Stranger Than Fiction: A look at the relationship between science and film
September marked the 113th anniversary of the premiere of arguably the first science fiction film. La Voyage dans la Lune, a French silent film directed by Georges Méliès in 1902, depicts a ragtag group of scientists launching towards the moon in a giant cannon and literally hitting it between the eyes. Upon landing, the academics fight off a series of crab-like creatures (in the process committing regicide and killing their king) before falling back to earth and landing in the sea. Even considering its legacy as a first-of-its-kind, or the fact that it was released 67 years before humans actually landed on the moon, it’s easy to imagine a physicist in the audience denouncing the precession angle of the rocket as it hurdles through space, or a marine biologist complaining about the anatomy of the crab-people. Scientific research demands an attention to detail that is engrained and difficult for scientists to shake even when we’re away from the lab, and so we naturally scan movies for factual inaccuracies whenever they carry the Science Fiction label. Today, the relationship between the research and film industries is a complicated one, and in honour of Georges Méliès’ pioneering work as well as the coming and going of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, Scinapsis will be taking a look at the love-hate relationship between Scientific Research and Science Fiction.
Ideas tend to flow freely between the realms of research and film. Scientific breakthrough generally provides the source material for a movie and Hollywood builds on those ideas, allowing us to visualize its long-term effects through a moral or ethical framework. Take for example, the Human Genome Project initiated in 1990 and essentially completed in 2004. Right in the thick of its development in 1997, Columbia Pictures gave us Gattaca, a film depicting a society in which eugenics and genotypic profiling have become commonplace. These are, of course, legitimate concerns that stem from the Human Genome Project, but even today companies that offer genetic testing can only provide definitive risk levels for a handful of rare diseases that are tied to a single gene. Identifying genetic markers for polygenic traits like height or for diseases linked to multiple genes is still a long way off, and when Gattaca was released this idea would have been just a blip on the NIH’s Future Directions slide. And so, although the immediate benefits to society afforded by gene sequencing far outweigh any potential long-term ethical dilemmas, films like Gattaca make it so that the latter is more fun to talk about at parties (this feels like the right time to mention that I actually love Gattaca and talking about genome sequencing at parties). Unfortunately, this seems to be the case for many Science Fiction films. Researchers are often portrayed as shortsighted and pursuing discovery for discovery’s sake without consideration of the moral implications that could arise. This is the trope of the mad scientist and it’s an image that has persisted throughout most of cinematic history. Fortunately, more recent movies have aimed to shake this negative stereotype, with films like Contagion, Interstellar, and The Martian depicting the ability of scientific innovation to help avert disaster, instead of being the disaster in itself.
Memorable Sci-fi films can also foster overblown expectations about what science can actually accomplish. We’ve all heard someone wonder aloud about why hover-boards haven’t been invented yet (if not, there’s a t-shirt devoted to the idea), but what gave them this outrageous expectation in the first place? This one can probably be traced directly to Back to the Future Part II (released in 1989), where Marty McFly travels to 2015 and roams around the future (present?) on a hover-board, and a quick search on Google Trends reveals that, indeed, people are demanding hoverboards in 2015. Of course, demanding hover-boards is all in good fun, but sometimes movies portraying fanciful technology can lead to serious misinformation. It is serious because it points to an alarming deficiency in scientific literacy. Is it funny that, after watching The Martian, some audiences believed it to be a true story and that we’d actually landed on Mars, or is it sad? Admittedly, it’s a bit of both, but sometimes the effects of this public misdirection can be long lasting. In an interview with The Guardian one scientist, referring to the effect that Jurassic Park has had on Paleontology, says “It raised expectations about DNA and what ancient DNA could do…when I give a talk about ancient DNA, they put up a poster and it has a dinosaur on it. I’ve objected. I’ve said: ‘there’s no dinosaur DNA. You should not show the dinosaur’. It’s had a bad influence.” I know we all wish for the T.rex to be brought back from extinction, but public perception of science matters, and when movies provide audiences with a skewed idea of what to expect from science, the public perceives research as lagging behind its potential.
There are, of course, very real benefits to having a big budget Hollywood film devoted to your area of research. Some would say that any publicity is good publicity, and irrespective of how scientists are portrayed in a film there is no denying that science fiction can help stoke the flames of public interest, and where there is public interest there is usually research funding. Science has a well-documented history of riding on the coattails of big budget Sci-Fi movies for the added publicity that they usually generate. In the movie Jurassic Park, dinosaurs are cloned from DNA found in prehistoric mosquitos that have been preserved in amber. Jurassic Park premiered on June 9, 1993. The very next day Nature published a paper reporting the sequence of the oldest DNA discovered to date: that of a weevil preserved in Lebanese amber estimated to be between 120–135 million years old. The day after on June 10, Jurassic Park was released throughout the United States. The timing of the Nature publication was certainly no coincidence, and the idea that such an illustrious journal would withhold (or rush) the printing of an article for publicity is alarming when you consider the risks involved, not least of which is the possibility of getting scooped and it’s curious to think about how the writers felt about this. Scientific American has since published a blog post with a first-hand account of the “race for ancient DNA” sparked by Jurassic Park that also describes the controversy surrounding the weevil DNA, which was possibly contaminated. Either way, the fact that Nature would publish such controversial data further highlights how eager they were to capitalize on that sweet, sweet dinosaur money.
It’s important to note that basking in the popularity of another, in this case, works both ways and there are specific instances of Hollywood shuffling its timing to coincide with a major scientific announcement, with the most recent example of this coming from the Martian. The film, originally slated for release on November 25, is about an astronaut stranded on Mars. However, the wide release date was moved up almost two months to October 2, a few days after NASA announced that it had found evidence of flowing water on Mars. The Martian has since gone on to rake in $100 million in its opening weekend and director Ridley Scott revealed that he was shown the water-flow images while they were working on the film alongside NASA.
There’s a comfort to knowing that filmmakers are beginning to work so closely alongside researchers to ensure that their movies are factually sound, and The Martian has been lauded by Neil deGrasse Tyson as getting “enough of the science right”, which is high praise coming from him. The recent string of big-budget scientifically accurate movies shows that there is an increasing respect in Hollywood for the scientific process. This respect extends beyond depicting accurate scientific principles to portraying scientists themselves as what we really are, normal people. In the end, although the realms of fiction and research share a sordid relationship, it’s important to remember that accuracy is and should be secondary when it comes to movies. Their job is to tell a compelling story, and if that story needs a hover-board to be compelling then so be it. The onus is on us, as scientists to help improve scientific literacy and to make sure the public is able to deduce fact from fiction.
Originally published at scinapsis.com.
