Learning on ScreenMad, Bad and Dangerous
Mad, Bad and Dangerous: The Scientist and the Cinema by Christopher Frayling (Reaktion Books, 2005). ISBN: 978-1861892850 (hardback), 258 pages. Price: £19.95; ISBN: 978-1861892850 (paperback) £17; Kindle, £19.95
About the reviewer: Dr Miles Booy was awarded his PhD by the University of East Anglia for his work on questions of authority in the representation of Christ in film. He is the author of Love and Monsters: The Doctor Who Experience, 1979 to the Present (IB Tauris, 2012) and his other publications include contributions to The Cult TV Book (2010).
Cinematic agendas aside, Christopher Frayling sees his book as contributing to the lengthy list of public issues which might be subsumed under the title ‘public understanding of science’. Questioning where the public gets its image of science and its practitioners from, this naturally takes him to popular culture, where misunderstanding might be a better word. In a book packed to the gills with Universal Studios horrors, radiation mutations, biology gone wrong and V2 missiles, the most frightening thing is perhaps a 1988 poll which found that two-thirds of people didn’t realize the Earth goes round the sun. To what degree is such astounding ignorance popular culture’s fault? Frayling’s analysis of early film’s representations of science, with laboratories portrayed richly in magical or alchemical imagery, and the similar discourse around the medium itself (Edison as a ‘wizard’ etc) might suggest that the battle was lost long before the emergence of cinema.
Of course, the scholarly norm has been to phrase the question as the representation of science itself, rather than scientists. Frayling’s small shift in emphasis has the advantage that whilst it intersects nicely with such studies, a number of the traditional stopping off points in the debate are sidetracked. Star Wars (1977), for instance, traditionally analyzed in such studies because of it twin poles of cuddly robots and planet-destroying weaponry, only gets some passing references. Instead, the public imagery of figures such as Einstein, Hawking and Wernher Von Braun are analyzed (the latter appeared in the flesh on television in The Wonderful World of Disney) as well as the great fictional mad professors of the Frankenstein ilk. There’s also coverage of the cinematic development of the computer geek, the boffin and other scientific types (or clichés). Undeveloped – because they might provide some answers for why scientific discourse fails to engage so much of the public – at the end is a consideration of the scientific mavericks of Contact (1997), Medicine Man (1992) et al, purveyors of a scientific heroism tainted by a New Agey feel.
The picky might say that for a book costing £20, stills are thin on the ground, but the ones used are well chosen, preferring to show the unusual over the familiar. There’s little to complain about beyond that. Though recognizing the part which the populace’s own disinterest plays in their scientific ignorance, Frayling is also worried about scientists – perhaps the majority of them, though we can all name high-profile examples – who, encouraged by the ‘publish or perish’ culture of modern academia, work only for their peers and never attempt public engagement. That’s a concern not only in science, of course, but also in the arts and humanities where recondite research rarely circulates outside the post-grad elite who generate and use it. No danger of that here. This is a readable book, always keen to engage outside its core subject matter and accessible to film followers of all types
Dr Miles Booy
