He’s climbing in your windows

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?

In Defense of Carl Sagan

Jasmine’s post raises a number of issues in the argument Penley develops against the scientific establishment and Carl Sagan in the first few pages of NASA/TREK. I’d like to add to that by explaining why I think Penley’s criticism of Sagan is, as a whole, unjustified.

Penley’s criticism of Sagan begins with the claim that Sagan believes that “Entertainment… is the opposite of enlightenment,” in the realm of science, and points out that “such a view contrasts sharply with that of … physicist Stephen Hawking”. As Jasmine points out, Penley’s attribution of this view to Sagan is simply wrong, given Sagan’s SF publications. Indeed, no contrast of the sort that Penley claims can be found between the views of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking: Sagan is committed to the popularization of science as long as it is accurately represented, which Stephen Hawking, being a practicing physicist himself, would surely have done in “A Brief History of Time”. Sagan only objects to popular science writing when it is grounded in a misunderstanding of modern science and misrepresents scientific facts, a caveat which Penley overlooks when she accuses Sagan of being anti-populist.

Penley also characterizes Sagan as insisting that “our pleasure in science… should only emerge through identification with the righteous joy of his skeptical debunking of nonscience”, but this characterization is clearly inaccurate. Sagan does not debunk pseudoscience because he derives pleasure from showing off his superior scientific knowledge, as Penley makes him out to be, but rather because he is concerned about the impact pseudoscience may have on the public, who may not be able to distinguish science fiction from fact. Given a choice, Sagan would certainly prefer to engage in writing his own works of popular science to spending time disproving scientific myths, making it difficult to see how he would derive any pleasure from being forced to debunk pseudoscience, much less expect others to derive enjoyment from such a debunking. Thus Penley’s characterization as Sagan as being some sort of holier-than-thou scientific elitist is simply wrong.

Subsequently, Penley rejects Sagan’s criticism of the X-Files, as she argues that the X-Files “does not eschew skepticism”, instead turning skepticism “towards the complicity of establishment science and the government”. Yet even her own characterization of Sagan’s argument shows that Sagan is not interested in skepticism in this sense. Rather, Sagan is criticizing the X-Files for its lack of empirical skepticism, or its preference for explaining unusual phenomena by means of alien involvement, rather than through scientifically plausible methods. Thus even if it is true that the X-Files is “fully skeptical” in the antiestablishment sense, Penley’s point is hardly a relevant response to Sagan’s criticism.

Finally, Penley accuses Sagan of being unable to “appreciate the levels of irony and humor in the X-Files”, and of underestimating “the degree of critical reflection fans are capable of”. In the process, she also makes another ad hominem jab at Sagan, again suggesting that his motivations for debunking pseudoscience are elitist. It may be true that by analysing the X-Files from a solely scientific viewpoint and focusing on its failings with regards to empirical skepticism, Sagan may be missing out on the various other themes of the show which make it so enjoyable, such as the issues of government accountability and gender which it addresses. But this is irrelevant to Sagan’s criticism, for the extent to which the X-Files makes insightful social and political commentary has no bearing on the extent to which it represents scientific facts accurately, and so again Penley’s supposed response to Sagan is inadequate. Given this and the other flaws in Penley’s argument I have outlined above, I consider Penley’s criticism of Sagan to be unjustified.