Is Sexing Up Scientists All That Bad?
Clifford at 4:10 pm, September 8th, 2005I’ve previously raised discussion (see e.g. here) about the benefits of protrayal of science, scientists, and the scientific process on TV before, in both fictional and non-fictional settings. Sadly, one of the best (and only) examples of a (fiction) show which does that in recent times has been Crime Scene Investigation (CSI), a show about forensic scientists. Now, I’ve never seen more than about two episodes of this (and those soon after its launch) but apparently it is now very popular indeed. I can’t help but think that this is potentially positive (for several reasons I’ve spoken about before), depending upon exactly how the writing is done, etc… (Others of you can (and no doubt will) comment, having seen it. Please do. I have no opinion since I do not watch it.)
Anyway, note:
Forensic science’s spell in the limelight has given it huge kudos. Glitzy TV shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation have sent students flocking to forensics courses. But while this interest is sexing up the image of scientists, is it also stopping police catching criminals and securing convictions?
This is from the New Scientist report on some interesting effects (not all positive!) of the popularity of the show on the legal system in this article. Here’s a further extract or two:
“Jurors who watch CSI believe that those scenarios, where forensic scientists are always right, are what really happens,” says Peter Bull, a forensic sedimentologist at the University of Oxford. It means that in court, juries are not impressed with evidence presented in cautious scientific terms.
Another problem caused by media coverage of forensic science is that it informs criminals of the techniques the police employ to catch them. “People are forensically aware,” says Guy Rutty, of the Forensic Pathology Unit at the University of Leicester, UK. For this reason, some forensics experts are reluctant to cooperate with the media.
There is an increasing trend for criminals to use plastic gloves during break-ins and condoms during rapes to avoid leaving their DNA at the scene. Dostie describes a murder case in which the assailant tried to wash away his DNA using shampoo. Police in Manchester in the UK say that car thieves there have started to dump cigarette butts from bins in stolen cars before they abandon them. “Suddenly the police have 20 potential people in the car,” says Rutty.
There’s a bit more discussion you should read, mostly focusing on the fact that it is actually very hard to beat the forensic techniques, as a criminal, even if you are aware of them, so we’re probably all ok in the long run…..
However, I can’t help but wonder: What is reported -especially about jurors being inappropriately influenced by CSI- might be a bit of a problem for forensics and crime, but might there still not be overall positive benefits (compared to where we are now, e.g. ID vs common sense, etc) if applied to other fields….? Maybe it would not be a bad thing if people started to be more prepared to believe people who present rational arguments, i.e., based on facts, observation, and deductive reasonsing….
But yes, it does seem that in the writing in these shows, more care needs to be given to showing that careful arguments, if based on limited data, or faulty assumptions, can fail.
Overall, I still think that the existence of such shows (given all the other stuff that’s on TV) is a positive thing, that we should be pleased to see more, and that more effort sould be made to try to make them even better. Thoughts?
-cvj
P.S. And (sigh) I have to say this right at the outset, even though it will still be mentioned: Looking at the improvement of the presentation of science in the popular media is not intended to replace teaching science in schools, ok? So you don’t need to bring that up again. We can proceed on all fronts.
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I watched CSI in spurts when I go home and actually have a TV. Since it is a TV show, the good guys always win very cleverly. But the show is very well written and kudos to the writers for actually making science interesting to the lay public.
I understand the “CSI effect” might result in a headache for lawyers, but what is wrong with that? I think I’ll rather have a slightly informed jury than an ignorant one (cue the cliche about how a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, but well…). I’d like to think that raised expectations are better than misplaced expectations.
Anyone remember MacGyver? Best. Show. Ever. CSI reminds me of that. So yeah, sex is sexy. Sexing up scientists is sexier!
(Ok, the last is part joke, part fantasy.)
Excellent post.
Let’s put it this way: is there any profession that TV does not “sex up” in a way that is not faithful to the reality of that profession? (Think cop dramas, shows on firefighters, shows about teenagers living in California…)
It’s in the nature of TV to distort reality until it’s entertainment. If folks are confused by CSI, it’s either a) because these are the same people who actually believe that TV is a source of accurate information, regardless of the subject or b) since folks are un-used to seeing science depicted on TV in this way, they’re also not in the habit of putting on their mental TV filters in evaluating the veracity of the information that’s presented.
All that aside, I think this is a fantastic development. Distortions or no, the more scientists young people see depicted as something other than the old white man / mad scientist stereotype, the more they’re likely to be interested in and respectful of the field.
Mr Orange:- We are in agreement…Excellent last paragraph.
Now I’m off back to my secret hideout (containing an astonishingly well-equipped lab) to continue my preparations to take over the world. (cue maniacal laugh: HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa…..!!)
-cvj
Hey Clifford,
I think it would be nice to get any new archetype, or any new plot line, on TV shows, and if it is a scientist, all the better… good luck with that.
Clifford, you are supposed to say, “The fools…I’ll make them all pay!”. People with Phds and therefore the title “Dr” are depicted by Hollywood as either insane, dangerous, unstable, egomaniacal or megalomaniacal, or some combination of these. Here are a few examples:
(1) Dr Hans Reindhart from the film “The Black Hole” has murdered all the crew and is in orbit around a black hole with plans to take his ship into it;
(2) Dr Smith from “Lost in Space”. Slimy and self-serving and totally untrustworthy;
(3) Dr Sorin from “Star Trek Generations” is an insane scientist destroying star systems so he can return to the “Nexus”;
(4)Dr Strangelove from the film “Dr Strangelove”, played by Peter Sellers is a nuclear weapon scientist with a Nazi arm he can’t control. Very funny this one though.
(5) Dr Weir from the film “Event Horizon” is the designer of a creepy spaceship that disappered and has been “outside the universe”. He ends up becoming quite deranged and starts killing everyone.
(6) Dr No. Mad guy from James Bond film who wants to take over the world. He even has his own nuclear reactor.
(7) Dr Morbius from “Forbidden Planet” whose artifically inflated IQ and bad dreams are responsible for countless deaths;
(8) Dr Balter. Computer genius from the new “Battlestar Galactica” tv series who is responsible for the humans getting ‘genocided’;
(9). Dr Wren. A nutter from the movie “Alien Resurrection” with plans to breed the aliens using human hosts.
There are many more I am sure but you get the point!
One interesting depiction of a scientist was “Dr Richard Daystrom” in the classic Star Trek episode “The Ultimate Computer”. Before he appears they discuss him, his genius, and about how he won the Nobel and “Xi Magna” prizes and so on. If you have never seen this before you are expecting him to be a white man but you are a little surprised when he is actually a black man, elegantly played by the late William Campbell. This was unusual and interesting for 60s tv since scientists were always depicted as middle-aged or old white men. I can never quite decide whether this was a truly positive picture of a scientist since in the end his new computer system fails and is responsible for hundreds of deaths before he himself takes a breakdown. He was not a bad or negative person though and it was a case of him creating something powerful that simply went beyond his control.
This is the only example I am aware of tv depicting a scientist as other than a middle-aged or old white man, at least from that era.(Sci-fi geek…me?:) Never:)). But I can think of few instances of a totally positive portrayal of a scientist in film or tv, or where the science involved does not go awry.
(Emerged from secret-hideout-lair for lunch: Great lab in there, but strangely no kitchen….)
Thanks for the examples, Steve. Some of my favourites. I’d also noticed and had exactly the same thoughts that you expressed about the Daystrom character.
Well, at least there’ll be some equations on the big screen next week….. I just watched the trailer for the film-of-the-play Proof. See link here. Of course, the mathematician’s genius drives him mad….. sigh. Yep… CSI seems to be the closest we’ve come to a mainstream portrayal of “scientist as regular person”. Sad, really.
-cvj
Oh… don’t forget Dr. Evil. Not Mr. Evil, Dr. Evil.
There’s also Otto Octavius, i.e., Dr. Octopus (fusion experiments drive him mad and his prosthetic arms fuse into his body giving him eight limbs), Dr. Doom (gamma rays drive him mad and give him some stupid powers of some sort), Dr. Connors (turns into a lizard-man as a result of experiments on regeneration…no doubt to appear in spiderman movies soon), Dr. Bruce Banner (turns into Hulk and smashes stuff when he gets excited or angry)…..
You know, maybe its a good thing that enrollment by domestic applicants to do physics and other scientists has been down for years. It is all part of a secret plan to break the pipeline producing evil white male geniuses wanting to take over the world…… Hmmmm.
-cvj
Ok. Last comment before returning to lair:
I just realized that it is (arguably) comic books that so far have done the best at portraying scientists positively (if not as “regular people”), but the movie versions have downplayed that aspect a lot so far….
For example, Peter Parker is in fact a science whiz. He designs and builds a lot of stuff, and one of the reasons he’s battling a lot of mad scientists as Spiderman is because of his association with the scientists in the normal world. He designs and builds his web-shooters, for example, and of course must know a lot of physics and materials science to get the fantastic propeties the webbing has. But in the film they just have him emit the webbing as part of his wierd collection of powers. Sigh.
Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four is also a scientist of note who does all sort so of great things with his science…… They play that aspect down in the film….. Bruce Wayne designs and builds a lot of his toys, I seem to recall…..he essentially mail orders them or gets others to build them in the Batman films…
Hank McCoy is an excellent scientist in the X-Men comics (as is Magneto, who of course is on the bad side…). Apparently he will appear in the third movie, and I bet they play down his scientist aspect a lot and just have him jumping around thumping bad people as the Beast…..
Sadly, they’re all white and male again (as far as I can recall)…. So they still were trapped within certain sterotypes….
I could go on, but…duty calls. Back to the hideout….(maniacal: HaHaHa!…etc)
-cvj
But what about MacGyver!
He was a physicist from the TVshow’s equivalent of Caltech! And he was so cool even though he has a mullet.
Seriously though, I think MacGyver was the first very successful TV show with a scientist as the main character solving things through scientific applications of knowledge, when other shows (faced with identical situations) would resort to guns and bombs.
Just looked at the Anthony Hopkins film link. Yes, we have “mathematical genius” and “unstable” together in same sentance. So more of the same. Hopefully they will at least have a math consultant on the film so any equations look convincing.
I forgot about “Dr Evil”. You are right, no way he would be plain “Mr Evil”. Other ones I forgot were Dr Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll, Dr Moreau, although I think these guys were MDs rather than Phds. I do recall now there are some rare instances in some movies of the scientist as a non-nerdy hero or leading man, breaking the usual stereotype. These guys were always more my idea of scientists. For example, Dr Clayton Forrester in “War of the Worlds” (the 1950s movie) and Dr Cal Meacham in 50s classic “This Island Earth. Also Dr Charles Forbin in “Colossas: the Forbin Project”. Here, the scientist is portrayed as square-jawed, good looking and heroic as well as brilliant. The characters are trustworthy, stable and have integrity–and they get the girl too!
What about Dr. Ellie Arroway from the movie Contact? A movie that I assure you has inspired many girls to take up physics. She may or may not have been crazy.
Steve wrote:
Oh yes…. so Mark and Sean are already well-represented in the movies then! Excellent…
Cassandra:- Yes! A rare and welcome example! Thanks!
-cvj
Oh yes…. so Mark and Sean are already well-represented in the movies then!
Clifford is being entirely too modest to include himself, though he certainly has those square-jawed–good-looking-heroic-brilliant-trustworthy-stable-have-integrity-get-the-girl aspects that Mark and Sean do.
Okay, enough flattery, lest I appear insincere, but I just had to put it out there.
BTW, I thought of two recent sci-fi films with black male actors as scientists: “The Core†stars Delroy Lindo who plays a geophysicist and inventor and is a member of a team of gifted scientists out to save the world; “Evolution,†with Orlando Jones as a geology professor who investigates the crash site of a meteor to take samples of organisms.
Back to sexing up science…
On the flipside of positive professorial portrayals, here’s a link to an article that mentions scientists using scientific inacuracies in movies as pedagogical tools to help students learn and to increase interest in science. I think of it as akin to those blooper shows that were once so popular; some people like to indulge their skepticism by laughing at the occasional slip-ups in film-making. When suspension of disbelief falls short of the mark, it still can be fun to dissect scenes and learn how the real world works.
“What’s Wrong with This Picture? Educating via analyses of science in movies and TV”
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20041016/bob10.asp
Athena, thanks for the link! …and I’ll take the charity, too. Thanks, I’m not proud…
-cvj
Dr. Doom (gamma rays drive him mad and give him some stupid powers of some sort)
Gamma rays? Stupid powers? Was this the movie version? That’s certainly not the comic book version.
Dr. Doom was a genius with no powers, with serious mother issues. His determination to resurrect his dead mother was the impulse behind all his evil plots. His power all came from things he built, working out of his castle stronghold in Latvaria. He only had superpowers on a few occasions, like when he stole the “power cosmic” from the Silver Surfer.
His nemesis (and old college friend) Reed Richards was irradiated with cosmic rays, of course, becoming Mr. Fantastic, who did indeed have stupid powers, but also was a genius who always built amazing devices to save the day.
[/dork]
Also, regarding Proof, at least from reading the play I don’t think the implication was that math drives one mad. The old man was brilliant and tragically struck by mental illness in his old age. The real focus of the story is on his daughter, also a mathematician, and one of his grad students. So I think it actually succeeds rather well in portraying very human mathematician characters. As for whether the equations will look right, I expect so. The play takes place in Hyde Park and the movie was filmed on and around the University of Chicago campus for accuracy, so I expect they got the details right.
Anonymous, I was talking about the movie version, (which was the theme of the discussion) not the comic. But I misspoke when I said gamma rays vs cosmic rays. Gamma rays were used for Bruce Banner and the Hulk. Thanks for the correction, and the background on Doom (which I did not follow as I was bored by the Fantastic Four as a kid). And I don’t mind Reed Richards’ powers by the way. Being able to stretch would be rather useful. But in the movie Doom has some stupid sparkly electric business or other…..very unneccessary addition. So yes….it would have been better if they’d stuck to the comic and had it as a battle of science
methods…..further emphasising my point that comics are still ahead of the movies in (inspirational/fictional) science….
I actually have high hopes for Proof, by the way. I was not talking about the play so much as the publicity for the film….Will suspend judgement on the actual film until I see it. But the publicity is focusing on the “thin line between genius and madness” cliche, which is a shame. This is what we’re discussing, right? A broader spectrum of portrayal of scientists in the media…. fictional or otherwise.
Cheers,
-cvj
MacGyver! He was kind of nerdy prolongation of the A-team; these A-Team films always had an scene about car mechanics. Which could be also a provocative way to introduce people into the world of Newtons Watts and Joules. Hey I have actually started a popMech project: http://dftuz.unizar.es/~rivero/bici/ and I hope to put some engine there someday.
Professor Jorge in Calabuch is a German scientist from von Braun team. He comes to Spain hiding from the USA army, but he is finally trapped when he wins a contest of fireworks in Valencia.
Captain Nemo (or Prince Dakkar if you prefer) from “Vingt mille lieues sous les mers” is a prototipe of involved scientist; he should be in the list.
Now, to me, an interesting related question is what happened with the appeal of science we had in the XIXth century and why did it dissapear. It happened sometime between the first and second World Wars and it is easy to find between the publications of 1950 a lot of essays even more pessimistic than our modern John Horgan.
Dredging up a hazy memory: there was a film starring Pierce Brosnan as a geologist/volcanologist (or something) who saves the day and gets the girl at the end I believe, without going crazy. Sorry I can’t be more specific.
And there was that stupid chain reaction movie, where Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman are physicists who develop some sort of fuel-cell-like technology and have to flee the government/big energy who are being cut out of the energy business.
Whether or not Keanu being a physicist is an insult to physicists is another matter…
bittergraduatestudent - the biggest insult to physicists in the movies may well have been Denise Richards’ Nuclear Physicist in some dreadful James Bond film or other. A character called Christmas Jones, or something like that. So much of the film was awful, I’m sure that it was not Ms Richard’s fault. It was just a bad part, and a bad script, and they ought to have stopped making those movies a long time ago anyway. But I do give them some credit for having a part like that for a female lead. If only they’d remembered to write a script….. sigh.
-cvj
The movie in whihc Pierce Brosnan is a geologist was “Dantes Peak”. he also appeared as a scientist/researcher in “The Lawnmower Man”. Hopefully, Proof will be an interesting film, but I get the impression it is just trying to follow “A Beautiful Mind”.
I was just thinking Clifford, one protrayal of a black scientist was in Terminator 2. Here, Dr Miles Dyson is a highly intelligent successful and wealthy man–a role model for African Americans you could say. He is also portrayed as a dedicated workaholic. So this seems initially very positive. However, he is also portrayed in a very negative way too: it is his work on AI that leads to the creation of the Cyberdyne computer that destroys the world in a nuclear holocaust. As the film progresses his home and family life are wrecked and he himself is sacrificed. This part of the film bothered me. I had similar thoughts about the Daystrom character in Star Trek. Then again, one can read things into these films that the writers/directors never meant. Another black scientist from sci-fi was David Kano from Space 1999, the computer whizz but he is always portrayed as being much closer to the moon base computer than to any of his human companions.
Finally, as I was talking before about the squared-jawed handsome scientists from some old 50s films that always gets the girl. To show what I mean here is the extremely well-groomed and handsome Dr Cal Meacham
from “This Island Earth”, top man in “nuclear and astrophysics”
http://www.mst3ktemple.com/images/thisislandearth4.jpg
The girl here is a scientist too but her role seems to get demoted to just screaming whenever something unpleasant or frightening appears and to clinging onto the hero male scientist. Notice also that his hair stays in place and he remains well groomed even when being attacked by a mutant alien
http://www.briansdriveintheater.com/beefcake/rexreason/rexreason5.jpg
Hope these links work. Maybe this guy is Mark’s role model?:)
second link does’nt work!
This one should
http://www.geocities.com/rex_reason/islandgallery.html
OK, I should go and do something useful now with my time:)
I saw an episode of CSI where Grissom (the Chief CSI) knowledgeably pronounced that ‘Terminal velocity is 32 feet per second per second’. That noise you hear is the grinding of my teeth.
When it comes to bad movie physics, of course, the Intuitor page on Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics rules.
[...] So I showed up for the first class (this is three weeks ago now), and sure enough, there are the six or seven graduate students from Nick’s class…. but there are four or five students from the condensed matter group, and from the quantum information groups, part of CSI ([update: that’s the group’s name, see an earlier post]…I kid you not) over in Electrical Engineering! They saw a course with that title and, understandably, thought it was a good chance to learn some Relativistic Field Theory. [...]
[...] It is so rare to see a mainstream film which has main characters who are all academics/scientists without resorting to a standard set of cliches about how to depict them. In fact, my usual complaints about how scientists are portrayed were addressed, as one character directly mentions that portrayal to illustrate a point in the film. There were some cliches, but they were mostly all mild in comparison to the ones to which they could have resorted, and I put them down to being part of the price you pay for trying to write a drama at all. There are also some amusingly stiff and unnatural uses of the term “theoretical physicist” by the mathematician characters, which while not intentional, I thought it resulted in those references being actually funnier, being a theoretical physicist myself. [...]
[...] The whole world view expressed by the magazine (and the group, as far as I can tell) seems to be so in line with my fantasy of the way society should be in terms of being science-savvy, which I’ve talked about so many times in other posts on this blog. (See here , here, here, here, and comments of mine in the accompanying discussion threads too.) [...]