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By Vincent Resh Faculty members appreciate the decade-old freshman seminar program, too; it allows them to teach topics they are passionately interested in but don't have a chance to cover in the more traditional curriculum. For instance, a microbiologist colleague who specializes in human gut bacteria leads a seminar in the economics and logistics of alternative transportation, and a statistician (who's also a former chancellor) teaches a seminar on theater in Berkeley. My own teaching and research centers on biology with a focus on ecology, water pollution, and water-borne vectors of disease, but I conduct a freshman seminar that brings in another interest of mine, entitled "Science goes to the movies." (What do my scientist colleagues think when they hear I'm teaching a course about movies? Sometimes they ask me for recommendations, but they don't seem entirely convinced when I tell them I'm preparing for a class as I skip out of the lab early to go see a matinee.) Before my students and I watch any movies together, I ask the class to describe a typical scientist. "Mad" is one of the first adjectives they offer. The list continues with "nerdy," "power hungry," "ambitious," and "good but naïve." It's easy to see the origin of such negative preconceptions. I grew up watching the evil scientists in Frankenstein and The Fly, and all those characters--played by Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, and Peter Cushing--left me unsettled and occasionally terrified. But I also saw movies like The Story of Louis Pasteur, Madame Curie, and Arrowsmith, which portrayed scientists in a more positive light. There are still a few movies made today that depict the type of role models I remember and that I want my grandson (who is interested in science) to see, such as October Sky and The Dish; but these are in the minority. Much more prevalent are movies like Jurassic Park, Outbreak, and Deep Blue Sea--movies that show the effects of uncontrolled science and leave the viewer wondering, "Could scientists really be thinking about doing such things?" When I first started teaching this seminar, I wanted to explore the question of how accurately science is depicted in films. But I soon realized that there was something more important to consider. As many critics have suggested, movies embody our culture's dreams and nightmares; and movies about science tend to reflect society's fears about how powerful science is, the perceived lack of control over this power, and the consequences it can have on all of our lives. So, as the course developed, I scuttled the popcorn-stained notes I had used during the first year and began watching these movies from the perspective of society's attitudes toward science. For centuries, people have been afraid of what science could do to them. Think of the reactions to Galileo and Copernicus, the rise of the Luddites who lost their jobs to technology, and the numerous scientific advances that have been looked on by many with skepticism if not loathing. But are people afraid of science or of the changes that it can bring about? Is it the search for forbidden knowledge that scares us, or what can happen when Pandora's Box is opened, releasing the sometimes unintended consequences of science? These are some of the questions the freshmen and I tackle. We watch a lot of movies in the course of a semester, some in their entirety, others as clips, starting with the granddaddy of all popular films about science, Frankenstein, made in 1931. (I know, real film scholars would go back to Faust and silent movies; but life, and a semester, is too short.) Everyone who has seen the original movie remembers that the monster, Frankenstein, is brought back to life by using the electrical power of lightning, right? Wrong! Frankenstein was the doctor. Early on in the 800 or so remakes of the classic story, Frankenstein becomes the name of the monster, not the doctor. Certainly by 1948, when Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein came out, the monster had fully claimed the title name. (By the way, of all the remakes, my two favorites are the recent Rock 'n' Roll Frankenstein, where the monster is assembled from rock-star body parts and a certain anatomical piece is mistakenly taken from Liberace instead of from Jim Morrison, and Frankenhooker, which is referred to by cult movie watchers as "Sluts and Bolts"!) Frankenstein also sets the trend in portraying the misuses of new technology--in this case, electricity, which had a much more frightening meaning to people watching the film 75 years ago than it does today. In the early 20th century, most of rural America was not yet electrified; debates about the dangers of using 220 volts versus 110 were widespread and helped instill a fear about the hazards of this powerful and mysterious new force; proponents of 110 volts used the fact that the electric chair was powered by 220 volts, for example. There are many other examples of society's fears being expressed in film. Island of Lost Souls (1933) was an early warning about animal rights violations and fears of human vivisection. When the film was remade in 1977 as The Island of Dr. Moreau, it drew on suspicions of another scientific breakthrough--genetic engineering. In the 1950s, mutant monsters created from radioactivity (the ants in Them, for example) and post-apocalyptic visions of a world gone haywire provided movie themes that underscored society's fears of the atomic-energy technology just then being developed. I've observed in these films, as well as later ones (think of Splash or E.T. ), that the worst effects seem to come about when scientists join forces with government. Also, you can tell almost immediately that a movie scientist is up to no good if you see a sparkling, well-ordered lab with "efficient"-looking people working there. By contrast, a lab in disarray, occupied by an eccentric scientist, suggests a hero (or at least a good guy) in the making. Take a look at the bad guys in the movie Twister--they not only had a clean and tidy lab, they also drove black SUVs! The movies based on Michael Crichton's books are excellent expressions of our fears about technology gone out of control and, as a bonus for our class, they occasionally contain some reference to Berkeley. In Andromeda Strain, a deadly organism that threatens the human race dies out naturally, no thanks to the futile efforts of scientists to control it. A fictional Berkeley scientist in that film is a participant in the military-science shenanigans. Crichton's Jurassic Park trilogy about genetic engineering, on the other hand, was based on an idea presented in a research article by a real Cal scientist, professor of entomology George Poinar. Such movies deal primarily with the harm that scientists can do to others. But there is also a whole series of films about scientists who create or release the monster within themselves. The many versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, Hollow Man, Forbidden Planet, The Fly, and Altered States all show this quite effectively. The past two summers' big hits, Spiderman and The Hulk, both presented a similar theme under the guise of genetics run amok, and both use an old story updated to reflect new fears. In the case of Spiderman, the spider venom in the decades-old original comic book story resulted from exposure to radioactivity; in the new movie, the venom and its odd effects on Peter Parker come from a genetically engineered spider. The Hulk also uses genetic engineering to propel its plotline--and no wonder, given ongoing uncertainties about genetically modified foods and the deciphering of the human genome. What about women scientists in film? I started to think about this after my students and I had seen one particular film about science, and a young woman in the class asked indignantly: "Where are the women in this movie?" She had a point. In the real world of science, despite gains over the past decades, women remain in the minority. In the film world, the gender gap is even more extreme. I now ask women graduate students from my lab to lead a discussion in my freshman seminar on the topic of women in science. While male scientists in the movies are almost inevitably destructive--whatever their intentions--female scientists are most often depicted as bumbling and incompetent. Think of the hilarious Elaine May as the socially awkward botanist in A New Leaf. And though biochemist Lorraine Bracco (before studying psychiatry for The Sopranos) is serious enough to stand up to the authoritative Sean Connery in Medicine Man, how could she not have seen right away that the antidote was in the ants in the sugar bowl? Dr. Ellie Arroway in Contact is, to me, the best portrayal of a woman scientist in the movies. In fact, I think Contact is the most realistic movie made about the issues a modern scientist faces every day. Dr. Arroway (played by Jodie Foster) struggles with such concerns as who gets credit for discoveries and how to obtain funding for speculative research, problems every scientist deals with. But my students don't choose Contact when they vote for the "Best Science Movie Watched" at the end of the semester. The movie they invariably choose is Fat Man and Little Boy, the story of Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves, and the Manhattan Project. (In the movie, a Berkeley class is shown with a professor smoking a cigarette while lecturing--something that has been illegal here for quite a few years!) I show this movie not only because I think it's a great depiction of scientists in the 1940s, but also because many of the events of that project have been so well documented; I am also able to include anecdotes from many of the emeritus faculty at Cal who knew the participants. Comparing the movie with the actual events, we can see how movies alter reality for dramatic effect. For example, it's well known that a signal from a California radio station accompanied the countdown for the Trinity test of the atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico; but the actual music was Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for Strings," not "Dance of the Reed Flutes," as heard in the movie. Perhaps the film's most dramatic sequence, the radiation poisoning of physicist Louis Slotin (played by John Cusack), which in the film functions as a warning of the uncontrolled consequences of nuclear bombs, actually occurred almost a year after World War II ended. I've often wondered why Fat Man and Little Boy is a perennial favorite among the students. Is it the engrossing story of the conflict between the physicist Oppenheimer and General Groves for control of the project? Is it the movie's suggestion that some of the scientists tried to stop--and maybe could have stopped--the dropping of these bombs and their horrific effects? A movie depicting events six decades after they happen perhaps leaves us wondering, "What if things had been different?" The "Science goes to the movies" seminar ends with student presentations on topics from "Depictions of scientists when they meet aliens" (such as scientist Sam Jaffe in awe of suave alien Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still) to "Childhood experiences that turn children into scientists" who become heroes (Contact and October Sky) or villains (The Young Poisoner's Handbook). One of my favorite presentations drew on concepts a student learned from a Physics I class to explain why certain scenes were physically impossible, like the fights in The Matrix. I look forward to these presentations; Berkeley students are creative and, like most of us, have strong opinions about movies. But most of all I enjoy seeing these students end the semester with a critical eye about the science, and the scientists, they watch in the movies. Vincent Resh, a professor at Cal since 1975, won a Distinguished Teaching Award in 1995. |
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