'What the #$*!' makes 'Bleep' so popular

If you're a fan of indie-movie fairy tales, try this one on for size: In February 2004, a theater owner in Portland, Ore., strikes a deal with three fledgling filmmakers. He'll screen their movie What the #$*! Do We Know!? -- a New Age-y hybrid of documentary and fiction that examines the basic precepts of quantum physics -- for five days. If the film sells at least 1,600 tickets, he'll extend its run for another week.

Five days in Portland turns into five months. That one theatrical engagement leads to as many as 147 more by fall, including a two-month run at Loews City View in Fort Worth. Fueled by extraordinary word-of-mouth, What the #$*! Do We Know!? (or What the Bleep, as it's come to be known) crosses the $10 million box-office mark -- and nearly a year later it's still going strong. After a six-week hiatus from its Dallas run, What the Bleep has just reopened at the Inwood Theater, where it sold out several shows last weekend.

There's only one twist to this particular fairy tale, a happy ending tinged with melancholy: What the Bleep continues to fly far below the radar of the mainstream media and mainstream moviegoers. There have been a few notable blips: Michael Keaton recently praised the film on the Today show, and USA Today and The Wall Street Journal published articles on its popularity. But the usual media frenzy that accompanies such indie triumphs (My Big Fat Greek Wedding's Nia Vardalos doing her "Opa!" shtick on every morning talk show) is nowhere to be found.

So what the bleep gives?

"As much as the media and Hollywood like to think they're hip and happening, they're really conservative," says Mark Vincente, a cinematographer (Sarafina!) who co-directed the $5 million-budgeted film with William Arntz and Betsy Chasse. (Arntz -- an Internet millionaire -- reportedly financed the entire movie himself.)

"This film is just really out there. When you start discussing the very notion of God, and what reality is, it seems blasphemous in some way. And people get nervous talking about it. But I find it interesting that another film -- one that perhaps would have more violence or more sex -- would somehow be more acceptable."

Vincente might sound like just another leftie paranoiac raving about Vast Media Conspiracies. (And after you've seen What the Bleep you might decide he's exactly that. One of the film's interview subjects is "Ramtha," a spiritual guru who claims to be channeling a 35,000-year-old "spirit-warrior.") But he's onto something here, about how the mainstream can't entirely process ideas that go against the basic assumptions of mainstream culture.

Consider the content of What the Bleep. Featuring Marlee Matlin as a photographer in existential crisis, the film shifts between interviews with physicists and awkwardly staged fictional passages designed to illustrate their ideas. It's hardly the only recent movie to actively question the existence of God (even Bruce Almighty did that). But it's certainly the first to conclude that our common notion of a god -- as a higher power who created us in his image, and whose approval we must seek in order gain entry into heaven -- is preposterous.

And more than arguing against the existence of God, the movie argues that we control our emotional, spiritual and physical destinies. Those ideas seem especially revolutionary following the recent presidential election, a contest many felt was heavily swayed by religious fundamentalists.

"The movie makes people look at their life and be honest about some of the things they may or may not be doing," says Vincente, referring to the film's midsection, which analyzes our culture's addictions (and our addiction to 12-step programs). "We have a government that pretty much supports that idea -- that we don't have to take responsibility for our individual actions -- and a media culture that supports it as well. You don't find in the media -- network television, or the studio film system -- messages that produce freedom. You find messages that either coddle people or push their buttons."

It should probably be noted that much of What the Bleep is confused and disorganized; that it tells us nothing a good introductory college philosophy course couldn't; and that the passage on addiction is a snide, crassly filmed melange of bad computer animation and grotesque close-ups of hapless actors.

But Vincente and company certainly deserve some bleepin' credit: Not unlike The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11, What the Bleep has tapped into an underserved niche market. And that market may not be such a "niche" after all.

Indeed, while Vincente says he can understand why What the Bleep has done so well in such New Age hotbeds as New Mexico and Arizona, and in left-leaning cities like Portland and Seattle, he has no clue why it has performed so well here in the Bible Belt. Other than to say that "the mainstream" is a lot less vast than those of us who traffic in it -- especially those of us in the media -- would like to pretend.

"People are born into this life, they take on the characteristics of their society, their parents, their teachers, their priests," Vincente says. "But I think that human beings are more than that. They're more than the behaviors that they learn. And I think there's something called a soul or a spirit that, when it sees information that is freeing or inspiring, [reacts to it]. And it seems to me that people are being inspired by this film."