Red Lights - Film Review

 A classic film for lovers of  scepticism, this is a story about scientists debunking stage psychics using a variety of laboratory techniques.

IMDB linky

The story centres around a small team of scientists who, aside from their academic careers, work to prove or disprove the genuineness of people who claim to have psychic powers. Sigourney Weaver plays a college professor who has 20 years' experience in the field. We see her giving lectures about how so-called mediums use tricks during seances - with the buildings power to make the lights go off and on, and use sleight of hand to move the table around, and so on. Weaver's character has strayed away from objective science a long time ago, having never seen a genuine case. Her assistant, played by Murphy, is the technician with all the fiddly bits of recording equipment. He's younger and less sceptical, but she's done a reasonable job of bending him to her belief that there is no such thing as psychic powers.

Along comes De Niro who is clearly based on 1980s spoon-bending guru Uri Geller. He can also apparently read minds, cause electronic equipment to explode and do faith healing. He and Weaver have "history", and he's the only psychic who really has her thinking that her sceptical view of the world might be wrong. Cue arguments within the team, embarrassing TV chat show recordings, spooky psychic events happening all over the place, and the feeling that De Niro really does have powers that he can use at a distance. Several twists make it into an intriguing tale with a surprising ending.

There are some really good scenes where the psychic powers are being analysed under lab conditions. This movie is a good introduction to the science of scepticism.

Poor points in the film include ridiculous over-acting (Weaver sometimes comes across as if she's fighting aliens rather than doing science experiments) and a bizarre love affair that's quite inappropriate, yet has no bearing on the rest of the story.

So all in all not a particularly gripping, or even convincing watch, but it gets you thinking a lot about psychic powers and leaves you with a sense that not all the answers are yet there.

Vaginas

A teacher in Idaho is under investigation by the local board of education. They
have received complaints from parents that he used the word "vagina", and discussed female orgasms and various forms of contraception.

Did he say these things loudly in the middle of the town square whilst masturbating naked? No.
Did he say these things whilst teaching 5-year olds? No.
Did he discuss these items in the context of sleeping around flirtatiously, or devil worship, or some other such un-Mormon activity? No.

In fact, he delivered these messages calmly and professionally during school biology lessons for 15-year olds, and the material he used came straight out of a school text book. Just like he's been doing for the last 17 years.
In fact, one might almost say that he was doing his job as a teacher in a very real and normal way. He even gave students the option of missing the sex-ed classes if they didn't feel comfortable with them.

Amazingly, the teacher himself, one Tim McDaniel, does not attempt to deny or refute these claims. In fact he considers them a normal part of biology education for young teenagers in the western world.

The first question that springs to my mind is this: do these parents really think it is feasible that their 15-year old children, growing up in the USA, are not already somewhat aware of these facts? For fuck's sake! This is a country where sexuality is almost forced upon kids through culture and porn. A 15 year old girl probably has 15 other words for vagina, already has personal preferences for contraception and if they haven't had orgasms yet, they've had a damn good go at trying. What kind of reality do they think their children actually live in?

In fact, Education like this is all the more important, in a highly sexualised society, as so much of what culture teaches about reproduction is warped, misogynistic, religiously biased, or more commonly, all three. Teaching kids the actual biology of reproduction helps them to dispel some of the myths that society pushes, and many would say that to do so at the age of 15 is way too late. Don't these parents want their kids to get a formal message about what real sex means?

Another reported fact about the McDaniel case reveals that this was probably a politically motivated attempt to oust him from a position of authority within the town. It seems that parents weren't just upset about the sex education stuff. It was also an issue when he showed the documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth". In case you missed it, this documentary, by former Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore, presents compelling evidence for man-made climate change. Something of a political hot potato in small-town America. He didn't even present the documentary as solid facts, he showed it as the basis of a discussion about the climate change debate. Again, normal school stuff. He probably would have showed a compelling documentary showing evidence against man made climate change (but there isn't one).

So it's entirely possible that, instead of being shocked or upset by these issues, the parents who have made the complaints about McDaniel just, basically don't like him, don't like his mainstream politics and are looking to fuck him over.

In the meantime, the kids in him class think he's great, other teachers from all over the world are wondering what all the fuss is about as he's doing the same stuff as they all do, and most people with an ounce of sense are dismissing these complaints as coming from a bunch of whingeing religious zealots who can't bear the fact that their kids are learning cool stuff at school that their preachers and stockbrokers don't agree with.