20130814: Documentary--UFOTV Presents Touched

UFOTV Presents Touched (hulu+)

1. Mockumentary, 65 minutes, live action, straight-to-video format, 2008.
2. Neither IMDB nor Rotten Tomatoes will touch this thing.
3. Stars: John E. Mack, Arnold Relman, Alan Dershowitz, Patrick Harpur.
4. Case studies of 'real' abductions plus discussion by a variety of researchers.
5. Karin.  Young woman from Florida from an impoverished dysfunctional conservative upbringing.  Strange dreams, OBE, channeling, feeling lost in her own life, as in, is this truth or delusion?  She asks the universe for some sort of physical sign that her experiences are real or not. One night she's beset with electricity and paralysis.  Then she sees something on the bed with her that looks like a big bug.
6. Peter and Jamy.  He's an ordinary well-grounded man.  He falls in love with Jamy, and life is even better after they eventually marry.  They run a comfortable business together in the Caribbean.  One night, months later at home, his sleep is disturbed, and he gets some night terror.  It does not repeat for a couple of weeks, but then it does.  He gets the sensation of electrical flow in parts of his body, and has some residual marks the next morning.  Elited time.  They move back to the States, to snow country, and he enrolls in acupuncture school. She enrolls in a program in psychology.
7. At the hospital where his training is done, Peter meets John E. Mack, MD, a clinical psychiatrist who works with people who think they have been abducted by aliens.  He held a tenured professorial position at Harvard until he died in 2004.  He won a Pulitzer prize for one of his many books.
8. One of his colleagues, Arnold Relman, MD (Harvard Medical School), was interviewed.  Relman led a committee in the mid 1990s to investigate Mack.  Relman asserted that Mack's reputation was somewhat tarnished by his efforts with the 'abductees.'  One of my favorite comments from Relman was that one should at least try to verify the experiences.  Does  anyone fact-check this nonsense?  No.  And why not?
9. For more on Mack versus Relman, see Harvard investigation.  To Mack's credit, he did not end up asserting the physical existence of aliens.  See the same Wikipedia page for a nice discussion.
10. The movie jumped the shark when Peter described how Mack asked him what had happened to him.  Peter came out of the session believing in alien abduction.  Before he had no such notion at all.  Later Peter does regression with Mack.  The film shows Peter making bubbles while a tape of one of Peter's session is played.  This was an odd choice at best.
11. Since Mack died four years before the film was released, the whole subject seems dated and moot.  Harvard did not openly censure Mack. Mack's best opinion on the subject was that the abduction scenario is just part of the grand human tradition of similarities in hallucinations.  This is centuries old, is quite well-known, and is about humans, not aliens.  The alien veneer is more about people sucking in narratives from popular culture, like The X-Files, and adding that to the shared hallucinations.
12. The film maker takes a field trip to Brazil to see whether their culture accepts the experience of beings from other realities.  The third case study shows up, Luppa, a man who had a normal, successful life, and did not need, in any sense, the bother of experiencing alien presences.  The local scientist claims that these experiences can make one crazy, but one does not experience such things because one is already crazy.
13. The regression sessions are pretty heavy-handed.  What Peter comes out with does not seem to come from him.  The added stuff from Mack seems like active interference in this supposed process of discovery, and helps reinforce the pattern of similarity of the faked experiences.
14. People do like their fifteen minutes of fame.  Also, they enjoy lying to be part of a larger group.  Put those two together, and the shared hallucinations are as natural as anything, especially if sharing gets you in a movie.  Also, the stories told by the abductees start out as rather different, but as time goes by, then get closer together.  More time to polish the party line, one assumes.
15. This is especially true in a world where X-Files has been seen by multiple millions, and there are several 'reality' shows on television simultaneously about finding ghosts wherever one looks.  The paranormal, the extraterrestrial, and transcendent beings are all culturally accepted.  Just watch 'Paranormal Witness', or 'Ghost Hunters, season 9,' or 'Ghost Mine.'  These are all current 2013 shows, and there are many more in production.  Ghosts and aliens are an industry in their own right, and have many cliches available for consumption.
16. Three stars of five, for making me look up the biographies of the Harvard experts.  Also, as outrageous faking goes, this was pretty amusing.

Cinematography: 2/10 Video style quality (soft focus, washed out, jerky movements, refusal to frame properly, poor depth of field, 4:3 aspect ratio), and not even good video style.

Sound: 6/10 OK for video sound.

Acting: 7/10 Fairly good.  I usually did not catch the feeling that the interviews with the abductees were scripted.  The Harvard experts seemed to be giving their opinions as answers to questions.

Screenplay: 6/10 I guess I was entertained, though I was still appalled that this kind of hoaxing is still considered fashionable.

Special Effects: 0/10 The movie's director attempts to illustrate what the actors are describing with dancing lights or working with a bubble maker. Yikes.