At Page 3.14, our lovely and gracious Overlords have posted a great new reader's poll encouraging folks to choose their favorite pro-science movie as a sort of response to the anti-science of Expelled.
There's one problem, as one of the commenters has stated. One of the movies on the list is absolutely not pro-science. Jurassic Park is as anti-science as you can get in pop fiction, promoting a Faustian fear of science and knowledge.
Now before I get Booted from ScienceBlogs, let me clarify that I'm not being an ass when I say that Ginny and company are gracious and lovely. They are indeed both, especially considering they gave me ample time to get my shit together while not blogging, and I still got to keep my spot here at Sb. That means a hell of a lot to me.
So this is just a friendly argument of why I think Jurassic Park shouldn't be on that list. More backpedaling and disclaimers below the fold. Maybe I'll even describe the history and difference between Faustian and Promethean stories and why Jurassic Park is the former.
I've read a lot of analyses of our pop culture perceptions of science, and most of the recent articles will trace back to Frankenstein, where the mad scientist plays God, creating a twisted simulacrum of humanity that ends up tormenting him for the rest of his life. This story has its roots in another, much earlier story of Faust, who essentially sells his soul to the devil (Mephistopheles) for knowledge that only a god should possess. The Faust story has an even deeper source: The Biblical story of Adam and Eve.
Jurassic Park is a rehash of don't touch that apple/don't sell your soul for knowledge (power), essentially. Hammond is a Very Bad Man who is greedy and doesn't understand what he has unleashed on the world. He facilitates the creation of life (i.e. takes knowledge for himself that he should not have) and the tortured, ravenous creatures he creates end up killing him (in the book, anyway). Sure there's lots of neat theory about DNA and warm-blooded dinosaurs and the dinosaur models are beautiful and actually based on scientific data, but the story remains paranoid and fearful that science will make us gods, and that's a Very Bad Thing.
On the other end of the spectrum we have the Promethean view of science in pop culture and lit, though not quite as familiar or ubiquitous. Prometheus was the titan that stole fire (knowledge) from the gods and gave it to human beings, and was celebrated by the Greeks as a savior. We have little Promethean stories in popular film, but there are many stories that truly support science that were written in the "Golden Age" of science fiction. Writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark told stories where human intuition and invention were a boon to society. Asimov's robots were not twisted simulacrums like Frankenstein or Crichton's dinosaurs; they lived to serve humans and were under our control. One of his main characters even became a guardian of humankind himself, protecting the human race from extinction for millenia. Star Trek probably comes closest to this view in film and television, as Asimov and the others are not nearly as well-known (and I, Robot was a total joke).
The funny thing about the Adam and Eve story is that, in a sense, it is ambivalent, both Faustian and Promethean depending on your perspective. Adam and Eve are given the apple by the unnamed serpent, who convinces them they will be gods if they eat it. They do, and suddenly they are cast out of paradise (ignorance) and aware of their place in the world. The serpent is cast as Satan by Christians, the ultimate evil who turned us against God, but Satan is in fact playing the role of Prometheus, pushing us out of ignorance and encouraging the human race to grow and learn. Like Prometheus, who was condemned by the gods to have his liver picked out every day and grow back anew, the serpent was condemned by god to crawl on its belly for eternity and eat dust for the rest of its life, "cursed" more "than any beast of the field."
If Jurassic Park were a pro-science, pro-knowledge movie, humankind would benefit from Hammond's contribution in some way. Instead, Hammond sells his soul, like Faust, everyone dies and Crichton goes on a 15 page incoherent tangent about Chaos Theory and nuclear war.
But it makes for great entertainment. We love these kinds of stories, where humankind has done wrong, has learned too much or become too greedy. The post-apocalyptic film is perhaps the best way to move an audience and drag them into a different world, not so different from ours, even if the idea or philosophy behind the story is a bit old-fashioned.
So, instead of Jurassic Park, I humbly submit Star Trek (pick one) to be added to the list. It's a bit more appropriate than JP.
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
I think S.J. Gould summed it up best when he looked at the translation of Frankenstein from literature to the big screen in "The Monster's Human Nature." A more intricate story was changed to "Don't cross the boundaries that God set on nature" and the film version of JP follows suit.
I still think it should be on the list though, if not no other reason that it brought dinosaurs to life. Working paleontologists got involved with the special effects team to make the creatures in the film seem real, and I know it definitely renewed my interest in paleontology when I saw it. Given that it the film is special-effects driven (people are going to see the dinosaurs, not for the social commentary), I don't know if I would say it was anti-science. I guess that depends on how many people came away from it thinking "Science is bad and will destroy us all." Most people, I think, were just happy to see the dinosaurs.
Indeed, each film in the poll has different strengths and weaknesses. Contact had a more pro-science message, but I don't think it got as many people interested in learning more about real-world science as Jurassic Park did (such is the draw of dinosaurs). I still cast my vote for JP because of my dino-bias and because of the collaboration between scientists and artisans to bring extinct animals to life, but I still think you make an excellent point, Jeremy. Movies involving science usually focus on people or scientists crossing some boundary God put in place to their own peril; why can't there be more positive (or at least intricate) stories?
Posted by: Laelaps | April 29, 2008 1:44 PM
None of Crichton's tripe is pro-science.
His ouvre capitalizes on fear and fear of science.
Posted by: jeb, FCD | April 29, 2008 1:54 PM
While I agree largely with jeb, I do think The Andromeda Strain is still pretty pro-science in both the movie and book. I seem to recall people saying it's also one of the more accurate depictions of science, in that it involves a lot of experimentation, and multiple avenues of experimentation to determine the nature of the titular lifeform, rather than putting it in the Magic Scanner Booth and getting the answer.
Posted by: Left_Wing_Fox | April 29, 2008 2:21 PM
The Andromeda Strain should be better science -- Crichton was just out of med school when he wrote it. Nonetheless, if I recall correctly, he had some major errors in the way he described the isolation lab and secure handling of the organism.
Posted by: chezjake | April 29, 2008 3:27 PM
One thing I've noticed about Crichton's novels: the less I know about the particular area he's writing about, the less sense it seems to make. For instance, when I read JP for the first time, I thought that the genetic engineering stuff sounded interesting, if science-fictiony, but that everything about chaos theory in there was nonsense. I was studying nonlinear dynamics at the time, and I had the distinct impression that his 'research' consisted of skimming James Gleick's popularization without really understanding any of it.
That should have made me suspicious. I've since learned that the biology doesn't make any more sense than the math in that novel, naturally ... But if you don't know anything at all, his little bits of knowledge sound very impressive.
Posted by: Scott Simmons | April 29, 2008 3:30 PM
I was in college when JP the movie came out, and I'd already figured out that Crichton was a popularizer of anti-science (not to mention a rabid misogynist and generally third rate author to boot).
Posted by: Rev Matt | April 29, 2008 4:09 PM
I've read several Crichton novels (though Jurassic Park is not among them), and I find (as did Scott) that they generally don't hold up to scrutiny. He has a tendency to push his case far beyond what the available evidence shows. That goes not just for his science/technology novels (Terminal Man, Prey) but his other novels as well (Rising Sun, in which he displays a stunning ignorance of US cop culture by having his narrator, an LA cop, describe a car chase as reaching speeds of 160 km/h rather than the 100 MPH a real American cop would use). No matter what the subject is, Crichton takes an alarmist view: anti-science on scientific subjects, anti-Japanese in the case of Rising Sun. (Though in the case of Rising Sun, the book was better than the movie, which managed to add an anti-female tone to Crichton's anti-Japanese tone.)
How bad a writer is Crichton? I've given away all of the Crichton books I had in my personal library. I only do that for books which are either duplicates or truly, outrageously bad. Crichton is definitely in the latter category.
Posted by: Eric Lund | April 29, 2008 4:57 PM
I think Jurassic Park is unintentionally pro-science. It's message should be "scientists play god and that's bad" but the real take-home message in usually "dinosaurs are awesome". I remember walking away from the movie thinking of the DNA and computer stuff and the effects and the dinosaurs as being things worth looking into further; the moralizing of the mathematician and the obligatory comeuppance of the people doing cool stuff were just hack Hollywood plot devices to get the raptors runnin' after the leggy blond.
Posted by: pough | April 29, 2008 5:20 PM
What about The Day After Tomorrow? That had some real cool climate science. JUST KIDDING! I did enjoy that movie, mainly for a great special effects! But man, the plot was stupid!
I gotta agree with you about JP. I'm trying to think of a movie that actually got science right and I'm blanking out. I did really enjoy Contact, but I consider that Sci-Fi. What about Dante's Peak? The volcano science was pretty accurate for a movie, I thought.
Oh, and Michael Crichton sucks.
Posted by: Jennifer | April 29, 2008 8:09 PM
most of the recent articles will trace back to Frankenstein, where the mad scientist plays God
Re-read the 1818 edition of Frankenstein. It's not anti-science at all. Most of the "tampering in God's domain" bullshit was added in the early stage adaptations, and then Mary Shelley, who found religion and rejected English Radicalism when she grew older, added some tepid critiques of rationalism in the second edition of Frankenstein. Even so, most of the original text is about psychopathology, lack of empathy, and generally Victor Frankenstein's overall assholiness.
Don't be dissing Frankenstein. It's the first unmistakable Science Fiction novel ever published (and the first horror novel, for that matter), and it's overwhelmingly pro-science and anti self-centered, psychopathic asshole.
(The site I linked above is a goldmine of Frankenstein info. You might be particularly interested in the links between Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin, and the great electro-biologist Sir Humphry Davy. Shelley's novel is absolutely not anti-science.)
Posted by: HP | April 29, 2008 11:19 PM
Crichton can be naively appealing in a Randish sort of way to a sheltered mind in a humanities course. But I'll tell ya something about Crichton -- I've heard people complaining about how he was being "politically correct" when he made the girl the computer genius in the movie rather than the boy. I actually don't have any particular problem with that -- or at least I wouldn't, if that had been how he'd done it in the first place. Truthfully, Crichton pretty much lost me when he wrote The Lost World as a sequel, not to the book, but to the movie. I didn't think much of his integrity as an artist when he did that.
I have to admit to having been really impressed with the book when I was in college, as I'd come out of a rather religious family with a rather narrow-minded upbringing. I knew about the controversies over the anti-Japanese crap in Rising Sun, but JP seemed like a pretty good book. Looking back I realize that chaos theory is quite a bit more subtle than Crichton's portrayal, that he treats genetics like black box computer code modules with no need for glue code or even a well-defined API, and that the entire book is not just anti-science but anti-curiosity. From where I sit I see three Crichton books on my shelf; haven't read a one of them in years.
Posted by: Brian X | April 30, 2008 2:48 AM
HP,
I've read the original Frankenstein. It isn't about tampering on God's domain, but it's definitely about scientific invention run amok. The monster is much more intelligent than later versions and theology isn't an overt focus, but he does go around killing everything of value to his creator.
Posted by: bsci | April 30, 2008 8:10 AM
so noted, jeremy! but hey, we had to have something on the list that would incite all this debate. :)
Posted by: Ginny | April 30, 2008 2:41 PM
I agree with you, Jeremy, but with all respect I'm surprised that you needed to blog about this. Jurassic Park is one of the quintessential anti-science/technology movies, along with just about every other book or movie associated with Michael Crichton. I don't think this is very controversial. If you read the book, you'll see it even more clearly: it's full of explicit anti-science messages of a vaguely Kuhnian or Feyerabendian provenance.
The most that can be said against this is (1) the book/movie does not actually deny that dinosaurs existed. It's not anti-science in that particular way. And (2) by the end of the series as a whole, the dinosaurs are so cool that the Sublime Coolness of Dinosaurs becomes a powerful message, even to some extent overshadowing the warning about Promethean hubris. Hence, the narrative contains thematic contradictions.
Re (2), this kind of thing is, of course, a common occurrence in science fiction - I'm not the first person to observe it, though I'm certainly one of the people who observe it most often (e.g., I also talk about it to some extent in my article on "Technology" in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy). There are many such examples, but the other one that I always use is The Terminator. Even in the first movie, the Schwarzenegger character is so cool that many people root for him, though that of course runs against the grain of the movie's cautionary message.
Be that as it may, it would be perverse to think of such movies as pro-science.
(Ahem, my own trilogy of Terminator novels - The New John Connor Chronicles - doesn't have the same anti-science elements, as far as I can tell, and nor does my Michael Crichtonish thriller, Kong Reborn, but writing these sorts of narratives tends to push you subliminally in an anti-science direction because obviously you need to create suspense and excitement, which will tend to involve depicting technological products as dangerous (as well as alluring). I'm pretty sure that Crichton himself is not as anti-science as his books and screenplays are.)
For those knocking Crichton as a storyteller, I'm rather amazed. He's a master of narrative pacing whose technique would repay study by any aspiring author of action/adventure narratives. Even when I hate his message, as I so often do, I can wolf down a huge Michael Crichton book at a sitting. In that sense, I'm a fan of his, albeit a cautious and critical one. It's not just a fluke that he's made a lot of money, sold a lot of books, and translated well into the visual media; he has immense talent, of a particular kind, and superb craftsmanship.
Posted by: Russell Blackford | May 1, 2008 2:53 AM
I think the movie isn't as anti-science as all that. The message is more "make sure you do the science right. The animals get out, but in the end the characters are all "Oh, wow, that's so amazing", which is why people get into science in the first place.
The books, on the other hand, are all bullshit about chaos theory and intellectual masturbation through the sock-puppet mathematician.
Posted by: wazza | May 1, 2008 6:40 AM
And why is GATTACA, of all things, on the list? It's another movie that cautions against The Evils That Will Come From Promethean Science.
It's difficult to find unequivocally pro-science movies because the central idea in any popular movie is likely to be associated with conflict and suspense ... and therefore appear dangerous. The movies that really do have nothing anti-scientific about them tend to be iffy for other reasons. I certainly wouldn't suggest Things to Come.
Fortunately, even movies that depict Promethean scientific hubris often contain the message that whatever is being problematised is also cool, and they don't actually say that science provides a false worldview. Science is seen as magic was in earlier centuries (the Faust idea): potentially evil or at least dangerous, but not thereby false. The "cool" part is important; so often the movie makes some room for the values it seems to attack, as when the destructive science depicted in Forbidden Planet is literally incorporated into the cosy little world of the space ship (itself a product of science) at the end, when the robot - a product of Krell technology - is allowed to join the crew (as is a tamed and civilised Altaira, but that's a different point).
My feeling is that any of the X-Men movies does good for science, even though the "science" presented is magical. We are made to think that the mutants are cool; there's nothing Promethean about the plot and themes (it's all to do with alienation, the treatment of outsiders, and alternative responses to oppression, rather than with scientific hubris); and even though we know the science is magical, the movies assume as background the truth of basic evolutionary and genetic theory, before re-imagining these in blatantly magical forms. I can't see this kind of magic-science stuff doing any harm - since no one takes the super powers of Magneto or Phoenix or Wolverine seriously - whereas it might actually turn on some kids to real science, or at least give the real-science-loving nerds like I was a chance to play in a weirdly distorted magic world and have their own moment of feeling cool. (Indeed, when I was a teenager I loved both real science and superhero comics, knowing full well that the "science" in the latter was a magical re-imagination of actual science.)
I also wonder why 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn't on the list. It is a very science-friendly movie, and surely the classic of sf cinema. And what about The Right Stuff?
Posted by: Russell Blackford | May 1, 2008 7:24 AM
Arguably most of Crichton's works are like this -- they ostensible warn us about some latest technology, while at the same time implicitly making clear how frickin' cool it is. And, just to further the irony, it seems pretty clear to me that Crichton is much more interested in the technology than he is in his characters -- for someone who is warning us about losing our humanity, he write people as two-dimensional cardboard cutouts.
Posted by: Tulse | May 1, 2008 9:11 AM
Nuclear Wessels!
Posted by: tangent | May 1, 2008 11:18 AM
What about Apollo 13? Its messages are that (a) the Universe is full of wonder, (b) exploration is a noble task for the human spirit and (c) when things go wrong, we can team up and bloody well fix them. It tells us there's a better use for the "Right Stuff" than turning out fighter jocks to go and get killed in senseless wars. Oh, and it has rock-and-roll in zero G.
I watched Jurassic Park with some friends not long ago, and I came away with some odd impressions. The whole Faustian aspect was much easier to see than when I saw the movie fifteen years ago. I disagree with Gould, however, in that I don't think the book was any better. In fact, I'd say one of the movie's redeeming features is that the "chaos theory" babble is not as strongly endorsed: instead of being endorsed by the All-Seeing Narrator, they come out of Ian Malcolm, who is, let's face it, a bit of a prick.
More importantly, I felt that Richard Attenborough and Sam Neill were in a different movie than everybody else. Watch Attenborough's character explain why he built the park — the speech over ice cream, where he talks about his old flea circus — and the scene where Sam Neill says, "Bet you'll never look at birds the same way again." Those are moments from a different film, a better film. It breaks the heart.
The oddest impression of all, though, was the realization that the sysadmin character was played by Samuel L. Jackson. That's right: if Jurassic Park had first been released in 2006, the Internet would be lousy with fan-made trailers in which Jackson soundalikes scream to the skies, "I am tired of these mothafuckin' raptors on this mothafuckin' island!"
Which just goes to show you why Randall Munroe is justified in fearing raptors: they are more badass than Samuel L. Jackson.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | May 1, 2008 11:28 AM
wazza has it right. Crichton's books are the product of fear which in turn is the product of deep ignorance -- hey, Crichton is so ignorant he even believes in spoonbending --, and it got on my nerves that JP the book is like a Greek or Shakespeare tragedy in that everyone who has put any amount of guilt upon their shoulders dies, but Spielberg is no Crichton. What people remember of JP the movie is the scene where the supposedly main characters gaze upward, climb on top of the car, and see the Brachiosaurus. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the most impressive scene in the history of cinema (...AFAIK).
Spielberg has mostly rescued the movie from being as reality-challenged as the book.
Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | May 1, 2008 11:41 AM
Russell Blackford:
Forbidden Planet gets bonus points for using the Three Laws of Robotics, albeit not by name. Furthermore, they're not just window dressing, or an in-joke for the fan community: Robbie's Asimovian programming becomes a plot point when (spoiler alert) he can't do anything to stop the Monster from the Id, because he knows whose Id it's coming from. The allegory pumping through Forbidden Planet is that technology is double-edged, and it's people whose destructive tendencies cause real problems. Beyond that, even, I'd say that it undercuts its own warning, in a sly (and probably unintentional) way. The final Aesop, delivered by Commander Adams, is that we can't purge the demons from our Id — but there at the navigation console is Robbie. . . .
As long as we're going retro, I'd suggest that The Day the Earth Stood Still is a pro-science movie, in a subtle way. Professor Barnhardt is a kind of home-grown American Einstein figure; not only is the scientist shown as a better conduit for otherworldly wisdom than the government or military, but also, the movie tells us that Earthly science, while limited, has found a solid and valid subset of the knowledge which Klaatu's people have discovered.
The Day the Earth Stood Still suggests that over the last two thousand years, we as a civilization have gotten better at telling stories about the death and resurrection of non-human visitors. "It isn't faith that makes good science, Mr. Klaatu, it's curiosity. Sit down, please. There are several thousand questions I'd like to ask you."
Posted by: Blake Stacey | May 1, 2008 11:52 AM
Oh yeah. Forgot to mention: what the movie says about dinosaurs has been much criticized, and rightly so, but the book is even worse. It portrays the small ones as lizards, complete with lizard behavior and lizard skin, features that not even crocodiles share. It boggles the mind.
Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | May 1, 2008 11:53 AM
Oooo. That's a movie I want to see. :-)
Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | May 1, 2008 12:00 PM
Blake: I was thinking about The Day the Earth Stood Still myself!
And as far as ultracool science-types go, doesn't anyone remember Buckaroo Banzai anymore? :)
Posted by: gg | May 1, 2008 2:27 PM
David wrote "Oooo. That's a movie I want to see. :-)"
And indeed you should, at the earliest opportunity. It's a superb film, but it does take some liberties with the book. Read up about the differences after you've seen it.
Jeremy wrote "So, instead of Jurassic Park, I humbly submit Star Trek (pick one) to be added to the list. It's a bit more appropriate than JP."
The Next Generation! Picard is a pro-science hero.
Posted by: MH | May 1, 2008 3:02 PM
If only he could pronounce his own name. (The u part.) :-)
Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | May 1, 2008 8:22 PM
I read a number of Crichton novels in my youth, but I oddly didn't realize that his work is generally anti-science until I saw Westworld a couple weeks ago. I had an epiphany during that movie---Holy crap, Michael Crichton hates science!! How did I not see this before?!
Posted by: lylebot | May 2, 2008 7:41 AM
Russel: The thing is, I didn't see it as a condemnation of science but of the political interpretation of science.
Keep in mind that I live in Universal Healthcare Canada, where the pre-existing condition problems of US health insurance is present only in discussion by conservatives about the possibility of two-tiered health care. GATTACA's future is a uniquely American one, where the economic inequities of health care doled out on a purely for-profit basis have seeped into a political underclass. The antagonist of the movie is not science, but the politics of inequity using science to further that goal.
Just my opinion though.
Posted by: Left_Wing_Fox | May 2, 2008 1:58 PM
Jurassic Park is, if anything, painfully simplistic, but it does endorse a bare-bones conception of the precautionary principle.
Now, the fact that (in the novel, at least) Crichton couldn't decide whether Ellie Sattler was "Dr. Sattler" or a graduate student makes me think he was totally unfamiliar with how that part of the academic world works.
Posted by: Julie Stahlhut | May 2, 2008 4:14 PM
Left Wing Fox, I understand your point and thank you for it. But the natural (and certainly, in my experience, popular) reading of GATTACA is as a cautionary tale warning about the development and availability of a particular technique: PGD for selecting traits, based on advanced genetic science. I may have missed something, but I can think of nothing in the movie that displays any aspect of genetic science positively. It doesn't even allow room to think that there might be something cool about it.
Yes, it could be read as a warning that PGD is on the way and although this promises benefits we must have strong laws against genetic discrimination. Or it could be read as just a reminder that genetic determinism is false and that genetic potential will never line up neatly with grown-up people's realised skills and capacities (and public policy should recognise this). All of that may be true, but the presentation of the science is relentlessly negative. It is used to support a genetic data base that is directed to horribly oppressive purposes.
In short, GATTACA portrays a near-future dystopian society whose dystopian aspects are deeply dependent on the science. Even if PGD for the purposes of choosing childrens' traits is as bad as the movie encourages us to feel, I can't see any pro-science message in it.
Posted by: Russell Blackford | May 3, 2008 10:00 AM
And why is GATTACA, of all things, on the list? It's another movie that cautions against The Evils That Will Come From Promethean Science.
So is that always wrong? The main thing warned against in Gattaca was the prejudice against people with natural genetics as opposed to the shiny new designer DNA that was possible in the movie's world. This is a real issue with the today's insurance companies starting to mumble about wanting to check people's genetics before insuring them.
The actual fact of the designer genetics was not shown in a negative light. Jude Law's character was in a wheelchair because of an accident, not through any malfunction of the technology. Everyone else with the shiny DNA was good looking, healthy and there was strong implications of very extended lifespans.
Posted by: Quiet Desperation | May 23, 2008 3:21 PM
Holy crap, Michael Crichton hates science!!
No, Michael Crichton writes technothrillers. End of story.
"In essence, science is nothing more than a method of inquiry. The method says an assertion is valid and merits universal acceptance only if it can be independently verified. The impersonal rigor of the method means it is utterly apolitical. A truth in science is verifiable whether you are black or white, male or female, old or young. It's verifiable whether you like the results of a study, or you don't. Thus, when adhered to, the scientific method can transcend politics." -- Michael Crichton
Yeah, sounds like a real hater to me. (rolls eyes) Honestly, some of you folks come across like little kids going into hysterics. Should I read Starship Troopers and declare Heinlein a fascist?
Posted by: X9 | May 23, 2008 3:33 PM