Unscientific America

“REALITY ENDS HERE.” IT’S THE UNOFFICIAL MOTTO OF THE UNIVERSITY OF Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, cast in concrete at the entranceway to the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts and, in Latin, at the South entryway of a new complex building. As scientist-turned-filmmaker and USC film school graduate Randy Olson explained to us, the slogan

is not a joke. It’s a bold, challenging statement—a basic “screw you” to the outside world who thinks that accuracy and reality are important variables in storytelling, when in fact they are the dread enemy of storytelling. No storyteller wants an expert around who will question his premises. It’s hard enough to tell a story without having some annoying expert sitting there correcting every detail and negating every premise.

No wonder scientists haven’t always been pleased with depictions of themselves, and the subjects they study, in the entertainment media. There’s a long litany of complaints: Too many stereotypically nerdy scientists—think Rick Moranis in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids—and too few positive role models. Too many mad scientists trying to play God. Too many plotlines dependent upon the supernatural and the paranormal—stories in which, as in The X-Files, the credulous believer is always right and the scientist-skeptic is always wrong. And too many simply ridiculous “scientific” premises, epitomized by the 2003 film The Core, in which Earth’s magnetic field begins to collapse because the planet’s core stops spinning.

In light of the massive influence of the American entertainment industry, both here and around the world, scientists’ complaints about Hollywood deserve to be taken seriously. Successful blockbusters reach audiences numbering in the tens of millions or more, and gross in the hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. Some become pop-culture reference points for entire generations: Even those countless Americans who can’t name a living scientist probably know who “Doc” from Back to the Future is. Entertainment industry expert Marty Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, perhaps puts it best when he describes Hollywood films as the “unofficial curriculum of society.”

Within this curriculum, science usually gets taught through the medium of science fiction and the sometimes related disaster-movie genre, both of which have become dominant storytelling modes. From the Star Wars films to The Matrix to Jurassic Park, it has been estimated that sci-fi blockbusters constitute fully one-third of the top fifty biggest film moneymakers in history—and disaster movies don’t do too shabbily either. But the relationship between science fiction and actual science is, at best, complicated.

In the sci-fi film genre, there’s a kind of unending arms race to achieve ever higher degrees of verisimilitude through ever more stunning computerized graphics and special effects. Reality—or at least the semblance of it—sells. The pursuit of filmic “realism,” however, comes about to serve moneymaking goals rather than to satisfy a small, scientifically trained demographic, which may be the only audience group that sees past the veneer enough to contest aspects of it. Consider the dramatic presentation of big-screen dinosaurs in 1993’s Jurassic Park: Many aspects of their portrayal—the idea that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, for instance—were contested on a scientific level, but viewers thought they were watching the most “realistic” dinosaurs yet depicted. Seeing is believing, especially when the picture is worth millions of dollars.

And so sit the scientists, in the dark, struggling to suspend disbelief but feeling rather ambiguous at best. Yes, science underlies the imaginative leaps of the sci-fi genre, and whenever a big geophysical disaster movie is being made, you can bet that the producers will call on a scientist to consult and lend the film plausibility. Yet scientists remain perennial Hollywood outsiders, always threatening the plot with their pesky emphasis on details. The problem was apparent as early as the 1920s, with Fritz Lang’s film Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond). Lang’s science consultant, a rocket scientist named Hermann Oberth, reasonably pointed out that as the moon doesn’t have any atmosphere, the characters would have to carry out their roles dressed in spacesuits. Lang replied, “How could one present a love story taking place on the Moon and have the lead characters talk to each other and hold hands through space suits?” Needless to say, there were no spacesuits in the final cut of the film.

To better grasp why science can stumble in its interactions with the entertainment industry, perhaps we need only define our terms. According to Kaplan’s Norman Lear Center, the word entertaining in its broadest sense simply means “not boring.” The entertainment drive, Kaplan adds, is “the imperative to capture and hold attention”; that’s how the entertainment industry makes money. To hold attention, successful entertainment requires a strong story line, character development, and high stakes, often of the life-and-death variety. Events unfold at high speed, and there must be serious action or serious drama, not to mention very attractive people.

The problem for science in this context is that the technical facts it furnishes can rarely hold the attention of non-scientists—and anyone who has watched presentations at a scientific conference knows why. That is not to say the goals of science, education, and critical thinking can’t also be advanced through entertainment: They can, but only if doing so poses no apparent risk to the product and if the people who matter—writers, directors, producers—see some value in it.

In the many notorious cases where they don’t, meanwhile, the most stunning factual and theoretical howlers can occur. It’s not merely that you shouldn’t look to Spider-Man or X-Men to learn about the process of mutation, as these films greatly exaggerate it for dramatic purposes. Some of the worst sci-fi and disaster films go much further, seizing upon entirely nonsensical “scientific” premises and then proceeding to come increasingly unhinged as the story advances. In 1997’s Volcano, for instance, an actual volcano suddenly appears out of the ground to threaten Los Angeles (luckily for L.A., the San Andreas fault, due to its particular tectonic nature, can only produce earthquakes). Then there are the simply excessive made-for-TV disaster movies, like NBC’s heavily watched four-hour miniseries 10.5 (about a scientifically impossible earthquake) and CBS’s Category 7 (about a scientifically ridiculous mega-storm). And don’t forget the idiotic bloopers, as when a boastful geneticist in 2000’s Red Planet, showing off his wisdom, names the DNA bases “A, G, T, P.” That’s right, the actor actually says “P.” Didn’t the filmmakers see Gattaca? A high school science student would have been able to catch that one.

Yet in marshaling scientific complaints against the entertainment industry, it’s important to consider what really matters and what doesn’t. Any specialist—a historian, say, or an anthropologist—is prone to get ticked off if a film or TV drama makes a mistake about his or her field. And films like The Core and Volcano probably don’t help students or the public understand science—but then, neither are they intended to. So how worried should we really be if an inaccuracy or implausibility slips into a film to serve the plot or to satisfy audience expectations—if, say, Star Wars shows fiery explosions in space? Probably not very.

In other realms, though, matters grow more serious. For instance, inaccuracy about medical conditions and treatments can have a real impact on people who get a little too much of their sense of reality from the screen or television. Hollywood’s medical plots and subplots are legion—just think of Grey’s Anatomy, House, Lost (in which the main character, Jack, is a spinal surgeon), E.R.—and these are just prime-time dramas, not movies. These shows pride themselves on their medical realism; the directors and cast of E.R., for instance, make much of the fact that they consult constantly with real doctors. Good for them, but there’s much to make up for. For example, one mid-1990s study of television episodes involving CPR found that survival rates were unrealistically high and concluded that “the misrepresentation of CPR on television shows undermines trust in data and fosters trust in miracles.”

Perhaps more consequential than scientific inaccuracy, however, is a problem we might call scientist stereotyping. Many groups in society get exercised about how they come across in entertainment depictions, and scientists aren’t necessarily the most aggrieved. Still, their complaints have merit. As science-fiction film director James Cameron (Aliens, The Terminator , Titanic, and much else) has observed, the movies generally “show scientists as idiosyncratic nerds or actively the villains.”

Cameron’s statement finds support in a considerable body of data produced by scholars who have analyzed the treatment of science in film and on television going back several decades. A study of prime-time television programs between 1973 and 1983, for instance, found that one in six scientists was depicted as a villain and that one in ten got killed, both results being the highest rate for any occupational group on television. Such representations have consequences: Researchers who have studied the stereotypical views of scientists held by children even report that when they encounter real-life researchers who visit their classrooms, they think someone’s pulling their leg, because the scientists aren’t anything like the big-screen version—mean, male, gray-haired, and mad. As one study author explained to the magazine Nature: “They might say the person was too ‘normal’ or too good looking to be a scientist. The most heart-breaking thing is when they say, ‘I didn’t think he was real because he seemed to care about us.’”

The uncaring scientist, unconcerned about consequences, pursuing knowledge at all costs—this is the ugliest scientist stereotype, and also the most deeply rooted. It hails from a long literary tradition, dating back before Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Goethe’s Faust and Greek precedents like the story of Prometheus, which depict the search for knowledge as forbidden and dangerous, and leading to disastrous consequences. In this narrative, knowledge leads the scientist to play God, interfere with nature, and attempt to thwart fate by determining who lives and who dies. To know is, in essence, to kill. In film, such depictions go all the way back to Fritz Lang’s 1926 classic early sci-fi film Metropolis, in which the grotesque mad scientist Rotwang builds an evil robot to resemble the woman he loves, because he can’t have her in real life. The paradigmatic modern example of the evil scientist trope is perhaps E.T., in which the scientists, looking like astronauts in their protective gear, want to slice up the cute alien for research.

As we don’t see many films about evil literary critics, it’s safe to infer there’s something about scientists that triggers a particular kind of stereotyping, and that this reflects our society’s uneasiness with the power they can sometimes wield. As we saw in the Pluto story that began this book, scientists also make enemies by taking away from people things they cherish—beliefs, settled understandings. Through such actions, they can intimidate and sometimes even enrage non-scientists, and thus they play some role in the construction of their own image.

Does Hollywood hate scientists because they’re mean and intimidating and spoil all the fun? Probably not. But throughout the industry, there is certainly a sense that science is inimical to storytelling, that it quashes creativity, which must be allowed to breathe. As screenwriter and ScienceDebate2008 founder Matthew Chapman explained about some of his fellow writers: “Among the less talented, there’s I think a kind of inherent prejudice against science, because science means being rational, and being rational is considered the opposite of being creative—whereas fantasy, superstition, magic, all of these more child-like ways of looking at life, are somehow thought to be what the creative process is about.”

Not everyone in Hollywood shares such sentiments: Many filmmakers care about science, as do many writers. But unless they have serious clout within the industry, they may not be able to get their way even if they try. “The person who creates the idea for a story or screen-play is not the person who makes it generally,” explains Joe Petricca, a screenwriter and executive vice dean of the American Film Institute. “The person who makes it is about money, business, filling theaters, and sales—and they will exert all the pressure they can to make changes so that it’s not so, ah, threatening in that way . . . threateningly intelligent.”

The top directors—the Ron Howards, James Camerons, Steven Spielbergs—have enough status in Hollywood to ensure the realization of their artistic visions, which may include the favorable or serious treatment of science (or math, as in Howard’s A Beautiful Mind). And a number of films have been commended for their plausibility and scientific accuracy, ranging from Carl Sagan’s Contact (directed by Robert Zemeckis) to the 2003 smash-hit Pixar film Finding Nemo, which luxuriated in its sensuous depictions of undersea life and strove, with the help of its science consultant, to achieve the maximum degree of ichthyological realism possible. But when it comes to the sympathetic treatment of science in Hollywood, “the word that comes to mind is serendipitous,” observes Martin Gunderson, a University of Southern California electrical engineer who has consulted on several films, most notably 1985’s Real Genius. In other words, it happens—but more because some individual director, writer, or producer cares than because of industry culture.

Hollywood ought to do better, but scientists also need to be realistic about what they can expect. At least at the extreme, we find in the scientists’ camp a hectoring annoyance over inaccuracy, the unwillingness or inability to suspend disbelief, and the strange idea that serious science education—instruction about facts and theories—ought to occur through the medium of fictional film and television. These tendencies just won’t help in Hollywood interactions. And some scientists will also have to get over the idea that everyone ought to be as captivated by the intricacies of science as they are. “The natural world is fascinating in its own right,” Oxford’s Richard Dawkins has stated. “It really doesn’t need human drama to be fascinating.” He even reportedly told the New York Times that he wondered why Jurassic Park required a cast that included human beings—after all, it already had dinosaurs.

Such science-centrism simply won’t work for the broader, non-scientist population. It ignores their compelling need not to be bored. Successes like March of the Penguins notwithstanding, most of the time people need to see and hear stories about other people, or about animals that are given human attributes, as in Disney-Pixar films. Dawkins and some other scientists fail to grasp that in Hollywood, the story is paramount—that narrative, drama, and character development will trump mere factual accuracy every time, and by a very long shot. Either science will align itself with these overweening objectives or it will literally get flattened by the drive for profit.

The scientific method, as a process, generally does not make for great storytelling, and particularly not filmmaking. As the late novelist, screenwriter, and movie producer Michael Crichton once put it, there are at least four important rules of movies that don’t mesh with the process of research: “(i) Movie characters must be compelled to act. (ii) Movies need villains. (iii) Movie searches are dull. (iv) Movies must move.” Crichton argued that real science, with its long, drawn-out intellectual processes and frequent dead ends, simply can’t be reconciled with such exigencies. “The problems lie with the limitations of film as a visual storytelling medium,” he concluded. “You aren’t going to beat it.”

But maybe scientists can join it? The entertainment industry needs science both to achieve very valuable filmic “realism” and to serve up the most intriguing ideas about the future, in order to furnish compelling sci-fi and disaster story lines. The scientific community should take advantage of this fact and seek out constructive consulting roles within the entertainment industry. It should develop relationships with important players and learn how to serve them to further shared goals, rather than merely issuing criticism and denunciation. Scientists who have done so have frequently reported that the experience was a very enjoyable one, and that they made a real difference. For instance, science consultants working on the 1990s films Dante’s Peak (about a volcanic eruption) and Twister apparently headed off attempts to cast scientific leaders or institutions in the role of out-and-out villains.

Science consultants can have an impact on the scientific content in a film’s script, on its set design, on its sound effects. In general, they are invited on board by those at the head of film projects—directors, producers—and their influence is proportionate to the closeness of their relationship to that leader. By the time a science consultant arrives on the scene to work on a project, many things such as plotline, cast, and budget are usually already agreed upon, and a script has likely been written, at least in draft form. Given all of this, any effective science consultant or adviser will be acutely aware of the realities and constraints of filmmaking and will work with them, rather than trying to overturn them.

To see as much, one need only consider Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. It was a very unconventional film—a documentary centered on a PowerPoint presentation—but something in the zeitgeist just clicked, perhaps because the messenger was the man who should have been president. Thus, the film’s smash success not only transformed Gore’s image and influence but also helped to move the global warming debate onto a new footing. Gore’s subsequent garnering of an Oscar (again bestowed by Hollywood) and a Nobel Peace Prize (not bestowed by Hollywood, but certainly very much influenced by it) only broadened the impact further. The stars aligned, and a Hollywood film had a massive impact in translating science’s relevance to policymakers and the public.

Hollywood can also shape and direct the pursuit of scientific careers. The success of CBS’s television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which glamorizes and dramatizes forensic science, led to a much-noted growth of student interest in the field and the proliferation of university programs to service that demand. This happened despite the fact that real forensic work is hardly as exciting and dramatic as it appears on TV, and few forensic scientists are as hot.

Perhaps these examples show why we badly need more go-betweens to link the science world and the entertainment industry. Luckily, the science community has begun to recognize this and work in a concerted way to promote it. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences—whose members once spurned Sagan—recently launched a project entitled the Science and Entertainment Exchange, which aims to “facilitate a valuable connection between the two communities.” This included the opening of a permanent National Academies office in Los Angeles to “make introductions, schedule briefings, and arrange for consultations to anyone developing science-based entertainment content.” This is a new initiative, so one cannot yet judge its success, but it is precisely the type of outreach the scientific community should be engaging in if it wants to take advantage of the immense opportunities afforded by the mass medium of film.

Sagan in fact epitomizes both the promise and the perils of scientists working with Hollywood. His 1997 film Contact, based on his novel of the same name, strove to preserve scientific accuracy and plot plausibility. It also depicted the main character, astrophysicist Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster), as a positive role model, a visionary who overcomes numerous obstacles to pursue her quest of determining whether extraterrestrial life really does exist and is trying to reach us.

Contact didn’t do badly. It earned $171 million worldwide, nearly doubling the $90-million production budget. But it was also competing with two considerably more brainless alien-related sci-fi movies, 1997’s Men in Black and 1996’s Independence Day, both of which made a great deal more money ($589 million and $817 million, respectively). And that unfavorable financial comparison, more than anything else, dramatizes the incredible challenge science faces in Hollywood. If films that strive to balance scientific plausibility with a compelling story line don’t succeed at the box office, the road will be tougher for future efforts. Luckily, scientific stinkers don’t necessarily make the biggest fortunes, either. When you compare two dueling 1997 volcano movies, the more plausible Dante’s Peak and the much less scientifically serious Volcano, the former did more business ($178 million worldwide) than the latter ($122 million worldwide).

Such figures provide hope that Hollywood could play a role that serves the interests of the entertainment industry, science, and society alike by helping us grapple with the future we are hurtling toward. The ideal synergy would occur if more sci-fi and disaster plots took as their basis the problems that we really need to worry about, and dramatized them compellingly. There have been some excellent, and successful, examples of such films in the relatively recent past, and in closing, let’s survey them.

Among science-related topics, human cloning and genetic engineering—issues that are already raising ethical concerns for us now and that will likely raise a great many more in the future—seem to generate some of the very worst filmmaking (as anyone who has seen The Sixth Day or Godsend or The Island can affirm). But 1997’s Gattaca, starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, represents an exception, a counterexample showing how filmmaking can help audiences contemplate the challenges that new discoveries could pose down the road.

In the futuristic film, Hawke plays Vincent Freeman, a so-called In-Valid because his parents did not opt, before his birth, to have a child whose genetic defects had been weeded out. This puts Vincent into a lower genetic caste, limiting his ability to achieve his dream of flying into space to Titan, the largest of the Saturnian moons. The film details how Vincent overcomes the obstacles posed by his genetic “limitations”—because in the end, genes aren’t everything. In laying out such a story line, Gattaca undercuts a kind of unthinking proposition that we’ve been fed all too often, which one critic called “genetic determinism.” In many Hollywood films, the techniques of biotechnology and genetic manipulation appear all-powerful and perfect; in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film The 6th Day, for instance, it’s no big deal to clone an exact replica of a human being. Gattaca challenges such questionable presumptions and constructs a far more realistic scenario in which the techniques of genetic manipulation have become unevenly distributed in society, creating considerable inequities, while at the same time, some genetically “limited” people overcome the hurdles they start out with even as some genetically “gifted” ones fail to achieve their potential.

Another film that tried to prepare us for the future—the 2004 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, which grossed a very impressive $542 million worldwide—focused on global warming. Unfortunately, on a scientific level the film’s plot is risible: It depicts climate change as the trigger for an instantaneous new ice age (huh?) and shows the world facing a massive, coordinated assault by upside-down, freezing hurricanes that somehow travel over land. Still, the movie also features a scientist (played by Dennis Quaid) in the lead protagonist role and contains a considerable amount of accurate dialogue and even some speeches about climate science—before the improbable lunacies begin, anyway. Virtually all of the film’s top characters are scientists and are treated sympathetically; and the message, inaccuracies aside, is that global warming is a problem that we can’t delay addressing, lest very bad things happen—so let’s listen to the scientists before it’s too late.

It would surely have been possible to make a global-warming-related disaster movie with a much closer connection to the actual risks posed. Still, it appears The Day After Tomorrow did have an important effect on its audiences. According to one study, those who had seen it were significantly more worried about global warming than those who had not and were significantly more convinced that global warming could trigger specific weather and climatic impacts (including, unfortunately, the idea of a new ice age caused by an ocean-current shutdown).

Contact, Gattaca, and The Day After Tomorrow all demonstrate the potential for collaboration between the world of science and the world of Hollywood, and suggest such interactions could be mutually beneficial, at least if those who care about science take up the challenge of connecting in a more positive way with the film and television industry.

That challenge must be met quickly, because the enemies of science certainly recognize the medium’s potential as a tool of propaganda. For example, the 2008 right-wing documentary Expelled! features the comedian Ben Stein in a dishonest look at the evolution controversy that slanders the scientific community for intolerance toward religion and the quashing of anti-evolutionist dissent. Throwing the kitchen sink at evolution, Stein not only charges that pro-intelligent design scientists have been repressed on university campuses by dogmatic Darwinists, but even preposterously blames Charles Darwin and his work for the Holocaust.

This is all quite inaccurate, even ludicrous; but the message conveyed by Expelled! about the evils of the scientific community has reached a lot of people, because it debuted at 1,000 theaters across the country. It ultimately earned over $7 million, making it the fifth-highest-grossing political documentary ever.

Expelled! represents a cultural warning sign that should not go unheeded. Film and television are massively powerful media and can be used as damaging weapons. Scientists must learn how to wield them as well, and for more virtuous purposes. They’ve been in the dark for far too long.