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 Feel-good physics cures what ails us Quasi-documentary has a message: Think again
"What the #$*! Do We Know?!" Good question. The feature-length movie of this name mixes up genres in an attempt to tell the layman the news about radical changes in the worlds of quantum physics, philosophy and brain science. Naturally, it features some drunken girls at a Polish wedding. If you're the sort who likes to keep a clear line between new-age self-help blather and hard-core Stephen Hawking coffee-table book science, this film will fascinate and possibly infuriate you. And if you're a woman who hates her body, you might also get a boost out of it. "What the #$*! Do We Know?!" links the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (that subatomic particles can be in two places at one time) and the way neural nets work in the brain. The result is a sort of feel-good message worthy of Oprah -- that we make our own realities, that if we wish hard enough things will change, that hating yourself is a self-fulfilling prophecy. At times it feels like a standard documentary: talking heads having bad hair days, talking in riddles. However, a fictional strand gets things moving. Portland is the backdrop for the wanderings of a depressed photographer, Amanda, played by Marlee Matlin. From the slow-motion opening, shot in a honey-colored Union Station, the city looks radiant. (The film was shot in late summer 2002, using local crew members.) Amanda's boss assigns her a wedding to photograph in the same church where her own disastrous marriage began. The irritable snapper is humbled by the discovery of just how preconceived her notions are -- she's afraid of men, she hates her body, she trusts no one. The wedding scene is particularly entertaining, as 3-D graphics illustrate the points being made by scientists about synapses and superpositioning (the concept of matter being in two places at once). If you get lost, you can always enjoy the wonderful dance sequence where guests pair off with mobile IV drips. The point here is that we are addicted to our emotions. The movie has three directors -- William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente -- although it was Arntz's idea, and he bankrolled it. Arntz studied physics but skipped the Ph.D. to become a hippie in the early 1970s, driving his BMW 1600 around the country for a time. He moved to San Francisco, became a "sort of" Buddhist and started a software firm. He sold his first invention, a job-scheduling software program called AutoSys. This was eventually sold for billions to Platinum and then Computer Associates. "I'm the guy who sold the goose that laid the golden eggs," he jokes now. He was annoyed enough to start another company and eventually sold that. "I made enough so I don't have to work again," he says. After a few years of boredom he decided he had the means to make a movie that would get people to ask questions about reality. He hired Chasse, who had been looking to escape Hollywood, to co-direct. "Will showed me the script, and it was like a PBS documentary," she says. "I said, 'You want it in theaters? Will, this is boring. I don't get it.' " "After a good laugh, people are more receptive and learn better. We know that now," Arntz says. "It was a simple video project that got bigger and bigger. I used to say it cost me a small fortune." Chasse was new to the concepts in the script, but reading books such as Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" and "The Holographic Universe" by Michael Talbot, she says, blew her mind. She calls the movie "self-help for the new millennium. It shows you scientifically that your thoughts affect your body and your life. This isn't some hippie-dippy thing." She herself eventually moved to Yelm, Wash., and met her soul mate. Their first child is due in May. The three directors all take Ramtha as their spiritual teacher. Ramtha is a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit from Atlantis channeled by a woman in Yelm named J.Z. Knight. Ramtha/Knight is interviewed in the piece, without explanation. "This is in no way a recruitment video for the Ram, it's logical information you can get anywhere," Chasse says. "The talking heads are not students of Ramtha." She stresses that the movie is not religious. "Religion is dogmatic, and usually divisive. In the world now we need to be anything but divisive." Arntz sums up: "The big thing is you create your reality, you're not a victim of the world doing things to you." Let Portland's dippy hippies and science geeks be the judge of that. Contact Joseph Gallivan at jgallivan@portlandtribune.com .
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