“Movies are entertainment; if you want a message, call Western Union,” as the Hollywood golden age producer Samuel Goldwyn said. Actually, he almost certainly never said it, which kind of illustrates the point. But I am interested in the message. Everyone thinks their own profession is the least well represented in Hollywood, as if films have some obligation to tell the truth. Scientists frequently bleat that movies don’t get scientists or science right. Spoiler alert: there’s no engine noise in space. There’s no such thing as truth serum. We can’t resurrect dinosaurs. Wormholes, so heavily relied upon by screenwriters for interstellar travel, don’t exist.
I mostly don’t care. Mostly. Tell a good story. Explore ideas. Entertain us. Movies do profoundly influence how we think about things and can become culturally ubiquitous. The flat-headed, neck-bolted image of Frankenstein belongs entirely to Universal Studios and Boris Karloff, and not to Mary Shelley. There’s a robust body of research about the perception of science and scientists, some of which indicates children form negative images young, and then develop them. The results of the Draw a Scientist Test – which is fairly self-explanatory – are always disappointing. Children draw white, white-coated, bespectacled, crazy-haired men. Girls very occasionally draw women, but boys only draw men. There’s a paucity of data on how movies depict science and whether that influences how we culturally regard research and experimentation.
So I do care, and it’s pleasing when a film gets it right and is entertaining. I adore Contact and I love Dr Ellie Arroway – Jodie Foster’s tough, passionate, sharp-as-a-whip astronomer. She spends as much time harrumphing about grant applications and showboating superiors as she does sky-watching. Ask any scientist and they’ll soul-crushingly tell you how true that is.
This week the world gets to meet Matt Damon’s Dr Mark Watney in The Martian, the crew member of the Ares 3 left for dead on a dead planet. All humankind is united in wishing his survival and bringing him home. This film is glorious, funny, thrilling – as good as Prometheus was bad, which is impressive, given they are both made by Ridley Scott. The Martian also immediately enters the pantheon of movies featuring on-screen scientists worth admiring. In Damon’s fantastic turn, we get a witty, resilient and, importantly, super-smart, problem-solving science hero. We see him iteratively experiment, fail, and try again with modified parameters. We see him invent through trial and error. If this sounds boring, it’s not. It’s just nice to see something akin to what science actually is on screen. We don’t see him enlightened by divine inspiration or eureka moments, which, as every scientist will tell you, never happen. And he introduces the greatest new verb to the lexicon of people like me: “to science”. As in, “I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.” Science students are hereby instructed to deploy this at will.
And Watney is not explicitly a scientist (and astronaut), he’s also a breed of scientist criminally under-represented in popular culture. He is a botanist. Fictional botanists whom you might have stumbled across include Dr Pamela Isley, aka Batman’s adversary and supervillain Poison Ivy, immemorably portrayed by Uma Thurman in thebest forgotten Batman & Robin. Oh, and Bruce Dern’s rogue bio-domer in Silent Running. And, that’s it. I can’t think of another.
This planet has been green far longer than it’s had animals. Finally, this most unsung branch of science gets the hero it deserves. In real life there are plenty, and Gregor Mendel might be the one who changed the world the most. Invariantly described as a 19th-century monk (though his scientific legacy outweighs his contribution to monkery by many orders of magnitude), Mendel cross-bred thousands of pea plants and, in doing so, discovered the rules of inheritance and the basis for genetics. The 18th-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus invented the system by which we classify all life, and his prime concern was plants. Joseph Banks went on voyages into the undiscovered world and established the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew as the world centre of plant science. Botany is also a branch of science that is, unusually, not under-represented by women. The role call of female botanists who contributed massively to our knowledge of plants from the 17th century onwards is rich and deep: Ellen Hutchins, who identified more than 1,000 plants and lichens in the 18th and 19th centuries; Mary Agnes Chase, who studied grasses when she wasn’t being a suffragist; the Nobel prize laureate Barbara McClintock, whose achievements in plant genetics are too fruitful to list. Beatrix Potter was also out there classifying when she wasn’t writing Peter Rabbit (though her contributions to fungal science are greater).
I’m sure people will find scientific fault with The Martian, but I’m not that fussed. Here’s a big mainstream film with an A-list cast that celebrates exploration and the process and ingenuity of a life in science. There’s my secret agenda. I’ve worked on a few movies, in both trivial and non-trivial ways, and I do want them to influence the perception of science and scientists in a positive way, but not at the expense of a good story. The Martian is a rare breed that does both.
