[submitted for The Accretionary Wedge #7]
It’s a fact of life that scientific accuracy is not generally at the top of Hollywood’s to-do list when making a movie. Any scientist can no doubt recall multiple occasions when their ability to suspend disbelief has been compromised by the screenwriters’ arbitrary (in the sense that the breach seems to be more due to ignorance and intellectual laziness than the fundamental demands of the plot) suspension of the laws of reality. I can’t deny that this sometimes gets a bit annoying, but it also has a certain entertainment value if you’re in the right mood, and given that basic narrative logic is also an early casualty in many big movies, it’s really no surprise that annoying scientific facts are not allowed to get in the way either. In fact, when it comes to science in the movies, I’m usually most vexed by something else entirely: the way that scientist heroes are almost always mavericks, working outside of the big bad scientific establishment, and they always end up being vindicated.
One example that always sticks in my mind is Dante’s Peak. In terms of scientific accuracy, it’s not a particularly egregious offender for the genre (the voyage across the steel-eating ultra-acidic lake notwithstanding). But in typical “maverick against the system” style, we have our heroic geologist Pierce Brosnan mind-melding with the mountain and just “knowing” that the volcano is about to erupt, whilst his staid USGS colleagues, sitting in their little mobile lab and relying on their seismic monitoring, see nothing. Guess who ends up being right?
Of course, in TV-stereotype land this is not such an unusual outcome (if there was ever a time when Scully was proven right in the X-Files, I missed it), but it plugs directly into one of the more pernicious scientific stereotypes embedded in the public consciousness: that scientific progress is exclusively precipitated by the occasional visionary genius, usually outside, or at least seriously at odds with, the scientific establishment and/or consensus of the day. This how science works in Dante’s Peak World:
Heroic maverick: Doom, doom I tell you!
By the book scientist: Calm down, calm down. The instruments show nothing. Why are you panicking all these people?
HM: The mountain speaks to me, and it says BOOM!
BTBS: Helpful. I will now seal my grisly doom by not taking your “feelings” seriously.
Given that predicting volcanic eruptions is fraught with difficulty, you could have developed a story in Dante’s Peak where the volcano is sending out mixed signals, and the scientists are disagreeing over what they mean. Instead, look at how Pierce Brosnan’s character goes about his science: he drives up the mountain to have a look around. In between multiple shots of him striking a broody and pensive pose, we do actually see a couple of signs that all is not well (dying trees and some parboiled skinny-dippers, I seem to recall). So far, so vaguely scientific. But what does he do then? Collect gas or soil samples? Take photos? Bring his colleagues out for a look? You know, work to put some flesh on his “gut feeling”? This is what a scientist would do – because a scientist is fully aware that your guts have s**t for brains. They don’t ignore hunches, half-guesses and inspiration: they just acknowledge that these are merely the starting point, and that working out what’s really going on requires something a little more objective. Instead, this movie once again sends the message that our instincts beat flashy boxes and fancy-pants degrees any day. Bah.
That said, I’ve just been watching the second season of Deadwood, which features a geologist serial killer of all things, and suddenly having James Bond as a geologist, even a piss-poor one, doesn’t seem quite so bad…
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