Jokes of bedside manner aside, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was troubling in several ways. The first problem is that the feature character Dr. Bennell was a curious choice in his role as the active defender of free human will and patriarchy (“They’re after all of us… Our wives, our children, everybody!”). One problem was that he was a doctor, so that the privacy of physician-patient privilege only added to the covert aspect of the story. Not that it stopped Dr. Bennell from blabbering about his patients’ troubles with Becky or Dr. Kaufman, which of course is perfectly within legal bounds, but it automatically put the police in an antagonistic position throughout the film, even before evidence of their infiltration by the pods. I suppose the broader idea here is that of “secret knowledge,” something that Dr. Bennell alone possesses as his ticket out of Santa Mira (and which Steffen-Fluhr would say is another misogynistic reference of the film). Dr. Bennell is forced to consider doubt about his knowledge, notably by Dr. Kaufman, but his stubborn support for his own totalized interpretation of the small secrets of town, and his ultimate vindication, support the notion of an absolute knowledge about the other, whether it be the neighbor across the street or from the sky. Furthermore, medicine has never historically been about truth as much as amelioration.
The second problem is the dual uplifting of and disregard for science. Dr. Bennell remarks somewhat nonchalantly that the pod was a genuine possibility given the tremendous strides of science in his time. So while it may technically be alien proper, the pod may equally be considered an inevitable product of human knowledge. Of course, the destructive relationship between pod and person doesn’t really glorify the role of science in society (shameless plug). All sorts of technology, even agriculture, are literally sapping away our feelings from under the rug. Dr. Bennell and Becky have to retreat to the (prehistoric) cave to survive, albeit temporarily. Kaufman’s (semi-)rigorous psychiatric analysis suffers a similar setback. Like Bennell, Kaufman is a doctor and voice of authority, but as a voice of science he cannot be trusted! Bennell’s intuition proves superior to Kaufman’ psychologic, just as Bennell’s irrational faith in the necessity of emotion as an identifying part of humanity triumphs the cold argument for removing emotion as a less “complicated” way of life.
The third problem is Bennell’s activism, which is unusual given his oath to elevate life above ego. Somewhat in the spirit of generalizing over all premeds, I’d say Dr. Bennell might have better kept to his degree by allowing life to continue emotionless rather than using his special knowledge to resist. To him, the human shapes incubating in the pods were not fully human and therefore not fully qualified as life, giving him the right to equip the pitchfork and do them in—a rather sage presage of the future conflict for legalizing abortion. It’s suggested that he gets so emotionally invested because he sees a developing body of Becky, but the fear of these humans of artificial, scientific origin goes around Bennell, Becky, Jack, and Wendy. For the same suggested love, Bennell also breaks into Becky’s house and just sweeps her away out of the sanctity of the home. He is a doctor, as he constantly reminds Becky, and apart from passively accepting patients he is very willing to intervene even when it nullifies their privacy. (House, anyone?)
Taken together, these three problems about the portrayal of science and Dr. Bennell, the Scientific Man, suggest that there is something unnatural about science and the scientific thought behind modern medicine. The relationship between human and science is not limited to that of user and tool but one encompassing reverence, fear, skepticism, and the loss of free will. It is not really a rejection of science, since educated skepticism may be scientific, but Science, with its promise of absolute knowledge and its own academic hive mind, looks like a really scary thing and is perhaps essentially other to us, its practitioners, because of our own innate irrationality, i.e. our emotions. It may also be a revival of Frankenstein; do the products of science have rights beyond their creation by mere humans? Do we look at the pods in horror because they are absolutely and irrevocably alien (like the planet in Solaris), or because like the doctor we cannot be driven to concede our obsolescence, some feature of our human identity which we hold as unique despite a scientific novelty?
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
The Problem With Ashton Clark, Also, How Much I Hate Katin
In Nova, the figure of Ashton Clark seemed to be a somewhat enigmatic, yet fascinating entity in the backdrop of the action. At first, I perceived him to be a futuristic religious figure, and one who had been around long enough to made his way into the colloquial language to boot (“thank Ashton Clark”, and “Ashton Clark go with you” seemed to just be normal, modern, phrases with “God” replaced by AC). Moreover, I initially took this as a parody, perhaps some sort of neo-scientology that worshipped a man whose name definitely would not seem out of place on a sci fi cover. Katin’s eventual explanatory pontification on Ashton clark (one of many by Katin, which, to be frank, I found annoying) I realized it was not satire, but some sort of representation of an idealist economic theory cum spiritualism.
Ashton Clark brings up the of how religion works in a society where science has progressed that engineers become prophets. While there are many differences, this secular religion still seems alarmingly similar to the least attractive aspects of spiritualism. Take, for instance, Mouse’s seeming lack of understanding about the origin of Ashton Clark (which is arguably also just a weak device in order to get Katin to explain to the reader what is going on): he knows literally nothing about the religion, and yet uses its terminology as a reflex. Though he does not believe in it per se, growing up as an outsider in a Gypsy colony, the admission that they “swear by Ashton Clark” proves an equal acknowledgement of his spiritual clout, though for them as a devil rather than a saint. In that case, it is somewhat troubling that Mouse knows so little. A theoretical attraction to a “scientific religion” is the same attraction we have to science right now, hopefully there is a rational logic behind it that allows us to only accept it because we agree with that logic. However, in the case of AC, humanity is ascribing to a social/political/scientific position simply as a matter of faith. Though ailments like disease, nationalism and the limits of the speed of light seem to have all been eradicated, the world of Nova appears to be a dystopia none the less, for more reasons than the political conflict which frames the narrative. The “solution” to religion that Delay provides in conjunction with his solution to disease and space travel (all long-windedly explained by Katin, I’m sorry, I’m just not going to let this go) proves to only be more of the same. Too bad for the future.
Ashton Clark brings up the of how religion works in a society where science has progressed that engineers become prophets. While there are many differences, this secular religion still seems alarmingly similar to the least attractive aspects of spiritualism. Take, for instance, Mouse’s seeming lack of understanding about the origin of Ashton Clark (which is arguably also just a weak device in order to get Katin to explain to the reader what is going on): he knows literally nothing about the religion, and yet uses its terminology as a reflex. Though he does not believe in it per se, growing up as an outsider in a Gypsy colony, the admission that they “swear by Ashton Clark” proves an equal acknowledgement of his spiritual clout, though for them as a devil rather than a saint. In that case, it is somewhat troubling that Mouse knows so little. A theoretical attraction to a “scientific religion” is the same attraction we have to science right now, hopefully there is a rational logic behind it that allows us to only accept it because we agree with that logic. However, in the case of AC, humanity is ascribing to a social/political/scientific position simply as a matter of faith. Though ailments like disease, nationalism and the limits of the speed of light seem to have all been eradicated, the world of Nova appears to be a dystopia none the less, for more reasons than the political conflict which frames the narrative. The “solution” to religion that Delay provides in conjunction with his solution to disease and space travel (all long-windedly explained by Katin, I’m sorry, I’m just not going to let this go) proves to only be more of the same. Too bad for the future.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
What Alice Didn't Know
ENG 396 Week 4: Gender Appropriations: James Tiptree, Jr.
It’s no surprise that animals are well represented in Sheldon/Tiptree’s stories, especially as representations of the feminine. Women’s status is reduced and compared to that of secret possums, pigs, sought and hunted ducks, or even obsolete spacemen.
What if Sheldon portrays something more sinister than just antifeminism? After all, she was the experimental Psychologist Who Empathized with Rats (not unlike the Japanese “Princess Who Loved Insects,” a model for Miyazaki’s Nausicäa), and her research was supposed to probe fundamental biology and animal behavior beyond the messy social influences which humans endure and learn from. Tilly Lipsitz’s rats, subject to starvation, penetration, and blindness, stand in as more than scientific toys, not unlike Carol Page, who is probably more than a voice for woman as humans understand.
This is all quite vague; consider instead a sort of related biological idea. There is a thought among the physics community (one that is prevalent here) that life is “optimized” for its tasks, whether it is to maximize the sensitivity and resolution for images discerned by the retina, or to minimize in the eardrum the random noise that fogs up the precise sounds made by humans and animals. Down-to-earth examples may suggest a grander “theory of life,” which may be BS but at least suggests that there does exist a logical plan in the design of life which may be understood through scientific theory and experimentation.
As much as Sheldon was a scientist, she did not identify with those scientists who hacked off rat heads, and instead she felt the misery of the rats (89). She was a scientist but not a part of Science, which in its violence is unempathetic and masculine. Yet Science, supposedly, seeks the unadulterated truth of Nature, who is female, and the capitalization is curiously common in scientific texts. If Science is done from the male viewpoint, can it still supply the truth? Perhaps only half of the truth.
But for Sheldon there is a more fearful possibility, one that “Love Is the Plan the Plan is Death” most strongly suggests: What if Nature is sexist? What if there is a cosmic Plan, the Plan is sexist, Moggadeet is always doomed, and Carol Page must die a rara avis? Sheldon’s answer is only halfway negative. On the one hand, the women of “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” have dismissed the millenia-old male institution for something equally viable, and even more “human” (216). But although the perspective is balanced through the male experience, the statement of truth has shifted to female. There seems not to exist any conciliation between male and female truth; even the beatification of Carol Page was in the arms of the female Cavaná (273).
Then this is Sheldon’s dilemma: As much as the female and male perspectives are equally truthful, they share no mutual resolution from their own pools of thought, so that the two worlds must remain orthogonal. (For the brave among you… consider the spin of an electron, which can exist in any superposition of “up” and “down,” but any observation, such as by light heading toward a human eye, collapses the spin to either up or down and never both.) Perhaps, from Sheldon’s own message, the best way to understand is through alienation from one’s own world—for the scientist to be aloof of Science, for a man to be removed from masculinity, for a human to acknowledge and pass up their terrestrial place. Sheldon lifts science fiction from literary method to an epistemological Plan for comprehending all Plans.
It’s no surprise that animals are well represented in Sheldon/Tiptree’s stories, especially as representations of the feminine. Women’s status is reduced and compared to that of secret possums, pigs, sought and hunted ducks, or even obsolete spacemen.
What if Sheldon portrays something more sinister than just antifeminism? After all, she was the experimental Psychologist Who Empathized with Rats (not unlike the Japanese “Princess Who Loved Insects,” a model for Miyazaki’s Nausicäa), and her research was supposed to probe fundamental biology and animal behavior beyond the messy social influences which humans endure and learn from. Tilly Lipsitz’s rats, subject to starvation, penetration, and blindness, stand in as more than scientific toys, not unlike Carol Page, who is probably more than a voice for woman as humans understand.
This is all quite vague; consider instead a sort of related biological idea. There is a thought among the physics community (one that is prevalent here) that life is “optimized” for its tasks, whether it is to maximize the sensitivity and resolution for images discerned by the retina, or to minimize in the eardrum the random noise that fogs up the precise sounds made by humans and animals. Down-to-earth examples may suggest a grander “theory of life,” which may be BS but at least suggests that there does exist a logical plan in the design of life which may be understood through scientific theory and experimentation.
As much as Sheldon was a scientist, she did not identify with those scientists who hacked off rat heads, and instead she felt the misery of the rats (89). She was a scientist but not a part of Science, which in its violence is unempathetic and masculine. Yet Science, supposedly, seeks the unadulterated truth of Nature, who is female, and the capitalization is curiously common in scientific texts. If Science is done from the male viewpoint, can it still supply the truth? Perhaps only half of the truth.
But for Sheldon there is a more fearful possibility, one that “Love Is the Plan the Plan is Death” most strongly suggests: What if Nature is sexist? What if there is a cosmic Plan, the Plan is sexist, Moggadeet is always doomed, and Carol Page must die a rara avis? Sheldon’s answer is only halfway negative. On the one hand, the women of “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” have dismissed the millenia-old male institution for something equally viable, and even more “human” (216). But although the perspective is balanced through the male experience, the statement of truth has shifted to female. There seems not to exist any conciliation between male and female truth; even the beatification of Carol Page was in the arms of the female Cavaná (273).
Then this is Sheldon’s dilemma: As much as the female and male perspectives are equally truthful, they share no mutual resolution from their own pools of thought, so that the two worlds must remain orthogonal. (For the brave among you… consider the spin of an electron, which can exist in any superposition of “up” and “down,” but any observation, such as by light heading toward a human eye, collapses the spin to either up or down and never both.) Perhaps, from Sheldon’s own message, the best way to understand is through alienation from one’s own world—for the scientist to be aloof of Science, for a man to be removed from masculinity, for a human to acknowledge and pass up their terrestrial place. Sheldon lifts science fiction from literary method to an epistemological Plan for comprehending all Plans.
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