Mad, Bad and Dangerous

This title has been re-announced with the ISBN 1861892551. Christopher Frayling's study explores the portrayal, often negative, of scientists in film from the early days of cinema to the present.

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This title has been re-announced with the ISBN 1861892551. Since its origin cinema has had an uneasy relationship with science and technology: scientists are almost always impossibly mad or impossibly saintly, and technology is nearly always very bad for you. In "Mad, Bad and Dangerous", Christopher Frayling explores the genealogy of the film scientist - especially in Hollywood - showing how the filmed scientist has often been used to represent the prevailing phobias of the time. In the 1950s, for example, films were dominated by the fear of botched atomic research, and were a showcase of mutated, outsized creatures and radioactive zombies. However, since the 1970s the role of the scientist has been less straightforward, with damage to the environment and the spread of diseases becoming the predominant consequences of science gone wrong. Scientists - and the corporations that controlled them - became the "baddies".
The author also looks in parallel at the portrayal of real-life scientists in the movies, noting how they are in the main depicted as misfits, immersed in their work, sacrificing any normal life to the interests of science, yet distrusted by the scientific establishment. Interestingly, the cinematic portrayal of fictional and real-life scientists follow very similar dramatic conventions, and Frayling concludes that the mad and the saintly scientist are two sides of the same Hollywood coin.