I just came upon a lost gem of a movie–recommended by my dad–called Mindwalk. It was released in 1990, but has never made its way to dvd. After watching it, I’m not surprised, given that–as the Washington Post described it at the time–the “film has virtually no action, no drama and no narrative.” With that sort of criteria, a film would have to be some sort of touchstone French new wave art house classic from the ’60s to get released on dvd. But really, it’s a wonder that Mindwalk ever got released in the first place.

The film is essentially a two-hour conversation between three characters: a politician (played by Sam Waterston), a physicist (Liv Ullman) and a poet (John Heard). The setting is the medieval island of Mont Saint-Michel, where all three characters have converged to escape from their respective midlife crisis. But what this movie lacks in Hollywood elements, it makes up for with an intense existential dialogue on the very meaning of life–but more than just that, it’s the clashing of two distinct ways of seeing life.

Although it is structured like a dialogue, the movie is in large part a monologue or–perhaps more accurately–a forum for the physicist to espouse her new world views upon a reluctant old world politician (described as a conservative democrat) and his generally open-minded poet friend. This approach definitely comes off as a bit too didactic at times, but I’m willing to forgive the filmmakers because it’s clear they too were aware of this pitfall and attempted to compensate by inserting a daughter character, who periodically pops in to remind her mom that no one wants to hear her crazy boring ideas about how the world should work.

Nevertheless, the physicist–whose withdrawl to the island stems from the realization that her work was being fed to the U.S. Defense Department–begins her lecture by telling the politician that he suffers from a mechanistic view of life that dates all the way back to Descartes.

Her next lesson is that this mechanistic view of life has dug its way into society has a whole, creating a “crisis of perception.”

She then recommends a new vision of the world.

This new vision of the world reminds me of what Dr. King said in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

It’s no wonder that she earlier declared herself a non-voter and further explained that the basic political ideas of right and left are outdated and ill-equipped to solve these larger systemic problems. But how do we solve systemic problems? By understanding the very nature of systems, which is–as the physicist explains in her final lecture–the very essence of life itself.

It’s striking how much of this is relevant to me now, nearly 20 years after the making of this film. The candid talk of global warming, child death rates, and weapons spending shows how little things have changed in the time my generation has grown of age. The Cold War was coming to an end when Mindwalk was released. And perhaps a new world vision seemed possible. Yet somehow, in the years since, it seems like we’ve only become more entrenched in the old world vision of machination and exploitation.

It would be easy to draw the conclusion that the ideals forwarded in Mindwalk are unrealistic and unattainable. But I see something positive in my attraction to this movie (and it’s the same reason I’m drawn to the teachings of King, Gandhi, Dorothy Day, etc.). Among each new generation that finds its world in disarray, the popular solution continues to be the championing of interconnectedness and an appreciation for all living things.

Incidentally, if this entry has interested you enough to watch the whole movie, your best bet is to download it or watch here on Google video.