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Uncomfortably Numb
Who Gives A Bleep?
Enlightening scientific journey or cultist propaganda?
BY DYLAN BEHAN.
A genre-mixing film, it cuts constantly between grey talking heads explaining science (their true identities aren't revealed until the end), the fictitious daily dramas of a deaf divorcee photographer (played by Oscar Winner Marlee Maitland) and lots of 3D computer animations of atoms, particles and at one point, Robert Palmer impersonating proteins. For Vicente, this odd way of combining comedy and science was a no-brainer as they needed 'a story to hang ideas on'. He says: "We also understood biologically when you laugh your brain becomes more neuro-plastic, there's a chemical reaction that occurs in your body that makes learning easier... if humans don't have an emotion attached to something it's hard for them to take it in."
Matrix or I Heart Huckabees fans will get off on the existential ponderances that the universe could be constructed from our own thoughts, as well as the discussions about emotion creating peptides manufactured in your brain affecting moods. Positive thinking (aka prayer) affecting the material world is also explored in depth, as are its thought on addiction, both material and emotional. Even if you disagree with most of what it says, it'll get you thinking more than a braindead, peptide producting action film will, that's for sure.
Such positive thinking is the only way I can explain a film like this ever got made. Vicente basically got handed a blank cheque by software millionare (and co-director and co-mystic) Will Arntz to make this indie, which with a total budget of $500,000 has gone onto sell over a million copies on DVD on Amazon (a completists 5 Disc set is on the way).
Despite many unmistakable links to an organisation called Ramtha's School of Enlightenment (the 35,000 year old Atlantic warrior goddess herself is supposedly channelled through one of the interviewees), I doubt the intelligent Vincente, a former Hollywood Director of Photography and lover of science, was just out to make propaganda. Instead, he wants people to think more about the world around them and the part they play.
"(The aim) is to switch them onto what science is saying and what mysticism has been saying for a long, long time, and get them excited enough to go out and buy a book... The point of all this eventually is for us to evolve into some futuristic possibility of what it is to be human. What is it to use all your brain, to turn all that on."
While I agree people should think more, no amount of positive thinking is going to make our public transport run on time - both myself and Mark were both late for our interview. We may all be the makers of our own universe, but Sydney public transport is fucked up.
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Directors David Cronenberg Miranda July Walter Salles Guillermo Del Toro American Splendor Morgan Spurlock Tarnation's Jonathon Caouette What The Bleep...
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Attacked by Christians for using science to illustrate god, and attacked by scientists for distorting scientific facts, yet somehow finding an audience of millions without a studio behind it, What The Bleep Do We Know is really, aimed at neither of those people, says co-director Mark Vicente. "The film is made for reasonable logical people who sense there must be more to life but aren't really sure what that more necessarily is. We're just saying maybe some of that 'more' is to be found in analysing science and what it has to do with us. Science has been taken away from people and it's only the domain of very smart, intelligent people with white, greying hair."