Here's an idea.
Different pieces of media have differing responsibilities
for being accurate.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Spoiler alert.
The dinos in "Jurassic World" do not have feathers.
In space, no one can hear you explode.
And no matter how leet you are, haxing the mainframe
doesn't look like a bag of Skittles mated with a word
processor on mushrooms.
Often, a movie or TV show will cause many people, and almost
certainly Neil deGrasse Tyson, to exclaim, no,
that is not how that fictional thing would actually happen.
This is important, because even fiction unavoidably references
our world, and it portrays other worlds which, on some level,
claim to be true or, at the very least, consistent.
And stuff that's wrong, especially stuff
that doesn't need to be wrong in service of that consistency,
can really stick in your craw.
Importantly, the things taken the most
to task for their inaccurate portrayals
of science, technology, or history
are duh, the ones that are usually the most widely viewed.
For example, since the first "Jurassic Park,"
paleontology has progressed and revised
much of what we thought to be true about dinosaurs, chief
amongst those dino discoveries-- they were probably feathered.
WOMAN: So it's possible that the most famous and feared dinosaur
might have been sort of fluffy.
[ROARING]
So why did "Jurassic World," part of a franchise which
is famously the pop culture source for knowledge on dinos,
fail on feathers?
There is some in-movie meta dialogue
explaining that audiences don't want realistic,
they want scary.
Maybe they thought feathers weren't fearsome enough.
[SCREAMING]
I don't know.
I find ostriches terrifying.
And they are basically just feather dusters
with legs and a beak.
But I don't know, maybe that's just me.
My guess is that it has something
to do with focus groups, sure, or that one guy in the writer's
room who has never played "The Witcher"
or stared eye to eye with a falcon who
kept being like, dudes, no way, feathered stuff
just isn't scary.
But also, significantly with brand recognition,
with that consistency.
In films, when things explode, even in space, they go boom.
When it is awesome and appropriate, and sometimes
when it is neither, a car will drive
between the wheels of a semi.
Regardless of what is factually natural in the actual world,
these tropes are natural in the world of cinema.
This is why we go to the movies.
[FLESH RIPPING]
Not this.
[SILENCE]
This.
[CAR ENGINES REVVING]
Not this.
[SILENCE]
This, not this.
[CRICKETS CHIRPING]
The assumption is that there's no time
or place for accuracy in a nonstop, big-budget thrill
ride.
And in certain situations, sure, I really
don't need Goatee McWolf Muscles to spend more than six words
explaining how his boots work.
Up is hard.
Down is easy.
And if every stunt in "Furious 7"
has to be literally possible, that
means there's no driving the Lykan super-car
between the Etihad Towers in Abu Dhabi twice.
[EXPLOSION]
But [INAUDIBLE]
But I think there are some movies, or even some parts
of some movies, from which we can reasonably expect facticity
as opposed to coherence.
Real reality versus internal consistency.
Is "Jurassic World" one of those movies?
For me, no.
But for many other people, yes.
Same with countless sci-fi and space
films, which miss the mark portraying
what it's like floating around a tin can far above the moon.
I get all bent out of shape over movies like "The Imitation
Game," which invented or misrepresented all kinds
of stuff about Alan Turing.
You could argue that this also applies
to film adaptations of comics, which many people see
as having a responsibility to reconstruct or teach
wider audiences about the complex, sequential art
universes they love.
And that, I think, is a big part of it-- responsibility.
Beyond being irritated that movies mis-depict something
you are well familiar with, frequently,
frustration mounts because the things being misrepresented
don't already enjoy wide appreciation.
Astrophysics, paleontology, forensics, computer science,
the actual lives of real people portrayed
in a piece of popular culture provide an opportunity
to set the record straight and let
people know what's really up.
Mozart and Salieri were pals.
But I mean, how great a story is the mostly invented feud
between two amazing composers in the Vienna of old?
A story about two composers who were just
sort of friendly rivals wouldn't be as much fun.
And this, I think, is the mostly invented trade-off--
what is actually true and perhaps slightly educational
versus what's more entertaining.
How do creators choose?
Playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht
thought that theater, at least, can and should
be used to educate, that artistic experience
and education go hand in hand.
But Brecht also always wanted audiences
to know they were watching a construct,
so they could react critically.
If you willingly suspend all disbelief,
you become immersed and are no longer
in the theater in your body, having critical reactions,
and thinking about the work and its place in the world.
This makes me wonder, though, how much
actual willing suspension of disbelief
really exists anymore.
Lots of modern audiences grasp that media
is made by people with aims, biases, and backgrounds,
using technology designed to create believable simulations.
But frequently, this understanding
is used to diminish the impact of media, not appreciate it.
There might be wide recognition of media artifice,
but we have a while to go before critical consideration is
commonplace.
Also, we don't tend to accept that the cinema
and media in general is already teaching us things.
Every piece of media teaches us how its creators think
the world can, should, or does work,
and teaches us the conventions of its own creation.
Every book, TV show, movie, or video game
teaches us how books, TV shows, movies, and video games work.
To claim that there is a strict binary between education
and entertainment on the side of the audience
is to deny that media educates us about these things, which
it does, while it is also entertaining us, which it does.
Unless you're watching a Pauly Shore movie.
Pauly Shore joke.
[HIGH-FIVE]
Maybe the dichotomy is between accuracy and creative freedom
on the creator side then.
If focused on accuracy, then creators
can't follow their beautiful and unique snowflake creator
hearts.
And forget about all this responsibility nonsense.
Besides, I don't watch "CSI" to learn about forensics.
I watch it to-- (WHISPERING) hey, why do people watch "CSI"?
That's what happens when worlds collide.
[SCREAM]
David Ehrlich for Slate writes that judging films
based on their accuracy misses the point completely.
Facts and truth are two very different things,
he writes, and suggests that it is not only possible
but perhaps cinema's imperative to accomplish truth
without facts.
He was writing about based-on-true-events movies
like "Selma" and "Foxcatcher."
But I think the extrapolated conclusion
is that the means are justified by the ending, where
two inaccurately portrayed giant lizards fight to the death,
and we all get super hyped about dinos.
So if that is the point of "JP" and it fudges details
in order to do it, so be it.
But even if we don't want to learn,
even if we consciously know that what we're watching
is a fiction, that doesn't stop us from absorbing some of it
as fact.
You might not watch "CSI" to learn about forensics.
But as it turns out, you might think you're learning anyway.
The "CSI" effect describes, quote,
"the impact that viewing fictional criminal
investigation shows like 'CSI' has
upon jurors' real-life decision-making processes."
Tamara F. Lawson at the Loyola University "Chicago Law
Journal" writes that the entire criminal litigation process is
potentially influenced by the fear that the "CSI"
effect has created a population of "CSI"-infected jurors that
respond to the criminal case and its evidence in different
and unexpected ways.
So maybe that responsibility, if it does actually exist,
is different for different pieces of media.
If we're all sort of wrong about dinosaurs, maybe that's OK.
But if the public perception of the justice system is affected,
maybe that's a bigger deal.
Of course, there's also the question of
whether or not "CSI" is responsible
for the recent rapid rise in actual forensic scientists, who
I'm assuming, you know, went to, like, actual school as opposed
to just watched "CSI."
I am gonna get to the truth.
[SCREAM]
What do you guys think?
Do movies and TV shows have some degree of responsibility
to be accurate?
Let us know in the comments.
And if you like our aims, biases, and backgrounds,
please subscribe.
Is nothing sacred?
The answer is no.
Let's see what you guys had to say about remakes.
[INAUDIBLE] on the subreddit connects
all of the remakes being made to the idea
of political and artistic progression.
And I think that this is a really smart and interesting
way of looking at this.
And that you can see all of these movies that
are being made as a symptom of culture and media
sort of being stuck.
But I think that this also relates to something that
Brian Knutson wrote in his comment,
that's you can also view it as a symptom of another kind
of progression, that sort of the distribution of technology
that allows people to make movies
and the ability for studios to remake things with greater
production value, better graphics, et cetera, et cetera.
So yeah, I think these are-- these
are sort of ideas in tension with one another
that are-- that are both really good.
CT Cassian also on the subreddit talks
about how Freud is begging to be referenced here.
And this idea that I'm not-- that I was not familiar with,
that when you take something away from a child,
they might be sad.
But then when you show it to them again,
they become excited.
And that this maybe plays into the glut
of remakes that have come out.
And this, I mean, aligns with-- with the Baudrillardian look
at things, which is the sort of infantilization
of the masses by media.
So I mean, hey, yeah, sure, why not?
(IN RUSSIAN ACCENT) Our desire for remakes [SNIFFS]
are artificial.
Wesley Whiteside points out that even though remakes might not
be a new thing, that there is maybe
a new attitude about them, and that you could say that remakes
of the past were about bringing previous or older
properties to a new audience, whereas now
it is about bringing the same thing
back over and over and over again to the same audience.
And I think this is a really interesting distinction.
I'm going to think about it for a little while.
But I'd be really curious to know what you all think
about this sort of dichotomy.
Alejandro Chavez talks about how plays are constantly remade,
and yet nobody complains.
And Joseph Lablat talks about this very thing,
right, that this is part of our understanding of plays
as a piece of culture, that they are
a-- they're sort of like a score for a symphony,
that they are a thing that is remade, whereas we tend not
to think of movies that way.
At least, it's not a given in the media itself.
But yeah, this was-- this was a great-- a great point.
Sarah Fogg, dijibro, and a bunch of other people
talked about the possibility that remakes are experiencing
such a moment because of our taste for modern-seeming media,
that there is a lack of desire to go back and view older
media for all kinds of reasons, one of them being that it just
doesn't look as good.
And so it feels almost like maybe a responsibility
to update these things, so that they are natural-looking
or seem normal to a modern audience.
And I think this is a really-- I think
this is an interesting idea.
And finally, The Feminist Baker that maybe,
like many other things, the baby boomers
are to blame for this problem, that the-- the number
of remakes is a symptom of the fact
that there is a generation of people who have sort of risen
in the ranks from fan to some production capacity.
And they are using their influence and power
to remake the things from their past.
Yeah.
Maybe.
I mean, any excuse to blame the baby boomers for something.
(SCORNFULLY) Mom and dad!
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these fine, feathered dinos.
We have a Facebook and IRC and a subreddit links
in the doobly doo.
And the tweet of the week this week is not a tweet of the week
so much as a cool thing that I found via Twitter.
Waywords and Meansigns is a project
to record the entirety of "Finnegan's Wake" set to music.
It is exactly what you are imagining it to be,
but also better than that.
Check it out.
[MUSIC PLAYING]