What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? (2004) on Netflix
NR20041h 49mComedyDocumentaryDrama
Amanda, a divorced photographer, finds her daily life coming apart one fall. She questions her work and her relationships while scientists and theologians answer an off-screen interviewer.
- Netflix2.2/5
- IMDb5.2/1014,151 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes34%
Trailer
Plot summary
Documentary interviews are woven through a fictional story. Amanda, a divorced photographer, starts to view her surroundings differently over one fall, questioning her role in life, her career and her relationships with men, and the layers of her everyday experience open onto cells, molecules and the quantum level beneath. Scientists, philosophers and theologians answer an off-screen interviewer about consciousness and quantum physics, with animated graphics illustrating their points. They return to one idea: that minds, alone and in groups, can influence the material world, that the universe is better understood as built from thoughts and ideas than from matter, and that what a person believes about who they are and what is real shapes the reality they inhabit.
Cast
- Daniela Serraas Bride
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? (2004)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- With no Hollywood budget, the filmmakers used "guerrilla marketing" to get into theaters and draw audiences, which brought accusations, formal and informal, that the film's proponents spammed online message boards and forums with thinly veiled promotional posts.
- David Albert, a philosopher of physics who appears in the film, accused the filmmakers of selectively editing his interview to make it look as though he endorses the film's thesis linking quantum mechanics and consciousness, a link he says he is "profoundly unsympathetic" to.
- Co-director Mark Vicente later joined NXIVM, the sex-trafficking pyramid scheme of convicted con artist Keith Raniere, and after leaving it appeared in the exposé series The Vow, which revealed the cult's damaging tactics.
- Candace Pert tells the film an apocryphal invisible-ships story in which Native Americans could not see Columbus's ships; according to David Hambling in Fortean Times, the tale likely traces to the voyages of Captain James Cook, not Columbus.
