When boiled down to an easily digestible sentence, the premise of Tom Shadyac’s documentary I Am seems quite fascinating: the man behind such commercially successful Hollywood comedies as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Nutty Professor, and Bruce Almighty uses (quasi-)scientific evidence to attack the scientific community and blame it for all of the world’s problems, ultimately concluding that only some hazily defined spirituality can save us.
But the premise is in some ways quite infuriating. An inordinate amount of the film is devoted to a discussion with Rollin McCraty, director of research at HeartMath, an institution that explores supposed corollaries between the heart, human behavior, and psychology. McCraty provides (spurious) evidence (vaguely) suggesting that the heart possesses telepathic intuitive powers, and that human psychoemotional dynamics can affect the number of electromagnetic waves emitted by inanimate objects — which was, oddly enough, also a psychobabble theory of Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters II — claiming that these obscure “messages of the heart” are actually man’s connection to a higher power. The film also indirectly avers that mirror neurons are divinely conceived: since these neurons fire when an animal both performs an action and sees that action performed by another, then they “must be” proof that we are all a part of one divine consciousness.
The film’s message is a simple one: only love can save us. But the problem with I Am is that Shadyac’s devices are so clumsy and at times contradictory that he actually ends up making a weak argument for an idea that practically requires no argumentation. He spends about an hour rallying for egalitarianism against rugged individualism, a tenet which has arguably ruined this country. For example, Dean Radin of the Institute of Noetic Science — an unorthodox branch of metaphysics concerned with the relationship between intuitive activity and the physical world (its proponents contend that thoughts are actually particles of light with a given weight) — discusses certain species of deer that exhibit something resembling democratic referendum. But then the last 10 minutes of the film is devoted to hero-figure worship, with Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama all putting in involuntary appearances, which supports the antiquated “Great Man theory” of the 19th century, seemingly giving the lie to his postulation that we’re all equal.
The stars of the show are those who Shadyac might consider equally great thinkers of our time: pseudo-scientist Lynne McTaggart and the aforementioned sorta-scientists Radin and McCraty. Even if we and most of the educated, reasonably intelligent world do not accept what they have to say, I think we can all agree that it was still possible for Shadyac to create a handsome, cogent “package” for their ideas. Instead, he creates a sprawling, scattershot mess of a documentary without a clear thesis. Further diluting the actual meaningful content of the film are no end of cloying, sentimental passages of “stock footage,” which seemingly must be implemented to illustrate every single idea discussed. Given the explanatory nature of these montages, not only is this exceedingly condescending — and of that most irksome breed of condescension: the watered-down explanation of that which is fairly easy and obvious — but it renders an already tenuous movie pure, unadulterated propaganda.
