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May 24, 2008

This is the first of two talks I gave at the Building A New World Conference , which was held at Radford University in Virginia. The panel was on climate change.

May 24, 2008

This talk was delivered at the Building A New World Conference, which was held at Radford University in Virginia.

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 [...]