Hacker Cinema
Creation
2009 · Film · 108 min
Directed by Jon Amiel
A psychological, heart-wrenching love story that provides a unique and inside look at Charles Darwin. Torn between faith and science, he struggles to finish his legendary book "On the Origin of Species," which goes on to become the foundation for evolutionary biology.
1 negative3 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
I'm not going to discuss TV movies.
But let's look at the other ones, shall we:
2004's Kinsey. Kinsey's a hero to the social justice movement, also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kinsey#Personal_habits
2009's Creation. Opened on 7 screens in the US. Hardly a cultural phenomenon.
2004's Aviator. Close, big surprise Hollywood chooses to mythologize a legendary director's early life.
Tim's Vermeer. "Inventor Tim Jenison seeks to understand the painting techniques used by Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer." Are you intentionally wasting my time?
2011's A Dangerous Method. Look who got first billing and is on the center of the cover. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1571222/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
2015's Experimenter. Do you not know who Milgram is? From the IMDB page the focus of the movie is his inhumane experiments. Whose case does "look at the horrible things this white guy did to people" help more?
1999's Insider. It's a stretch because it's a movie about a whistleblower who happens to be a scientist, but at least it was a big film with real actors.
2008's The Strangest Dream. A Canadian documentary that nobody's ever heard of. Doesn't even have a cover picture on IMDB or even one vote on Rotten Tomatoes. It's about the one guy who left the Manhattan Project. What are the odds that this is a vehicle to pass judgement on all the other guys who didn't leave the Manhattan Project?
> You for some reason switched to fictional scientists with Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014). Why is that? For that matter, you restricted me to scientists and mathematicians, while the protagonists of Gravity are engineers and astronauts - it's poor form to change your metric part-way through.
I hoped you would connect the dots that I was talking about large-scale, big-budget movies.
> If I expand the list to include engineers, astronauts, and similar occupations, then "Captain Phillips" (2013) concerns the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by pirates, "The Wind Rises" (2013) about Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II ... oops ! Sory, not a white man, though he would have been an "honorary white" in apartheid South Africa, " Zvorykin-Muromets" (2010) about the Russian inventor of television, "Flash of Genius" (2008) about the Robert Kearns and his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper,
At this point it appears you're intentionally wasting my time for effect, like maybe you're hoping somebody who glances over your post will assume it's well-researched and well-thought.
Naoki Mori? I was hoping you would notice from context I was referencing male scientists who were publicly disgraced as people, not as fraudulent scientists.
I'm sure you'll understand that I don't have enough time to fact-check your ridiculous list of movies and sift through all of your loaded questions, so I've left them unanswered.
> How do you define 'mythologizing' in such a way that it's at least roughly repeatable?....If you can't do that, then you don't really have a good metric.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mythologize
At least you closed with Deep Web which might be an actual counterpoint.
That list was incomplete. I added a recent Indian film about Ramanujan and a Soviet film about Sofia Kovalevskaya from the 1980s. FWIW, there's also an upcoming film "Dau" (in post-production) about the Russian mathematical physicist Lev Landau.
One difficulty is that the Wikipedia list does not include made for TV movies and documentaries, like 'Dangerous Knowledge' (2007) on Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, or the BBC documentary 'Isaac Newton: The Last Magician' (2013), or the PBS documentary 'Newton's Dark Secrets' (2005), or "Breaking the Code" (1996), another biography of Turing, or "Freedom Man" (1989) about the black American mathematician Benjamin Banneker, or the 1973 Italian TV movie "Non ho tempo" about Galois, or Simon Singh's 1996 documentary "Fermat's Last Theorem", focusing on Andrew Wiles but including other mathematicians.
Or the BBC documentary "The Birth Of Calculus" (1986) on Leibniz, the four-part BBC series "The Story of Maths" (2008), the 2008 "Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem", or ... I think you get the picture that there are many TV movies about mathematicians, and most of them are white males. BTW, none of them are "average".
When "Moneyball" was turned into a movie, people asked how a book that dealt with statistics could be turned into a movie, since statistics alone isn't that interesting. What big screen movie is there to make out of Dirichlet's life? Of Riemann's? Of Wiles'?
So, of "regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years", where I'll define "mythologized" to mean "made a movie about them", and I'll limit it to feature length films based on lives of actual scientists:
"Kinsey" (2004) on Kinsey, "Copenhagen" (2002, TV) on a meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg, "Creation" (2009) on Darwin, "Something the Lord Made" (2004) about heart surgeons (one of which was a white male), "Tim's Vermeer" (2013) though that's more an amateur scientist, "The Aviator" (2004) about Howard Hughes (aerospace engineer and inventor), "A Dangerous Method" (2011) concerning Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (the first two being white males), this fall the film "Experimenter" about Stanley Milgram will be released, "The Insider" (1999) is a drama based on the research scientist Jeffrey Wigand, and "The Strangest Dream" (2008) about the physicist Joseph Rotblat.
Those are movies about 10+ real scientists, all male, straight, and not disabled, plus a couple of others. (There were a few movies with other than white, male, straight characters, but certainly not this many.)
You for some reason switched to fictional scientists with Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014). Why is that? For that matter, you restricted me to scientists and mathematicians, while the protagonists of Gravity are engineers and astronauts - it's poor form to change your metric part-way through.
If I expand the list to include engineers, astronauts, and similar occupations, then "Captain Phillips" (2013) concerns the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by pirates, "The Wind Rises" (2013) about Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II ... oops ! Sory, not a white man, though he would have been an "honorary white" in apartheid South Africa, " Zvorykin-Muromets" (2010) about the Russian inventor of television, "Flash of Genius" (2008) about the Robert Kearns and his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper,
A problem with your list is it's easily interpreted as cherry picking. Jodie Foster was the protagonist of "Contact" (1997), a big budget sci-fi film. How does your choice now of "Gravity" indicate a changed pattern from nearly 20 years ago?
Another problem is that you haven't established what the baseline should be. Given the 12.2% of the US population is "Non-Hispanic Black or African American", what percentage of films with 'hero scientists' should have a "Non-Hispanic Black or African American" in that role? Given that 51% of the adult population in the US are women, how many hero scientist movies should have a women in that role? Perhaps it's more that these roles were previously underrepresented?
Is the pattern you see simply explained by the secular trend that people other than straight white males are becoming more frequent in science?
You ended by picking two items from a different context - postings to HN in the last month and 'male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year', I think to establish a pattern. But you again lack the evidence needed to tell if your observations are really a pattern instead of cherry picking. What is the expected baseline?
If the ratio of men to women in science is 4:1, then we would expect a female scientist to be publicly disgraced with about the same ratio. (It's hard to give a good ratio since I think it's more likely that a senior researcher will be found out and reported in the international news. I believe there are more males in higher level positions than females. Also, "Japanese women account for only 10% of the researchers in Japan" and "only 12 percent of the science and engineering workforce in India was female in 2010", so the international ratio is probably more like 8:1.
Checking now, I searched "Retraction Watch" for all people described by the writers as being "disgraced". The complete list of male scientists in the last few years are: Naoki Mori, James H. Hunton, Dipak Das, Don Poldermans, Yoshitaka Fujii, Joachim Boldt, Diederik Stapel, and Woo-Suk Hwang.
The only disgraced female scientist mentioned is Bengu Sezen.
This 8:1 ratio is about what I expect from the percentage of women doing science in the world stage, and within the error bars for something with so few numbers.
What method did you use to count disgraced male and female scientists? I see you missed Haruko Obokata as another disgraced female scientist, so it doesn't seem like you've done a systematic search.
(A double-check search against sciencemag.org finds Jens Förster and Marc Hauser as additional 'disgraced' male researchers and no additional female researchers. Note that Science does not use the term 'disgraced' in articles about Haruko Obokata.)
Also, what do you use as the ratio for males in science vs. females in science? If it's 4:1 or higher then with 3 male disgraces you would expect less than a 50% chance of hearing about a female in the same situation, no?
Otherwise, if you're just making connections based on the latest hot gossip, then you'll be suffering from some serious bias error. You're not going to hear about Naoki Mori on HN.
Regarding postings to HN, what is your criteria? For example, "Alain Badiou Is Making a Movie About Plato with Brad Pitt and Sean Connery" from 7 days ago is a movie about a guy. Is it mythologizing a male? What about "Deep Web (2015 Documentary) – The Story of the Silk Road" from a month ago - does it mythologize Ross William Ulbricht? How do you define 'mythologizing' in such a way that it's at least roughly repeatable?
If you can't do that, then you don't really have a good metric.
It's very easy to see patterns which aren't present. We as humans are quite good at doing this. How might I confirm that this pattern is present?
To start, let's look at movies that deal with "Scientists, Engineers, Doctors, Researchers, Inventors, Explorers and People who do Amazing Things", from http://www.imdb.com/list/ls050940841/ . These include Apollo 13, Fat Man and Little Boy, Einstein and Eddington, Shackleton, Creation, Captain Cook: Obsession and Discovery, Gorillas in the Mist, Temple Grandin, Jobs, and Reach for the Sky.
Of the 31 films (though two are not biographies or based on real-life), 2 are about women (Gorillas in the Mist, Temple Grandin), and the rest are about men. Einstein is certainly high on the list of mythologized people, so mythologization is not limited to women. (Feynman would be another. Infinity (1996) is a biopic about Feynman, but it's not on the list.)
Women appears underrepresented in that list compared to their modern presence in STEM fields. To be fair, the movies include Pasteur from the 1800s, and Harrison from the 1700s. Women were often strongly restricted from doing research in STEM fields during that time.
I saw one non-white person on that list, Vivien Thomas, from the 2004 film "Something the Lord Made".
"Reach for the Sky" from 1956 is "The true story of airman Douglas Bader who overcame the loss of both legs in a 1931 flying accident", and Temple Grandin is autistic. However, since 1956 is rather a long time ago, it does point out the need for a baseline - if the percentage of movies about disabled people has been stable, then it's not a growing pattern. As another example of someone who 'received the mythology treatment', consider "Helen Keller in Her Story" from 1954.
(Howard Hughes, in 'The Aviator' (2004), may also fall into the mentally challenged category, due to his obsessive-compulsive disorder which was present already by the 1930s. I haven't seen the film to see if it touches on his mental illness.)
Films about gay people would have been restricted under the Motion Picture Production Code, so not really seen in films from the 1930s to 1968. That would make it hard to establish a long term pattern. Still, as about 2% of the US adult population (1.2 to 5.6 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States ) identifies as LGBT, then about 2% of the films about famous people in STEM should concern someone LGBT.
It should not be hard to come up with an evaluation technique, like "all biopics about people in STEM done as movies/made-for-TV movies in the US from 1970 to the present", and redo this same evaluation to see if there is a pattern.
The tricky part is to normalize it. If 2% of the population is homosexual, then what percentage should we expect to see portrayed as they are in movies? If 51% of the US population are women, and 27.9 percent of the PhDs in the physical sciences are women, what patterns should we expect to see in films?
Otherwise you might just be seeing the secular trend that more women are getting involved in STEM, that policies like the ADA make it easier for people with disabilities to get advanced educations, etc.
How have you done the analysis to determine if the patterns you see are due to the expected shift in population distribution of people in STEM, vs. any special sort of mythologization?
Infinity (1996) - "Story of the early life of genius and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman."
Creation (2009) - "a partly biographical, partly fictionalized account of Charles Darwin's relationship with his eldest daughter, Annie (Martha West), as he struggles to write On the Origin of Species"
http://www.imdb.com/list/ls050940841/ lists more movies about scientists (and others). So does http://www.imdb.com/list/ls059739125/ .
Films about mathematicians - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_mathematicians .
http://www.swide.com/art-culture/15-films-about-real-life-scientists-before-the-theory-of-everything-and-the-imitation-game/2015/01/21
The question starts to be, how much time do you want to put into this?
1. A story about a rich man who, afraid he will go to hell, hires a spiritual "coyote" [0] to smuggle him into heaven.
2. Legion of Creation: I read a 2009 Wired review [1] of the films (unrelated) Legion [2] and Creation [3]. Not realizing the article was reviewing two separate films, I thought it was describing a single film about an angry God sending an army of angels to assassinate Charles Darwin and cover up his theory of evolution. It sounded like a more interesting film than either Legion or Creation, so I imagined a mashup called Legion of Creation. :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_%28smuggler%29#Coyotes
[1] http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/09/legions-tattooed-angel-plays-darwin-in-creation
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_%282010_film%29
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_%282009_film%29
Quoting from John Scalzi http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/09/13/they-should-have-called-it-darwin-the-revengination/:
" A producer of Creation, the film about Charles Darwin and his wife Emma, starring Paul Bettany and his real-life wife Jennifer Connelly, is griping that the film has no distributor in the US, apparently because so many Americans are evolution-hating mouth-breathers that no one wants the touch the thing; it’s just too darn controversial.
Well, it may be that. Alternately, and leaving aside any discussion of the actual quality of the film, it may be that a quiet story about the difficult relationship between an increasingly agnostic 19th Century British scientist and his increasingly devout wife, thrown into sharp relief by the death of their beloved 10-year-old daughter, performed by mid-list stars, is not exactly the sort of film that’s going to draw in a huge winter holiday crowd, regardless of whether that scientist happens to be Darwin or not, and that these facts are rather more pertinent, from a potential distributor’s point of view. . . . Maybe if Charles Darwin were played by Will Smith, was a gun-toting robot sent back from the future to learn how to love, and to kill the crap out of the alien baby eaters cleverly disguised as Galapagos tortoises, and then some way were contrived for Jennifer Connelly to expose her breasts to RoboDarwin two-thirds of the way through the film, and there were explosions and lasers and stunt men flying 150 feet into the air, then we might be talking wide-release from a modern major studio. Otherwise, you know, not so much. The “oh, it’s too controversial for Americans” comment is, I suspect, a bit of face-saving rationalization from a producer "