How does the story of Amanda illustrate M. Scott Peck's ideas of Maps?
The movie "What the Bleep Do We Know" puts into emotions and images what M. Scott Peck meant in his book "The Road Less Traveled" about the idea of people and there different "maps of the world". In his book, Peck discusses how each person makes a map of the world that is determined by their own life experiences, their accomplishments, and failures in life. He also explains that as different experiences hit us in our life it gets harder and harder to modify those experiences within our maps because either we're too lazy or they just ignore it. Some people ignore it because everyone's route to reality isn't easy. People tend to stop revising and modifying their maps after adolescence and are left with unfinished views of the reality. Also people refuse to fix there maps because either an occurence or experience has rendered them to think one way and view that specific occurence as the reality around them. When people do this they respond only to the experiences of childhood plus a select others and leave out all other instances of reality, this is called transference. Because we are bombarded daily with events and experiences of reality some of us tend to tune out the ones that hurt us or give us pleasure whether based on our good or bad past experiences.
In the movie "What The Bleep Do We Know!?" It follows the story of a woman named Amanda who has been hurt in the past by her bad occurence with marriage. Because of this she doesn't see much happiness in her world and is overwhelmed with anxiety and often annoyed. She is confused all the time because her map is out of date. Ever since her husband cheated on her she couldn't see anything good or loving in the world anymore. Her "map" had ceased to modify itself because it was too hard for her to go on and she felt more secure feeling sorry for herself and trying not to understand the world. One example of her one-sidedness would be at the wedding when she mistakenly thought that the groom at the wedding was cheating on the bride at the reception. Because her mind was so focused and infested with the bad memories of what happened at her wedding she immediately assumes that's how all men will behave on their wedding day. Then when she accidentally sees, vaguely, two people having sex she immediately marks them as the groom and a bridesmaid. However she is mistaken and finds the groom with his bride. It is because of her unfinished map that her past realities continue to play over and over again in her head which she mistakes as the reality now.
Its not until the following morning after lashing out at herself for not being beautiful that she remembers what the man said to her in the subway station the other day. "If these emotions can do that to water, imagine what they can do to us." Because we are made up mostly of water those professors, who commentated during the movie hypothesized that water was one of the reasons we have emotions. It is at this point in her life that Amanda realizes that she must stop living in the past and actually see reality as it truly is. At the end of the movie she begins to modify and revise her own map to the reality now and it helps her cope with her past and eventually move on and begin to see things as they truly are instead of distorted visions combined with her bad memories.
