The moment when Portlandia killed me softly was with this sketch,
wherein yet another good-looking Somebody advertises herself as "just a
big nerd, really!" — at which moment a portly young man appears and
breaks the frame, confessional-style, to share what an "actual nerd"
looks like. He is, of course, the spitting image; doughy, beady-eyed,
seemingly uncomfortable in his own skin. He looks and sounds exactly
like the Magic: The Gathering nerds who were my friends in middle
school, and the overweight grumpy guys that ran the comic book shop I
frequented. These are "actual nerds," and they are not good-looking,
confident, or cutely dressed. They are often unhappy people.
Today, Hollywood is having a flush of infatuation with scientists, in the wake of Warner Bros.' release of Interstellar, which forms a kind of one-two punch of well-received science-fiction epics with last year's Gravity. Both films have been praised for their scientific accuracy, lambasted for their schmaltzy dialogue, and celebrated as heralds of a new era in pro-science cinema.
This
is all well and good. Putting science front and center at the movies —
whether as a playground for spectacle or as a methodological approach to
interacting with the world — can only have a positive influence on the
public, especially given the alternatives of Let's Be Cops and Iron Man 4.
My complaint for the hour is not with the above films' treatment of science, broadly — I have no issue with the absurd liberties taken in Interstellar's third act, or the fact that Gravity should have been called Inertia. My complaint is with Hollywood's continuing portrayal of scientists as looking and sounding nothing like actual scientists.
The trouble with Interstellar,
arguably, began with casting Matthew McConaughey, who accepted his role
as America's All-Purpose Cowboy with a smirk about five years ago and
now plays just the one guy in every movie, a persona disdainful of
everything but intuition and good times, all right all right. But even a
perfectly-cast actor remains a servant of the dialogue he is given, and
this is where science truly gets short-changed. I can't link to scenes
from Interstellar without committing piracy, but consider this
dialogue from the film, as a group of highly-trained astronauts and
engineers perform a critical docking procedure:
Cooper: "Okay, taking control... Approaching docking port... It's all you, Doyle."
(Doyle wipes his brow as he guides the spaceship toward the connection point.)
Cooper: "Nice and easy, Doyle, nice and easy."
Doyle: "No good..."
Cooper: "Take it slow."
Doyle: "Locked!"
Cooper: "Target locked. Nice work!"
Brand: "Good job."
• • •
Now watch this video of an actual ship docking with the international space station. Or just read this rundown of what's involved in the launch of any space shuttle. Here's a sample for those who don't click:
"T-minus 5 minutes to launch: The
commander of the shuttle will be given the "go" to start
the orbiter's auxiliary power units (APU), which produce pressure for
the shuttle's hydraulic system. There are three separate onboard APUs,
and their fuel systems are located in the aft fuselage of the orbiter.
Once the APUs are powered up, ground teams will analyze the system, and
if they detect any glitches, this could halt the countdown. At the
T-minus 4 minute, 30 seconds mark, the Ground Launch Sequencer program
will switch the main fuel valve heaters off. As the clock ticks down,
the GLS will also perform checks of the fuel and main engines."
Start
to get the idea? SCIENCE IS HARD. The things that
scientists do — whether it's docking a space shuttle, splicing genes, or
colliding particle beams —are incredibly complex and dangerous, and
each action requires an exhaustive set of checks and confirmations to
execute. This rigor of procedure is at the heart of what scientists do
and what kind of people they are; they perform tasks carefully,
thoughtfully, and methodically, because if they don't, they usually wind
up with (at best) tainted lab results or (possibly) a horrific fireball
of death consuming them and all they know.
Okay, fine, you say — but what about when the scientists are in a frantic, fast-paced survival situation, as in Interstellar
and every other sci-fi movie ever? The answer is (ask any scientist),
those situations are precisely when their scientific training kicks into
fifth gear. Listen to the dialogue in this clip from Ron Howard's Apollo 13, a movie that mercifully embraces and revels in its jargon:
"Houston, we have a problem... We have a main bus B underbolt. We've got a lot of thruster activity here, Houston."
"What's the story with the computer now?
"It just went offline."
"I'm checking the quads."
"Christ, there's no repress valves."
"Maybe quad C."
"I'm gonna reconfigure the RCS."
"It doesn't make any sense."
"We've got multiple cautions and warnings, Houston. We've got to reset to restart."
"All right, I'm going to SES."
....This is an incredibly exciting scene. That's
not a joke. That dialogue you just read is thrilling as shit when you
watch the movie. The scene is suspenseful because 1) we know something
really bad has happened, 2) the music is churning and the camera
movements are frantic, and 3) we believe that these guys are
extremely smart and are doing everything they can to fix things, and are
still helpless. It doesn't matter that we don't have a clue what
they're saying. If an audience member has half a brain, he should expect to not understand a lot of the dialogue in a movie about fucking astronauts.
Do we really think that when rocket scientists are building the rocket
they say to each other, "Here, run the big blue wire up through that
little slot next to the bolt thingy."? No, they say "Please pass the
transducer conduit through the LTS junction so our sync feed can connect
to the fiber relays." Or some shit like that.
The point is that science jargon makes movies featuring scientists better.
It makes us believe that the characters are smart and that they will
make good choices in the face of peril and that they have earned their
place in the story. It works especially well in scenes of high tension;
try this sequence from another Matthew McConaughey not-quite-masterpiece, U-571.
For all I know, "main induction valves" might be a part of my washing
machine, and the screenwriters just bullshitted it right onto a German
submarine. But it sounds like the kind of thing these seamen should be yelling about. I believe this scene.
Hollywood
fancies itself in the throes of a new crush on scientists, but it has
spent too many decades in bed with the All-American Cowboy, and it still
swoons for His way above all others — for His Way is the Way of
Generalization, wherein all specific dialogue is eliminated and replaced
with drawled generalities: "Press the red button" becomes "You got this, Jim!" The Cowboy Way constitutes a diminutive and irreverent approach to
scientific exploration, and it is dangerous for our young movie
audiences, who may now think the best people to lead our pioneering
scientific expeditions are those with the most swagger — a proposal that
may literally come true with the planned reality TV show to launch the colonization of Mars. The movies shouldn't make us want to see John Wayne flying the space shuttle. He would be terrible at it.
