Abstract
Via fascinating interviews with a wealth of scientists who have acted as advisors for Hollywood films, David Kirby’s book offers an absorbing insight into the relationships between the media and science industries, and the competing (and sometimes overlapping) motivations behind the work of each. For a reader like me, who comes from a film and television studies background, such insights into working practices are really interesting, and the empirical data gathered by these interviews give us access to a common industrial practice which not only is hitherto underexplored, but also demonstrates the assumption that “bad” science on screen is at least partly responsible for society’s failure to understand and support real science in practice.
This relationship between fictional representations and the real world comes about, according to Kirby, because cinema acts as a form of “virtual witnessing” (p. 24) which “convince[s] the audience that these representations accurately reflect the natural world” (p. 25). Yet at the heart of this book is a confusion between ideas of “realism,” “authenticity,” “naturalism,” “the real,” and “the realistic” which film and media studies have gone to great pains to unpick (Armstrong, 2005), examining how each of these points towards a significantly different relationship between fiction and reality. That Kirby manages to summarise (and conclude) realism and cinema in eleven pages (pp. 27–38) is rather worrying, considering this is one of the longest-running debates in media studies. Instead, it might have been more helpful if the interviews here were used to explore assumptions about such realism, rather than arguing that “the naturalizing lens of the cinema removes all discourse and forces closure on scientific disputes” (p. 234).
Perhaps another problem is the focus here on the production process, to the detriment of other aspects of media meaning-making. Kirby’s assertion that “It is always important to keep in mind that the content of media texts is determined entirely by choices made during production” (p. xiii) might conform to common sense ideas of how we can think about media, but completely ignores a wealth of media studies and film studies approaches which foreground sociological (Hall, 1973) or reception and audience contexts (Brooker and Jermyn, 2003) as the key makers of meaning. Indeed, while one of the motivations scientists cite for advising film-makers is the need to ensure audiences get the “right” science, no evidence is offered here for how people who consume cinema situate the science they see in fiction films relative to that they know exists in the real world.
To that end, I think it would be even more useful if the impressive interview data gathered here were explored by analysts from science and media and film studies, precisely so the contexts each field would bring to the material could be acknowledged. As it is, I can see why scientists might like this book, as it paints them as gallantly defending science from the barbarians of entertainment cinema; as someone from a media background, though, I believe this book serves to demonstrate that while scientists might (rightly?) worry that most people don’t understand what they do, the same seems to be the case for those of us working in film and media studies.