Emerson College Senior Honors Thesis - May 2006

Abstract:
Paradigm Shift is a series of four screenplays, the last of which was made into a super-16mm color film, 20 minutes in length.  The content for these science-fiction screenplays is inspired by the two Sophomore Honors Seminar courses: Evolutionary Theory and Philosophy, as well as other scientific, mathematical, philosophical and religious research that I have done subsequently.  The film Paradigm Shift: Involution revolves around two ambitious youth with opposing metaphysical viewpoints on the origins of the universe and the next step in the evolution of the human species.  Involution was filmed and edited in the Spring semester of 2006.

Paradigm Shift: A Science Fiction Film Series

            In the Fall of 2003, for the final project in Alan Hankin’s Seminar on Evolutionary Theory, I wrote a screenplay that theorized about evolution, not just of the species, but of society as a whole.  This was an incredibly vast idea to get my mind around, and the screenplay continued to expand, until I stopped myself with an ambiguous “To Be Continued” at page 35.  Hypothesizing about the course of society, or civilization – essentially, all of humanity – was quite overwhelming.  This was not only due to the fact that the issue of social advancement is multi-faceted, and must be examined through a broad, interdisciplinary, interconnected web of studies, experiments, dialogues and activism.  What also overwhelmed my efforts was the constantly reemerging prospect that humanity would possibly never overcome its challenges, unless there were a mass alteration of its entire perspective, and its behavioral patterns, at all levels of society – a complete transformation of consciousness.  I thus titled the film after a term that I had just learned in my Economics class:  Paradigm Shift.
            After turning in this first screenplay as my assignment, I realized that there could be many more stories contained within the universe I created for Paradigm Shift.  Ellis could be merely one of a series of protagonists, discovering their potential as bearers of a new era in the evolution of the species.  There could be a variety of groups everywhere, among university students, technology experts, political scientists, stock exchangers, cynics and Doomsday fanatics, who were all in pursuit of the same information:  the key to surviving this developmental adolescence of humanity, or perhaps facilitating or taking control of this next transformative stage that civilization is so quickly approaching.  Whatever the motivation of these characters – justice, survival, or power – there were enough stories to be told that I could begin writing another screenplay, more concise and manageable, that I could actually produce as my Thesis Project.
            Another source of material that was not lacking were the themes and ideas that could be represented by all these different groups and characters.  The new installment could focus specifically on the realm of mathematics, or biology, or Chaos Theory, or a combination of all of those.  What resulted from these continual ponderings was a series of four screenplays, each one experimenting with a different set of environments, characters, story structure and level of realism.
            In The Hidden Order, the young student Ellis discovers the existence of an organization on his campus, the “Paradigm Shift”, that meets secretively to unravel mysteries about the fabric of the universe, which Gabriel, a world-traveling alumni helps them understand.  Ellis soon discovers that to be part of the group he must abide by a strict life discipline, which will in turn prepare him to accept the grave responsibilities he is destined to fulfill.  The second installment, Transient, follows Willard “Will” Morven, the victim of a severe and sudden handicap:  the inability to perceive time.  An underground group of eccentric geniuses known as the “Rain Tents” help him recover his faculty of time-perception, and discover a greater ability he has acquired as a result:  to transcend the relativistic boundaries of the time-space continuum.  Origins, the third installment, returns to the character of Ellis and the group “Paradigm Shift” in the midst of their pursuit of Lorei, a man whose ability to travel through fragmentary wormholes has led him many places, stealing genetic information crucial to the advancement of the human species.  In the fourth installment, Involution, Jeremy and Hiroshi, two computer experts in their own right experience a clash of opinions and a clash of interests, as Jeremy sees his ambitious genome laboratory fall into the grasp of yet another duo of opposing groups: “The Enders” and Hiroshi’s eavesdropping assistants.  With every installment, I reached a different balance between theory, plot, character and action.  Since the fourth version of Paradigm Shift seemed to be the most balanced, I decided to produce it as a pilot episode, or a conceptual test-run for the rest of the series.
            The themes infused into each of the story lines reflect a great deal of research, and the continuous brainstorming that filled the pages of my notepad for months; the left-over ideas that were never relevant enough to put on research papers, and the expression of many of my own personal struggles and realizations.  The Hidden Order deals with abstract, non-linear and holistic definitions of “Reality, capital R,” as Ellis suggests in a phone conversation with his ex-girlfriend.  This installment establishes the rhetoric for the rest of the films, taking time to explain the extent to which our human senses are limited, and how our perception of the universe must take into account the interconnectedness of life, and all fields of understanding.  Alfred North Whitehead offers one of the most sophisticated and serious works in the area of process philosophy, and his book Process and Reality is referred to in the screenplay, as one of the sources that Ellis researches.  A source of inspiration was his famous quote that reminds me of evolution:  “The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.”  Furthermore, Whitehead writes with a greater vision in mind, for the nature of advancement in civilization.  One of his central themes is:  "the story of the dynamic effort of the world passing into everlasting unity… accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the world's multiplicity of effort" (Whitehead 57).
            Each of the main characters in the Paradigm Shift installments, but especially Ellis, is supposed to represent an individual who is sincerely and unselfishly in pursuit of truth.  Within the first two pages I tried to immediately establish what motivates his pursuit:  a concern with the worsening condition of humanity as a whole, and a hope for somehow “halting the oncoming catastrophes”, by studying the realities of the universe so copiously as to identify what patterns led human beings to where we are.  The following idea - that the only way of ensuring our survival is if we collectively entered an evolution of consciousness - is inspired by Peter Russel‘s The Global Brain.  Russel‘s approach brings together many disciplines to propose that all of civilization is part of a global organism that includes the rest of nature, and becoming aware of its functions would lead to a higher, more united level of consciousness.  I began with this idea and branched off into more philosophical, metaphysical, mathematical and prophetic interpretations, while trying to connect everything back to evolutionary theory.
            After quickly establishing Ellis‘ character during the library scene, his relationship with people and the obsessive-compulsiveness of his techniques of investigation, I tried to provide a backbone for his entire mode of thinking with the monologue entitled “The Big Picture”.  What he spews into the tape-recorder is how I‘ve learned from my parents, teachers and mentors, to understand events in history and the world.  Everything is an on-going process with both negative and positive fruits, and it is important to step back from our narrow perspectives to understand what has caused the present conditions. I found this to be similar to Darwin‘s gradualist approach, and many other modes of modern thinking, and decided to define it in The Hidden Order as Process.
            When I studied chemistry and physics in high school, this became clearly connected with how the universe is organized at a sub-atomic level:  forces of attraction building complex structures and forces of decay causing entropy and disorder.  The fact that matter is never created or destroyed, only transformed, was a reassuring statement that there was hope for the world‘s recovery, if only through transformation into something new.  In the third installment, Origins, Ellis returns to talk about this with one of the members of the group, and it expresses a reoccurring theme throughout all of the installments.  His German friend explains:
            Two [opposite] forces cause change… One force causes slow disorder, you have components of a system all heading in different directions, dispersion of energy, stagnation, entropy... BUT, what is the reason for this? There is another force, that is causing change as well. The natural gravitation towards balance, refinement, equilibrium, equations consolidating. Disorder could not have caused this, you see?  We are not in a random universe.  There must be a force that allows complex organisms to function, that keeps improbable compositions from disassembling, and the universe from collapsing on itself.  Natural selection slowly polishing beautiful things.  This is an orchestra towards perfection. We are held together and pushed forward with this, the same force that attracts electrons to protons, and, even, humans to each other. (19)
            I was also fascinated by the idea that, from one simple code of organization, the simplest particles and energies of reality expansively spiral into infinite complexity, even self-aware complexity.  From this came the main aspect of science-fiction in The Hidden Order, when Ellis proposes that these “infinite and mysterious forces… would finally become increasingly decipherable, even… predictable”. (1) I figured that if anyone were able to reach complete awareness of the workings of this “hidden order” that composes the fabric of the universe, they would be able to manipulate it.  Throughout the story, Ellis displays subtle signs of paranormal abilities, although they are not completely under his control, and he is not even completely aware of them.  “These are perceptions that come unbidden,” says Gabriel, “and are not fitting for this realm”. (33) Although Ellis is tempted with the idea that this paranormal awareness is the goal of human evolution, Gabriel is there to assure him that the true evolution is more significant.
            The whole mentor-like character of Gabriel represents to me a spiritual perspective of life.  He introduces into the story the complementary element of intellectuality: faith.  The definition of faith that Ellis discusses with him is based on Kant‘s Metaphysics of Morals.  “When reason is exhausted…” Gabriel says, and Ellis completes his sentence: “… Faith begins.” (29) During his four-page speech, Gabriel references many ideas that I was exposed to during a lecture by a Persian religious scholar on the nature of revelatory language.  I am not entirely able to support the connection between Quantum Physics and the interpretation of Muhammad‘s writings, but that thought was added to make the speech more dense and contain a contrast of information.  The quote from Rumi, a Sufi poet of the 13th Century encompasses the idea that all of reality is a whole, and the only separations and distinctions are made by our own limited perception.  Gabriel recounts passionately: “’Show me something that is spiritual’ someone once asked of the poet Rumi. He replied: ‘Show me something that is not’”. (23)
            At the end of Gabriel‘s speech, perhaps the core of The Hidden Order, even the whole series, is exposed in the clearest, most honest way, making the philosophy of the whole story more relevant to today‘s society, especially youth.  I wanted to express the vision of hope that people may become united, overcoming the tribulations of the past through a slowly evolving process.  Mainly, this view is emphasized regularly in the Bahá‘í Faith, which has been my religion since childhood.  The writings of Bahá‘u‘lláh, the Prophet-founder of the Bahá‘í Faith, provided much of the spiritual backbone of the story, and were an inspiration to write it in the first place.  In continuing to research the spiritual and scientific ideas that constituted the first version of Paradigm Shift, I was then compelled to shift my focus to two other themes:  time, and life after death.
            The first spark for the Transient installment came to me when I was listening to a song called “Planet of the Shapes” by Orbital, and I heard a short sound sample where a voice with a British accent said quietly:  “Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.”  This was such a simple idea, yet it conveyed so many complicated questions. Firstly, the inadequacies of our instruments of measure are apparent, in the sense that their accuracy depends on our active supervision and operation of these instruments, and even so, they are far from providing us with an absolute description of the passing of time:  they only remind us periodically of what our human frame of reference has created.  Even the most modern clocks – ones that are synchronized to extremely accurate “ticks” at the atomic level of the universe – still express time by less-than-perfect units of measure, that may very well become obsolete in a thousand “years” time.
How relative, then, is our experience if our clocks can be stopped without putting a halt to the phenomenon we call “time”?  How even more relative, if a dysfunctional stopped clock can still perform its function, even if for two infinitely brief moments in an imaginary cycle?  What does that say about other instruments of measure, and our perception of the universe independent of those instruments?  Without clocks, television, computers, and other reminders, how would we know if our placement in this abstract temporal plane was precise?  All of these questions eventually led me to think about the human mind – the most basic instrument of measure, and perhaps the most unreliable.  Yet if time itself is relative, and if our sensual experience revolves entirely on the passing of our lives, infused with a sense of memory, psychology, ethics, a plethora of disciplines, the endlessly debated sense of consciousness and free will, and what many ages and civilizations have described as the “soul” – then our relative and illogical interpretations of the universe are perhaps, the most accurate of them all.
            Thus came the idea for Willard Morven, a character whose mental deficiency deprives him of his sense of time, but not without a reason.  His incapacity to perceive the difference between past, present and future is merely a premature side effect of a much greater transcendental ability that Will must develop.  Transient therefore sees the physical construct as a constriction.  Time is an inescapable prerequisite of the external world, along with our limited and precarious modes of traveling through space.  After the members of the underground youth organization “Rain Tents” help Will understand his new ability, he not only breaks free of time restrictions, but by extension, bends his spatial surroundings as well.  “Having arrived at his last coordinate, [Will] lifts an arm, to which the space around him responds by skipping around in time and taking him forward, past the city streets, through his apartment, then into the – [Meeting Room – Following Night].” (13)  The film therefore draws a clear relationship between time interventions and space interventions.  What science-fiction films rarely consider is whether time travel would imply parallel distortions of the physical universe.  Robert Zemeckis’ adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel Contact deals with this issue brilliantly, in a scene where Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) travels through wormholes in space, while her physical form is stretched like a rubber band, and her face distorts slightly to utter words in response to events she experienced a few minutes earlier, or is about to experience in the following scene.  Time travel, in both these films, is seen as inseparably related to space travel, and transcending one restriction would mean transcending both.
            Willard does not achieve this state of enlightenment without strenuous costs, however.  Dr. Awkward orders him to perform a series of physical feats that involve running through different coordinates in the midst of an urban environment, while his sensory perception of the world slowly dissipates.  This not only assumes a connection between time and space, but extends that relationship to include our instruments for understanding those two elements – our five known senses.  The more control Willard has over his spatial and temporal surroundings, the less he can control his own being. According to the universe of Transient, the order of our sensual existence is therefore directly proportional to the order of time and space.  To understand a chaotic surrounding we must become chaos ourselves.  In other words, Willard cannot arrive at this prohibitive transcendental state unless he rids himself of these metaphorical chains:  his hearing, touch, taste and smell, and eventually, his sight.
            Thus, by submitting Willard to this arduous process, Dr. Awkward suggests an even deeper relationship between time, space, the senses, and the very thing that makes us human.  While describing to the rest of the Rain Tents what happened to Willard during his ritualistic experience, Dr. Awkward says:  “At this point he’d been stripped of almost all his connections to the physical plain, left only with that tiniest fraction of character, the only testament to his individual consciousness, the freedom of choice - which, ironically... he is meant to ultimately surrender... to a greater force.” (13) The irony lies, of course, in the fact that our protagonist is nicknamed “Will”, yet everything in the film occurs against his will.
            Many novels, films and traditions tell the story of the hero who must sacrifice himself to serve greater responsibilities, and this is no different.  If the fate of humanity, as the Rain Tents put it, depends on the success of Willard Morven’s mission, then he has no choice but to accept it.  And if that responsibility involves the surrender of all capacities and choices in order to achieve a higher form of existence, a life of unimaginable capacities – then one would argue that the submission of one’s freedom of choice is worthwhile.  This is, in fact, the story and tradition of many religions, particularly Eastern.  Islam is founded on the belief that submission to God’s will, even in the face of adversity, leads to a more satisfying life.  The fantasy created in the universe of Transient is perhaps a metaphor for the very real, yet fragile experience that we somehow try to escape and simultaneously prolong, during this precious existence.
            Although Transient was perhaps my favorite of the four installments, the complexity of the visual effects would make it impractical to film, unless the video format was used, and months were spent in post-production.  I began shooting it on miniDV, but had to discontinue the project in favor of writing the two last installments of the series.  The opening of the film is completed, and can be see on my website at http://www.luisdechtiar.net/films/pellicle.
           Finally, Origins and Involution take a different turn in terms of narrowing the themes into comprehensible, easily dramatized sequences.  Involution does this more effectively, although both scripts still contain long technical explanations of theories, and heavily layered information.  Origins explores a unique territory, however, in terms of spiritual evolution bringing about social change.  Ellis is depicted as more of an activist for social justice, and right away his rhetoric is less scientific, and more political than in The Hidden Order.  Perhaps this has to do with my influences while I was writing the script:  a class on Globalization and another on Cinema and Social Change.  Ellis’ view is based on practical facts about current events, but the solution is nonetheless based on an abstract and non-linear interpretation of reality.  In the first scene, he speaks passionately in front of a class, bringing attention to the critical level of unsustainability, corruption and injustice of the current world order:
            …We can’t ignore the facts: 90 percent of the world’s resources are currently being used by 10 percent of the population. Extreme unbalance there. By 2025, two-thirds of the world will have no access to water - right now, one infant dies of disease every two seconds - all scientific sources indicate that every living species is in decline, that the current system of this civilization is unsustainable…  The past century was a disaster. A philosophical battlefield of ideas about how to organize society, most either feeble or corrupt, resulting in two world wars, a surrender of the masses to empty ideologies - existentialists, disillusioned, staring at their belly-buttons instead of doing anything… The situation everyone is in today is a result of human thought failing to catch up with the pressing needs of an overgrown, complex civilization, where everyone is budding heads and competing for resources, with no coherent way to manage themselves, or mediate moral systems, no real way to prevent injustice. (4)
            This way, Origins calls into thought the concrete effects that an evolution of consciousness could potentially have on a civilization in dire need of renewal.  This connection between intellectual decadence, and the material decay of the world’s resources, is later reinforced in Involution, through the character of Hiroshi.  He opposes Jeremy’s simplistic, egotistical and mechanistic view of social evolution, reflecting a broader perspective, mainly based on the ideas of French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.  In fact, it was not until I read his theories that I felt my ideas were perfectly worded, and consolidated into a unified system to the point that I could bring this Thesis project to a conclusion.  I discovered that his perspective on evolution was the closest to my own.  He described it as:
            [A] phenomenon which inevitably reminds us of the entirely material, phenomenon of a river gradually establishing its course to conform with the terrain over which it flows. But just as, in the example, I have chosen of the river tracing its bed, there is (whatever the breadth and the form of the basin under consideration) the same gravity acting everywhere and always on the flowing water, so in the case of 'speciating' matter also (that is to say in order to explain the formulation of any phylum), is there not- must we not inevitably postulate- the existence of a single basic factor in operation? (272)
            Teilhard de Chardin viewed this as the “law of complexity consciousness”, and it is explained almost word-for-word in Hiroshi’s dialogue with Jeremy:
            First, the universe is in a process of expansion, from really small to immense. This is obvious, right? Secondly, it’s also in a process of organic involution, that means, from extremely simple life to extremely complex. And thirdly, at the same time, there is an increase of interiorisation in the psyche, or consciousness. So, everything becomes more complex and organized, from material systems, to the potential of the mind, and as a result, society, civilization... (10)
            Teilhard de Chardin attempted to relate the science of geology (inorganic evolution) to the processes of organic life (biogeology) and the world of social history. He observed the same process of increasing organization in the passage from subatomic units to organic molecules, living units, cells, primitive man and finally complex social organizations.  In all, he observed the presence of potential mind becoming more intense, more complex as the result of complexification of organization in material systems. Teilhard de Chardin identified the consummation of this vast evolutionary process in the formation of a global civilization based on universal solidarity of humankind and a single psycho-social unit with organic characteristics.
            Hiroshi finally suggests that only we, as complex, self-aware human beings, have to capacity to break free from our environment and improve our conditions.  His final speech brings the theoretical arc of the movie to a dramatic climax, and brings closure to the Paradigm Shift series as a whole:
            Change has NEVER come out of static, or idleness. The way we will advance in this world full of destruction will not come from some rich kids sitting on a sofa. There has to be a crisis, and then victory. There has to be a state of chaos in our surroundings, punctuated by a revolutionary exertion of the Free Will, a step forward for all of human reality. Nothing else can create change. There is no other way for us to evolve.
            Once this script was finished, I decided it was finally time to produce the film.  Although the task of bringing something of this complexity was challenging, I had essentially preparing for it ever since I wrote the first draft of The Hidden Order.  Two days before the shoot, after realizing that the 17-page script translated into 108 shots to be completed over a 3 and 1/2 day period, I had sudden doubts about how well we could take it to completion. But at the end of this sometimes-turbulent journey, shared by 19 crew members, 8 actors with speaking roles, and the stray cat inhabiting our dusty, machine-encrusted locations, I can confidently say that we achieved something quite rare, and I feel lucky to have worked with such a talented and dedicated group.  We filmed at a boiler room and a machine maintenance room at the Saxonville Industrial complex, in Framingham, MA. The location provided the perfect, ready-made atmosphere -- a free set that $5 million budget production could not have replicated.
            Although different version of the concept for Paradigm Shift have been under development since 2003, the realization of this particular story within the Paradigm world happened extremely quickly. The philosophy and themes have remained the same from the beginning, but the outline for Jeremy and Hiroshi's characters and story came about in January 2006, and the script was not finished until March 21, after the actors had already been cast (mostly without having needed to audition). At that point Andrew J. Whittaker (Director of Photography) jumped on-board as co-producer as well, offering indispensable help in positioning all the elements necessary for shooting to begin on March 31.
            This production, however, took on an unconventional form not because of lack of preparation, or because compromises had to be made. Neither did it conform to a restrictive set of circumstances that stilted the initial concept. Rather, because we allowed it to morph freely, and until the last minute, adjusted its comprising elements to make best use of the most current inspirational vibes, I think the story has taken on an energetic appeal that would not have been there if I had stuck to a script that was written a year or even six months ago.  I had not heard of Teilhard de Chardin, for example, until February.  The film has adapted. Like a species, it has not simply surrendered to its environment, it is in unison with it.  And to feel so dependent on, yet embracing of these unpredictable realities -- those perhaps shaped by chance, perhaps design -- is quite humbling. Thus has my perspective about the nature of filmmaking changed throughout the course of this Thesis Project.  This... was my paradigm shift.
            The attached DVD contains a version of the film that is near completion.  Some elements of sound design, score, and titles are missing, and certain edits are still to be polished.  However, the essence of the story is captured within it, and the entirety of the process could not be more evident.  Hopefully the finished product will soon be accessible, and perhaps even continuing versions of episodes of this series will someday come into fruition.

 

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