FILM
What the bleep is going on?
BY ALEXANDRA ALTER
aalter@herald.com
Her friends call her "the Bleep movie pusher.''
After seeing the indie hit sleeper What the #$*! Do We Know, Elizabeth Angulo of Sunny Isles promptly e-mailed 70 friends and insisted they see the film. Then she joined a Bleep ''street team'' passing out promotional postcards and, at one point, wore a ''What the Bleep?'' baseball hat. Now, she calls herself a Bleeper.
So what transformed a 34-year-old director of business development into a gushing evangelist for a docudrama about consciousness and quantum physics?
''I loved that it was a thinking man's movie with a heart and spirit,'' said Angulo, who helped organize a ''What the Bleep?'' conference that begins Friday in Miami . "It questions our beliefs and it questions our dogma, but at the same time it looks at scientific truths where you find the essence of God.''
Devotees like Angulo are driving a cult phenomenon that industry experts say resembles the frenzy surrounding The Passion of the Christ. Bouyed by fans who've formed Bleep study groups and Internet chat sites, the film quickly generated a movement in the eight months following its release. Some 60 study groups have formed from Jacksonville to Queensland, Australia (none in South Florida so far), a book titled What the Bleep Do We Know: Discovering the Endless Possibilities for Altering Your Everyday Reality will be published by Health Communications this November, and summer conferences with the film's scientists and directors will take place in Miami, Portland, Ore., Scottsdale, Ariz., and Vancouver.
Part documentary, part fiction, the film poses parallels between quantum physics and spirituality, poking holes in the conventional view of material reality as separate from our thoughts, emotions and perceptions.
''This interest in spirituality is global,'' said Nathan Katz, the director of the Center for Spirituality at Florida International University, who will speak about contemporary American spirituality at the Miami conference. "We may end up with a form of spirituality that we don't even recognize any more.''
Even the film's creators are surprised -- and somewhat concerned -- by the passionate following their project has generated.
''I'm rather blown away by all the study groups that are forming,'' said Mark Vicente, who directed the film with Betsy Chasse and William Arntz. "It's not something that we ever expected. It also makes us slightly uncomfortable because some people have turned it into some kind of dogma. . . . It's philosophy and theories.''
Philosophy and theories, it turns out, can turn a profit.
The movie passed the $10 million mark at the box office several months ago and has sold more than a million DVD copies. As word of the film spread, pastors rented out theaters, meditation teachers took students to see the film and some churches held classes on the movie's philosophy. The Rev. James Trapp of Miami 's Unity on the Bay, who saw the film last summer in Barcelona at the 2004 World Parliament of Religions, rented out a screening room at Regal Cinema on Miami Beach and took 150 congregants to see the film when it opened last fall.
''It was very much in alignment with the principles we see in our own teachings,'' he said. "One of our primary beliefs in Unity is that the thoughts we hold begin to create our experience.''
The movie's popularity isn't entirely organic, however -- it owes a lot to a strategic marketing campaign directed at Buddhists, followers of Transcendental Meditation, members of New Thought churches and others, said Pavel Mikoloski, a member of the movie's marketing team. The film's DVD distributors targeted a niche audience of New Age seekers by placing ads in publications such as Awareness, Enlightened Woman, Essential Wellness and Total Health magazines, according to Shari Rosenblum, a spokeswoman for Fox Home Entertainment.
It seems to have worked: Some 11 percent of the DVD's sales were repeat purchases, an unusually high percentage.
''We haven't seen that since The Passion of the Christ,'' she said. By comparison, just 3 percent of the Passion's DVD sales were repeat purchases, she said.
Vicente said the comparison to Mel Gibson's groundbreaking theological blockbuster is apt.
''I have a tremendous amount of respect for Mel Gibson,'' he said. "What he did and what we did was recognize a market that the industry did not recognize. People have serious spiritual questions.''
But unlike its Christian counterpart, What the #$*! Do We Know? veers far from the path of theological orthodoxy. Many of the film's ideas stem from the teachings of Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit channeled through his chosen medium, a bleached blond, throaty-voiced woman named JZ Knight. The film's three directors are students at the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, a center in Washington where students study telepathy, self-healing and other practices.
''The film was made basically to be an advertisement for her,'' said John Olmsted, an adjunct instructor in psychology at Portland State University in Oregon, who called the scientific experiments referenced by the film ''horrible jokes.'' "People who have the religious belief that reality is simply an illusion have taken bits of quantum physics and used them to prove what they want to -- that there's no material reality and consciousness controls everything.''
Olmsted and others take issue with the film's central premise -- that reality is no more than a projection of our own mental states -- arguing that such thinking can have dangerous consequences.
''This is kind of a disturbing film in a sense,'' said Chris Monroe, pastor at Barstow Free Methodist Church in Barstow, Calif, who posted a critique of the film on his Weblog desertpastor.typepad.com. "It goes way too far in duping people into embracing a belief that humanity has everything it needs in itself to control its destiny and that's where it sharply deviates from traditional Christianity.''
Rev. Trapp, who ranks among the film's advocates, said the ideas presented in What the Bleep? may spark a new focus on science within contemporary spirituality.
''We're still in the early stages of understanding this level of spirituality,'' he said. "This is a very revolutionary idea; sometimes new ideas can start and they're considered to be heresy.''
© 2005 Herald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. (Reprinted with Permission)
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