A Sober Documentary About an Intoxicating Life: New York Times review of a new film biography of Ram Dass (Richard Alpert). I haven’t seen the film yet but, from the review, it’s hard to understand if it’s the filmmaker or the reviewer who hasn’t understood Ram Dass’ life. As would be the temptation in a film about him, it appears that it gives in to three sorts of superficial spectacle — that of the “vanished time” of “long- haired youths cavorting on the family golf course while the beaming, bearded guru strolls shirtless among his initiates, gingerly adjusting the ankles of those standing on their heads”; of Alpert’s current post-stroke (diminished? one would really want to know, from a reliable source…) presence; and of his grief-counseling work .

Remarkably, the film appears not to touch upon the significance of Be Here Now at all. The reviewer appears to use this point as an excuse for a tangential reflection on how

…”BE HERE NOW” is, in essence, a simple description of what movies do, 24 frames a second. What other medium gives you access to such rapturous nowness — the quality of sustained immediacy, an immersion in the moment, reality revealed as a weave of subjective sensation? Being here now is the primary miracle drawing us to the most exciting documentary films…

which leads him to a misguided comparison with a film on “another quixotic, modern-day near- saint, the Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist”. That’s what you get, I suppose, when you let a filmmaker rather than a cultural historian or a philosopher do such a review.

Ram Dass’ life deserves to be viewed through the lens of spiritual quest and both the psychological and sociological tensions that develop between an attempt at wholesale devotion and the late-20th century American social context that both nurtured and devalued that quest. For example, thinking about him as someone who had “one guru” instead of a succession of influences might have led to the film’s apparent failure to grapple with one of the most important episodes in Ram Dass’ public life — his complicated prostration at the feet of a spiritual leader named Joya who had been a Queens, NY housewife and whom he ultimately repudiated as a sham — which would have yielded documentary riches about yearning, credulity, and humility, about the dialectic between ego and transcendence.

Speaking of humility, it is not even clear if the film understands the arc from a quest to find a way to be here now to the radical devotion to the alleviation of suffering Ram Dass has practiced, the Ram Dass of later books like How Can I Help? (which I searched for on the net but does not appear to be in print any longer). What is the significance of such compassion? How possible is it? How genuine? How selfless? How much does it matter? (As an aside, did Ram Dass manage to survive the American spiritual epidemic of pseudo-humble but ego-ridden spiritual leaders falling in disgrace to scandal when the discrepancy betwen their deeds and their words became clear?)

And finally, given his dedication to grief counseling and preparing people for their mortality, how does Ram Dass face the end of his own life after a near-fatal stroke? Does the film, or the reviewer (as it appears from reading this essay), irresponsibly suggest that Ram Dass’ hallucinogen use contributed to his stroke? And, by the way, what in hindsight is the relationship between psychedelic exploration and Eastern spirituality?

Perhaps I’m expecting too much from a film. Grappling with these themes might only be done justice in a print biography. But, of course, I’m totally offbase commenting without having seen the film. If, despite the review, it shows a sophisticated, interwoven and reverent grasp of Ram Dass, I’d be pleased and surprised.