Kirby and Weingart, et. al., both address the portrayal of science in the movies, and what that means for science and society. Kirby sees the intersection of science and cinema grouped around four major research questions: Production (how science is represented in the production of cinematic texts), Content Analysis (how much and what kind of science appears in films), Cultural Meanings (cultural interpretations of science and technology in film), and Media Effects (effect of cinematic portrayals of science on science literacy and public attitudes towards science. Kirby, in particular, is interested in getting away from scientists’ narratives of popular films as detrimental to science literacy (by propagating inaccurate science) and towards a greater appreciation of how films produce and reproduce cultural meanings of science and thereby affect attitudes towards science. In the realm of production of films, filmmakers and scientists have different needs and attitudes towards “authenticity” and “verisimilitude” of science, with scientists concerned primarily with accuracy over an entire film, while filmmakers are concerned with authenticity as a resource to draw in audiences, and subservient to the constraints of budget, time, and narrative. Filmmakers can leverage the authority of scientific consultants to add authenticity to their films, but whether or not they do so, the notion of “authenticity” is contested and negotiated between filmmakers and scientists, and even films with notable inaccuracies from a scientific perspective may still be meaningful and useful for scientific educational purposes. However filmmakers’ claims to authenticity may harm science literacy because they naturalize both “accurate” and “inaccurate” science.
Content analysis is primarily quantitative studies of how much and what kind of science appears in films. Kirby cites Weingart, et. al., in this regard, and doesn’t himself go further into it. Weingart’s analysis of 222 films over eight decades finds that medical sciences appear most often, with psychology at the top, then biology and genetics. Next comes physics and chemistry. Though Kirby considers Weingart’s study primarily content analysis, the category blurs into cultural meanings, as Weingart and colleagues spend most of their time looking at patterns of portrayal of science in film. The frequency of disciplines portrayed is highly related to the frequency of archetypes of scientists and the cultural view of the field of science being done by the scientist. The study finds that over 80 years, most scientists in film are white, American, male, and middle aged, over a third single and another third whose relationships are unknown. Only 18% of scientists are female, and all are younger, more attractive, and lower on the career ladder than male counterparts. Weingart splits depictions into “benevolent” and “mad scientist” poles, with “ambivalent” scientists in between, but notes that even “benevolent” scientists are to some extent “ambivalent” in their portrayal as naïve but well-meaning. Mad scientists are generally associated with biological or psychological disciplines, sometimes with physical sciences, but always willing to cross ethical lines for the sake of knowledge or fame. Anthropology, astronomy, zoology, geology, and the humanities tend to be portrayed positively. Ways in which knowledge is gained include animal and human experiments, field studies/expeditions, knowledge acquired through genius, or by accident. Certain of these methods, biological experimentation and occasionally genius, are more often associated with mad scientists, while astronomy and the humanities are almost never portrayed negatively, although not being associated with genius, they are also often seen as marginal or insignificant. Rarely are scientific methods actually portrayed, usually only the results, with the exceptions being psychological and biological disciplines portrayed negatively due to criminal nature of the methods portrayed. The location of scientific production also correlates with positive or negative portrayal: mad scientists are always seen doing research in secret, outside the scientific community. “Good” science, rather, is public. The highly positive portrayal of anthropologists is connected with action adventure genres. Medical research, genetics, psychology are the fields most often portrayed in conflict with ethics, followed by physics, with astronomy, anthropology, and the humanities mostly not in conflict with ethics. A majority of science in film is fictional or future science, in utopian or dystopian worlds, mostly dystopian, and science usually portrayed just beyond the current state of research. What Weingart, et. al. conclude is that in the twentieth century, films involving science have primarily been concerned with human interventions into humanity itself, creating monsters, robots, hybrids or other abominations which have problematic relations to humanity, or bring up the specter of playing God by meddling with our own natures, which explains the predominance of biology, medicine, and the human sciences in mad scientist portrayals.
Kirby’s own analysis of cultural meanings of science and scientists mostly differ in his findings compared with Weingart. Rather than only mad, ambivalent, and benevolent scientists, he identifies other stereotypes for scientists: helpless scientists (who lose control of their experiments), amoral rationalists (who deny responsibility for the consequences of their research in favor of knowledge at all costs), absent-minded professors, and heroic scientists. Biopics of real scientists are another genre. These would range on Weingart’s scale of benevolent to ambivalent to evil. Kirby notices that particular stereotypes are dominant in certain decades (also with certain fields dominating in certain decades) greatly complicating Weingart’s view. For example, helpless scientists predominated in the first two decades of the twentieth century, mad scientists and biopics concerned with medicine and psychology were dominant from the 20s to the 40s, amoral rationalists in nuclear and space sciences predominated in the 50s, same type but with ecology in the 70s, and helpless scientists with computers and robots in the 80s. Contrary to Weingart, Kirby finds that, in the 90s at least, female scientists were well represented (33%) and portrayed “realistically” and not always conforming to gender stereotypes, although they did correspond to traditional notions of femininity, reinforcing cultural assumptions about womens’ roles in science, were single and without children, and often involved in romances. The last two decades have seen a surge in scientific plots involving genetic engineering (in one sense a resurgence of the 1920’s focus on eugenics), in part indicated by the amount of scholarly activity surrounding Jurassic Park and GATTACA. The main difference between the ’90s and ’20s is that the eugenics films were concerned with harmful effects of state eugenics, while the contemporary fear is about individualistic society’s embrace of genetics.
In terms of media effects, Kirby points to such films as The Day After Tomorrow, Armageddon, Deep Impact, Twister, Dante’s Peak, Mission to Mars, and Space Cowboys as either generating increased awareness (though not necessarily “literacy”) of certain scientific issues such as global warming or Near Earth Objects, or being a tool for involvement in education or propaganda through popular films by institutions such as NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. Studies of The Day After Tomorrow’s effects on attitudes towards global warming were ambivalent (U.S. and British viewers were more worried or convinced, while Germans were less convinced due to the movie’s version of events in which global cooling followed global warming) but they all agreed that increased awareness resulted regardless of whether or not attitudes changed.
In terms of cultural meanings and media impact, popular films, whether scientifically accurate or not, could be used to portray or substitute for “real” science, and especially in cases of “genre interpenetration” between films, TV shows or documentaries, comic books, computer games, novels and news articles. An example would be the use of Outbreak scenes in coverage of actual Ebola outbreaks in Zaire. The use of Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) by the Public Health Service for educational purposes is a similar example. What is important for Kirby is that films involving science, whether scientifically accurate or not, have powerful roles in shaping people’s beliefs, meanings, and attitudes about science, and can and are used to focus public awareness on certain scientific issues and can and do thus affect state policies and the attitudes of scientific communities themselves towards those issues. This focus on the cultural framing of science through film gets away from the usual science literacy focus of films as inaccurate portrayals of science.
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