Film: "What the #$*! Do We Know!?" 


The film "What the #$*! Do We Know!?" is a cult propaganda piece dressed up in pseudo-scientific nonsense using the vocabulary of quantum physics and neural chemistry. The scientific verbiage doesn't support the outrageous conclusions about the nature of free will that the filmmakers foist on the viewer. 

At one point the filmmakers purport that photographs of bottles of water are radically affected by directing different emotions at them. Do they really expect people to believe that? In another segment, they claimed that a bunch of monks lowered the crime rate in D.C. through mass meditation. Yeah, right. I suppose there were fewer monks committing crimes while the meditating was going on.

Viewers of this film need to be asking themselves what is the agenda of the filmmakers, because clearly there is one (or more). One claim that the film seems to be promoting is the idea that one can will oneself into a state of mental health. The climax of the film comes when the main character throws out the drugs she is taking to overcome her debilitating anxieties and, in a totally calm frame of mind (perhaps we should say "one with the universe"), starts drawing heart shapes all over her body.

Salon reports that the so-called "experts" prominently portrayed in the film deserve more scrutiny than the press has thus far given them. Salon says that "at least one scientist prominently interviewed in the film now says his words were taken out of context." An unnamed theologian "is a former priest who left the Catholic Church after allegations of sexual abuse." Another "expert" is "actually a sect leader claiming to channel a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit named Ramtha." Salon calls the film a "full-blown infomercial for Ramtha" [the Ramtha School of Enlightenment].

David Albert, a Columbia physics professor who appeared in the film, told Salon that he was "edited in such a way as to completely suppress my actual views about the matters the movie discusses. I am, indeed, profoundly unsympathetic to attempts at linking quantum mechanics with consciousness ... Had I known that I would have been so radically misrepresented in the movie, I would certainly not have agreed to be filmed." 

Posted: Sunday - November 14, 2004 at 01:48 AM          

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