THE PYRAMID (not to be confused with THE PYRAMID (2014), which I also reviewed) is a movie that could either be charitably called an open-minded yet critical look at the problems of a fragmented individualist society governed by cold reason for which it offers a solution or, less charitably, as new-age propaganda.
There is a story, or rather several mini-stories, but they seem less important as fictional narratives than as devices to highlight contemporary societal problems: people prefer violence and sex to inspirational or feel-good news, individuals prefer to live pretend-lives rather than being their authentic selves, profit wins over paradise, alienation can lead to broken relationships between people who still love each other and even to suicide, and so on.
Ironically, at the time the movie was made, almost 50 years ago, the film-makers likely had no idea that many of these problems would still get much worse. As I was watching the main character bemoaning the ubiquity of violence, I received a newsflash on my phone of a third murder this year in my hometown, a city for which many a year has passed without a single homicide.
The exposition of various societal problems disguised as mini-stories takes up about the first half of the movie, but when the protagonist meets a woman who is a "focus instructor", someone who "takes people out of their dreams and into reality", the movie begins to turn into a quasi-documentary, and there is a corresponding shift of the focus from the problems to the purported solution.
At several places, we are told that everything is interconnected and a basic oneness underlies all. Even though these sort of new age ideas are usually traced back to Eastern mysticism, it turns out that the first pre-Socratic philosopher for which we have any (indirect) records, in other words a pioneer of the foundation of Western philosophy, Parmenides of Elea, already claimed 2500 years ago that "All is one". The idea is definitely not new.
Several real-life investigators of paranormal phenomena are marshaled, often documentary interview-style, through the device of the film showing a television set, including the actress-turned-parapsychologist Thelma Moss, the CIA interrogation specialist Cleve Backster, and the astronaut, ufologist and founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (as well as 6th man to walk the moon) Edgar Mitchell.
The overall message seems to be that our overreliance on science and ignorance of the paranormal aspects of the world has made us susceptible to the problems exposed in the first half, and that taking these phenomena seriously within a worldview that recognizes the oneness of the world can help us heal. I was unable to discern a clear role of the pyramid in this, other than as a demarcator of a boundary that establishes something akin to a safe space.
Unfortunately, the documentary part has not aged well.
Dr. Moss refers to Kirlian photography, which is an admittedly cool phenomenon but well-known to physicists yet not lay people, and the purported implication of which of an "aura" for things is rejected as pseudoscience.
So is the so-called "Backster effect", which ascribes to plants an inner life comparable to animals and even ESP. It is considered pseudoscience both because Cleve Backster carried out his experiments in a way that likely allowed his biases to influence his results (he did not follow the scientific method) and because his results could not be replicated. It is actually shocking to me that this CIA interrogation specialist and Chairman of the Research and Instrument Committee of the Academy for Scientific Interrogation seemed to care so little for making sure that his own biases do not taint his conclusions. It certainly does not bode well for the validity of "scientific interrogation".
The most credible figure by far is Edgar Mitchell (the only one acknowledged with a title card), but regrettably even he ends up in a poor light as he defends the Charlatan Uri Geller (of spoon-bending infamy) as "real enough" but making it difficult for scientists studying him because "he is a performer."
With the hindsight of nearly a half-century, the solutions this movie recommends come across as hopelessly naive and biased.
But even a contemporary viewer should have noticed that for a movie that preaches oneness and unity, this is a remarkably disjointed affair, not just in terms of the uneasy fusion between the fiction and quasi-documentary parts, but also the pointed lack of coherence between the mini-stories.
There is also a suicide scene which seems to have been inspired by the real-life on-air suicide of Christine Chubbuck and which struck me as tacky.
THE PYRAMID is probably best viewed as a time capsule of a worldview in the 1970s that no longer really exists as such. It has been largely dismantled by a better objective understanding of the world, and those parts which resisted this morphed into less benign cults such as flat earthism, various trutherisms and, most destructive of all to its believers, Qanon.
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