This era is the first and only scientific age of blockbusters where the cinematic craft, the effects and the underlying science are converging into a new language. 2001, Star Wars, The Shining, Altered States, these all jump started my search for a new lexicon past storytelling.

Altered States was first a book Chayefsky published in 1978 which he adapted from his partially completed screenplay and copius notes with Lilly. And every cool kid on the block had this two years before both Simon and the film version came out.

How would an animal that's going extinct have free will? Or one trapped in a hurricane that will kill it etc? Free will is simply an absolute concept trapped in the arbitrary words that make it. It has no real relationship to biological events as any experiment dissolves where will becomes costly.

What if causality is a glass ceiling offered by conscious will, probably an illusion. And as Gopnik suggests causal explanations are addictions. What if the image suggests, we become stuck at the arbitrariness of causes and the word itself?

Politics is narrative mindreading using arbitrary tools of cause & effect. Science is the escape from that rhetoric into correlational acausal reasoning. They are quite separable though they are not quite separate yet. This is the same problem with history, which is an illusion, and evolution (real)

It made the sun stand still and abolished change. All evil was blamed on the restless inferior races who lacked appreciation of the settled order of things."

— George L. Mosse, Towards the final solution: A history of European Racism (1978)

People don't understand what this is: when you can employ the full effect of arbitrary words and cause and effect (also arbitrary), eg calling the Jan 6 convicts "hostages", you control the arbitrary aspects of society like government, law.
Reality is specific, words are the farthest from this.

Digital is pre DNA, or sub-DNA. It's a synthetic regularity. It's a model, whereas nothing in reality is a model.

The question is why bother debunking, when both models, storytelling and engineering fundamentally distort our view of reality? Get rid of both modeling systems and start anew. Using them demonstrates humans are blind, and addicted to extracting value from causes, not gaining vision.

Explanations lacking causal connections are simple. They refer to chaos, fractal as conditions we must surf, rather than confront. ie: don't build here, if you do, randomize plots, placements. etc. Engineers and storytellers are all subject to causal connections, which preserve the initial mistakes.

Reality is simple, not complex. It's chaos. No cause and effect. Engineers (2-bitDavinci) and storytellers (ie conspiracy theorists) are different sides of the same coin, causal connections. Both use arbitrary means of gaining explanation.
We call that (from my POV) dinosaur thinking.

It's experimental 60s filmmaking meets New Hollywood.
Terminal Identity Bukataman and Plastic Reality Turnock explain this era as paraspatial, loss of identity in terms of space and body, the dissolving of boundaries.