Thought-Experiment About Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine And Hollywood

If Einstein, Planck, Bohr and other prominent physicists had make a concerted effort, around, say, 1920, to warn against the dangers of using radioactive materials in research, and had succeeded in keeping such research very small-scale and protective measures at a very high level, would they have succeeded in effectively banning nuclear power and weapons 20 years before they were developed, simply because things like radium and uranium and plutonium were consistently treated like exactly what they are: extremely dangerous things which should be kept as far from people as possible? At the very least, they might've lengthened Marie Curie's life a little bit, and who knows to how many beneficial scientific breakthroughs that alone might have led? And she's only the most famous of many physicists who killed themselves with radioactivity.

And if this had happened, would there have been fewer of those dopey movies made whose message, in a nutshell, is: Oh noes! Cutting-edge science and technology is leading directly to an apocalypse which will eradicate all of mankind, helphelphelp they're gonna kill us all?

You say you hadn't noticed such anti-STEM fearmongering in Hollywood? Well, sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Take a stroll with me through time: remember 1995? People were starting to get excited about the Internet. Remember the 1995 movie The Net, with Sandra Bullock and Dennis Miller? Sweet Sandra's life is threatened by one swarm of evil people after another -- all because she works on the (duh-duh-DUHHHHH!) Internet. Remember 2001's Swordfish, with convicted hacker Hugh Jackman forced by extremely-dangerous John Travolta and completely-topless Halle Berry, tempted by evil, evil cutting-edge equipment to participate in extreme violence via the (duh-duh-DUHHHHH!) Internet? Like many other movies, Swordfish is notable for unintentionally-hilarious depictions of how non-experts imagine that cutting-edge technology works. Movies about computers tend to age very badly.

Remember what genetic modification led to in The Fly and the Jurassic Park movies? Not to mention almost every single Frankenstein movie? Young Frankenstein ends pretty nicely. It's the only exception which occurs to me at the moment. Can you name one other Hollywood movie in which genetic engineering leads to anything other than pure horror? ("How could you have been so blind as not to see that playing God would end up killing us all?! Oh, damn you, damn you, you fool!")

Or artificial intelligence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator movies, the Matrix movies, or, to take a more recent example which may or may not prove to be as memorable, Transcendence, released in 2014, starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Cillian Murphy and Morgan Freeman, which has both the hilariously non-realistic computer stuff and the horrifying apocalypse as the inevitable result of AI? ("Oh, how could you have been so blind?! How could you not have seen that the attempt to make a computer brain could only lead to huge massacres?!" That's not a direct quote from the script of Transcendence but it's pretty damn close.) You beginning to see the trend I'm talking about?

You beginning to understand how vaccination could be so unpopular in Hollywood because so many people there don't understand STEM (that's Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) [PS, 1 July 2017: Actually, STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Whoops!] and have an uninformed fear and loathing of it?

I agree, unreservedly, that nuclear energy and nuclear bombs are very, very bad things, and that it's only natural that they would lead to an association of STEM and disaster in many minds. But things could have been very different. Scientists themselves could have prevented that nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs ever came to be, and if they had acted early enough, that prevention could have been relatively easy. There's nothing intrinsic about physics which had to lead straight to nukes.

And the fact that those bombs and plants did come to be has had a tremendous effect on the way that people in STEM research work. But that's one of the things you don't know if you don't know very much about STEM besides what you see in movies.

Another Annoying Movie Cliche: The Surprise Checkmate in 1

Recently I blogged about some movie cliches I hate, like how if a brand-new Lamborghini and a 30-year-old van are in a chase scene, the Lambo doesn't outrun the van, and how everybody always takes their coffee black.

Last night I saw Guy Ritchie's Revolver and liked it quite a lot, but it also gives me the opportunity to complain about another non-lifelike movie cliche, the surprise checkmate in 1. That is: a checkmate which the losing chess player didn't see coming one move before. And these were supposed to be advanced chess players. Grandmasters see checkmate coming inevitably many moves ahead, sometimes dozens of moves ahead. [PS, 7. September 2016: Since posting this, I've seen Revolver several more times, and I must point out that it is not clear, in any of the several games of chess played in the movie, that the losing player never saw the checkmate coming before the last movie. Sorry.]

In real life, sometimes the winning player will make the last move and say, "Mate in 6." Or in 12 or in however many moves it will take to end the game. Of course, the other player isn't required to resign just because the other player announces checkmate in however many. Chess players are never required to resign. But if they're both Grandmasters, chances are that the loser will see what the winner is talking about, if he hasn't already seen it moves before and has just been wondering whether the eventual winner already sees it coming too and isn't going to screw it up. Every now and then in world-class-level chess, the loser will play the game out until the end, until he is checkmated, but in such cases both players and and any advanced chess players among the onlookers know exactly what is coming long before the final move.

Ritchie handles this somewhat better in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Somewhat. Only somewhat. Because it is hardly unheard-of for a player to win a game by sacrificing his Queen. Only in the movies have advanced chess players never ever heard of such a thing, just as only in the movies does a customer in a bar order something no more specific than "a beer." (Well, okay: maybe in 1873, out on the American Western frontier, there was a saloon or two than only offered one type of beer, and only served it in mugs which were all the same size. Maybe. But you know what? Even in a Western set in 1873 it'd be refreshing to see someone ask a bartender whether the saloon had any good IPA.)

So how do you portray advanced chess accurately in a movie? Do you have to have actual Grandmasters on the set, or re-create Grandmaster games move for move? No. You could, but it might unnecessarily complicate things, and creating a good movie is a hell of a difficult complicated task under the best of conditions. The moviemakers aren't there to play world-class chess, but to present the illusion that the characters are playing world-class chess. Typically, in a movie chess game, the entire board position isn't visible, so keep it like that if you want to, because the point of all of this is the the illusion rather than the actual chess. But instead of the surprise mate-in-one as in almost every game of chess ever portrayed in a movie, have the eventual winner move and announce, "Mate in [however many)." Or have the loser do what Grandmasters often do in real life when they realize they've lost: think, then sigh or nod their head, and topple their own King, resigning. In a movie like Revolver, which portrays many chess games between two supposed chess geniuses with a third person looking on, it would be very easy to have the onlooker, realistically, be puzzled, and ask why the loser resigned, and have one of the players rattle off what the next 10 or so moves would have been, maybe throwing in a variation or two ("[...]not Queen to f6 because then Rook to b1, Bishop to to d3[...]" and so forth). It doesn't matter that the audience won't be able to follow it all, because in real life they wouldn't comprehend it either. Just have the onlooker, who is also a genius, but not a chess Master, listen politely and clearly uncomprehendingly to the 10-or 20-move explanation for the resignation, and respond: "Uhhhhh... Okay."

Easy to do. Easy enough, for extra-super-duper realism, to rattle off the analysis of a Grandmaster game from a chess book or a chess column, in which the writer, often one of the players in the game, explains the resignation by writing out what those last however-many moves would have been, often with variations. And easily, you make a good movie much better, because you don't take the chessplayers in the audience out of the suspension of disbelief, you don't give them a crude and entirely unnecessary reminder that this is make-believe, like a phone number that begins with 555, or a character who's supposed to be the world's greatest computer hacker who is mightily impressed by seeing some monitors rather than by hearing the specs of the computer before him.

Movie Cliches I Hate

1. In chase scenes, all vehicles go equally fast, and only a difference in driver skill can be decisive. If the bad guy is driving a brand-new Lamborghini, and the cops are chasing him in a ratty-sounding 30-year-old van with bald tires, the cops will be right on the bad guy's ass for miles. In real life, of course, the Lamborghini would disappear from the cops' view in about 5 seconds.

1a. As if this wasn't already bad enough (and it WAS), since around the release of Point Break in 1991, cops on foot have been able to keep up with fleeing motor vehicles.

2. Roger Ebert's movie cliche column pointed out the cliche of the tough guy setting a big explosion and then walking away and not even flinching when the big explosion goes off right behind him. Ebert's column pointed out that even the unusually cliche-free Syriana featured George Clooney committing this cliche.

Since then it has occurred to me that this is not only a cliche, but it could be really dumb tough-guy behavior as well, if the tough guy wants to evade detection. Oftentimes in this cliche, the big explosion occurs in a crowded place, and big crowds of people are running around terrified in all directions after the explosion, while the tough guys never flinches. Well, if there's a street camera covering this, the tough guy screwed himself by not acting like everyone else: on the camera's footage, he'll be the one guy walking along like he didn't feel or hear anything, standing out among a crowd of panicking people. ("There he is, right there: the tough guy, walking along unconcerned." And they put out an APB with the tough guy's full description.)

3. Someone's just been shot, and his friends, and/or the responding cops, firemen, doctors and/or EMT's, act like it's completely up to him whether or not he loses consciousness, and also that if he passes out he'll die. "Nononono, stay with me, buddy! Stay with me! NOOOOOOO!!!" I don't know: If I'd just been shot and some bozo was shaking me and yelling in my face to stay with him, I might want to pass out just to get away from the shaking and yelling. But I still couldn't decide whether or not to pass out. And I still know that losing consciousness and dying are two different things.

4. I've never in my life heard someone in a real bar order "a beer." In TV and movies, maybe once or twice I've heard someone refer to a brand of beer (or at least a type of beer. For example: "You got a good IPA?"), the way people do in real life, instead of saying "Gimme a beer."

5. Very nearly everybody in movies likes their coffee black with no sugar. I suspect this annoys Quentin Tarrantino too, and that that's why his characters take theirs with a lot of cream and a lot of sugar. (They also order brands of beer like real people.)