Thursday

Science on Wheels – Faces of Science Seen in Some Recent Films

Weighing “Art” against “Commercial Cinema” is a perennial hot topic with movie buffs, and in the present trend of movie-creators reaching out to the people it has become a topic we hear comments about from the mouths of the stars themselves – as never before. Loosely speaking, it would translate into a discussion on how much intellectual weight the “Common Man” (which term a friend of mine would often counter with a complementary contradiction about the “Uncommon Man”) would be able to handle. In a similar manner, though many films show heroes and heroines dealing rationally and heroically with disasters, the depiction of even the simplest science concepts is rare. This is another “bone of contention” between art and commerce, writer and producer, director and actor and so on at various levels.

In the following, I am not referring to those ultraheroic phenomena – consisting of leaps that take the hero all the way from Mylapore to Tiruvanmiyur to help him succeed in saving a pretty damsel’s modesty from being outraged, or the capacity the guy has to escape even an armed army with nothing to help him but a barbed wire cable. I am speaking of the sparseness of scenes that even touch upon science and even when they do, of the way it is treated by the script- or screenplay-writer.

Examples of occasions when this lacuna is typically felt are school and college scenes in stories involving students, science fiction or suspense stories and action films. The first example is obvious – you would have a class of advanced science students listening to a teacher reading out some really basic/school level equations from a book and the focus is always on a small group of students here getting into mischief or planning some getaway. The second set consists usually of war or weapon technology, unwarranted medicinal testing or computer viruses set off by enemy countries to spy on “our” secrets; the last set would also usually involve car chases or stunt scenes that violate all possible observable physical laws.

There are exceptions of course – you don’t have to be a great cinema historian to be able to quote titles like “Andha Naal”, “Athisaya Manithan” “Taare Zameen Par” etc. Despite these exceptions, the total number of films showing off the faces of science to the same degree of depth that they employ to unveil human passions is sadly sadly low.

The argument used is usually that these will be popular only in the A centres – if that – and these films will not lose the large numbers game. And if at all some science-related scenes get through the story stage and reach the end, they would be presented in an arbitrarily simple manner – on the pretext that anything more complex will go over people’s heads, thereby losing the audience.

The frequency of seeing science on screen will lead to appreciation, just as if, in order to understand an artist’s work, you need to see not just one painting in the right amount of detail but many pieces of work, many exhibitions, by the artist, sometimes all in a sequence. Only then can you get at what their perspective is; only then can a serious critique of the artist’s motivations or philosophy emerge. In the same manner, for science to be appreciated in cinema, many films having well-thought out aspects of science in them have to be shown to people, trusting that they will “get the funda” eventually.

The trend in recent films – of holding the viewer in respect when dealing with the scientific aspects in a film – is totally commendable. The movies that I am referring to are “Ninaithaale Inikkum (NI, 2009),” “Peraanmai (PE, 2009),” “Aayirathil Oruvan (AO, 2010),”and “Three Idiots (TI, 2010).” For the record I wish to discuss some minutae in scenes from these films in the passage below:

In NI, in the style of Selvaraghavan, who is one person in his generation of directors who impresses by his attention to detail in constructing classroom scenes, you see math classes in which the teacher teaches integral equations on the board instead of the usual equations (a-plus-b-whole-squared or e-is-equal-to-mc-square). Later, in a riotous protest scene, the girl gets injured and her friend, who is a chemistry student, picks up a bottle of potassium permanganate from the rack in the laboratory and dabs her wound with the diluted solution. It is well known that this chemical is used to kill germs, but the lack of familiarity, perhaps, led to this being totally lost. More critical comments were made about how it was too cinematic and heroic and so on. This would have been helped if he had said the words “Potassium Permanganate” or had the label KMnO-4 on the bottle… subtle and no need to waste mentioning it in a class earlier.

In PE, there was commendable coverage of indigenous knowledge and science – in showing the birthing of a calf; the tribal boy leader’s sense of the forest and his timely application of native weapon technology to oust a treacherous expedition and save not only the lives of some of his lost explorers but also, ironically, to save that very science technology that he would have to give tooth-and-nail to be part of. The rawness of the scene of cattle birthing was quite amazing and so too, the manner in which the boy’s knowledge unravelled naturally and appropriately. Some of the power politics which kept Dhuruvan and his people under-educated and demoralised was also dealt with in the film with candour.

AO was a graphics manifesto… if there is any such thing… the stunning visuals and breathtaking grandeur totally diverted one from looking closely at the story. It showed off weapons and “attitude” as products of modern science, contrasting them with similar defence technology of olden times. It was a great way to tell a story, but an excess or of everything which was a result of short sightedness in thinking out the flow lines of the story and focusing more on details and research. The film exposed the audience to a very narrow part of technology – the defence and weapon technology side. To the extent that there was an undercurrent of ancient verses modern. Was this a fair argument? The point is really debatable.

TI took one on a roller coaster ride through an IIT-like campus, telling us the story of budding technocrats and blooming idiots! Who can ever forget that “salt water is a good conductor of electricity!” after seeing this film? Would you understand better the effects of “Tele-Medicine” when you see the way Kareena’s Sister has a baby in a laboratory, under the guidance of her medic-student sister over the computer? Or, would you still not forget to discuss why it is that only the rural folk should learn to make use of “Tele” services while the urban elite can afford more personalised health care? Yes the film is seductive in its endorsement of science, but one cannot deny that it communicates well.

People in medicine speak of the Blood–Brain barrier, which is sort of similar to the Subconscious–Conscious barrier that shrinks try to deal with in their patients. This is like a mental block which prevents two aspects of your body from communicating with each other, as a result of which some processes/work/tasks that involve both these aspects become too difficult for the patient to tackle. In the way I see it, people’s lack of exposure to well-thought out and realistically presented science images and, especially, substitution of such well thought-out scenes with others that are so highly simplified as to be in no way connected to the original fact they were trying to depict is exactly the communication world’s analogue of the barrier – in this case it is a barrier to recognising even the science facts they do know about when they are portrayed on screen. .