Foreword

Foreword How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Story Downloaded by DUESSELDORF LIBRARIES on January 18, 2014 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): September 3, 2013 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2013-1139.pr001

I used to be kind of a jerk. This is not an easy admission to make, but science is about—above all else—honest and open assessment, even of ourselves. Especially if it’s painful. Those truths we hold most dear are the ones we must examine most critically. I am a scientist, so I have to follow this path no matter where it leads. My jerkdom wasn’t by nature, nurture, or by choice. Not immediately, at least. It grew over time, and in the interest of that honesty and openness, I’ll readily admit I was to blame, but I had help. Hollywood was my enabler. It had always been there for me. Ghost Host on Friday nights, and Creature Feature on Saturday nights: Weekends were made for science fiction movie marathons on local TV. Oh, I watched them all. From every black and white, rubber-suited reanimated dinosaur terrorizing Tokyo to the color Hammer horror flicks with budgets so small you could hardly see them on my family’s 18-inch TV set. I was addicted to the television. I dreamed of doing what the protagonists in those flicks did: fly a starship across the galaxy, meeting aliens, fighting those with nefarious intent, exploring strange, new worlds. I couldn’t get enough, and I loved those movies unconditionally. At least, at first. Because I was a budding scientist, it was not a blind love. I began to see the flaws in those movies, and over time was all too willing to point them out to friends, or anybody else who would listen. “That’s so fakey!” I would cry out loud when a spaceship on strings sputtered past, or a hobbling actor in a slimy alien costume stalked Our Heroes. Eventually, my verbal exclamations evolved into written ones. That was at the same time I became a professional scientist, researching the real Universe for a living. I never got to find another planet or meet aliens, but it was my hope that maybe my work made it a little easier for others to do so. Even if the real Universe didn’t allow me that privilege, that didn’t stop me from plunging in to the fictional ones crafted by others. I still loved watching movies, but now I went to the local theater with friends and we would dissect the xi In Hollywood Chemistry; Nelson, D., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.

films afterward, sometimes going over their scientific trespasses late into the night. We’d feed off of each other’s comments, laughing and escalating the snark until we got downright vicious. Yet we’d always go back to the theater.

Downloaded by DUESSELDORF LIBRARIES on January 18, 2014 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): September 3, 2013 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2013-1139.pr001

Eventually, the Internet came along. Not long after creating my first website (back in the Dark Ages of 1998), I decided it would be fun to continue this grand tradition of critiquing the science of cinema, and I dove in with both glee and fervor. No movie was safe: from Armageddon to Austin Powers. I was right; it was fun. It was surprisingly easy to deconstruct Hollywood accuracy, or lack thereof. Any mistake was fair game; a flubbed line with bad math was just as likely for me to mock as a plot device upon which the entire movie turned. Blowing up a giant asteroid? Pshaw. Saying “million” instead of “billion”? Please. Shadows moving the wrong way at sunset? Let me sharpen my poison keyboard. Movie after movie came and went, and I watched each in the darkened theater, off to the side, hunched over my notepad with my pen clicked and ready, and—literally—a flexible red-filtered flashlight (an old astronomy trick to keep the eyes dark-adapted) wrapped around my neck like a scarf to illuminate my writing in case the scene I was destroying was too dark for me to see my own words. Within hours an update to my site was ready for others to read. I tore apart movie after movie, savaging them for any scientific slight I perceived. Astronomy was my specialty, but any field of science was fair game. Then, one day, I had an epiphany. Well, actually, the epiphany was forced upon me. I was at a science meeting, a gathering of thousands of astronomers to present and share research. Taking a break between sessions, I was touring the rather expansive exhibit hall, looking over posters of research in progress, chatting with old friends and colleagues as we came across one another, and generally enjoying myself. One section of the hall was set up for professional telescope manufacturers, and there was some fairly large and sophisticated equipment on display. I stopped at one in particular to admire, and the gentleman who worked for the manufacturer came over to talk to me. We talked about the telescope for a while, and he told me he helped design quite a bit of the electronics that helped steer and point the lens. He got a gleam in his eye, and he asked me, “Did you ever see the made-forTV movie Asteroid?” I should have thought this through before responding. Sadly, though, (as you may recall) I was a jerk. xii In Hollywood Chemistry; Nelson, D., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.

I told him I had seen it, and I lit into it. I told him how the science was awful, and how the way they depicted asteroids was laughable. Nodding toward the telescope, I told him how badly the movie portrayed the observatory used by astronomers to track the killer rock. They even observed the asteroid during the daytime! I laughed, expecting him to join in.


He didn’t. He had borne my diatribe in silence, waiting for me to finish. When my laughter died off, he spoke up. “Did you get a good look at that telescope in the movie?” he asked me. Still not realizing what I had walked into, I nodded. “Sure,” I replied. “It was actually a fairly accurate depiction of what a ‘scope in an observatory looked like. Really, it was one of the few accurate things in the whole flick.” “I helped build it,” he told me. “The studio called me and asked me to work with them on that part of the set. I put one together that was pretty much the way it would be in a real observatory, but after the director looked at it, he decided he wanted it to look more complicated, to make it seem more like what the audience expects for a piece of scientific equipment.” At this point he fixed me with his stare, leaning in just a bit closer to me. “So I added a bunch of electronic boxes and wires and other stuff that had no real purpose at all. They were just there for show, to make it more exciting.” He paused pointedly, then continued. “You thought it was real, didn’t you? But it wasn’t. If you were fooled by that, and even thought it looked good, then why do you care if there are other little mistakes in a movie?” What he said cut right through me, and there was no way I could avoid the truth: He was right. It was a sea change, a pivotal moment for me. If I had seen our conversation in a movie, ironically, I would’ve scoffed at such hackneyed writing. But it was real, as was the absolute certainty that I had been a colossal ass. I had been watching movies for all the wrong reasons. I was doing it solely for the purpose of reviewing and eviscerating them, and no longer for the purpose of simply enjoying them. Amazingly, it was as if a weight was lifted from my life and, in that moment, it all changed. I accepted that while the science is important in science fiction, the story must come first. Don’t get me wrong: I’d prefer the science be accurate. In fact, I strongly believe that a writer who knows the science (or has access to it through a science consultant) will find plot developments he or she may not have considered otherwise. Science can, and should, lead the story where it needs to go. In the end, though, it is the telling of the story that must win out, even if there is a scientific xiii In Hollywood Chemistry; Nelson, D., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.

stumble or two along the way. After all, look where I was standing: at a meeting of astronomy professionals, and I was there because I was one of them. And I was one of them in large part due to the inspiration all of those movies, good and bad, that I had once so gleefully torn apart.


See? I was a jerk, but emphasis on the was. I had faced my own flaw, and had found redemption. My own story has character development, as any good story should. I still review movies when the opportunity arises, and I still point out the flaws. Now though, when I do so, I make sure it’s in the context of helping others understand the actual science behind the moment, showing them the joy and wonder of how reality really is. I used to do it to take the movie down a peg; now I do it to allow that movie to inspire others the way I was inspired. As I continue to be. How can I not? The introduction of bad science after good led to my own character development. What might good science after bad do for yours?

Phil Plait Blogger for Slate Magazine

xiv In Hollywood Chemistry; Nelson, D., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.

Foreword

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