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The Passion of the Nucleus:
“What the #$*! Do We Know?”
Challenges Our Sacred Mad Cows
By
Andy Gurevich
I have this aunt who used to drive my family crazy. Her name was Joan but she changed it to Isis after eating some bad blotter acid at a Dead show in Ventura, California in 1974. She would blow in to the obligatory familial ceremonies like a Technicolor typhoon; always wearing bells, always with a different guy, and always vaguely smelling like feet. At my sister’s wedding reception, she went postal over the blatantly carnivorous menu. Turns out the carving station was not a carving station at all but a “monument to a silent and unnecessary avian holocaust.” Who knew? I will never forget the look on my father’s face when she grabbed the microphone from the DJ and launched into a twenty minute diatribe on the benefits of green tea and something called “Macrobiotics.”
I always loved her visits. Mostly because she got me stoned at some point during her stay. Aunt Isis said that marijuana helped to free your mind from the arbitrary boundaries of reality set by a mechanistic and archaic understanding of the universe. At least I think that’s what she said. I was usually distracted by my preternatural hunger for cheese flavored snacks by this point in our discussion. But I also loved how she was always able to disrupt things in my otherwise bland and mind-numbingly consistent, middle class reality. Sure, not everything she said was realistic, or even intelligible at times, but her presence represented something so significant, so radical, that everyone was drawn to it, either to extinguish or bask in its peculiar radiance. She exposed a paradigm that was so ingrained into my consciousness that I was often only able to see it through her skeptical, ironic eyes. You could ridicule Isis. You could worship her. What you could not do very easily, however, was ignore her.
I thought of my flamboyant aunt as I watched a recent screening of The Independent feature/documentary hybrid on mysticism and science, "What the $#*! Do We Know?" starring Marlee Matlin. Filmed almost entirely in Portland, the film is an ambitious, if uneven, cinematic event that combines various technical and storytelling mediums to explore the mind’s extraordinary ability to participate in the creation of reality; a notion with such significant scientific, political and religious connotations that I am surprised the film hasn’t already been buried in the interest of “national security.”
What the #$*! Do We Know: A Quantum Fable, which will begin a run at McMenamins’ Bagdad theater on Friday, February 27, features Academy Award ‘ Winner Marlee Matlin who plays Amanda, a divorced photographer, who finds herself plummeted into an “Alice-in-Wonderland” rabbit-hole experience when her daily, uninspired life literally begins to unravel, revealing the cellular, molecular, and even quantum worlds, which lie beneath. “Science has been saying the mind affects reality for quite some time,” says William Arntz, the film’s writer, director and producer. “This is the first non-fantasy film that not only says this, but shows mind/matter interaction and does it in a thoroughly entertaining way.”
The film employs interviews with leading scientists and mystics who act as a sort of Greek Chorus, including University of Oregon’s own Institute of Theoretical Science Physicist, Professor, and author Amit Goswami, who introduce new concepts that then occur in Amanda’s increasingly unusual world. Betsy Chasse, who co-wrote, directed and produced the film, states, “We wanted to put today’s maverick scientists front and center and show the bizarre quantum world in a way that is entertaining and thought-provoking. That it is a hit with the audiences tells us that intelligent entertainment is the future of film.”
The film uses the advances in Quantum Physics to explore human psychology and its role, much more active and participatory than previously believed, in the creation of reality. The question is posed early in the film, “How can we continue to see the world as real if the self that is determining it as real is intangible?” Quantum Physics is described as the “science of possibilities,” a discipline that begins to blend into a very real and humbling mysticism the further one pursues it.
In fact, herein lies the film’s most inspiring achievement. The filmmakers have done a remarkable job not only in making Quantum Physics interesting and accessible to us common folk but in showing the very real and pragmatic implications this enigmatic science has for humanity. Although the animation is at times a bit sophomoric and the dramatic sequences tend towards the stereotypical and contrived, this is an important film, a groundbreaking work both in form and content.
Arntz, Chasse, and Mark Vicente, the film’s director of photography, feel they have developed a form that audiences are craving – that in essence, “We're re-defining the word "documentary." Just like the outrageously successful book The Da Vinci Code, which has become an overwhelming phenomenon in the publishing world with 4.5 million copies in print, factual information is used within a contemporary story line to provide the audience with a multifaceted, holistic experience that is meant to inform the audience through entertainment. The filmmakers concur, adding, “From the great success of our preview run, we see that Hollywood will have to wake up to the enormous audience out there, who want intelligent entertainment.”
At no time in recent history has the definition of reality brought with it such drastic consequences. The stakes are high and it is no exaggeration to state that our future as a race hangs in the balance. What the #$*! Do We Know: A Quantum Fable, is a starting point, an invitation to join the discussion. The world’s oldest questions are examined in a fresh light; one that is fueled by possibilities rather than threatened by them.
It appears my aunt Isis was right after all. The years of suffering insults at the hands of closed minded, epistemological tyrants who berated her ideas with pejoratives like “hippie” and “New Age” are now fading away into the shadows cast by the older systems of fear and control. One can only hope that audiences will follow this film into the strange and wonderful world of Quantum Physics; thus gaining a fuller appreciation for the beauty of paradox and the essential connection of all things. Just make sure you smoke a joint first for full effect.
“What the Bleep Do We Know?” opens at the Bagdad Theater starting on Friday, February 27th; (see mcmenamins.com or call (503) 236-9234 or (503)225-5555, ext. 8831 for show times).
