You have to be wary of a film that Madonna has pronounced “incredibly thought-provoking and inspiring”. To remind you, previous ideas the pop diva has found thought-provoking and inspiring include posing naked with Vanilla Ice, starring in
Swept Away, and jogging around in a tweed cap with Guy Ritchie.
Generally, if a film comes out that purports to represent a simultaneous breakthrough in, and melding of, the disciplines of quantum physics, philosophy and theology, you would want the quotes on the posters to be from Stephen Hawking, Rowan Williams and A. C. Grayling — not Evita. But then What The Bleep Do We Know!?, despite being a small (£2.6 million), independent movie, is a particularly showbizzy take on quantum physics. If you can imagine the legendary “high-concept” Top Gun producer Don Simpson being asked to make A Brief History of Time, this is probably what he’d have come back with.
Simpson’s pitch for Top Gun was a picture of a big plane with a pilot standing next to it. Similarly, judging by the prodigious quantities of smug, self-serving, spurious New Age bollocks that saturates Bleep, its pitch might well have been a picture of a hippy gazing contentedly at a gigantic dolphin wind-chime.
What The Bleep . . . has become a sleeper hit in the US, and is just about to take over from Super Size Me as the third highest-grossing documentary. Its appeal is based largely on the fact that, while it purports to be a factual documentary explaining quantum physics — and thus hugely flattering its audience’s intellectual egos — it is, in actuality, a fuzzy, feel-good self-help movie with the basic message: “If you believe everything will be OK, it will be.”
Prime Bleep ideas include the notion that unhappy thoughts are responsible for cell degeneration, ageing and death, and that negative thinking affects physical matter on a sub-atomic level. To illustrate this, photos appear of a Japanese “experiment” in which bottles of water were labelled “love” and “I hate you”. The “love” bottles had “produced” water-crystals, which, under a dark field microscope, look like beautiful, harmonic Venetian mirrors. The “I hate you” bottles, however, “produced” ugly crystals which — students of evil and discord will be intrigued to discover — greatly resembled cheese on toast, served with a splash of Lea & Perrins. Bleep saw this as evidence of the quantum power of thought, while missing the real big stories here — WATER HAS STARTED TO READ, and CHEESE ON TOAST IS EVIL.
Average moviegoers have little to no chance of knowing if someone is misrepresenting arcane aspects of quantum physics to us. While Bleep has been widely discredited by scientists in the major US newspapers, the papers of Middle America (Minneapolis Star-Tribune — “There’s no better way to heal the world than to see this movie”) have been largely gullible.
Key to this layman’s gullibility is the fact that Bleep, unusually for a scientific documentary, does not reveal the names or qualifications of its talking heads until the end of the film. It’s only after sitting through two hours of animated singing peptides, photos of “happy” crystals and spurious mentions of Heidegger that the closing credits reveal, like Hi-di-Hi!, who we have been watching. And what a catalogue of weirdos, bullshitters and suspect people they turn out to be.
Dr Joseph Dispenza — the guy who claims that we “create the effects of reality all the time” — is a chiropractor who graduated at “Life University”. John Hagelin, “world-renowned quantum physicist”, previously attempted to run for President of the US on a Natural Law Party and Yogic Flying ticket. The film’s theologian, Dr Miceal Ledwith, had an interesting previous career as president of Maynooth College in Ireland, a post and a country he left after allegations of abusing an under-age boy. Which certainly casts his claims that there “is no such thing as good and bad” in an intriguing light.
The main speaking head of the film, meanwhile, is the deeply interesting Ms J. Z. Knight. Knight, we learn, isn’t Knight at all — she has, in fact, been “channelling” a “mystic and hierophant” called “Ramtha” for the duration of the film. A little research reveals that “Ramtha” (ramtha.com) is a 35,000-year-old “Lemurian”, who has also hung out in Atlantis, and is founder of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment (week-long courses, £500).
Even more intriguingly, the Ramtha School of Enlightenment is closely allied with the Maharishi University of Management — a similarly spurious spiritual academy — which is run by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Yes — the Beatles-conning, Rolls-Royce-collecting, Mahesh Yogi.
As it turns out, all but one of Bleep’s “experts” is either employed by or linked with the Maharishi University of Management. The only one who isn’t — Dr David Albert, a professor at the Columbia University physics department — has claimed that his real views were “completely suppressed” in the film, and that he is “profoundly unsympathetic at attempts to link quantum mechanics with consciousness”. Why were his views suppressed? Maybe something to do with the producers and directors of the film, William Arntz and Betsy Chasse, both being students of Ramtha, whose books are usefully suggested as “further reading” at the end of the film.
The perturbing success of Bleep represents a wasted opportunity. There is clearly a market for an inspiring, accessible film to be made about quantum physics. What has so far been proved in physics — matter simultaneously existing in two different places; wave particle duality, where waves change into particles only when observed — is far more impressive than Bleep’s risible cheese-on-toast crystals, or positive thinking.
Ultimately, the visionary astrophysicist Carl Sagan summed up the whole affair more than 20 years ago: “There is much more wonder in science than pseudoscience. And in addition, science has the additional virtue — and it is not an inconsiderable one — of being true.”
What The Bleep Do We Know!? is released on Friday
