(no subject)

[suosikki]

I've been thinking a lot about the movie Safe, which I saw back in the early 2000s. In particular, I've been thinking about the ending, where Julianne Moore's environmentally allergic character severs her ties with the larger society and goes to live in a New Age compound.

At the time, I thought this was a very pessimistic ending. Now, I see it as sort of optimistic.

I used to be into libertarianism, mysticism, and various strains of holistic health; things you'd generally associate with New Age alternative subculture. Over the last several years, I've moved away from all of those, in terms of what I personally believe and in my politics. But I still find value in some of the ideas associated with that culture. I think of a lot of alt-health practice as a continuation of folk medicine: people making educated guesses, experimenting, and reporting the results to others, who incorporate them into their own best guesses. It may not always conform to the scientific method or meet the standards of a clinical trial, but it is a form of empiricism. And to the scientist, it's valuable as a source of data on outliers.

Safe is a movie about what it's like to be one of those outliers. It's about having a lived experience that doesn't match up with, and can't be explained by, established views. It's very much a "queer movie", subtext-wise, but it may also be the best explanation of alternative health movements and what draws people to them. Yes, there's a problem with doing medicine without having a scientific background; even if what you're doing works, you don't have the vocabulary or the resources on hand to adequately explain why it works. But if nobody else is doing what works, having a solution you can't explain is a damn sight better than having no solution.

By contemporary U.S. terms, I'm pretty firmly a rationalist. I support vaccination and genetic engineering. I recognize anthropogenic climate change as a thing. I have no paranoid fear of the government or large corporations, of which there are enough criticisms to be made from an evidence-based view. :P And on the whole, I think that the laboratory is a pretty kick-ass place to do inquiry. It isn't the only place, though, and I'm very critical of an attitude that uses "science" as a kind of political ideology or identity-badge to distinguish oneself from the barbarians at the gates.

Safe's compound represents a gap between different forms of knowledge and ways of knowing; but it also represents the generation of knowledge outside of official channels. And there's something hopeful in that.

Sometime later I might talk about personal cosmology and my relationship to atheism; for now, I thought it was worth getting this down while I remembered it.