We hear a lot about how infusing the popular media with science—improving its image in the movies, having rock stars sing out for science, getting pulchritudinous cheerleaders to flap their pom-poms for physics—will be an important remedy for Americans’ abysmal ignorance of science. Carl Zimmer begs to differ, at least about movies. In this week’s Nature, Zimmer discusses his experience as a judge at the Imagine Science Festival. While he’d like movies to be a good vehicle for promoting science, he just doesn’t see it.
For all that science and technology have delivered to Hollywood, scientists have received little back. Researchers portrayed in films bear scant resemblance to those in real labs. Some on-screen scientists are villains that must be destroyed by common-sense heroes. Others threaten nature with Promethean recklessness. Yet others are mavericks who find cures for cancer single-handedly in jungle tree-houses. And movies often distort science itself. Tornadoes, volcanoes, spaceships, viruses: all obey the laws of Hollywood, not the laws of Newton or Darwin.
Scientists have gnashed their popcorn buckets, wishing for something better. In 2008, the US National Academy of Sciences set up the Science and Entertainment Exchange to bring scientists and Hollywood film-makers together for fruitful exchanges of ideas. Gambis’s film festival serves a similar mission: its website announces that it “encourages a greater collaboration between scientists who dedicate their lives to studying the world we live in and film-makers who have the power to interpret and expose this knowledge, ultimately making science accessible and stimulating to a broader audience”.
I’m not convinced such collaborations will achieve this goal often, or even whether they should. Exhibit A: Harrison Ford. Earlier this year, he played a biochemist searching for a cure for a genetic disorder in Extraordinary Measures, a fairly accurate story inspired by a book by reporter Geeta Anand. In 2008, Ford also played a scientist in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a fairly accurate account of a comic-book fever dream. Extraordinary Measures earned a meagre US$12 million, whereas Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull earned $317 million. Hollywood is a place of business, not charity, and the marketplace speaks clearly: people want their scientists with bullwhips, not pipettes.
The next paragraph is the crux: there’s not necessarily a huge public appetite, actual or latent, for the kind of science the popularizers want to infuse into movies:
Even if Hollywood directors dedicated themselves to achingly realistic biopics about Peter Medawar or Henri Poincaré, that might not be a good thing. Films should not be propaganda, bludgeoning us with messages about how valuable certain things or people are. At their best, films embody the conflicts in our societies, and give form to our inner lives in all their ragged glory. They can use real aspects of the world as their raw material, but holding them drearily to account is a mistake. Citizen Kane is about a newspaper editor; it would not have been a masterpiece if Orson Welles had kept asking himself “Does this make journalism accessible to a broader audience?”.
Ugh, paywall during weekends – no access to me.
But yes, I can agree with the excerpt of Zimmer up to a point. Everything is portrayed falsely in Hollywood at some point or other, including all types of areas or works. And nothing is, on average, portrayed correctly.
I don’t think that is contested. Nor that movies should not obsess over accessibility of domains. The discussion should be something along the lines of “Given that this movie should make maximal ROI, what could be done for minor outside interests such as science?” (Max ROI in the environment of the investors, which may mean moderation of splatter movies for upholding the studio reputation, as a clarification.)
Movies have made a lot of good for “minor” interests such as ethnic groups, women (yeah, “minor”…), sexual groups, handicapped, et cetera. The trend could, should, continue with minor social areas. The way to do that is to make such a ruckus that movie producers get the problem; which they seem to have in this case, kudos to them.
Some of the more progressive things happened in certain subsets of movies, say the first broadcast black & white kiss is supposed to be on the original Star Trek. Now those are possible on an as-need basis. (While lost some of their newness and rebel appeal.) It will be such small social advancing things I’m afraid, not realism galore.
Incidentally, while some science was totally @#%! up due to environmental goals of the movie, Avatar had some nice portrayals of actual science and its methods. Say, no FTL drivel (even though the realism motivation was left out), and lab and field work which actually took time, was described as difficult, and not used as props for deus ex machina scripts. And this in a major movie!
Unfortunately I think the biology came up bad, count the number of legs of “related” animals! As well as the “concerned but not getting it” main scientist portrait. Well, you can’t win them all I suppose.
….as I was about to mention (albeit anecdotally), a number of people credit Star Trek with sparking an interest in science which eventually led to a career choice in science and/or tech. This despite (or is it because of?) the fact that anyone with even a frosh-level knowledge of physics or biology can get hours of entertainment out of picking apart the physics and biology!
Realistic science would be wonderful to see on the big screen. But at the risk of damning with faint praise: even hokey science isn’t a complete loss.
What bothers me is the excessive reliance on supernatural themes to drive plot lines in many thrillers, some blockbusters, and most horror movies. It demonstrates a tedious excess of prosaic unoriginality.
Unbridled sex appeal usually ensures ticket sales, so I would suggest you wear a pair of Sorrell Custom Boots (starting price: $1,675).
Unfortunately, it may also demonstrate the tedious mindset of the average moviegoer. Like Zimmer said, “Hollywood is a place of business.”
“Howard the Duck.” Says it all.
The last bit:
is just another dumb straw man. Very few people seriously argue that every movie ought to be great movie about science.
A more accurate representation of what most science advocates seem to be after, is that 10 or 20 percent of movies be good movies about science, and on top of that, another 20 or 30 percent of movies represent science accurately, but are not actually about science.
We already have a form of fiction that respects science as it is actually practised: hard sci-fi. Would you trust Hollywood to adapt hard sci-fi well?
What?
I’d go to a movie about Hemri Poincar/’e! And I’d take all my friend.
The fact that movies are unrealistic doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
When I watch a Harry Potter movie, I really couldn’t give a damn that the conservation of mass / energy is violated pretty much every time somebody waves a twig. That’s really not the point.
In a James Bond movie, the bad guys are shooting fully automatic weapons with laser scopes that spectacularly explode everything around Bond without even messing up his hair. Bond then pulls out a small, snub-nosed handgun that even an expert marksman couldn’t use to hit the broad side of a barn, fires a few quick shots without even aiming while riding a motorcycle backwards as it does a loop over a hovering helicopter, and all the bad guys fall to the ground dead. Anybody who watches a movie like that and gets upset over the fact that real scientists aren’t anything at all like Q and that nobody works in labs with exploding dummies armed with flamethrowers…well, you’re missing the point entirely.
Movies are the modern equivalent of the stories humans have told each other since time immemorial. I’d like to think that most people listening to tales of Odysseus ’round the campfire understood that it was make-believe and were excited, not disappointed, by the fact that it wasn’t an accurate depiction of reality.
Is it a problem that some people can’t tell fact from fantasy? Sure. Just look at all the people who think there really was a man who wandered around ancient Jerusalem for a month and a half with a gaping chest wound — and who invited people to fondle his intestines through said wound. But the solution isn’t to make our fantasies more realistic; it’s to let people know that they’re gullible idiots for blindly trusting people who tell them things that are contrary to everything they’ve ever personally experienced.
Cheers,
b&
Exactly, Ben. Feature films are all fantasy to one extent or another. Their first priority is always to entertain, and they’ll happily suspend the laws of nature to serve that end. Usually, they succeed, too, at least on balance. That said, 007 never did carry a “snub-nosed handgun.” Fleming preferred him to have been issued a semi-auto, which in most of the books (and films) was a Walther PPK.
http://www.notpurfect.com/main/snub.html
Real Genius
Notable for the plausibility of its fictional science.
You mean “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension” wasn’t an accurate description of science and scientists?
Laugh while you can, monkey boy:))
As a molecular biologist, I have had *dozens* of undergraduate student advisees tell me in recent years that the CSI shows got them interested in molecular biology/analytical chemistry. Some of these students have been quite good, and quite dedicated. The students know that there aren’t tricorders which extract DNA and carry out DNA fingerprinting…but they are excited about what the science can do even if they know they will have to put a lot more time in. A couple of these students are even working professionally in forensic science now – and other biology disciplines as well. One of the California State University campuses (not the one where I work) has recently approved a major/certificate program in forensic science, because of the cluster of students inspired by CSI.
Some of the most important science work is tedious and boring. Hollywood wants drama, not tedium.
Principal Skinner: “Sitting quietly, paying attention, writing down numbers — science has it all!”
Movies play to an audience that never took a science course, … and would have failed had they done so.
Movies appear to be written by people who never passed a science course.
But I think Zimmer misses the point here- it’s entirely possible to write a fast paced action filled movie and still have accurate science in it. It’d just take a little extra effort on the part of the writers and directors.
Sure, but the extra effort would be wasted on the majority of the audience who would neither understand nor appreciate the difference — and it’s they who provide the big box office results from the totally implausible thrillers.
In fact, it’s not that simple. I had a friend once who was a writer, and was hired on to write for a TV show about some form or other of crimefighter.
In one of his early episodes, he made the mistake of opening a psych text, and attempting to give the killer a realistic psychopathology. The result – the studio hired a bunch of psychologists to comb through his work, rewriting stuff to be better in line with the realities, and utterly destroying his story.
The next time he wrote a show with an insane bad guy, he described his disorder as “He’s just plain nuts.” No review, no rewriting, his show aired as written.
If you were a writer, which would you choose?
Hey, I didn’t put the blame entirely on the writers. I recognize that there are cuts that need to be made simply for the sake of there only being 40 minutes worth of timeslot, but it’d still be nice to see them clean up some of the howlers.
I’m always amused by how the cars and airplanes of the heroes of movies apparently can escape absolutely unscathed from impacts with a wide range of objects.
The other thing that amuses me is how the hero can be blown dozens of yards by an explosion with only mere scratches and perhaps a dirty face and clothing. No concussion, no internal bleeding, no burst eardrums, no nothing.
The latest meme is the slow-motion explosion, allowing the hero just enough time to jump aside, missing the effects of the explosion entirely. Up to and including, of course, the oxygen depletion in tunnels.
I get annoyed, but then realize it’s just Hollywood. As long as people realize that you can’t really get blown up and still fight the bad guy with your oh-so-pure karate, it’s OK.
There’s also a place for just getting the simple facts about science right. Try watching the Val Kilmer movie “Red Planet” sometime — it’s intolerable in its casual indifference to trivial fact checking, making it pretty much unwatchable. Low point: when the geneticist is bragging about his mastery of the language of the genome and rattles off the letters, A, G, T, and P. Say what?
And then there are movies like “The Core” that just ignore science altogether while making up a story that depends on science to work.
haha. P as in CpG islands perhaps.
It’s shocking that of all the people listed in the film credits there is not a single person with a basic science background. Because these aren’t nuanced inaccuracies but blatant goofs.
I’m surprised you managed to forget that seminal masterwork, Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus, which featured 600-foot-long animals traveling over 800 miles per hour underwater while being chased by a fleet of Japanese research and military submarines that mostly kept up with them….
Cheers,
b&
But that wasn’t a theatrical release, fewer people will have seen or heard of it.
The Happening had a face quote by Einstein. And a scientist who said that “Somethings things happen that we can’t explain, and we note them down and don’t really work to explain why.”
The first could be solved by a 5 second google search, the second made me want to shout in the directors face that this was not how science worked, ever.
Yeah, but all the ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’ movies more than made up for all that.
I think this sums it up:
“Hollywood is a place of business, not charity”.
Now if only someone could convince extreme libertarians that Dr Adam Smith’s prescription is not a panacea for all of mankind’s ills…
….”the Allegory of the Cave” …. You have to pander to masses staring at the cave wall.
Think of a field about which you know nothing. Imagine sitting next to someone who has a deep interest in it, while watching a movie you enjoy. How would you feel if all they did was complain about inaccuracies?
An accurate police drama would be boring – real detectives (at least in the UK) don’t act like that in interviews. Interviewing murder suspects is a long drawn-out and on the whole CALM affair.
War movies: cannon balls do not explode. Grenades do not pick men up bodily in a gout of flame, and hurl them 10 meters.
Real spies spend weeks finding out one piece of infomation, then trying to link it with with other pieces of information.
Let’s face it – real life can be pretty boring.
As a mathematician,however, I have little to complain. Here’s the late (and wonderful) Jill Clayburgh explaining ‘The Snake Lemma’, a key result in Homological Algebra (and something that every graduate student in math should prove on their own at least once)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZUhf2URq6k
Flawless presentation, perfectly delivered. It’s all the more commendable in a movie that’s not about mathematics.
A good film must be driven by a good story, and good stories need not be true, but just “true enough.”
A big box office production ($60M to make with $170M gross) is A Beautiful Mind based on Sylvia Naser’s biography. I was a graduate student in Cambridge MA, and we all knew the tragic story of John Nash being shipped off to a crazy house at the peak of his powers, leaving a beautiful, pregnant wife to cope. Nash’s contributions are necessarily taught in several grad school classes, and we treated this like a bad ghost story, rather than the amazing story of accomplishment and tragedy that Naser and the film depict. This is one of the rare films that actually have any real mathematical content, even if it is cartoon game theory and not the Nash embedding theorem, and even if Nash’s personal problems were sugarcoated for public consumption. So Zimmer is right: actual scientific content can really only appear if it helps to tell the actual story itself.
I can let inaccuracies slide. It’s the portrayal of scientists as “villains that must be destroyed by common sense heroes” which is really troubling. All part of the anti-intellectual, anti-expert zeitgeist we’ve got going in here in the good ol’ US of A. People want to see those know-it-alls taken down a peg. The masses can’t relate to “scientists”, and at the same time want their feeling that “common sense” is good enough to be validated. Hollywood, naturally, complies.
Also, the constant portrayal of scientists as lacking human feeling, performing their experiments haphazardly with no concern for any potential risk, having a “God Complex.”
It’s easy to say that it’s harmless, but far too many people seem to actually think that that’s how real scientists behave.
You two have nailed it.
I’m not too sure that ANY profession is dealt with realistically in Hollywood.
For that matter, people themselves aren’t dealt with realistically– kids, parents, etc.
All that being said, however, it WOULD be nice to see a scientist portrayed as a good guy but not a bumbling super-nerd type.
I’m not so worried about scientific laws being followed so much as the reinforcement of prejudices that are common in society – for instance look at the Hillary Swank movie ‘The Reaping’ or that abomination from last year, ‘The Skeptic’.
Both of these were based on the idea that a skeptical scientist decides to investigate a phenomenon and then refuses to accept ghostly conclusions despite mountains of evidence pointing in that direction.
In the end it is shown in both movies that the scientist was wrong and the supernatural explanation was correct.
I don’t so much mind the fact that the ghosty explanation was the real one in the movie (its fiction – they can do what they want!)but rather the fact that the scientist is shown to be operating from a ‘political’ standpoint (he or she “knows” the correct answer at the beginning and nothing will change their mind) rather than using the scientific method which, given the amount of evidence shown in favor of the ghosts, should lead any decent skeptic to conclude that there must be something weird going on.
‘The Reaping’ actually had well known skeptic Joe Nickell as its scientific advisor! – I suppose showing that even if skeptics do get involved in advising Hollywood on the science of their movies that advise will be ditched in favor of traditional storylines.
One that bothered me even more (though mostly from the synopsis, I can’t bring myself to see it) was The Exorcism of Emily Rose, where a the girl died from the exorcism, and the priest was on trial for murder, and was defending himself because it was a real demon.
But in real life, priests *do* kill children, and it there are *no* demons. Exorcism is just arcane child abuse, so seeing it defended in such a way really riles me up.
I think most of the problems with movie science are with supernatural things, and how it is always ‘improper’ to be skeptical of them since the movie hero believes and we’ve seen proper evidence already. But in real life it is the right thing to do every time, since its always nonsense or nature.
A friend of mine once commented that the only TV show that really did a good job of promoting skepticism was Scooby-Doo.
I always thought it was funny that the monster was always fake, but Shaggy and Scooby could run upside down on the ceiling.
Hey, it was a kids animation from the 60s, it’s impressive enough that the original run stuck with the premise that the person who said “There’s no such things as ghosts” was was always right.
The most unbelievable part of “The Reaping” was that it featured a house in south Louisiana with a basement! That, and the luxurious offices for LSU faculty.
Storytelling and science don’t necessarily or always follow the same rules. And even if you’re trying to your best by the science, it’s often extremely difficult.
I am a (British, not Hollywood) screenwriter who stopped studying any sciences at 16 – though nowadays I mostly read about science stuff for pleasure. I wrote a movie which hinged around the Price equation about altruism. I tried to explain the science (to the best of my amateur ability), and I think it was okay. But the general result was that scientists weren’t impressed, and many non-scientists found it incomprehensible.
Of course, maybe I could have done it better. But I think it was also a kind of structural problem – trying to mix science and a good story.