Shining the Spotlight on Movie Microbes

THE MICROSCOPE • Vol. 61:2, pp 63–73 (2013) C R I T I C A L FOCUS Brian J. Ford Shining the Spotlight on Movie Microbes arilyn Monroe Spielberg who created the “M was a confused, Movie stars don’t have to be human to be most unusual film stars of sweet angel,” said our visi- memorable. The microscopic realm offers all: microbes. His epic tor, as the sun sparkled on movie “War of the Worlds” his crystal glass of orange the most exciting images for filmmakers, features free-swimming juice. “And Cary — did but almost everyone ignores it. microorganisms in the you know he was born in opening scenes. We zoom Britain? Cary Grant was out from the nucleus of a so muddled in his mind. He and I became such good ciliated microbe to find a water droplet on a leaf that is friends. Archibald Leach, he was called originally. Poor swarming with protists swimming eagerly about. It chap ran away to become a performer when his mother is a memorable scene. The film, released in 2005, is one was locked up in a mental institution in Bristol and of the few to show microbes as part of the story. nobody told him about it. It’s strange what makes In narrating the closing moments of the film, Mor- people into movie stars.” My dear friend Charles gan Freeman muses that “humans have suffered bil- Bennett had been born in 1899, and stayed with us in lions of lives to earn the right to live with these tiny Cambridgeshire when he was 94. He was Alfred creatures.” That’s so true — microbes are more abun- Hitchcock’s first scriptwriter and lived next to Mel dant, more important, more ancient and more varied Tormé in Beverly Hills. I remember Charles’s desk at than human movie stars. So why is it that we so rarely his home cluttered with portrait photos and résumés encounter them in the cinema? Hollywood, for all its for would-be actors, each eager for fame. “What makes advanced computer-generated imagery (CGI), is miss- people into movie stars?” mused Charles. “Nobody ing out on the chance to create the most captivating knows. That would make such an interesting piece of and vivid organisms in cinema history. Film produc- scientific research.” ers take us into the cosmos, through the earth, be- One thing is certain: Movie stars don’t have to be neath the oceans and across imaginary dimensions human to be memorable. Audiences fell in love with of time and space — but without microbes they are “E.T.,” the winsome extraterrestrial. They don’t even missing a trick. have to be cute; people were enthralled by the 20-foot, Microscopic life in a horror film is not new. Organ- 2,500-pound great white shark in “Jaws” and even isms filmed through a microscope first appeared in more by those fabulous dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. the movies more than 90 years ago. In 1921, director What links these is the freewheeling skill of their cre- Friedrich W. Murnau founded Prana Film specifically ator, master filmmaker Steven Spielberg. And it was to make horror films. Having embraced expressionis- 63 naming the character Count Orlok, in an attempt to avoid charges of plagiarism). Florence, Bram Stoker’s widow, decided to sue the company but Murnau’s ir- responsible spending had already rendered Prana Film bankrupt. Even so, Florence Stoker pressed ahead, and in July 1925 the German courts ruled in her favor — all copies of Murnau’s movie were to be destroyed. The few copies that survived were smuggled abroad. Attempts to stage a world premiere in Lon- don later that year were halted by the courts, though it was shown in the United States in 1929. When Murnau died in 1943, his film had been forgotten — only more recently has it been recognized as a pio- neering classic. The archetypal mad professor shows an eager student his One of the innovations was a sequence filmed “vampire-like polyp” in this montage from “Nosferatu.” It was through a microscope. In the middle of the film, audi- released in 1922 and ordered for destruction by the courts shortly ences watched spellbound as a totemic mad professor after. The film is recognized as groundbreaking for featuring shows some young enthusiasts his experiments. The microscopic views of Hydra devouring a Daphnia. silent film caption explains: “And now, gentlemen, here is another type of vampire, a polyp with claws: trans- parent, without substance, almost a phantom.” He grimaces threateningly before we see the sequence filmed through the microscope — a quarter-inch Hydra viridis hanging in a glass phial. Someone drops Daphnia from a pipette and it is entrapped by the ten- tacles of the polyp to be slowly devoured. We watch as it struggles to escape in vain yet is doomed to a grue- some death. Hydra may be a quarter-inch long in the real world, but on the cinema screen it was the length of a car, and the struggling Daphnia would hang in the air above the horrified audience, bigger than a baby as it fought for survival. Murnau had chosen well. The astonishing Steven Spielberg’s movie “War of the Worlds” (2005) opened with sights that we see down the microscope are endlessly ciliated protists swimming in a dew drop. These stylized Parame- diverting: sometimes entrancing, usually mysterious, cium (with a suctorian in the lower left corner) were meant to often horrifyingly violent. There is little as fascinating symbolize the germs that killed the Martian invaders, though these in our daily lives as we can witness through the mi- are harmless pond dwellers. This is a rare example of microbes croscope lens, and few sights are more remarkable playing a major role in a movie. than microbes living their complex lives. This would make for marvelous movies, particularly in the era of CGI, yet nobody has shown the possibilities to today’s film directors. They are still lagging behind. They tic cinema, Germany was caught up in spiraling infla- haven’t even caught up with Murnau’s inventiveness tion and Murnau was aiming to make real money — back in 1922. convertible currencies from the outside world. The Today’s moviemakers make a fundamental mis- production company’s first (and only) movie was take. They imagine that the world under a lens is just “Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens” (Nosferatu, like the world we see about us, only bigger. The truth a symphony of horror). Murnau retold the story of is far more amazing — once you turn a lens on familiar Bram Stoker’s groundbreaking novel Dracula, which objects they cease to be familiar. Under the microscope, had been published in 1897. Because they could not our world explodes into a fabulous concatenation of obtain rights to the book, Murnau adapted the story cells and crystals, fibers and frustules, spores, cysts and cast Max Schreck in the role of Count Dracula (re- and cilia. Look at a minute mound of moss or a frag- 64 THE MICROSCOPE 61 (2013) CRITICAL FOCUS | BRIAN J. FORD ment of feather held at arm’s length and you would never imagine what it might be like under a microscope. Telephoto lenses take you close to a distant race- horse, or show you writing that you could not otherwise read, but it shows nothing that you didn’t already know existed. Telescopes can only reveal celes- tial bodies in the night sky, though people always could see that there were stars in the heavens. Microscopes are unique. Only they can show us this strange and captivating universe of haunting beauty, the existence of which you could otherwise never have conceived. This microscopical vista is beyond imagination, out of reach of our conventional comprehension; it is quite the most curious and complex interactive community of creatures anywhere in the world. Yet directors don’t know about it and, for at least 90 years, nobody has A diminutive Scott Carey (played here by Grant Williams) faced a troubled to tell them. monstrous world when reduced to minute dimensions in Jack Arnold’s 1957 movie “The Incredible Shrinking Man.” The detail in THE SAME, ONLY LARGER the microscopical views of his foes was no greater than can be seen by the naked eye. The opportunity to tackle photogenic My interest was attracted by an intriguingly microbes and experience the world of living cells was missed. promising film title when I was in school. It was “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” directed by Jack Arnold and released in 1957. It had originally been a novel, out by scientists in America and Russia who succeeded written by Richard Matheson and adapted by him in shrinking atoms. The effect wasn’t permanent, how- for the screen. The film told how a businessman ever, so objects (and people) could be miniaturized for named Scott Carey (played by Grant Williams) is af- a while and then restored to full size. This was set to fected by a curious cloud that passes over him off the change, however, when a researcher in Russia named coast of California, and he slowly starts to shrink. Jan Benes discovered how to make the process irre- The film was a disappointment because wherever versible. He defected to the West and was on the point Carey went the structure of his world remained much of revealing his crucial secret when a secret agent the same as it was to the naked eye. Objects became leaves him in a coma caused by a blood clot.

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