Review of Mindwalk (1991) by Tonypolito — 15 May 2010

You'll learn a lot more from the book upon which this film is based, that being "The Turning Point" by Fritjof Capra. That book, in my personal library (as is this film), is far better written than this script.

Capra's selling his intellectual/philosophical perspective here. Don't let the quartet of talent here fool you; there's no real plotline or acting going on here at all. It's Capra's vanity project, intended to help the average person understand and accept his "systems theory" argument. I wish I could say the film was successful in that attempt, but it's really not. Which is why, even though the message this film tries to deliver is so important, Paramount's not bothered with a DVD release after 20 years.

Capra IS seriously correct in his "systems theory" argument: that our organizations and systems are failing since we don't understand them holistically, synthetically, since we don't look first at making all the parts work together. Rather we still tend to emphasize the mechanical & analytical perspective (inherited from Descartes and Newton and the hard sciences), that we understand an entity best by dissecting, studying, analyzing and managing all of its parts. Capra's especially interested in how system theory perspective could improve our ecological and sustainability outcomes.

The plotline is no more than as if Capra were giving a university lecture; it's Capra's "Sermon on the Mount." The Mount backdrop used here is Mont Saint-Michel, just off the Normandy coast of France. And for viewers unfamiliar with it, it's a gorgeous sight to behold here throughout this film. The sermon is delivered by Liv Ullmann, a former physicist who now lives on the Mont, usually in quiet contemplation. But on this particular morning she starts lecturing Mont visitors John Heard and Sam Waterston. The duo, serving merely as foils for Ullmann's monologue, do little more for 112 minutes than wander along behind her saying "Wow!" and "Huh?" (Ione Skye, portraying Ullmann's daughter and delivering about two minutes screen time and 50 words of dialogue, is utterly irrelevant.).

Ullmann starts out well enough, trying to explain the basic systematic perspective as outlined above. Things would have fared better for the audience had she used a bunch of concrete examples that the target audience could comprehend. But instead of doing that, she moves into a heady, fuzzy discussion of quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (which Ullmann never-ever actually names as such).

Perhaps it IS kind of jaw-dropping (for the uninitiated) that light is thought to be sometimes particle, sometimes wave. Or that it's thought impossible to determine the position and velocity of an electron with any certainty. Perhaps. But what the HECK does all that have to do with Capra's argument for a holistic perspective of organizations? Almost nothing, actually. Capra's hoping that if the viewer jaw IS dropped, he'll just go ahead and bite on the hook that is the rest of his argument. Hoping that if he astounds the audience with such scientific oddities, they'll just be stupefied into acceptance of his perspective. Generally speaking, that's not a very good strategy to win others over to your argument with any degree of durability.

Eventually in Act III, Ullmann does get back on point and she does cough up a couple of decent examples (eg, trees are not just leaves, bark, roots - they are also nesting places, oxygen-and-food givers, erosion preventers, etc.). But really it's too little, too late. The typical viewer by this time is going to be totally lost within the weak and unfocused lecture.

Russell Ackoff has given much better examples than seen here. Eg, if you took apart a British car and studied its parts, nothing there would tell you why the steering wheel is on the right. You'd have to understand the car's place within its system to know why.

Capra wasn't the first to profess systems theory perspective. Ullmann briefly mentions some names, Gregory Bateson among them. The work of others such as Stafford Beer and Buckminster Fuller also predate Capra. And it could certainly be argued that even the emphasis of ancient Eastern religions on societal harmony and cooperation represent an early understanding of the importance of a systematic perspective.

What Capra argues IS important. It's just far better argued in his book.