Mindwalk (Bernt Amadeus Capra, 1990)

After losing the primary, a U.S. senator and erstwhile presidential candidate visits his poet buddy (and former speechwriter) in France. They travel to the Medieval abbey on Mont Saint-Michel together, and while wandering around catch the eye of a Norwegian particle physicist living in self-imposed exile on the island. The three wind up in an all-day discussion about early clocks, quantum field theory, William Blake, politics, Pablo Neruda, Descartes, lasers, ecology, systems theory and related subjects.

* * *

I try to take on all cultural experiences without prejudice. Thus, before watching Mindwalk, I strained to forget that the film was directed by the brother of and based on a story and book by Fritjof Capra, author of The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. It seems that, back in the mid-70s, it was all the rage to desperately try to legitimize the remaining threadbare beliefs of hippiedom with references to the "counterintuitive" nature of quantum physics. I've read Capra's book, possession of which I understand was once an astoundingly effective means to win over the chyx ("Wanna come upstairs and see my Hilbert Space?"), and since I'm being charitable, I will say that it's at least better than Gary Zukav's execrable The Dancing Wu-Li Masters. Both titles, however, belong to the class of works you'll come away from knowing less about physics than when you picked them up. Jeremy Bernstein said it all when he observed, "At the heart of the matter is Mr. Capra's methodology — his use of what seem to me to be accidental similarities of language as if these were somehow evidence of deeply rooted connections," which I call "reasoning by pun".

But we're here to talk about a movie, not to trash a book. Though it's barely known today — it's never seen DVD, but Capra himself has uploaded it to Google Video — Mindwalk was a full-fledged Paramount release back in 1990. I've heard it discussed over the years, with one common complaint: "It's just three people walking and talking!" That's a juvenile objection. Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre is a wonderful film, one of my very favorites, and it's just two people talking without walking. Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy resides in my top three of 2006, and it's just two people driving, walking, and barely talking at all. Gripes about form alone are groundless; every form is acceptable. What matters is how form and substance unite, and that's where the picture at hand has, well, Issues.

Let it be said, though, that the premise described above does get my blood flowin'. A feature-length conversation between three people of very different points of view that covers countless topics in art and science, all in an unusual, highly photographable setting? Sweet. Sign me up. I'm on board. Let's go. Here's how it rolls out: after an (ugh!) voiceover thought monologue from the poet about how simultaneously irritatingly and endearingly "American" the senator is — the poet's American too, mind you — the pair chat about the usual did-I-sell-out anxieties that plagued Baby Boomers during the George H.W. Bush era. While looking at a Rube Goldberg-y clock in the castle, they run across the physicist, who proceeds to denounce the mechanistic worldview that, while vital to building such an elaborate machine, cannot work when trying to solve the Earth's problems, which is how those stuffed shirts in Washington do it. The men then listen more or less rapt, interjecting only occasionally, as she expounds upon her ideas and the folly of everyone who does not subscribe to them: the United States government, pretty much all industries, other scientists, litterers.

What are her ideas? As someone who reads philosophy books for fun and profit, I can't resist breaking down the physicist's argument and seeing what makes it tick. It comes down to this: nothing is really reducible, and the reason the world is in such an awful state — that the world is in an awful state is simply asserted, by all three characters, as an axiom — is that everybody thinks everything is reducible. (She hooks reducibility up with masculinity and patriarchy, but the sleight-of-hand is tough to document.) For example, a reducibility-loving politician might consider the benefits of a coal-burning power plant in isolation, without so much as a thought to its effects on the people around it. Fair enough; I myself believe that unintended consequences lie at the heart of most political misadventures. Also, she says that it's a mistake to think only in terms of the individual; one should think in terms of the community, too, and the trees in the community, and the roots of the trees that collect water, and the clouds that drop that water from the sky, and the oceans from which the water gets to the sky, and the creatures in the ocean, and the salt the ocean deposits on the grass when the tide comes up, and the sheep that eat the grass, and the Medieval castle the sheep walk around. And don't forget to always, without exception, calculate your effect on our children's children's children's children. Thus the Norwegian makes her pitch for "systems thinking".

The problem here is obvious: not even the Earth Simulator can take that many variables into account, and it can do over 35 trillion FLOPS. (Though I've heard that NEC is working on a new 131-TFLOPS version, so hey, you never know.) A human who can't reduce is a human who can't think. For a while, her thesis seems to be that people would be better off if, in all choices, they considered more variables, which is not really an assertion amenable to inquiry, but hey. Near the end, she nearly breaks down in tears as she harangues her companions about the importance of a "sustainable" human lifestyle, showing herself to be at least a decade ahead of her time, buzzword-wise. Decoct all the verbosity, and what's her message? "Give a Hoot!^TM"

But the annals of cinema are peopled by plenty of eccentric characters with inconsequential beliefs, some of whom argue for them even less coherently than does Sonia the physicist. For instance, in Old Joy, one of the thirtysomething protagonists explains his theory of a teardrop-shaped universe while sharing beers with his friend over a campfire. His monologue, of sorts, reveals a lot about this particular character, why he is the way he is and where he's likely to go afterward. But in Mindwalk, Sonia's hundreds of lines about the importance of systems thinking don't reveal trait one about her character, because she's not a character; she's a mouthpiece for the viewpoint that systems thinking is the one true faith. If Sonia were to offer up the exact same theory as did Old Joy's neo-hippie, the movie wouldn't be shedding light on her inner life; the movie would be arguing that the universe is teardrop-shaped.

Mindwalk has no characters; it has puppets, their clapping wooden jaws manipulated directly by the Capra brothers. Either Sonia is a stand-in for Fritjof or she just happens to share all of the man's views as espoused in the book The Turning Point, on which the film is partially based. Thomas the poet sometimes fills the role of the fool, providing wisecracks and semi-apropos lines of verse, but he mostly fills the role of Sonia's cheerleader. Jack the senator is the straw man who exists only for Sonia to knock down: at first he spouts a few trivial counterarguments, but shortly caves, awed by the physicist's wisdom and serenity. "She's right, of course," he says to Thomas as they walk away from the abbey. "About damn near everything. Even the parts I didn't understand felt right." (Note the verb in that last sentence.) He even offers her a job.

If you don't read much of it, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that anyone who writes philosophy as a dialogue is cynically trying to play you like a fiddle. Of course the figure representing the opposing viewpoint is a doofus who doesn't even know the word mechanistic — the writer, and thus the picture, is actively selling Sonia's claims. This is an illustrious tradition going back Plato, but it's still a fundamentally dishonest one. Mindwalk's tagline is "A film for passionate thinkers", but how on Earth is a thinking person supposed to respond to Jack and Thomas' genuflection before Sonia's pronouncements? "Boy, she's really showing those stogdy old patriarchal Cartesians what's what"? Surely not. I do wonder, though, about the sort of person who believes anything because they saw one fictional entity convince two other fictional entities of it; I've got some swampland in Florida to sell them.

Far from having too little in the way of visuals and action, I would argue that the film has too much. The core material is essentially a persuasive essay, so it might hold up in a lecture format, but here it's expected to sustain an on-location, multi-character feature film. As I said, listening to a physicist, senator and poet hash out life would be fascinating; find a real one of each, plunk them on an island, and you've got yourself a solid documentary. Listening to a Fritjof Capra screed by way of three cardboard cutouts is less so. The problem with the movie isn't its form, and it's not exactly its (questionable) substance; it's the dishonesty that causes and is a product of form and substance that mesh so badly that the gears catch fire and melt the whole mechanism. The film is a lie, a polemic shabbily disguised as narrative; it purports to be a conversation, one of humanity's most enduring pleasures, but it's nothing of the sort. It's a sham, expressly designed to place one suite of assertions in the best possible light.

This gets me wondering, as I often do, about the place of politics in art. Again I arrive at the conclusion that it doesn't have one. If you want to make a political argument, write a book, or better yet, write an essay. Don't write a piece of fiction, because a piece of fiction isn't subject to the constraints of the real world, which is the only place politics matters. The makers of Mindwalk may have guessed, correctly, that the ideas they have to peddle would play much better in a fictional world, where they could control not only the arguments, but the counterarguments and the counterarguments to the counterarguments — and the effectiveness of them all. I could make a film where my veiled self proposes that we'd all be happy if only we used sardines as a medium of exchange, and I could prop up a couple of one-dimensional interlocutors who initially show skepticism but ultimately, after a carefully constructed imitation of conversation, come to accept — to love — the oracle-like originator of the sardines-as-money idea. But that wouldn't make a pocketful of rotten fish any more appealing.

adamcadre runs the Lyttle Lytton contest, where participants vie to write the worst possible short sentence with which to open a novel. (My personal favorite: "The foot delivered an unending holocaust of pain as it rocketed into Zamboni’s crotch.") One year, someone sent in the worst possible opening for a screenplay they could think of:

INT. MY MANSION - DUSK

A study in subdued luxury. A tall, handsome figure enters — it's ME.

ME

I have ninety minutes and lots of unpopular opinions, so let's get started.

Let's not.

 

Comments

[buy jeans]

This gets me wondering, as I often do, about the place of politics in art.

[Francis Bacon]

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