In the eyes of Hollywood, every scientist is either crazy or crippled, and most of the time both, laments Prof Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art in London.
"Sadly, every scientist has to be `the mad scientist', with wild grey hair and eyes rattling about their head, with strange suits and mechanical hands, inevitably plotting evil," he told students and film-lovers at the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Technology last night. Featuring slides from movies past and present to prove his point, his presentation was part of Science Week Ireland.
"The movie portrayal of the man in the lab coat is painfully predictable and misleading, even by Hollywood standards," he said.
That Hollywood look first took root in the 1926 film Metropolis, he said, which featured the dastardly Dr Rottwang, who wore a single black glove because of a laboratory accident. From then on every scientist had to wear a black glove, and eventually they all had to be wheelchair-bound.
And then came Peter Sellers as Dr Strangelove in 1962, who had it all: the black glove, the uncontrollable wheelchair and a mechanical hand that involuntarily sprang into the Nazi salute. "There's this view of the scientist as all brain, so much so that the body withers away and ceases to exist. They completely lose touch with manual things," Prof Frayling said.
It served to further the image of scientists as evil, "because they invoke all the anxiety and the fear people have of what they don't understand. From nuclear winter to genetic cloning, scientists have always been seen as the ones in control because of their knowledge."
Prof Frayling said he had always been a horror-movie buff, but his expertise on the topic developed after he heard scientist friends complaining about their film treatment. "I think if real scientists better explain themselves, and actually tell the public in articulate language what they are experimenting with, this image could change," he said.
While old anxieties included weapons of mass destruction, the fears of today had to do with genetically engineered foods, DNA experimentation and cloning. They are not entirely new, but at the dawn of the 21st century they are becoming all the more real, he noted.
"The biggest change I see in movies is that this fear is shifting from individual scientists to the big corporations," Prof Frayling added. "In movies like Jurassic Park scientists are not in control any more. Big business is. And scientists no longer solve problems these days. It's Bruce Willis in a torn T-shirt."