Expanded Cinema, Introduction – Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller, in his introduction to Expanded Cinema compares modern man on the surface of the planet to a baby gestating in its mother's womb.

He argues that a gestating child knows nothing of the larger universe and is only aware of the world within its immediate confines. After a child is born they go through a great process of being acclimated to the planet on which they life. And yet this is yet another womb, which doesn't reflect the reality of the universe, but a more simplified and understandable human womb.

He demonstrates this by our common language of left, right, up and down. They reflect thinking about place and position based on living upon a flat plane. He further identifies the flaw in nation states claiming land and airspace, and show how it mathematically makes little sense, nor does it make sense in the grand scheme of the universe.

This is an interesting metaphor that, while it seems like an almost sarcastic comparison, it reminds me of an argument by Joseph Campbell, stating that most human spiritual traditions contain some reverence and ceremony related to water (baptism, for example). He draws the origins of this focus on water to its ability to cleanse and sustain life, but also its connection to birth (amniotic fluid).

Buckminster Fuller's argument makes an additional twist on this idea. Earth is considered the blue planet because it has a large amount of life-sustaining water. In some twisted way Buckminster Fuller's metaphor is even stronger in this viewpoint: the earth is one of the only safe places in the universe that can sustain human life, much as the womb is one of the safe places for a nascent human.