I Am–Are You?

By Michael N. Nagler

Film reviews have been rare in these pages, but we feel that the new film by Tom Shadyac, I Am, is extremely worth seeing.  It is a real breakthrough in progress toward a new paradigm and nonviolent future in that it integrates nonviolence skillfully into the “Great Turning,” or overall paradigm shift.

I went to see I Am with some reluctance as I had been disappointed with the What the Bleep Do We Know because of its facile equating of “new science” realities with life at the macroscopic level (quantum events are indeterminate so in human life absolutely anything could happen) and above all its exploitation of shallow romance (in the quantum world you get your husband back) and sexuality.  I Am has none of these flaws.  Far from succumbing to any temptation to cheapness it is an in-depth exploration of — well — many of the themes that have occupied us recently at Metta: how to formulate succinctly the “new story” emerging from new science and ancient wisdom, who are we, and what has nonviolence to do with it (we think, everything).  The film is extremely well made and engaging throughout, often breathtaking.  I’m a bit of a sucker for films, of course, because I see so few of them, but I had several healthy cries at the emotional parts of this one.

Top scientists, like Elizabeth Sahtouris and IONS researchers Dean Radin and Marilyn Schlitz and the likes of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Bishop Tutu and stunning footage of Gandhi and the Civil Rights movement are the texture of the thrilling story.

Two things are missing, in my view.  Both are actually pretty serious omissions, but again (as with Richard Attenborough’s masterful depiction of Gandhi) perhaps the film goes as far as it can without leaving behind even the avant-garde audience of today.  First (again, like Attenborough’s film), there is no mention of meditation.  The ancients tell us, as Shadyac points out, that life is one: but they also tell us how we can know that life is one — to become aware of their same vision.  All I Am tells us by way of practical steps is to shed unneeded possessions — not, as Gandhi would say, how to shed the possessor. Second, it does not go far enough in clarifying that while there are, for example, mirror neurons that facilitate empathy the neurons don’t cause the empathy.  This is a common failure even among many of the new scientists and it means that in the end they do not gain ‘escape velocity’ from the prevailing paradigm of materialism and determinism.

Nonetheless, I Am is a great contribution to the Great Turning.  And great entertainment.  I heartily recommend it.