Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema , Christopher Frayling , Reaktion Books, London, 2005 $35.00 (239 pp.). ISBN 1-86189-255-1
Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art in London and the chairman of the Arts Council of England, is a raconteur of the Anglo-American cultural scene. His astonishingly eclectic resumé encompasses Strange Landscape: Journey Through the Middle Ages (BBC Books, 1995) and Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone (Harry N. Abrams, 2005). In his scholarly work, Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema, Frayling draws on his considerable knowledge of film to survey relationships between science and modern society as depicted in movies. His book focuses on European and American science fiction and biopic films over the 20th century, from the earliest days of silent films to later blockbuster movies.
In contrast to Jay P. Telotte’s comprehensive Science Fiction Film (Cambridge U. Press, 2001) or Vivian Sobchack’s esoteric analysis of American sci-fi films in Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (Ungar, 1987), Frayling examines film portrayals of scientists as protagonists to gauge the general public’s level of science comfort. His detailed historical descriptions of the early kinetograph efforts of such filmmakers as Georges Méliès, whose famous A Trip to the Moon debuted in Paris in 1902, are particularly charming and fun to read. Somewhat more disturbing is Frayling’s account of the links between Fritz Lang’s 1929 Woman in the Moon (which followed his 1927 classic Metropolis) and Hermann Oberth’s development of rocketry in Germany. Oberth’s efforts were apparently financed in part by residual money from his serving as a technical adviser on the 1929 film. His assistant during the film’s production was a teenager named Wernher von Braun, who in 1937 would become technical director of the Third Reich’s nascent rocket program, serving as an SS officer and production head of the slave-labor, V-2 rocket facility in Peenemünde, Germany.
In 1955 von Braun would team up with Walt Disney to produce the short television film, Man in Space. Frayling’s descriptions of the connections between the early German sci-fi film concepts of space travel and the later rise of von Braun as a postwar American icon closely parallel those of M. G. Lord in her Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science (Walker, 2005), in which she recounts the roots of the US space program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (for a review of Astro Turf, see Physics Today, February 2006, page 54). Both Frayling’s and Lord’s accounts are fascinating—and chilling. Frayling writes from an erudite, but lively, historical perspective, focusing on the first half of the 20th century. His analyses of more recent films tend to be overly crisp; if the book has any shortcoming, that may be it.
Society’s perception of scientists should be a concern to us. Much like the character Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, scientists have come to depend on the kindness of strangers—in Congress, in the media, and in the general populace—to get research support. How those “strangers” see us as scientists—with respect, fear, acceptance, or contempt—has crucial bearing on our professional progress and on society’s well-being. To ignore that fact would be at our peril. For most people, film and television profoundly shape perceptions of reality; thus Frayling’s insightful examination should carry import. He quotes from Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Random House, 1995): “We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements … profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.” Frayling asserts that the gap between the need for science and technology and societal understanding generates both public suspicion and wonder, a tensional paradox exploited by filmmakers.
Frayling describes the stereotypes that have painted scientists as “saints like Newton” or “sinners like Frankenstein” since the days of Christopher Marlowe’s story of Dr. Faust’s pact with the devil. Quoting from Roslynn Haynes’s From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1994), Frayling points out that those images of scientists are worth pondering: the maniacal alchemist seeking arcane hidden knowledge, the obsessed absent-minded professor who neglects every other aspect of his life, the inhuman rationalist ignorant of the moral implications of his work, the heroic adventurer going where no man has gone before, the helpless scientist whose work gets hijacked by nefarious government or corporate interests, and the social idealist, a maverick hero pitted against government and industry.
Frayling asks, Should scientists dismiss those generalizations as “low brow cultural phenomena … unworthy of serious consideration” or should we show “an awareness that popular images matter and can be challenged … to raise the quality of public discourse?” Frayling votes for the latter—and rightly so. He does point out, however, “that this is a difficult task in the era of the sound bite and when publicity is becoming increasingly important for research funding.” For the foreseeable future, opines Frayling, scientists may well be stuck fighting Homer Simpson’s succinct appraisal: “Pah! Eggheads—what do they know?”
Dave Pieri, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
