbiased chap. (Analogy gratefully borrowed from Slacktivist -- Thanks, Fred!)

So yes, this lady does not believe in quantum mechanics or love or happiness, and sure enough, her life suffers for it. And when I say "suffers" I mean she appears to be experiencing a buffet table's worth of unintentionally hilarious mental disorders. She screams "I hate you!!!" at herself in the mirror. She suffers Vietnam-like flashbacks to her past bad relationship when a guy starts coming on to her. Later, while drunk, she starts to hallucinate her mental hangups as tiny computer animated blobby monsters. You see, reasonable people don't disagree with the movie's thesis. Only sad, sad individuals with massive emotional baggage. You aren't that kind of person, are you? I sure hope not! Now, about that car I'd like to sell you...

The first sign that this movie was going to infuriate me came when one of the Very Serious Narrators explained with a straight face how the minds of Native Americans operated when the Europeans arrived to conquer them. It turns out that they couldn't see the ships coming. I don't mean they were distracted and didn't happen to notice them. In a dramatic reenactment, the tribe's shaman was staring directly at the approaching ships, and he literally could not see anything. You see, explains the Very Serious Narrator, these massive ships were so far outside the normal day to day experience for these natives, that their minds refused to process them. Eventually, the shaman points out the ripples on the water, and as everyone tries to figure out what's causing them, POOF -- suddenly there is the ship, plainly visible to all, thanks to the magic of camera tricks.

This is, of course, straight out of Douglas Adams.

"Can you see," said Ford patiently, "the SEP?"

"I thought you said that was somebody else's problem."

"That's right."

Arthur nodded slowly, carefully and with an air of immense stupidity.

"And I want to know," said Ford, "if you can see it."

"You do?"

"Yes."

"What," said Arthur, "does it look like?"

"Well, how should I know, you fool?" shouted Ford. "If you can see it, you tell me."

Arthur experienced that dull throbbing sensation just behind the temples which was a hallmark of so many of his conversations with Ford. His brain lurked like a frightened puppy in its kennel. Ford took him by the arm.

"An SEP," he said, "is something that we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem. That's what SEP means. Somebody Else's Problem. The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye."

There is, of course, a subtle difference between that scene and this one: Douglas Adams was deliberately writing comedy.

So naturally, while we were heckling this movie, the question that immediately came to mind was: "How The Bleep™ do they know that?" I mean, it's not like you can go back and question the natives about their experiences. They didn't leave a lot of written material about it either; and even if they did, how would you really know that the ships were actually invisible to them, and the shaman wasn't just covering his ass out of embarrassment?

This is a place where we can ask the film makers, because the question is right there on the official What The Bleep™ web site. You're going to think I'm making this up but I'm not, so prepare to be astounded.

My mother is stuck on the question of where the information on Columbus and the Native Americans came from. She can't seem to get past the part where the shaman 'showed' them the ships, and then they were able to see them. Where did this story come from?
Thanks,
Amy Proctor

[Good question, exactly what I was thinking. Thanks, Amy!]

The story of the Native American’s inability to see the clipper ships from Europe has two aspects to it: physiological and anecdotal.

[Ummm... evasive. Bad start.]

Any journalist is familiar with the phenomenon of asking three different people to relate the "facts" at an accident scene, only to receive three different versions of the "facts."...

[Yeah, people have bad memories. So... you're saying that the cars are invisible to some of them? Let's skip past this, seems pretty empty.]

Pattern recognition depends on familiarity. An example of this is experiments done by Colin Blakemore and G.F. Cooper in the 1960s...

[Blah, blah, blah, not answering the question. Skipping...]

I have personally experienced this as a truth, raising two wolves from 6 week-old pups. Frankly, I thought the male had brain damage. For months he never looked at me directly...

[WHAT THE BLEEP™ HAS ANY OF THIS GOT TO DO WITH HOW YOU KNEW ABOUT THE INDIANS???]

Now for the more anecdotal origins of the story,

[Oh good, FINALLY they're going to answer the damn question.]

which Candace Pert refers to as "A wonderful story I believe is true..."

[Aw, crap.]

Co-writer and producer Betsy Chasse says, “Other scientists related the same story to us.” And, apparently, there are references to the tale in an historical document made by an early missionary in the South Americas. This document, unfortunately, has not yet been found.

So now you know as much as we do about the origins of the tale!

[Are you bleeping kidding me?]

So that's it, right there, in their own words. The story is made up. They have a flimsy tale, told twelfth hand, and they have no source for it whatsoever. But they decided to treat it as fact in the movie in service of their point.

Elsewhere in the movie, they use more Very Serious Narrators to great effect, in one case citing the works of one Dr. Masaru Emoto, whose experiments in the exciting field of writing words on glasses of water have revealed that water can read and respond to English phrases by forming crystals that are "beautiful" or "ugly," depending on the sentiment behind the words. This is explained via an intellectual sounding museum tour guide, while soft classical music plays. That's how you know it's gotta be true.

In case you haven't got the point, someone bonks you over the head with it: "Makes you wonder, doesn't it? If thoughts can do that to water, imagine what they can do to us." And then that phrase returns through echoey aural flashbacks about five more times throughout the movie, as our deaf photographer skeptic proxy is sitting around wallowing in her own inadequacy and thinking about what a shallow, emotionless bitch she's been.

One of the worst scientific atrocities the movie commits is constantly confusing "subatomic particles" with "mental processes." Heck, they both involve little tiny things, and all little tiny things are the basically same, right? So they'll say something true ("The state of an electron changes when you observe it!") and something else true but completely unrelated ("Your brain is made of neurons!") and then they'll draw a nonsensical parallel from it, sounding superficially plausible but abandoning any pretense of anything you could actually research or falsify ("Therefore, if you imagine something existing, on some level it really does exist!")

The woman's story has a happy ending, of course: She scribbles little hearts all over her body with a sharpie, causing an instant attitude adjustment. People who knew her when she was one of those horrible skeptics come away reeling in shock because she was nice to them for a change. Or perhaps, based on her newly acquired facial expression of pure bliss, she is just intensely stoned.

The Very Serious People who explain things throughout the movie are a mish-mash of folks who are often bearded and are never identified until the credits are rolling. Some of them appear to be actual experts in real scientific fields, which explains why the movie occasionally manages to briefly make sense before cutting away from those people. Of course, the most sensible of the scientists is David Albert, who publicly disassociated himself from the film, saying:

"I am, indeed, profoundly unsympathetic to attempts at linking quantum mechanics with consciousness. Moreover, I explained all that, at great length, on camera, to the producers of the film ...Had I known that I would have been so radically misrepresented in the movie, I would certainly not have agreed to be filmed."

And then, of course, there's Ramtha.

Apparently this is common knowledge among aficionados of crackpottery, but I honestly had no idea that there was a sixty-something year old middle American lady who, since the late seventies, has been going around claiming to channel a 35,000 year old warrior from Atlantis. I found this out on the internet in between my first and second sittings (what, you think I could watch this drivel in one go??). Before I knew who she was, all I could think about her was: "Who is this ridiculous lady and why are they expecting me to take the stuff that's coming out of her mouth seriously?" After I learned more about her, my reaction was more like "OH GOD, OH GOD, THAT STUPID ACCENT, MAKE IT STOP." I guess my brain filtered out the crummy accent that she was putting on before, because it was outside of my normal experience and so I could not hear it. ("I thought you said that was somebody else's problem!")

Anyway, like Stephen Colbert, apparently Ramtha only speaks to the cameras "in character," which is why she is credited at the last minute, not as "JZ Knight," but as: "Ramtha, Master Teacher - Ramtha School of Enlightenment. Channeled by JZ Knight". Woohoo! Who needs scientific credibility when you have a Master Teacher at your disposal?

It was a terrible, terrible movie. Not terrible like a hilarious Mystery Science Theater target. Terrible like "If you locked prisoners in a room and forced them to watch this movie, you would be violating the 'cruel and unusual' clause."