The Scientist and American Cinema: Trends and Case Studies
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The Scientist and American Cinema: Trends and Case Studies Ciara Wardlow Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in Cinema and Media Studies under the advisement of Dr. N. Adriana Knouf April 2019 © 2019 Ciara Wardlow TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………………… 3 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 4 Chapter 1: A Historical Overview of Scientists in American Film……………………… 12 Chapter 2: Space Science and Cinema…………………………………………………………… 83 Chapter 3: Heroic Renegades and “Strange Birds”: Scientist Biopics……………….. 114 Chapter 4: The Scientist Goes to the Remakes: The Thing and The Fly……………..156 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………..198 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………. 202 2 Acknowledgements To begin, I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Adriana Knouf, for guiding me throughout this process, as well as Professor Maurizio Viano, who advised the Fall 2017 independent study that served as the basis for chapter 3. My deepest gratitude to the Cinema and Media Studies department at Wellesley for teaching me how to dissect a film, and to the publications Film School Rejects and The Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision website, for giving me the opportunity to further evolve those skills while reaching an audience. I would also like to thank my friends and family for their support and encouragement. In particular, I would like to acknowledge my father, Jesse Wardlow, for never checking MPAA ratings before taking me to see whatever sci-fi movie was playing that week, and my mother, Brid Wardlow, for not stopping him. I genuinely think I am a more interesting person today for having seen The Matrix at age six. Lastly, I would like to give a special shout-out to caffeine, for keeping me going. I wouldn’t have made it without you. 3 INTRODUCTION In 1957, cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead released a pioneering study of high schoolers’ perceptions of scientists that concluded that the average American high schooler imagines a scientist as an “unshaved and unkempt” glasses-wearing middle-aged man in a white lab coat with a single-minded focus on his work.1 While a number of the respondents cited the importance of scientific work or spoke admirably of scientists in terms of their contributions to society, the idea that work in the sciences was isolated and pursued to the detriment of interpersonal relationships was widespread even across respondents who described scientists in more generally favorable terms.2 The findings of numerous other studies published since on the public image of scientists have overwhelmingly echoed Mead’s results, even when studies use the visual “Draw-A- Scientist” test (DAST) instead of asking participants to describe a scientist in words. Numerous DAST studies over the years have repeatedly found the pervading stereotype of a scientist as an “elderly or middle-aged White male who works individually in traditional indoor laboratory settings and wears a laboratory coat and glasses while conducting dangerous experiments” dominates across study groups beginning at around 6-7 years of age, and has found to only become more firmly established with age.3 The consistency in these results begs the question of where this public image comes from. The prevalence of the practicing scientist as a public figure has ebbed and flowed over time and across cultures, but in the present-day United States the scientist has become a figure 1 Margaret Mead and Rhoada Metraux, “Image of the Scientist among High-School Students,” Science 126, no. 3270 (1957). 2 Ibid. 3 Aik-Ling Tan and Jennifer Ann Jocz, "Spiderman and Science: How Students’ Perceptions of Scientists Are Shaped by Popular Media," Public Understanding of Science 26, no. 5 (2017), 521; David Wade Chambers, "Stereotypic Images of the Scientist: The Draw-a-Scientist Test," Science Education 67, no. 2 (1983). 4 that is neither particularly heard nor seen directly. A poll done in 2010 estimated that only around 18 percent of Americans knew a scientist personally.4 Considering the average American does not know a working scientist personally, and that particularly in recent years, so-called “celebrity scientists” are few and far between, the most frequent images of scientists that the typical American sees are of those of the fictional variety shown in film and television.5 As A. Bowdoin Van Riper wrote in a 2003 article, “popular culture probably does more than formal science education to shape most people’s understanding of science and scientists.”6 In sum, the considerable majority of the American population formulates their idea and image of the scientist more or less entirely from media sources, and the research scientist is a figure more frequently depicted in fictional contexts than news media. While fictional media images of scientists play a significant role in shaping public attitudes and ideas of scientists and their work, these images are drawn by people who are very often drawing primarily from other fictional images.7 As put by Dr. Marty Kaplan, Director of the Norman Lear Center, “When writers depict scientists, they probably do what they do in every other realm, which is draw from their own experience, and whether that experience is personal or, more likely, from other entertainment. They have seen what ‘scientists’ look like. It’s in Frankenstein movies, and in cartoons, and that helps give them a [reference] frame.”8 So overwhelming numerous are the depictions of scientists as madmen (and occasionally mad women), obsessives, and social outcasts that actor Aaron Eckhart, after interacting with several geologists in preparation for his role as a scientist in The Core, was notably surprised to discover 4Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (Basic Books, 2009). 5 Lawrence M. Krauss, "Scientists as Celebrities: Bad for Science or Good for Society?," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 71, no. 1 (2015). 6 A. Bowdoin Van Riper, "What the Public Thinks It Knows About Science," EMBO Reports 4, no. 12 (2003). 7 Kevin Grazier and Stephen Cass, Hollyweird Science: From Quantum Quirks to the Multiverse (Springer, 2015). 8 Quoted in ibid 49. 5 that scientists are “just as concerned as you or I about everyday things.”9 In sum, trends in the depictions of scientists in mainstream media such as popular film and potential connections to the public image of scientists warrant consideration. I have fostered parallel interests in science—specifically, biology—and film since I was quite young. Though I loved movies from a very young age, I never considered them as something that could actually be studied until I was fourteen. I attended the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), and that meant taking a week-long course in January between semesters (“Intersession”). There was a catalog of options to choose from, and that first year I excitedly chose “Infectious Disease as Portrayed in Cinema.” Two of my favorite subjects together—it seemed like a match made in heaven. Sure, I had waited excitedly for the release of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) just five months prior and found myself ultimately a little underwhelmed, but I figured there had to be better examples of infectious disease in cinema out there. I was wrong.10 And for most of that week, very, very bored. But it made me wonder: why were they all so bad? So needlessly inaccurate? Where was the tense historical drama about John Snow investigating the Broad Street cholera outbreak? The biopic of Jonas Salk? Why was NASA the only scientific organization that got cool movies? It was my indignation over these questions that drove me to the school library’s one-and- a-half shelves of books on film history and criticism for the first time. It was then that I began to see films as more than something just to be watched and enjoyed, that I first began to learn about how to analyze them, study them, write about them. 9 Aaron Eckhart quoted in David A. Kirby, Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (MIT Press, 2011), 72. 10 Okay, so The Andromeda Strain is pretty good. But overall it was a rough week. 6 This thesis represents the culmination of nearly a decade of interest in the intersections between cinema and science. While I have written on numerous occasions about depictions of scientific topics and scientist characters in film for Film School Rejects and The Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision website, where I have been a regular contributor for the past few years, these have been short articles within the realm of 700 to 2000 words or so, and as such I sought to put together a thesis investigating this topic in more depth. As Benjamin Motz writes, “popular films are not merely cultural artifacts, but also cultural vehicles for public awareness.”11 A cognitive scientist, Motz noted in a 2013 article about the portrayal of his discipline in cinema that, for example, traffic to the Wikipedia page on “Dreams” doubled in the two weeks following the release of the dream-set heist film Inception (2010). The potential influence of popular cinema on attitudes towards violence, for example, is a frequently recurring debate; that film could have an impact on popular opinions and understandings of science and scientists is therefore well within reason—and indeed, particularly over the past few decades, has become an increasingly popular field of study.12 The existing body of literature on this subject is far larger than I ever anticipated at 14. The “intersection between cinema and science” is not really one overlap, but many—the on- screen portrayal of scientists, the role of scientists as advisors in the film production process, the relationship between cinematic portrayals of scientific subjects and popular opinion, in influencing the development of technologies, in inspiring children and adolescents to pursue (or not pursue) scientific fields, the list goes on.