Recently, when I was watching the trailer for the latest of Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi thrillers for 15-year-olds, I wondered, with all of his talent and success, why doesn’t Spielberg produce a documentary that attempts to show how we can make the world better, instead of cranking out more pop culture fluff?
The answer came to me last night, as I was watching the documentary, “I Am”, which, although not produced by a talent as well-known as Steven Spielberg, was nonetheless master-minded by one of the movie industry’s “in crowd.” Tom Shadvac, who made such films as Ace Ventura and Bruce Almighty, was doing well by Hollywood standards. He purchased a 17,000 square foot mansion in Pasadena. He owned a private jet. He threw big, expensive parties and drove cars that are worth more than most of the homes in the outskirts of Los Angeles these days. But after a serious mountain biking accident left him in excruciating pain and misery for many months and forced him to come to terms with his mortality, he had an epiphany. I guess Steven Spielberg has never had an epiphany.
He realized that everything he thought about the world was wrong. For years he believed he was doing something good for the world by producing his genre of movie. Instead, he laments, he realized that it was all a lie. He wasn’t helping the world, he was contributing to the problem.
So he set out to make a documentary that would answer two questions: What is wrong with the world and what can we do about it?
“I Am” then departs from Shadyac’s personal story to tell a greater story: The story of humanity and the scientific revolution and its offspring, the industrial growth economy. Shadyac weaves in conversations with some of the world’s brightest thinkers, authors and spiritual teachers to present a very powerful case on why we have it all wrong when it comes to the things we believe about our world and ourselves. David Suzuki, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Lynne McTaggart, Ray Anderson, John Francis, Coleman Barks, and Marc Ian Barasch offer their unique viewpoints on one fundamental truth that is presented for our consideration: that we are not separate from each other and everything else in the universe, but that we are all fundamentally connected. Everything we do, feel and think affects everything else.
Now, if this was just a film about a new age-y philosophy, it probably wouldn’t get much traction. What makes this film powerful are the words combined with the imagery combined with scientific proof—in some cases shown right there on camera. There’s a scene where he’s at the HearthMath institute, a neuro-cardiology research center, sitting in front of a petri dish filled with yogurt, thinking negative thoughts and affecting the yogurt culture. The most shocking information was about how world events, consciousness and random number generators are connected—something I don’t want to give away in this review because if you’ve never heard the connection, I wouldn’t want to spoil the fun of learning about it for the first time.
The movie is crafted to evoke all kinds of emotions. I found myself choking up or outright weeping during certain scenes in the movie, which were, ironically, meant to demonstrate our neurological basis for empathy and compassion. Shadyac is a master at this, as he was a master at manipulating audiences into laughter in his former career. No wonder, as the same muscles are used for laughter as for crying, as one of the authors declare in the film.
There are other lies Shadyac exposes, besides the one of humans being separate or about our world being mechanistic. There’s the lie that nature is competitive and ruled by alpha leaders. The truth is that nature, and humanity itself, is in fact cooperative and democratic by default. There’s the lie that acquiring more material wealth will make you happier, when in fact, beyond a certain level of comfort, more “stuff” does nothing to elevate your contentment.
This is a movie that is inspirational, mind-blowing, moving and ultimately, very positive. It does finally answer the questions, “What is wrong with the world and what can we do about it?” by the end. The answer doesn’t pander, isn’t cynical or obvious. The answer is at once, like the movie, simple and elegant.
Margaret Emerson is a freelance writer and ecopsychologist. She is the author of Contemplative Hiking: Along The Colorado Front Range. She lives and works in the Denver area.
Thanks for the review and the trailer. It sounds like a documentary I’d love to watch.
What happened to Tom Shadvac, and others who have had a similar wake up call, will soon happen to humanity as a whole. Only after a collective near-death experience will we come, en masse, to our collective senses.
Such a visceral epiphany is the only means to the Metanoia we all so desperately need.
Those who study consciousness understand that it is the veneer wrapping our being that prevents us from achieving unity as a species. It is this veneer that, until a person has had such a near-death experience, is so convincing in its own interpretation and simulation of its environment. We call this veneer our consciousness.
Consciousness believes itself to be the right and the only due awareness; the only rightful judge of reality, when in fact consciousness has a tiny bandwidth of only 10 bits per second, and can only hold in its awareness an average of seven things at a time. It even has a half-second delay that it is totally unaware of. It is by all scientific estimates, a primitive veneer, but it believes itself to be supreme.
In comparison, the subconscious, which is the awareness of the senses, has a bandwidth of 10-to-the-7th bits per second (a million times greater). It is the subconscious, when consciousness is shocked into submission by a life-altering event, which bleeds through to this veneer some of the reality it knows to be so obvious and true; what we then refer to as an epiphany.
But only some of the true reality bleeds through, lest consciousness be blown apart by the sheer intensity and volume of the sensory data continuously appropriated by the subconscious.
Consciousness is evolving, but at too slow a pace for the crises now facing the collective subconscious. The subconscious collective of humanity knows how much time is left for it to act for the benefit of its own survival in human form, and it will act with the means, and at the moment necessary, in order to insure its own survival.
It does so all the time to insure the survival of its host human, as my own experiences will attest, and it will do so in like manner for the species as a whole; of that I have no doubt.
Perhaps you have even had a curious event happen to you, which you have falsely attributed to an angel or some other guardian, due to your current mythical worldview; an event in which you were spared an injury or even death? It was your subconscious, aware of its own intention toward you, its host.
But, because there is relatively little time now for consciousness to evolve naturally at its current pace, the subconscious collective will have to stimulate the awareness of its collective host population by creating a mass stimulation event similar to the demonstrations it has already provided to those lucky few who have had their lives forever altered for the better by their own personal brush with death, and other such events.
What you are now becoming more and more familiar with (near death, out-of-body, and other like epiphanies) is a typical representation of what, on a large scale, will alter our trajectory toward an increasingly aware future; an increasingly more aware consciousness
It’s what I call a spontaneous metanoic bifurcation.
I very much share your sentiments although I don’t have much time for complex-sounding theories. The problem I have is that it assumes that humans are being singled out for special treatment- as if the species are too important to become extinct. Why?? It seems clear to me that our current civilisation is headed for the rocks- like many before it and presumably many more in the future. We just aren’t clever enough or perhaps too “clever” but not wise enough to surveive just yet. Most civilisations facing crises invent some “miracle” that will save them at the last moment but that doesn’t make it happen.
The part in the movie that talked about random number generators that generate the digits 0 and 1 becoming less random during major world events reminded me of The Matrix. Seeing those zeros and ones suddenly bend, suddenly become affected by human outrage and despair. We’re stuck in an alternate reality from which we have not yet woken.
It’s time to take the Red Pill.
We just aren’t clever enough or perhaps too “clever” but not wise enough to surveive just yet