What the BLEEP was I thinking?
Posted on | June 20, 2005 | 13 Comments
I knew nothing about the movie except that I’d heard the title and that Marlee Matlin was in it. So, when my suggested renting What the Bleep do We Know? last night, I thought — sure, why not?
Ugh. What a piece of New Age horsecrap littered with pseudoscience. If you’re not familiar with the movie, it’s a combination of documentary featuring a number of talking heads (unidentified until the closing credits) and a companion fiction piece that attempts to portray the hooey they’re trying to sell. The gist of the movie — that because there is indeterminism in the universe thanks to quantum physics, then we are able to create our own realities.
They use the old tried and true methods of any pseudoscientist. They quote unnamed sources (It has been proven that… Several universities are studying…). They take unproven assumptions as fact and use them to develop a house of cards. The big one here was a Japanese “study” wherein a man writes words on flasks of water and discovers that the structure of the water has changed in response to these concepts. Since that is true (they say), imagine…and off they go. They also take some big, big concepts and try to distill them down and force them into proving allegations they were never meant to address. Sure, reality is objective — we all cloud reality with our own perceptions and experiences, but they would have us believe that the chair I’m sitting on and the keyboard I’m typing on are pure constructs of my imagination — that I’m making up my own reality completely.
The fact that many of the experts are real scientists from reputable institutions only proves that if you spread your net widely enough you can find a dozen wingnuts anywhere! It helps there case not one bit that one of their “experts” is a collagen-pumped Tammy Faye Bakker lookalike psychic who is channeling a 35,000 man from Atlantis named Ramtha.
I went to the MWA Southwest conference on Saturday and had a good time. Had lunch with Joe R. Lansdale and his wife and Bill Crider and his wife. Entertaining as always. Lansdale was the final speaker of the afternoon. Via a series of funny anecdotes he conveyed the story of how he went from being a writer producing saleable stories that could have been written by anyone with a modicum of talent to writing works that were identifiably Joe R. Lansdale stories. That was my take home message from the conference — finding your unique voice.
Five days to the Stoker Awards. I suppose I should write an acceptance speech, just in case.
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About
Bev Vincent is the author of The Road to the Dark Tower, the Bram Stoker Award nominated companion to Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, which was nominated for a 2010 Edgar® Award and a 2009 Bram Stoker Award.
His short fiction has appeared in places like Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, From the Borderlands and The Blue Religion. He is a contributing editor with Cemetery Dance magazine and a member of the Storytellers Unplugged blogging community. He also writes book reviews for Onyx Reviews.
June 20th, 2005 @ 10:07 am
We’re pulling for you, Bev! Good luck!
June 20th, 2005 @ 10:10 am
Speech, heck, pick out a tiara now.
June 20th, 2005 @ 10:11 am
Thanks! We’re going to have a good time one way or the other. Signing at Dark Delicacies, reading, meeting Matheson and (maybe) Clive Barker. It’ll be a blast.
June 20th, 2005 @ 10:12 am
I’m not sure how good I look in diamonds…
June 20th, 2005 @ 10:15 am
The whole movie is basically propoganda for the cult of Ramtha. It’s horseshit.
Good luck with El Stokero!
June 20th, 2005 @ 10:25 am
I think I am with Phil Plait in getting rid of the term psuedoscience and just calling it antiscience. Since it is.
He goes on about his reasonings here http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/?p=63
June 20th, 2005 @ 10:32 am
I’d agree with that. Anti-science. Quite right.
June 20th, 2005 @ 11:03 am
How has this caught on in such a huge “Da Vinci Code” way?
June 20th, 2005 @ 12:27 pm
It’s not that huge, but…basically, JZ Knight has lots of money and still has followers in show biz who also have lots of money.
That movie was really big in the hippy-dippy part of Portland last year.
June 20th, 2005 @ 12:32 pm
It’s even spread out to New England, to people I thought would know better.
June 20th, 2005 @ 12:43 pm
Was it filmed in Portland? We were trying to figure out what city it was in, and there were a couple of indications in the credits that it might have been Portland.
June 20th, 2005 @ 12:50 pm
Yeah, it was all filmed in and around Portland. I am so ashamed.
June 20th, 2005 @ 5:28 pm
Well based on your review this movie just got bumped way down my “wanna see” list *lol*
And I am definately keeping my fingers crossed for you with the Stoker Awards!