FOR most of the 20th century, popular movies portrayed scientists as mad, bad or dangerous to know. Their branches of research may have changed over the years (poison gas and death rays in the 1920s, medicine with good intentions gone wrong in the 1930s, nuclear physics in the 1950s, biology/genetic engineering since the 1980s), but the folklore remained the same. The cinematic Who’s Who of mad doctors, including Caligari, Rotwang, Frankenstein, Jekyll, Moreau, Cyclops and, of course, Strangelove, epitomised the stereotype: they worked alone, had unusual hairstyles, did not publish (too paranoid), were usually disabled, and were wont to say things like “it’s a crazy idea but it just might work”. Their eccentric philosophy of science was well expressed by Dr Otto von Niemann in The Vampire Bat (1933): “Mad? Is one who has solved the secret of life to be considered mad? Life, created in the laboratory. No mere crystalline growth, but tissue, living, growing tissue that moves, pulsates and demands food…What are a few lives when weighed in the balance against the achievements of biological science? Just think of it. I have lifted the veil…”
Mad scientists have become such a clichĂ© that it is all too easy to dismiss the real agendas of anxiety they once represented and to some extent still do. Films shamelessly play to these anxieties, then resolve them in the last reel (or, since the 1980s, don’t – leaving the way for a sequel). As cultural commentator Theodore Roszak wrote: “The scientist who does not face up to the warning in this persistent folklore…is himself the worst enemy of science. In these images of our popular culture resides a legitimate public fear of the scientists’ stripped-down, depersonalised conception of knowledge.” This may be overstated; public anxiety is usually about the applications or unintended consequences of science, rather than its conception of knowledge. But the message echoes louder and clearer than it did in the mid-1970s when Roszak was writing – and when żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ (28 August 1975) conducted a now-celebrated survey of popular stereotypes of scientists. Clearly, the stereotypes still need to be taken seriously, unpacked and debated.
A recent survey of 1000 horror films distributed in the UK between the 1930s and 1980s reveals that mad scientists or their creations have been the villains of 31 per cent of the films; that scientific research has produced 39 per cent of the threats; and, by contrast, that scientists have been the heroes of a mere 11. The stereotype is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it has become a staple ingredient in advertising and in comedy, as well as in children’s sci-fi cartoons and computer games, where it may be doing more damage than ever. Forget Darwin versus creationism. As someone once said, the creation myth that matters most these days is Frankenstein. Hence the non-stop evocation of the dreaded name – often attributed wrongly to the monster rather than its creator – in debates about DNA and molecular biology in the 1960s, test-tube babies in the 1970s, and bioethics in the 1980s, the Human Genome Project in the 1990s and “Frankenfoods” today.
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It has been said that only one classic British novel contains a positive and credible characterisation of a scientist: Tertius Lydgate, the up-and-coming surgeon who researches tissue structure and is involved in civic medicine in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But at a less exalted level, there has been an assortment of scientist-heroes: the eccentric adventurers and inventors of Jules Verne, the rivals of Sherlock Holmes, H. G. Wells’s “freemasonry of science”, and the square-jawed philanthropists of pulp fiction magazines in the heyday of the interwar years. Dr Indiana Jones is the heir of the Verne tradition – as are all the other action-men-researchers who seem to be on permanent sabbatical – and the many detectives who work in forensics these days are the heirs of Conan Doyle.
In 1930s Hollywood, several major film studios attempted to counterbalance the growing craze for mad-scientist movies (which was at its height from 1931’s Frankenstein to the beginning of the second world war) with a parallel cycle of films based on the lives of real scientists. Such films were much more likely to win Academy awards and improve the studio’s image. Besides, there were lots of small-part actors on contract who looked good in side whiskers and lab coats. The cycle began with The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), which indeed won an Oscar for Paul Muni as the saintly French chemist, and continued with Dr Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940), The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), Young Tom Edison and Edison, the Man (both 1940), and Madame Curie (1943). Reviews in Variety routinely complained that “a test tube is a test tube and a picture is a picture” and ne’er the twain shall meet – while praising the romantic sub-plots and the tense trial scene which became the obligatory climax. But critic Paul Rotha probably got it right when he wrote that such films were “earnest and vigorous attempts to convince the electorate of the possibility of a rational society based on science and education”. Sounds like an exciting night out!
Since the 1980s, a more sophisticated batch of Hollywood films featuring scientist-heroes and heroines has emerged. Jurassic Park included a first in Hollywood history: a sexy mathematician in black leather. Jeff Goldblum, as the mathematician Ian Malcolm, was one of several very bankable stars who played scientist-heroes around that time. There was a ponytailed Sean Connery as Dr Robert Campbell, finding “the cure for cancer” in the Amazon rainforest (the screenwriters seemed to think there was only one kind of cancer) and lording it over tribal rituals in Medicine Man (1992). There was an unusually restrained Robin Williams as Dr Malcolm Sayer, helping his “hopeless” patients rediscover their inner selves with a little help from the drug l-dopa in Awakenings (1990). There was Jeff Goldblum, again, in The Fly (1986) as the shy and single-minded geneticist who asks his girlfriend “is this a romance we’re having – is that what it is?”, and who wears the same clothes every day because “this way I don’t have to expend any thought on what I wear – I learned that from Einstein”. There was Dustin Hoffman as Colonel Sam Daniels, specialist in infectious diseases at the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (Level 4), who puts his career on the line and saves his marriage by disobeying orders and finding a way to immunise an entire town against the monkey-wrought “Motoba” virus in Outbreak (1995). There was Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind (2001) as genius Princeton mathematician John Nash, whose schizophrenia leads him to imagine he is working for a Pentagon spymaster and whose chat-up line is “I don’t exactly know what I’m required to say in order for you to have intercourse with me…”
“Will science ever develop a more constructive relationship with film?”
There was Sigourney Weaver as Dian Fossey, obsessive researcher of mountain gorillas in Rwanda in Gorillas in the Mist (1988), who has no patience for less dedicated researchers whom she calls “snotty little scientists with slide rules up their back pockets”. There was Saffron Burrows as Dr Susan McCallister, who also lets her nurturing instinct lead her astray – in this case by messing about with sharks’ brains in a mid-ocean research centre to find a cure for Alzheimer’s in Deep Blue Sea (1999). Burrows sacrifices herself to the most vicious of the resulting super-intelligent sharks by deliberately exposing her head wound under water while muttering “come to mamma”. And best of all there was Jodie Foster as the bespectacled astrophysicist Ellie Arroway, who is “obsessed with a subject considered professional suicide” – making radio contact with extraterrestrial intelligence – in Contact (1997). Ellie is scorned by her male peers (“still waiting for ET to call?”) and by grant foundations, but she keeps at it until the end, when she might or might not have made contact after travelling through a technically impossible wormhole.
With the likes of Connery, Goldblum, Williams, Hoffman, Crowe, Weaver, Burrows and Foster playing them, scientists seem to have fared much better in recent years. But have they really? All these characters are mavericks, usually with a new-agey approach, who stand outside the institutions of science and sidestep their peers. Mainstream science has become thoroughly institutionalised – by big business, by government or by the military – and the new scientific heroes are those who have the special insight to prevent institutions from distorting science. The sexy mathematician opposes the corporation; the immunologist opposes the military (“who am I talking to?” asks Dustin Hoffman, “the Pentagon, the CIA or the major-general?”); the astrophysicist opposes the male old-boy network. Confronted by the challenge of encouraging us to sympathise with scientists, scriptwriters have resorted to surrogate villains instead: politicians, soldiers, business people or administrators who mistreat scientists. The bad guys in Jurassic Park are not the lab scientists but their disabled corporate boss. It’s Bill Gates as villain, the figure who pulls the strings. The Frankenstein corporation is now a household brand – colonising our minds and employing scientists.
Will science ever develop a more constructive relationship with film? And have the audience’s fears about science and scientists really changed that much since Frankenstein’s monster lumbered across the screen? The details may be different – a researcher in Flatliners (1990) says, “I’m sorry, Lord. We stepped on your fucking territory” – but the message is the same as when Victor Frankenstein first phrased it.
As long as we have anxieties, films will play to them. As long as we have concerns about, or frustrations with, technology, film narratives will help us cope with them. The original Frankenstein was about vitalism and the divine spark; now it’s about genetically modified crops and DNA. Carl Sagan (who provided the original idea for Contact) outlined the problem well: “We’ve arranged a global civilisation in which the most crucial elements…profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.” The need for sophisticated understanding at all stages of science has never been greater or more widely acknowledged. And, yes, the surface realism of the science on television and in films has improved a lot. But appearance and substance are different things. Have the movies filled the gap by directly affecting popular attitudes towards science or scientists? Discuss.
This communication gap may well be “a prescription for disaster”. On the other hand it has also been a prescription for a number of hugely entertaining films which have pleasurably fed our innermost anxieties. As the playwright Sean O’Casey once wrote, the needs of drama will always distort the complexities and boredom of history. Otherwise, there’s no drama.
Profile
Historian and critic Christopher Frayling is rector of the Royal College of Art, London, chairman of the Arts Council of England, and a radio and TV broadcaster. His books include Spaghetti Westerns and Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. His latest book, Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ and the Cinema, is published by Reaktion this month
