Introduction Science and Popular Audio-Visual Media 1 Michael Fuchs and Martin Butler Our introduction to this special issue on science and popular audio-visual media sheds light on the intricate interconnections between science (and discourses about science) and different popular audio-visual media. Focusing on the topics of global warming and the ongoing pandemic, on the one hand, and the genres of horror, science fiction, and fantasy, on the other, we illustrate some functions of science and scientists in audio-visual media and also turn to the history of photography and motion pictures and their significance as both scientific tools and entertainment media, before briefly introducing the individual essays included in this issue. In an essay on the importance of science education published in 1990, Carl Sagan notes, We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster. It’s dangerous and stupid for us to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain. (1990: 264) More than 30 years later, Sagan’s observation has not lost any of its significance: in an era in which populism runs rampant and social media perpetuate ‘alternative facts’ in an attempt to turn ‘post-truth’ into the social reality of the day, communicating scientific knowledge has become imperative. 1 We would like to thank the Volkswagen Foundation for funding received in the context of the research projects “Fiction Meets Science II: Varieties of Science Narrative” and “Pandemic Meets Fiction”. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 47 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2022-0010 Michael Fuchs and Martin Butler 172 In view of the importance of communicating science and scientific knowledge - but also due to the various obstacles that science communication faces in the over-saturated mediascape of the early twenty-first century, the humanities have begun leveraging the potential of cultural representations in the production and transformation of science, its objects, and its subjects. Next to the fields of literature and science, popular culture and science, and the history of science, the interdisciplinary field of environmental criticism has been at the forefront of bringing the humanities closer to other fields of science, in particular the natural sciences, which has also helped the humanities demonstrate their importance to discussing burning issues of both the present and the future. For example, the editors of the volume Climate Change and the Humanities (2017) confidently (but perhaps over-zealously) proclaim, “Environmental problems including the current climate change crisis have their origins in human culture and to solve those problems we need the insight of the humanities” (Elliott et al. 2017: 1). In Anthropocene Fictions (2015), Adam Trexler notes that literature may, in fact, provide a means for climate science communication: [T]he creation of ‘facts’ depends on their circulation beyond the laboratory and scientific journal, into funding bodies, political arenas, and publics. Fiction is not just an impure reflector of scientific knowledge. It models the entire process of circulation and, in some cases, traces new paths of circulation. Public understanding of science is an important field of research, and literature could be used as crude tool to trace the imperfect dissemination of climate knowledge from academic to literary circles. A more interesting approach would explore how different works of fiction articulate the overlapping categories of science and public. There is a historicist competent to this project, tracking different models of circulation through different literary periods. However, it is also speculative, showing how fiction seeks to reimagine both scientific practice and public organization in the future. Above all, this research should not devolve into a history of ideas: things like global climate models, ice cores, wind turbines, and tipping points have specific histories that shape both scientific and literary practice. (2015: 234-235) As Trexler suggests, global warming is not just a climatological fact and a social reality that has entailed (and hopefully will bring about more dramatic) changes in funding policies, business practices, and infrastructure investments, among others, but also a discursive field in which various actors configure and reconfigure its meaning and the science backing the idea of human-made climate change. Popular audio-visual media play an important role in this context. Roland Emmerich’s movie The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Alexa Weik von Mossner has pointed out, was “the first Hollywood mega-blockbuster that was self-consciously about climate change” (2020: 116), even if the film Science and Popular Audio-Visual Media 173 suffers from Emmerich’s characteristically bombastic style of film-making and two-dimensional storytelling. The movie begins by depicting the collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf, which palaeoclimatologist Jack Hall witnesses first-hand and on-site. After having established the cataclysmic setting, the action jumps to a U.N. conference on global warming in New Delhi, where Jack gives a presentation and stresses that “if we do not act soon, it is our children and our grandchildren who will have to pay the price. […] At the rate we’re burning fossil fuels and polluting the environment, the ice caps will soon disappear” (Emmerich 2009). Clearly, The Day After Tomorrow taps into what Adeline Johns-Putra has identified as “one of the most prevalent tactics in contemporary environmentalist discourse” here: the “parental rhetoric of posterity” (2019: 4). However, the climate catastrophe that Jack predicts will hit the planet in “[m]aybe a hundred years, maybe in a thousand” (Emmerich 2009) arrives much sooner than expected: within days, tornadoes are devastating Los Angeles, baseballsized hailstones are killing people in Tokyo, and people in Scotland are freezing within seconds when stepping out of their cars. Jack theorises that melting polar ice has led to a “critical desalinization point” in the Atlantic Ocean (Emmerich 2009), causing the North Atlantic Current to change. Soon, Jack and his team discover that three super-storms distributed across the northern hemisphere will radically alter the climate (Illustration 1). Illustration 1. Climate modelling allows the scientists to predict that three mega-storms will dramatically change the planet. Screenshot from The Day After Tomorrow © Twentieth Century Fox, 2009. Crucially, similar to many other natural disaster films, the environmental issues that The Day After Tomorrow touches on function as the backdrop to what David Ingram has described as “anthropocentric, human interest stories” (2000: 10). Accordingly, as the climate catastrophe unfolds and a super-blizzard hits the north-eastern United States, the movie focuses on the heroic scientist, Jack, who makes his way from Washington, D.C., to New York City to reunite with his son, while the larger political, social, Michael Fuchs and Martin Butler 174 and environmental questions raised in the course of the narrative take a back-seat to the family melodrama driving the plot. In typical Emmerich fashion, The Day After Tomorrow hammers home its ‘messages’ in its closing minutes, as the President of the United States proclaims, These past few weeks have left us all with a profound sense of humility in the face of nature’s destructive power. For years, we operated under the belief that we could continue consuming our planet’s natural resources without consequence. We were wrong. I was wrong. The fact that my first address to you comes from a consulate on foreign soil is a testament to our changed reality. Not only Americans, but people all around the globe are now guests in the nations we once called ‘the Third World’. (Emmerich 2009) In its final seconds, the movie references Blue Marble (1972), the first photograph taken by a human being that shows Earth in its entirety (from one side, of course; Illustration 2). As Adrian Ivakhiv has explained, the iconic photograph has generated a host of interpretations: “of wholeness and globality, the unity of a world without political or cultural borders and divisions, and of a common destiny shared by all organisms; of planetary vitality, but also of the vulnerability and fragility of life on Earth, and of fear and trepidation for its, and our, future” (2015: 134). The Day After Tomorrow exploits these established connotations of the photograph to emphasise not so much the vulnerability of the planet but rather humankind’s dependence on the Earth system while calling for solidarity among all people. Yet what the overly trite and clichéd conclusion glosses over is that both within the diegetic world and outside it, this particular image of Earth results from techno-scientific progress: the development of the imagining technologies needed to capture the planet in this form (or a photo-realistic digital simulation) and of the technologies that have made possible the International Space Station, from where astronauts gaze upon the planet in the movie. In other words, human hubris, human overreach, and human (over)reliance on the technologies that have made possible modern life are the prerequisites for representing Earth in this particular way. At the same time, these depictions of Earth shape the way in which we conceive of the planet and its socio-cultural architecture. Accordingly, it is certainly not a coincidence that the movie appropriates the iconic photograph in a quite peculiar way: whereas Blue Marble primarily shows the African continent, the final seconds of The Day After Tomorrow focus on the Americas, zooming out from the east coast of the United States, as if to suggest that the future of the United States is the future of all of humankind, thereby exposing the American exceptionalism that the entire movie espouses. Science and Popular Audio-Visual Media 175 Illustration 2. The closing seconds of The Day After Tomorrow evoke the Blue Marble photograph while showing that large parts of North America are covered by ice. Screenshot from The Day After Tomorrow © Twentieth Century Fox, 2009. The Day After Tomorrow caused quite some waves in the mid-2000s. In an article published a few months after the movie’s release, Anthony Leiserowitz points out that “[b]efore it even hit the theaters”, the film “generated an intense storm of media controversy as scientists, politicians, advocacy groups, and political pundits debated the scientific accuracy and political implications of the movie and global climate change” (2004: 23). While “[s]ome commentators feared that the catastrophic plotline […] would be so extreme that the public would subsequently dismiss […] global warming as fantasy”, others believed “the film would do more to raise public awareness of global warming than any number of scientific papers or documentaries”; and yet another group believed that the film would have no effect whatsoever on the public perception of global warming and, accordingly, neither on political decision-making (Leiserowitz 2004: 23-24). As Leiserowitz’s study demonstrates, however, the blockbuster had “a considerable impact on the global-warming risk perceptions of those who saw the movie” (2004: 28). Similarly, the Academy Award-winning documentary film An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which focuses on Al Gore giving a presentation that explains some key conclusions of climate science, from Naomi Oreskes’s study about the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change (2004) to the Keeling Curve, struggles with a few “factual errors that do creep into [the film]” (Steig 2007: 6); however, the documentary “has had a much greater impact on public opinion and public awareness of global climate change than any scientific paper or report” (Quiring 2007: 1). While global warming brought science to the media spotlight in the 2000s, the Covid-19 pandemic has arguably put science centre stage in the more recent past: scientists such as American immunologist Anthony Fauci Michael Fuchs and Martin Butler 176 quickly became the most coveted interview partners for television shows, radio programmes, and various online formats. As mediators between the research community and the general public, scientists such as Fauci have explained the virus and Covid-19 and guided governments’ decision-making processes (or not). While these figures popularised science, in particular during the early stages of the ongoing pandemic, they were also popularised - turned into modern-day superheroes in social media and urban artworks alike (cf. Butler et al. 2021). In addition to giving countless interviews and appearing at dozens of press conferences, a cartoon rendition of Fauci is featured in three episodes of the final season of Showtime’s series Our Cartoon President (2018-2020). Set during the Covid-19 pandemic and the attendant campaign for the 2020 elections, Fauci’s appearances in the series are brief. In the episode “Coronavirus”, he comments on a Trump rally, wondering, “Is it worth saving everyone? ” (Colbert et al. 2020a). In “Party Unity”, he is scheduled to appear at “an unaired presser” (Colbert et al. 2020b). Don Junior and Eric storm into the room and ask Fauci how long it would take to find a cure for Covid-19, as they want to host “a sick-ass houseboat sex-and-drinking party” (Colbert et al. 2020b). Fauci spoils the boys’ dreams, explaining that it takes years to develop vaccines. And during a presidential debate in “Senate Control”, Fauci unadornedly diagnoses, “This country is like a rabid dog that ran off with the shotgun that’s supposed to put it out of its misery” (Colbert et al. 2020c). In general, cartoon Fauci embodies not so much indifference to politics but rather exhaustion with its procedures and operations while also acknowledging some realities of scientific research. In the first two of the episodes featuring Fauci, Deborah Birx functions as his counterpart, as she backs Trump publicly, but is clearly dissatisfied with the President’s actions and that she is expected to support him. Our Cartoon President thus draws on and perpetuates a problematic gender-based opposition in which Fauci represents the good scientist who stands in for his ideals, while Birx ignores ethical questions in her pursuit of (little) power. However, by turning Don Junior into a mad scientist figure in “Party Unity” (Illustration 3), the series emphasises that reducing science’s positive and negative potentials to (gender) binaries proves overly simplistic. Similarly, Trump’s “elaborate stage play” in which he battles the coronavirus (Colbert et al. 2020a; Illustration 4) might, on the surface, critique the President’s proclivity for spectacle and theatrics, while it also, more subtly, addresses the media’s tendency to turn people fighting the virus into heroes and heroines, which, more often than not, reduces questions pertaining to science - in particular research and its application - to binary oppositions. As Roslynn Haynes has highlighted, science is much more complex, for it has given us fundamental survival techniques in agriculture, in engineering and medical science, in transport and communications, and in safety criteria. It is Science and Popular Audio-Visual Media 177 our knowledge base for socioeconomic structure and core politics, and for the quality of life that Western society takes as its right. It holds out the best hope we have for monitoring and repairing environmental degradation and possibly, if we are lucky, halting climate change and species extinction. (2017: 1) At the same time, science “has […] produced weapons of mass destruction and other inventions that, while less violent, even potentially benign, nevertheless entail possible dangers - physical, moral, and humanitarian - over which we currently have little control” (Haynes 2017: 1). Illustration 3. Don Junior experiments on Eric. Screenshot from Our Cartoon President © CBS Media Ventures, 2020. The hopes and fears that Haynes raises in this passage have also become evident during the Covid-19 pandemic. To stick with the example of Anthony Fauci, in particular in the first year of the pandemic, he figured both as a saint (or even God) and the devil in disguise in different contexts (cf. Butler et al. 2021). While the immunologist was thus thrown onto an ideological battlefield on which, among others, two warring parties negotiate what ‘America’ means today, what is more interesting to us here is that this struggle against the backdrop of an unfolding pandemic has turned the media spotlight onto scientists. Aside from being entangled in ideological warfare, Fauci’s presence in audio-visual media during the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic not only suggests that science and the scientist have a particularly pop-cultural allure in a crisis but also indicates that the much-maligned ‘old, white man’ still exudes notions of knowledge, trustworthiness, and reliability in times of crisis. Michael Fuchs and Martin Butler 178 Illustration 4. President Trump confronts the coronavirus. Screenshot from Our Cartoon President © CBS Media Ventures, 2020. These ongoing developments not only confirm the significance of science in our modern world but also reveal the intricate relationships between science and audio-visual media, two fields that have been contaminating each other in various historical contexts and constellations. Indeed, the emergence of photography in the mid-nineteenth century and film in the latter decades of the nineteenth century is tied to the use of these new technologies as tools of scientific inquiry and documentation: Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs helped study animal locomotion, while film was employed in such diverse fields as medicine (Ostherr 2013) and ballistics (Curtis 2015) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Expedition films of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were akin to the travel writings of the previous centuries. Mary Louise Pratt has observed that “science came to articulate Europe’s contacts with the imperial frontier” in the second half of the eighteenth century (1992: 20), which was reflected in the various documents that expedition members produced, from reports to fictional narratives. Similarly, a colonialist mindset undergirds (semi-)documentary expedition and adventure films such as Simba: The King of Beasts (1928) and Bring ’Em Back Alive (1932), as they try to educate their viewers about distant lands, foreign peoples, and exotic animals. While film was used as scientific tool, scientist characters also appeared early and often in fiction films. For example, Frankenstein (1818) was first adapted to the then-new medium in 1910. The short film tells the story of how Frankenstein “discover[s] the secret of life and death” during his time Science and Popular Audio-Visual Media 179 in college (Illustration 5), but “instead of a perfect human being”, Frankenstein “creates a monster” (Dawley 2017). Akin to a magic show, the monster manifests behind closed doors in a lengthy special effects sequence before Frankenstein abandons the creature, “appalled by the sight of his creation” (Dawley 2017). Visually more of a cross between a devil and a werewolf than the monster we have come to know, the creature haunts the scientist, whose imprudent actions threaten to bring misery to his entire family, but the creature eventually (and suddenly) vanishes while staring at its horrifying mirror image. With Frankenstein’s terrifying alter-ego successfully expelled, the doctor can live happily ever after (unless the suppressed monster returns at some future point in time). Illustration 5. Frankenstein communicates with a human skull to uncover the secrets of life. Screenshot from Frankenstein © Edison Manufacturing Company, 1910. Early sound films such as Universal’s Frankenstein (1931) and Dracula (1931) likewise combine fantastic elements with scientist characters, as does King Kong (1933). However, the story centring on the giant ape inhabiting a secluded island adds a decidedly self-reflexive layer. Focusing on filmmaker Carl Denham, who sets out to capture “something […] that no white man has ever seen” (Cooper/ Schoedsack 2022), King Kong draws on Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s earlier nonfiction films, such as Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927). Fatimah Tobing Rony has Michael Fuchs and Martin Butler 180 rightly noted that King Kong is “a film about the making of an ethnographic film” (1996: 159). Arguably, this connection becomes nowhere as explicit as in the scene in which Denham and his team approach the Indigenous people of Skull Island engaging in a ritual. The camera’s focus repeatedly turns to a small group of men dressed to look like apes. In these moments, King Kong exposes its ethnographic gaze, as the Indigenous people are Othered by being decidedly coded in ways that blur the lines separating humans from animals. Denham is fascinated by what he sees and starts filming (Illustration 6). The discovery of, and ensuing confrontation with, the Indigenous population encapsulates one of the driving motifs of the film: “the danger” that emerges from “our desire to see things we are not supposed to” (Telotte 1988: 391) - an issue which not only is closely tied to the (scientific) exploration narrative that sets the action into motion, but which also echoes the topics of human hubris and overreach mentioned in our brief discussion of The Day After Tomorrow above. Illustration 6. Carl Denham uses film to document exotic rituals. Screenshot from King Kong © Warner Bros., 2022. The more recent King Kong remake/ reboot Kong: Skull Island (2017) includes a group of scientists surrounding a cryptozoologist who set off to “hunt [… an] imaginary monster” (or, rather, seemingly imaginary monster) on “an uncharted island in the South Pacific” that is referred to as “a place where myth and science meet” (Vogt-Roberts 2017). More properly Science and Popular Audio-Visual Media 181 described as a place where Indigenous knowledge exposes the limitations of Western techno-science, the island houses gigantic creatures that emerge from the planet’s interior, simultaneously espousing the pseudoscientific notion of Hollow Earth and hinting at the anthropogenic traces left in the Earth’s layers that define the Anthropocene. While Kong: Skull Island is not subtle in how it connects human alterations of the environment with Nature’s response (seismic bombs dropped to study the island’s geology lead to the creatures’ rising), this point is made even more explicit in the franchise sequel, Godzilla: King of Monsters (2019), in which a scientist points out, Humans have been the dominant species for thousands of years - and look what’s happened: overpopulation, pollution, war. The mass extinction we feared has already begun. And we are the cause. We are the infection. But […] the Earth unleashed a fever to fight this infection. [… The creatures] are part of the Earth’s natural defense system: a way to protect the planet, to maintain its balance. (Dougherty 2019) Echoing Paul Crutzen’s famous assessment that “[u]nless there is a global catastrophe […,] mankind will remain a major environmental force for many millennia” (2002: 23), the scientist character’s statement universalises the varied anthropogenic contributions to environmental destruction, while the movie renders the incomprehensible scale and various dimensions of the environmental crisis visible through giant monsters that can be confronted head-on. Overall, Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse (which both movies are part of) uses its scientist characters to both highlight the films’ fantastic character and to suggest that scientific progress is often rooted in speculation - the belief that there is something ‘out there’ to be discovered, beyond the horizons of institutionalised knowledge. Accordingly, the discourses of speculative fiction and science do, in fact, have some features in common. All of these movies stage the “deeply embedded myths” about “science as the quest for knowledge, its practitioners, and its imagined impact on our lives” circulated in the Western world (Haynes 2017: 2). Accordingly, they employ and develop a number of the (stereo)typical representations of scientists that Roslynn Haynes has identified, from the “morally suspect alchemist” to the “helpless scientist” (2017: 5-6). As a more recent audio-visual medium, videogames often draw on stories established in other media; as a result, scientist characters permeate videogame storyworlds just as much as those of film and television (e.g. Pfister 2020). For example, the first-person shooter Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014) and its sequel, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (2017), include Nazi scientists as an extreme example of the morally suspect scientist, while the action role-playing game Vampyr (2018) adds a twist to the vampire narrative, as players control a doctor who happens to be a vampire Michael Fuchs and Martin Butler 182 and who tries to find both a cure against his vampirism and the Spanish Plague decimating the population of London. However, in contrast to other audio-visual media, videogames may employ science in decidedly interactive ways - as a game mechanic, that is. For example, strategy games in the tradition of the iconic Civilization (1991) map a culture’s progress onto a technology tree (Illustration 7). These technology trees reduce complex technological developments (and the social developments that accompany them) to a series of distinct steps that primarily depend on allocating resources and largely ignore that scientific progress “is produced by, and in turn shapes, a contingent malleable, complex social world” (Vint 2014: 314). In addition, in Civilization-type games, human history is not only connected to an overly simple (and flawed) conception of the forward motion of Western techno-scientific progress but also closely tied to colonising foreign lands. Illustration 7. The final stages in the process of technological advancement in Civilization VI. Screenshot from Sid Meier’s Civilization VI © 2K Games, 2019. Indeed, even videogames in which science is not overtly linked with colonialist and imperialist aspirations often perpetuate (neo-)colonial ideas through gameplay. In Jurassic World Evolution (2018), for example, players are tasked to build dinosaur theme parks on uninhabited fictional islands. Apart from the colonial tradition of terra nullius that undergirds the entire franchise, the mining of DNA (which serves as the basis for creating dinosaurs) is underpinned by neo-colonial extraction networks. Although the majority of dig sites are located in North America, there are also sites in places such as Argentina, Mongolia, and Niger that players may harvest (Illustration 8). The costs of expeditions differ, but the expenses seem to be primarily related to how much income the dinosaur will generate in the future, essentially suggesting that the resources are available for the players’ extractive practices if they are willing to invest some money. This co- Science and Popular Audio-Visual Media 183 lonial practice becomes all the more problematic because of the geosciences’ roots in colonialism: “palaeontology did not just develop in parallel with colonialism in the nineteenthand twentieth-centuries”, Chris Manias has stressed, “but was very much entangled with it” (2021: 59); entanglements that have not disappeared in the twenty-first century (see Cisneros et al. 2022). Illustration 8. Fossil extraction networks expose the colonial mindset perpetuated by Jurassic World Evolution. The dots on landmass represent fossil sites. Composite image of individual screenshots. Jurassic World Evolution © Frontier Developments, 2018. Since science pervades audio-visual media, these media contribute to shaping the techno-scientific imaginary as well as the institution of science. For example, numerous space scientists have highlighted the impact science fiction shows such as the original Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969) had on their career choices. Maybe more importantly, popular culture shapes our understanding of science. In the mid-2000s, media outlets discussed the ‘CSI effect’ - “the notion that in order to convict accused felons, jurors now expect prosecutors to prove scientific certainty rather than to merely overcome reasonable doubt” introduced by the popular crime series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2004-2015) and its spinoffs (Harriss 2011: 4). But did jurors’ expectations really change due to the television series? An early review of media effects research suggested that the CSI effect may, in fact, “lower standards by creating a mystification of scientific evidence” (Tyler 2006: 1055), while an empirical study only found “scant evidence […] that Michael Fuchs and Martin Butler 184 CSI viewers [are] either more or less likely to acquit defendants without scientific evidence” (Shelton 2008: 4). However, CSI viewers have higher expectations when it comes to conclusive evidence - scientific or otherwise (Shelton 2008: 4), attesting to the educational potential of popular culture. Indeed, audio-visual media have become important means of science communication: not only does the public often encounter science through these media, which hence influence people’s understanding of scientific theories, practices, and technologies, but scientists have also come to understand that audio-visual media, such as YouTube clips, provide key channels for science communication. In his editorial to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Science & Popular Culture, Steve Gil accordingly stresses, Studying science in popular culture is essential to understanding how scientific ideas are utilized, explored, critiqued and sometimes exploited outside of their formal contexts. So too is such study necessary in evaluating the many levels at which popular culture inflects and frames scientific knowledge and research. (2018: 3) The four articles included in this special issue take up this challenge of exploring the dynamic interplay between popular audio-visual media and representations of science. Two of the articles are rather situated in the tradition of science communication studies, albeit one of them has a relatively apparent cultural studies bent, while the other two contributions are more clearly anchored in cultural, media, and television studies, showcasing the different approaches to studying the entanglements between science and audio-visual media. Roslynn and Raymond Haynes open this issue with an essay about audio-visual representations of mathematicians. As they stress, the depiction of mathematics in film, television, and other audio-visual media is somewhat of a paradox, as mathematics may well be the least visual of all sciences. Nevertheless, Roslynn and Raymond Haynes demonstrate the variety of representations of mathematics and mathematicians in film, television, and other audio-visual media of the last thirty years and the different topics that these depictions have addressed, from questions of diversity to the social struggles that mathematicians face, while developing from the stereotype of the socially awkward mathematician to more varied representations. In the second essay, Martin Butler explores the space of the laboratory in AMC’s hit series Breaking Bad (2008-2013). Ranging from an RV to a well-equipped laboratory, characters use a variety of spaces to ‘cook’ meth. Set against the backdrop of New Mexico and the ‘fringe science’ (nuclear and otherwise) historically conducted there, Butler’s reading of the different meanings of lab spaces highlights how the constant reconfiguration of Science and Popular Audio-Visual Media 185 ‘the lab’ reveals science as what Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka have termed “situated practices” (2022). Rudolf Spennemann and Lindy Orthia employ a quantitative framework to investigate what futuristic technologies (as science applications) featured in the Iron Man films viewers remembered and whether they anticipated these technologies’ development. Based on a survey and focus groups, Spennemann and Orthia conclude that the relevance of the respective technology to the plot and/ or its connection to main characters as well as its potential to be featured in spectacular scenes are more likely to render the technology memorable than their potential for real-world use. In addition, viewers are more likely to encourage the development of technologies that they perceive as ‘good’. Finally, Michael Fuchs’s article focuses on the docuseries Expedition Great White, in which scientists and professional fishermen combine their forces and efforts to catch and tag great white sharks. Drawing on Antoine Traisnel’s notion of the development from the hunt to the capture regime, Fuchs demonstrates that the series merges both conceptual fields in the attempt to understand and, eventually, control the shark. Moving from the television series to its paratexts, in particular the Shark Tracker website, Fuchs demonstrates how controlling the shark is less about the actual, physical animal, but more about its spectral traces in the mediascape. With their different theoretical perspectives and thematic foci, the contributions to this issue showcase some of the numerous discourses surrounding science in popular audio-visual media. In view of the growing skepticism towards scientific knowledge and attendant belief in pseudoscience fueled by populist rhetoric, the articles underline that we need to take more seriously popular audio-visual media as important catalysts in the communication of science, its practices, subjects, and effects. As such, the essays may serve as starting points for further explorations into a highly diverse field of inquiry. Bibliography Butler, Martin et al. (2021). PandemIcons? The Medical Scientist as Iconic Figure in Times of Crisis. Configurations 29 (4). 435-451. Cisneros, Juan Carlos et al. (2022). Digging Deeper into Colonial Palaeontological Practices in Modern Day Mexico and Brazil. Royal Society Open Science 9 (3). https: / / doi.org/ 10.1098/ rsos.210898. [Jul. 2022]. Cooper, Merian C. & Schoedsack, Ernest B. (dirs.) (2022). King Kong [1933]. [Film]. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. [Blu-ray]. Colbert, Stephen et al. (exec. prod.) (2020a). Coronavirus. Our Cartoon President. 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