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Band 47 · Heft 2 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0) 7071 97 97 0 \ Fax +49 (0) 7071 97 97 11 info@narr.de \ www.narr.de \ narr.digital Notice to Contributors All articles for submission should be sent to the editor, Bernhard Kettemann, as a WORD document as mail attachment: bernhard.kettemann@uni-graz.at Manuscripts should conform to the AAA style sheet or follow either MHRA or MLA style. (Copies of the MLA Style Sheet may be obtained from the Treasurer of the Modern Language Association of America, 62 Fifth Ave, New York, N. Y., 10011; copies of the MHRA Style Book from W.S. Maney & Son Ltd., Hudson Rd., Leeds LS9 7DL, England.) Documentation can be embodied either in footnotes or in an appended bibliography, with name and date reference enclosed in brackets in the text. Footnotes should be numbered consecutively and listed on a separate page. The footnotes will appear on the bottom of the page where they are mentioned. They should be limited to a minimum. Languages of publication are German and English. Authors are requested to provide an English abstract of their contribution of about 15 lines in a separate document. In the normal procedure first proofs will be sent to the authors and should be returned to the editor within one week. Authors receive one free copy of the issue containing their contribution. It is our policy to publish accepted contributions without delay. Gründer, Eigentümer, Herausgeber und für den Inhalt verantwortlich / founder, owner, editor and responsibility for content: Bernhard Kettemann, Institut für Anglistik, Universität Graz, Heinrichstraße 36, A-8010 Graz. Tel.: +43 / 316 / 380-2488, 2474, Fax: +43 / 316 / 380-9765 Web: https: / / narr.digital/ journal/ aaa Herausgeber / editor Bernhard Kettemann Redaktion / editorial assistants Georg Marko Eva Triebl Mitherausgeber / editorial board Alwin Fill Walter Grünzweig Walter Hölbling Allan James Andreas Mahler Christian Mair Annemarie Peltzer-Karpf Werner Wolf Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 47 Heft 2 Inhaltsverzeichnis Michael Fuchs and Martin Butler Introduction: Science and Popular Audio-Visual Media......................................171 Roslynn Haynes and Raymond Haynes The Mathematician as Hero in Audio-Visual Media ...........................................189 Martin Butler On the Siting of Science: Laboratories, Scientific Practice, and Its Subjects in the U.S.-American Television Show Breaking Bad .....................................................209 Rudolf Spennemann and Lindy A. Orthia Creating a Market for Technology through Film: Diegetic Prototypes in the Iron Man Trilogy ........................................................................................................225 Michael Fuchs Capturing the Shark: White (Eco-)Masculinity and the Pursuit of Science in the Docuseries Expedition Great White .......................................................................243 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Der gesamte Inhalt der AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Band 1, 1976 - Band 40, 2015 ist nach AutorInnen alphabetisch geordnet abrufbar unter http: / / wwwgewi.uni-graz.at/ staff/ kettemann This journal is abstracted in: ESSE (Norwich), MLA Bibliography (New York, NY), C doc du CNRS (Paris), CCL (Frankfurt), NCELL (Göttingen), JSJ (Philadelphia, PA), ERIC Clearinghouse on Lang and Ling (Washington, DC), LLBA (San Diego), ABELL (London). 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Printed in Germany ISSN 0171-5410 ISBN 978-3-8233-1001-3 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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This is true both in depicting the inner life of scientists and in presenting credibly what they actually do when ‘doing science’. Mathematics is arguably the most non-visual and non-verbal of sciences, as the science lacks even the visual apparatus of chemistry. In addition, mathematical symbols and formulae are the most arcane to non-scientists. Thus, the problem for film-makers is the question of how to engage and maintain audience interest while presenting the mathematicians’ experience faithfully and avoiding ‘information dump’. In this article, we focus on the depiction of mathematicians in film, television, and recorded TED talks and the success (or otherwise) of their representation. “All we know about the world we know through the mass media.” Niklas Luhmann The Reality of the Mass Media (2000: 1) The stereotypical mathematician of film, an unfashionably dressed and socially inept guardian of abstruse and boring knowledge, has never been a likely candidate for movie stardom and box-office success. So why, since the 1990s, has there been a steady stream of successful films featuring mathematicians as the main characters? 1 Two pivotal events in the history of mathematics may have sparked this interest in maths and the people who dedicate their lives to it. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was published on April Fool’s Day 1988 and sold out the first edition in a few days. Improbably for a book about theoretical physics based largely on mathematics, it rocketed 1 Wikipedia lists 45 films about mathematicians since 1992 (List of Films about Mathematicians, 2022). AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 47 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2022-0011 Roslynn Haynes and Raymond Haynes 190 to the top of the best-seller lists, was translated into more than 35 languages, and has now sold more than ten million copies world-wide. Its success reflected a combination of fascination with the big questions it posed about the origins of the universe, and the interest generated by Hawking’s well-known motor neuron condition and his witty persona. These aspects were preserved in the biographical film of the same name, along with interviews with Hawking’s family, friends and colleagues, and computer graphics to illustrate his complex ideas. In 1994, the British mathematician Andrew Wiles made media headlines with his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, for which he received the prestigious Abel medal in 2016. Prior to this, few non-mathematicians would have heard of Fermat’s Last Theorem, 2 but the publicity suggested that maths was not just a matter of cut-and-dried answers; rather, it was an intellectual discipline of such difficulty that a problem might wait threeand-a-half centuries for a solution, even though, in the interim, many mathematicians had pursued it through a lifetime of dedication, obsession, and frustration. The level of public interest was maintained by Simon Singh’s television documentary “Fermat’s Last Theorem” (1996), made for the BBC’s Horizon series. 3 Singh saw the potential of Wiles’s story in terms of the classic myth of the hero’s quest: the young man achieving hero status by completing a near-impossible task - as Theseus, Jason, Hercules, and the legendary protagonists of many cultures had done. In Singh’s words: There is a brilliant genius from the past who solves an apparently impossible problem. He dies without revealing the solution. It becomes buried treasure, and every subsequent mathematician goes in search of it. There are heroes, villains, rivals, rich prizes, a duel at dawn, a suicide […,] but after 300 years the problem remains intact […]. Undaunted, however, a young boy promises to devote the rest of his life to solving this notorious problem. After thirty years he suddenly identifies a strategy that might work. For seven years he works in secret. He reveals his proof only to learn that he has made a mistake. He hides away again, humiliated and ashamed, but he returns a year later, this time triumphant. The problem has been solved. His journey is over. (Singh n.d.) In Singh’s documentary, which proceeds like a detective story following clue after clue, Wiles speaks of his experience of doing maths in Gothic 2 Fermat’s Last Theorem is stated in the form: The equation xn + yn = zn has no solutions in integers if n >2. It was formulated by Pierre de Fermat in a handwritten note in Latin in the margin of a book in 1637: “I have a truly marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain”, he wrote (qtd. in Manin/ Panchishkin 2005: 341). After spending their life trying unsuccessfully to solve this theorem, some mathematicians have doubted whether Fermat really did have a demonstration of the proposition. 3 In the United States, the documentary was shown under the title The Proof on NOVA in 1997. The Mathematician as Hero in Audio-Visual Media 191 terms, as “entering a dark mansion” (Singh 1996). With considerable emotion, he describes his breakthrough in terms of “this incredible revelation” (Singh 1996), but it is clear that this ‘revelation’ is not a bolt from the blue but emerges from years of dedication to solving the problem rationally. An analysis of the films and television programs that have appeared since these events indicates that, in audio-visual media, maths has been presented in two contrasting scenarios: a) Maths as magic, mystery, and madness, associated exclusively and inexplicably with the figure of the genius and mysterious powers, such as the esoteric Kabbala of Jewish mysticism, or inspiration derived from the imagination that was central to nineteenth-century Romanticism. In its modern form, maths is portrayed as a sudden rush of intuitive understanding, rather than the result of intellectual effort. Because of its unexplained nature, maths is often associated with obsession, schizophrenia, or mental illness (e.g. A Beautiful Mind [2001] and Proof [2005]) or with religious revelation (e.g. Pi [1998] and The Man Who Knew Infinity [2015]), an unexplained talent (e.g. Good Will Hunting [1997] and The Gifted [2017]) or autistic spectrum disorder (e.g. X+Y [2014] and Beautiful Young Minds [2007]). The majority of these films conclude with the genius figure either abandoning a potential career in maths altogether (e.g. Pi) - in the case of young prodigies, opting to embrace a life of emotion, joy, and relationships (e.g. Good Will Hunting and X+Y) - or, rarely, seeking a compromise (e.g. The Gifted). b) Maths as the product of reasoning and sustained mental application, the antithesis of mysticism. This reaffirms the ancient Greek insistence on rigorous proof, involving a series of arguments based on logical deductions leading to an inescapable conclusion; but it is also associated with the cult of reason that characterised the European Enlightenment. Central to this scenario is a belief that reason (epitomised in mathematical equations) reduces apparent chaos to order. In the modern context, the formal steps of the proof are usually carried out by computers solving complex algebraic equations devised by a mathematical genius, as in The Imitation Game (2014), Enigma (2001), A Brief History of Time (1991), Fermat’s Last Theorem, and Hidden Figures (2016). In this second group of films, the hero figures complete their quest and triumph in the world of maths (e.g. Hidden Figures and The Man Who Knew Infinity), though this success may be tempered by other limitations - physical (e.g. A Brief History of Time), psychological (e.g. A Beautiful Mind), social (e.g. The Big Bang Theory [CBS, 2007-2019]), or by personal tragedy with social repercussions (e.g. The Imitation Game). Roslynn Haynes and Raymond Haynes 192 Representing Maths in Audio-Visual Media Compared with fiction, specifically the science novel, 4 audio-visual media both enhance opportunities for, and impose constraints on, the communication of mathematical facts and theories and the depiction of the inner life of mathematicians - what they actually experience and feel when ‘doing science’. Maths is the most non-visual and non-verbal of the sciences; it is an almost wholly cerebral pursuit (although, as we shall see below, its applications are not). Its symbols and formulae are even more arcane to non-scientists than the jargon regularly used in other sciences and, more strategically, it lacks the visual interest of a chemistry laboratory or a biology field station. The problem for the film-maker therefore is how to engage and maintain audience involvement, faithfully presenting the experience of mathematicians while avoiding the disconnect of the too-obvious ‘information dump’. In this article, we focus on the depiction in audio-visual media of mathematicians, the success or otherwise of their representation, the level of science communication achieved, and the significance that the audience is likely to attribute to their work. We explore how successfully various audio-visual media can: a) communicate mathematical concepts and theories to a general audience; b) escape the stereotyping that has characterised film scientists from the beginning and present mathematician characters as interesting, even charismatic; c) avoid the ‘information dump’; d) explore the effects of discrimination arising from race, gender, class, religion, physical disability, sexual orientation, or family expectations on the lives of mathematicians, both real and fictional; e) convey the motivations, obsessions, and the intellectual and moral struggles of mathematicians; and f) examine how real-life mathematicians have used audio-visual media to educate and inspire audiences. As case studies, we draw mainly on the films A Beautiful Mind, The Man Who Knew Infinity, The Imitation Game, A Brief History of Time, and Hidden Figures, scenes from the television sitcom The Big Bang Theory, maths documentaries and TED talks given by mathematicians, but we also refer to other films and documentaries where appropriate. 4 ‘Science novel’ is a term used to describe realistic fiction which has as its theme some aspect of science, and in which a major character is a scientist. It is not to be confused with science fiction or science fantasy. For a study of modern examples, see, for example, Farzin et al. (2021). The Mathematician as Hero in Audio-Visual Media 193 a) Communicating Mathematical Concepts and Theories to a General Audience The language of maths is numbers and equations, but these are regarded as a major disincentive to non-specialist readers and film audiences. When Stephen Hawking submitted an equation-riddled first draft of A Brief History of Time to Cambridge University Press, the then-science editor, Simon Mitton, advised him that for every equation in the book the readership would be halved. Thereupon Hawking removed all but one equation, E=mc 2 , which was so well-known as to be non-threatening, and later attributed the phenomenal success of the book to Mitton’s advice (Falk 2018). Film-makers usually regard equations as merely background props. Even when correct, their purpose is not to explain the maths or even to be understood by the audience, but rather to indicate that this character is indeed a mathematician with a level of intellect far above the average. The focus is on the mathematician character, writing (usually illegible) equations on multiple sheets of paper, blackboards, whiteboards, or, extraordinarily, on windows. Even though the era of solving maths problems on the back of an envelope has long passed, film mathematicians are rarely shown using computers, possibly because they obscure and dehumanise the process of solving the problem and have become too ordinary in our everyday experience. Written equations, by contrast, can more immediately suggest obsession, frustration, perplexity, genius, or, in the case of Proof, authenticity of authorship through handwriting. In The Man Who Knew Infinity, Srinivasa Ramanujan is at first regarded with grave suspicion by G.H. Hardy and his colleagues at Cambridge because he does not conform to the Western culture of mathematical proof through a paper trail of equations that lead to an incontrovertible solution. On Hardy’s insistence, Ramanujan undertakes the rigorous procedures required to substantiate his intuitive answers. We see him at the desk in his chilly Cambridge room frantically covering reams of paper with equations, dropping them to the floor in frustration until he can present his mentor with an acceptable, conventional proof for what he, alone, knows. In Good Will Hunting, the young, untrained janitor’s ability to complete a hitherto unsolved equation left on a college blackboard by a lecturer marks him as a unique intellect and railroads him against his will into an academic education. In A Beautiful Mind, John Nash writes abstruse equations in chalk on a window (Illustration 1). This improbable procedure has a filmic purpose: it enables the audience to view simultaneously the complexity of the Roslynn Haynes and Raymond Haynes 194 problem Nash is working on and the perplexity apparent on his face seen through the glass as he does so. Illustration 1. John Nash’s writing on a window allows viewers to simultaneously see the equations and Nash’s mimics. Screenshot from A Beautiful Mind © Universal Pictures, 2011. The long-running American TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory centres on the lives of four nerdy, young scientists: Sheldon (a theoretical physicist who considers himself intellectually far superior to everyone except Stephen Hawking), Leonard (an experimental physicist), Rajesh (an astrophysicist), and Howard (an aerospace engineer). Sheldon and Leonard share an apartment in which whiteboards covered with formulae and equations that change throughout the series suggest that they are working on advanced maths problems and models. However, mathematically astute viewers would realise that the equations displayed are not new research, but undergraduate level and sometimes wrong, 5 indicating the limitations of Sheldon’s self-proclaimed genius. These limitations are further exposed in the episode “Hawking Excitation” (2012), in which Sheldon finally meets the real Stephen Hawking, to whom he has sent his thesis on the Higgs boson, an idea “that came to [Sheldon] in the shower one morning” (Lorre et al. 2012). Hawking, who plays himself in the episode, sets Sheldon up with, “You clearly have a brilliant mind”, before demolishing him by saying, “Too bad it’s wrong. You made an arithmetic mistake on page two. It was quite a boner” (Lorre et al. 2012). Similarly, in the episode “The Pirate Solution” (2009), Sheldon grudgingly allows Raj to work for him on a pro- 5 For example, in “The Hamburger Postulate” (season 1, episode 5; 2007), Leslie corrects one of Sheldon’s equations. The Mathematician as Hero in Audio-Visual Media 195 ject exploring string theory from gamma-ray dark matter. Sheldon has covered a whiteboard with mathematical formulae, trying to design an experiment to look for annihilation spectra resulting from dark matter collisions in space. They both stare at the whiteboard, thinking hard, until Raj pronounces that one of Sheldon’s equations is incorrect (Lorre et al. 2009b). Throughout the series, the aspiring scientists debate current theories, mathematical models and experiments, and agonise over their failure either to solve the problems they set themselves or to advance in their respective careers. They discuss real issues that confront scientists - the politics of funding, job acquisition and security, the difficulty of getting published - and through the lens of comedy and social ineptitude, expose unsuspecting viewers to real, often up-to-the-minute, scientific discoveries. In all these cases, the actual maths concepts and theories are little more than window-dressing, designed to assure viewers that important science is ‘happening’ here. The references to maths do not communicate any significant scientific knowledge to the audience, although they do indicate the insecurity, the loneliness, and the intellectual risks of a career in mathematics (e.g. A Beautiful Mind, Proof, and X+Y). A significant exception is A Brief History of Time, in which Hawking explains to a non-specialist audience current thinking in cosmology about the origin of the universe, black holes, and time. His introductory lure is a series of intriguing questions: “Which came first: the chicken or the egg? ” “Where did the universe come from and where is it going? ” “Why can we remember the past but not the future? ” (Morris 1991). Although the goal is to provide an overview of the subject, Hawking also explains some complex maths concepts, and while viewers may not receive take-home answers to the big questions, he retains audience interest because of his witty, and necessarily slow, presentation. 6 b) Escaping Traditional Stereotypes Cinema has had a long tradition of employing a limited range of visual stereotypes for scientists because they tapped readily into the audience’s pre-conceived image of what a scientist should look like and presented an immediate cue to recognise this character as a scientist. In the case of mathematicians, this was supplemented by stereotypical behaviour involving social ineptitude, lack of conversation, and a demand for an isolated space to work undisturbed on mathematical problems. However, the 1990s ushered in a major change in films about mathematicians by abandoning obvious caricatures in favour of exploring their behaviour and psychology (cf. Frayling 2005). 6 Following a tracheotomy, Stephen Hawking spoke using a voice synthesiser, which produced slow, flat, robotic drawl. Roslynn Haynes and Raymond Haynes 196 In Lab Coats in Hollywood, David Kirby recounts how “to maintain a high level of realism, studios frequently call on science consultants to help actors portray ‘scientists’” (2011: 67). Much of this involves knowing how to act like a scientist. In the case of mathematicians, this frequently involves writing lengthy and abstruse equations with the speed and confidence of familiarity. For A Beautiful Mind, Dave Bayer served as both science consultant and ‘hand double’ for Russell Crowe (who played Nash): it was Bayer’s hand that fluidly wrote the equations in the film. For The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), Seth Shostak wrote out the required maths equations in pencil for Keanu Reeves to trace over in chalk during filming (cf. Kirby 2011: 69-71). Even so, the film had to be speeded up to make Reeves appear more confident. Because mathematicians have no identifying workspaces or clothing, devising visually convincing locations is more difficult - hence the emphasis on writing math symbols on blackboards or whiteboards to indicate that ‘real maths’ is being done, and reproducing the language that mathematicians might actually use when discussing theories. In most cases, the jargon of science is boring and incomprehensible to non-specialists, but this is part of its purpose: it connotes ‘scientific knowledge’, which is what gives science its authority over those excluded from such knowledge and the characters who use it an aura of unique intellectual power. However, while needing to convey authenticity, filmmakers must avoid boring their audiences and thereby alienating them from the maths characters. Psychologically, mathematicians are often presented as being on the autism spectrum, a not unreasonable connection. The BBC documentary Beautiful Young Minds (2007) tracked the selection process and training of the U.K. team to compete in the 2006 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), as well as the actual event in Slovenia. Many of the young mathematicians featured in the film had a form of autism, which the documentary clearly linked to mathematical ability. Morgan Matthews, who directed Beautiful Young Minds, went on to direct the British fictional drama X+Y, released in the U.S. as A Brilliant Young Mind. It follows sixteen-year-old Nathan Ellis, a maths prodigy diagnosed with autism, who is being prepared to compete for a place in the IMO. Having lost his father (the only person able to communicate with him) in a car accident, Nathan is unable to relate emotionally to anyone until, at a two-week maths camp in Taiwan, he meets Chinese maths student Zhang Mei, who helps him adjust to these new surroundings and encourages him to fight through his fears. Nathan and Mei both qualify for the IMO to be held in Cambridge. However, Mei’s uncle finds her in Nathan’s room and forces her to leave the competition. Nathan now realises he loves Mei and the first question on the paper triggers memories of his father. At this pivotal moment of his mathematical career, he must decide whether to stay and pursue his dream or identify with his father and Mei. He rushes from the exam room, and his mother drives him to the station The Mathematician as Hero in Audio-Visual Media 197 to be re-united with Mei. Despite directors’ determined attempts to ‘get the science right’, A Brilliant Young Mind, and a number of similar films, capitulate to a Romantic rejection of maths and its intense intellectual demands in favour of a life attuned to nature and relationships. The plot of Pi follows a similar trajectory. Pi is a psychological thriller focussing on Max Cohen, a numbers theorist, who is obsessed with finding patterns in numbers and who suffers constantly from debilitating headaches, hallucinations, extreme paranoia and schizoid personality disorder. One day his computer, called Euclid, produces a 216-digit number and then crashes. This number is of interest to a group of Hasidic Jews, who believe it is a means to interpret the Torah as a code from God, and also to a Wall Street firm, which sees it as a means to manipulate the stock market. Despite pressure to reveal the number, Max refuses and, driven insane, destroys part of Euclid, burns the paper with the number on it and trepans himself with an improvised cranial drill to obliterate all memory of the number. Abandoning maths entirely, he sits in a park, enjoying Nature, a capitulation to Romantic values. Likewise, Good Will Hunting traces the journey of a youth with a geniuslevel IQ who, as a result of having been severely abused as a child, has been in trouble with the police and has a probationary job as a janitor at MIT. Finding a difficult maths problem left unsolved on a blackboard in a corridor, he amuses himself by solving it, covering the blackboard with complex equations. On finding the problem solved, the astonished professor is determined to discover who the unknown genius is and then to ensure he receives an education to reach his potential. Will resists this plan but agrees to see a therapist as an alternative to a gaol sentence. However, at the end of the counselling sessions, he turns down the challenging, intellectual jobs offered to him and instead drives to California, hoping to find a more fulfilling life with his former girlfriend. Similar suspicions about the limitations of a life dedicated to maths are explored in Gifted, the story of a child prodigy, Mary, whose mother, a brilliant mathematician, committed suicide as a result of the extreme stress she underwent when trying to solve one of the Millennium Prize problems. 7 Mary’s mother appointed her brother Frank as guardian of Mary, with a request to raise her daughter in a normal lifestyle. However, Mary’s mathematical gifts are discovered at primary school and there is pressure on Frank to send her to a special school. Mary’s grandmother challenges Frank’s custody and attempts to channel Mary into an academic career. The film ends in a compromise: Mary continues to live with Frank and attend school with her age peers while taking college-level courses outside school hours. 7 In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute of New Hampshire released seven maths problems of extreme difficulty with a reward of U.S.-$1,000,000 for each correct answer. To date only one has been solved. Roslynn Haynes and Raymond Haynes 198 While Will and Mary are fictional characters, A Beautiful Mind is closer to reality, being based on Sylvia Nasar’s biography of mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate John Forbes Nash. Nash suffered for decades from schizophrenia and hallucinations, which produced bizarre behaviour. In the film, Nash believes he has been recruited by a representative of the Defense Department to thwart a Soviet plot by looking for hidden patterns in magazines and newspapers and posting his results in a secret mailbox. The film tracks Nash’s struggles, supported by his wife, to relinquish his belief in this alternative reality, to which he is obsessively dedicated. While there is no specific link between Nash’s condition and his mathematical brilliance, the film implies that a life with more social interactions would be less prone to such hallucinations and self-destructive behaviour. Proof makes a more direct connection between mental illness and brilliance in maths. As Robert, a highly-regarded mathematician, descended into dementia before his death, his daughter Catherine, also a gifted mathematician, completed the proof of a complex equation that her father was struggling to solve. She herself is fearful that she has inherited her father’s mental illness as well as his mathematical genius. After his death, she suffers hallucinations that her father is still alive and struggles to combat both her sister’s assertion that she is mentally unsound and the university department’s disbelief that she was capable of completing the proof discovered amongst her father’s papers. However, this film ends more optimistically with the qualified hope that Catherine may eventually develop her potential as a mathematician at the University of Chicago. Notably, despite their social and psychological problems, all these characters are presented empathetically. Unlike the stereotypical mad scientist of fiction, who was portrayed objectively as either threatening or a figure of fun (cf. Haynes 2017: ch. 12 and ch. 3), viewers see the worlds from the characters’ perspectives. Indeed, until late in A Beautiful Mind, viewers likely believe in Nash’s alternative reality, while the opening scenes of Proof suggest that Catherine is actually talking to her father in real life. Only later do viewers learn that he has already died. c) Avoiding the ‘Information Dump’ Film-makers face a major problem when trying to introduce scientific concepts and technical information while, at the same time, maintaining audience engagement. The most direct and concise means of disseminating information is the lecture, but artistically this is the most dangerous form in terms of retaining audience interest and is rarely used in fiction films. However, this approach is the flagship of TED talks, where experts, including mathematicians, speak passionately about their subjects. The very successful format of TED talks includes a large initial injection of humour, visuals, immense enthusiasm expressed through the voice and manner of The Mathematician as Hero in Audio-Visual Media 199 the lecturers, personal accounts of the excitement of breakthrough moments, absence of jargon and an explanation of why this research matters for individuals and society. French mathematician and Fields medallist Cédric Villani gave a model TED talk with the provocative title “What’s So Sexy about Mathematics? ” With a hair style reminiscent of the Romantic poets, a flowing cravat, and outsized jewelled spider brooch, his flamboyant appearance aroused immediate attention, but his mission was to inspire his audience with the beauty, usefulness, and truth of maths: “Math is exciting because it is about reasoning; it is about imagination; and it is about finding the truth” (Villani 2016). He insists, however, that “beautiful mathematical explanations are not only for our pleasure” (Villani 2016); they are also eminently useful. Using a Galton board, he demonstrates the universality of the bell-shaped Gauss curve for numerous everyday events: choosing the most important eye-witnesses to an event, selecting the most relevant Google pages to consult for research, proving that our world is composed of atoms, and much more. He also includes an account of his personal frustration at not being able to solve a problem in plasma physics. Having worked late into the night with no success, he fell asleep and woke with a voice in his head telling him the steps which would establish the missing part of the proof. However, instead of attributing this ‘voice’ to intuition or to a mysterious revelation (as Ramanujan does in The Man Who Knew Infinity; see below), Villani ascribes it to reason - his brain continuing to work on the problem during sleep. Other TED talks illustrate scientific concepts by analogy with everyday events, for example demonstrating the relevance of maths to basketball, love, the stock market, infinity, and discovery (see, for example, Maheswaran 2015, Antonsen 2015, and Woo 2019). These lecturers successfully model a way to make maths interesting and relevant, using examples that appeal to general interest, analogy, visuals, and humour, while exuding a passion for presenting the relevance of maths in everyday situations. TED talks are designed for a self-selected audience already interested in the subject. In a fiction film, on the other hand, lectures of more than a few minutes are considered sudden death to audience engagement. When they do occur, they are compressed and used for a purpose other than to disseminate information: to indicate the character of the lecturer, the response of the audience, antagonism between the lecturer and a member of the audience, or acclaim for the speaker. The same is true for lengthy soliloquies by an individual mathematician and exchanges, however dramatic, between mathematicians. One of the more prominent exceptions are the ‘lectures’ that Sheldon gives in The Big Bang Theory. They are rambling, boring, and usually irrelevant but succeed in the context of the sitcom just because their inappropriateness or other characters’ inability to see their relevance is comic. For example, in the episode “The Tangerine Factor” (2008), Sheldon attempts to explain to their neighbour Penny Schrödinger’s hypothetical proposition Roslynn Haynes and Raymond Haynes 200 that a cat locked in a box with a vial of poison which might explode at any (unknown) time would, until the box is opened, be theoretically both alive and dead. 8 Understandably, Penny cannot see any relevance to her question as to whether or not she should go out with Leonard. In the episode “The Gorilla Experiment” (2009), Sheldon reluctantly agrees to teach Penny “a little physics” to impress Leonard (Lorre et al. 2009a). Beginning with the Greek word ‘physika’, he threatens to meander through the twentysix-hundred-year history of physics, from ancient Greece to what Leonard is researching, without clarifying anything about the subject. However, Penny does memorise several impressive sentences and unfortunately blurts out Sheldon’s opinion that Leonard’s experiment “is qualitatively no different than the experiment already conducted in the Netherlands[, which has] already conclusively demonstrated the electric analogue of the Aharonov-Bohm quantum interference effect” (Lorre et al. 2009a). For all their exaggerated nerdiness and oblivion to social cues, a modern version of the stupid virtuoso of the Restoration stage and the absentminded professor of twentieth-century comic films such as ‘Doc’ Brown of the Back to the Future movies (1985-1990) and Professor Kelp/ Klump of the Nutty Professor movies (1963, 1996, 2000), 9 the characters of The Big Bang Theory do deliver a surprising amount of up-to-the-moment scientific discoveries, disguised and made audience-friendly through comedy. They debate problems in physics and maths, presenting actual theories and models on their whiteboards, and some episodes incorporated appearances by real scientists who were fans of the series, including Stephen Hawking and astrophysicists George Smoot and Neil deGrasse Tyson. d) The Effects of Social Discrimination on the Lives of Mathematicians Where the scientist is the main character of a film, other interests, usually unrelated to science, are introduced to ‘dilute’ the technical aspects and create a sense of a life outside maths. Like the mythical heroes, these protagonists, whether real or fictional, are almost always presented as being discriminated against on the grounds of some personal or societal issue, which they must overcome in order to succeed in their quest: race, gender, class, religion, physical disability, sexual orientation, and/ or family obligations. Ramanujan, the gifted Indian mathematician of The Man Who Knew Infinity, arrives in Cambridge, where he confronts not only the inimical climate and a meat-based culinary culture abhorrent to his Hindu regimen, but prejudice against his colour, race, religion, and culture, as well as the pressures and expectations of his mother and wife in India. The extreme 8 Schrödinger’s Cat is a recurring topic in The Big Bang Theory, also featured in “The Codpiece Topology” (2008) and “The Russian Rocket Reaction” (2011). 9 For an analysis of the stupid virtuoso, see Haynes (2017: 41-54). The Mathematician as Hero in Audio-Visual Media 201 contrast between G.H. Hardy, doyen of Cambridge mathematicians, and his Indian protégé is exemplified in their opposite assumptions about deriving solutions to maths problems. For Hardy, proofs are validated only by a chain of algebraic equations; Ramanujan, on the other hand, is convinced that he ‘knows’ a solution because the goddess Lashki has written it on his tongue. During World War I, he is attacked by English soldiers who deride him for failing to enlist, and Hardy’s attempts to have him accepted as a member of the Royal Society are at first rejected on grounds of race. The three African American women on whom the biographical film Hidden Figures centreswere gifted mathematicians who worked at NASA during the Space Race of the 1960s. 10 As the film emphasises, their contributions were crucial to the launching of astronaut John Glenn into orbit. But it is their struggle against gender, class, and racial discrimination (Illustration 2), rather than the maths solutions they produce, that sustains the drama (and sometimes humour) of the film and makes their eventual recognition meaningful for the audience. Illustration 2. While Katherine Johnson repeatedly solves complex mathematical problems, her and her fellow African American scientists’ struggles against racism and misogyny drive the plot. Screenshots from Hidden Figures © Twentieth Century Fox, 2016. The Imitation Game is based on the biography of Alan Turing, the cryptanalyst who designed a machine to decipher the Enigma code messages used by German Intelligence during the Second World War, thereby providing the British with prior knowledge of planned Nazi attacks. However, the main focus of the film is not the maths involved or even the suspense about cracking the Enigma code, but Turing’s difficult and reserved personality, the hostile interactions between members of the code-breaker team at 10 Katherine Johnson was a mathematician who calculated the flight trajectories for Project Mercury and other NASA missions; Dorothy Vaughan was a NASA supervisor and mathematician; and Mary Jackson was an engineer. Roslynn Haynes and Raymond Haynes 202 Bletchley Park, the revelation of Turing’s homosexuality, the social consequences of this, and the threats to his personal liberty at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence in Britain. 11 In A Beautiful Mind, the focus is on the torment arising from Nash’s paranoid schizophrenia, delusions and hallucinations, the strain on his family, and his eventual triumph over his disability. Good Will Hunting explores class differences and the progressive revelations through psychoanalysis of both Will and his therapist. Gifted revolves around the battle between the diverse expectations of Mary’s uncle and her grandmother for her education and, by implication, a debate about what constitutes the good life. In A Brief History of Time, although Hawking contrives to deliver his theories of the universe, presented through creative graphics, the main interest of the film for general audiences is Hawking’s way of dealing with the onset of motor neuron disease, his immobility, and his dependence on computergenerated speech alongside commentary from family, friends, and colleagues. e) Motivations, Obsessions, and Moral Struggles of Mathematicians For actors to appear realistic as mathematicians, they need to do more than speak and act credibly in the role. They need to express the level of motivation required to spend years of frustration pursuing a theoretical problem, often to the detriment of personal relationships. That motivation is an intense desire to understand how the universe ‘works’, how all the diverse phenomena that we observe and experience can be reduced to the elegant, non-negotiable terms of an equation that gathers chaos into order. In Cédric Villani’s words, “Hidden truths permeate our world; they’re inaccessible to our senses, but math allows us to go beyond our intuition to uncover their mysteries” (2016). It is the possibility of discovering these laws governing the universe that drives mathematicians, and film directors and actors need to understand and express this. Ironically, the sub-plots that are introduced to make a film more entertaining for an audience often detract from this central purpose. In A Beautiful Mind, Nash’s fascination with number theory is subsumed in his delusion that his activities are helping to combat an espionage ring. It is his colleagues who see the far-reaching significance of his real contribution to maths and games theory. In The Imitation Game, a similar short-term aim, to further the war effort, obscures references to Turing’s more enduring work in artificial intelligence. In The Man Who Knew Infinity, Ramanujan’s initial fascination with maths problems, while still a clerk in India, is wellportrayed by implication. It drives him to overcome the many barriers to his departure for Cambridge: his mother’s religious prohibitions, his wife’s distress, the poverty they will endure without his income, the culture shock 11 Turing was given a posthumous royal pardon by Queen Elizabeth II in 2013. The Mathematician as Hero in Audio-Visual Media 203 of arriving in an indifferent environment with incompatible expectations, and mores. However, once in Cambridge, it seems that the driving force is to conform to Hardy’s requirements rather than the joy of maths itself. In Proof, it appears that Catherine’s dedication to her father and the wish to complete the proof that he himself is no longer able to derive are her motivation, rather than her own engagement with the subject. Unlike physicists and chemists, who have been implicated in the development of destructive weapons and deleterious substances, mathematicians have enjoyed a relatively benign reputation because their work seems to be of no immediate practical importance and hence no threat to society or individuals. This view is challenged in the first season of the American docudrama Genius (2017), which traces Albert Einstein’s life from his early years as a struggling patent clerk to his status as an internationally renowned theoretical physicist, whose mathematical work was the basis for the development of atomic weapons. His life is presented as a series of conflicting obligations beginning with his stormy relationship with a brilliant fellow student, Mileva Marić, whom he marries but who continues to resent the fact that her own potential career is halted in deference to his. Their poverty while Albert pursues his theories of relativity is alleviated when he secures an academic position, but his marriage is again threatened by the growing appreciation of his work by luminaries such as Marie Curie, leaving Mileva housebound with the children. He then has an affair with his cousin Elsa, who demands that he divorce his wife. With the increasing Nazi offensive, he is under pressure to assist his fellow Jews, even while his academic colleagues press him to join the German war effort. Fleeing to the United States, he still tries to save German Jews from the holocaust. When the atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, ending World War II, Einstein, a life-long pacifist, suffers intense guilt for his role in urging President Franklin D. Roosevelt to develop the atomic bomb and spends the rest of his life trying to halt the Cold War. 12 In a lecture to students at Caltech, he said that science was often inclined to do more harm than good (Isaacson 2007: 374). Genius is one of the very few audio-visual examples that engages with the conflicting roles and allegiances of a scientist - intellectual, personal, political, and religious. It suggests that Einstein’s multi-faceted work came at the cost of other obligations. Two fictional films also deal with ethical struggles of mathematicians. One is the intellectual thriller Travelling Salesman (2012), in which four mathematicians are hired by the U.S. government to solve the elusive P versus NP problem, potentially the most powerful tool in computer science. 12 Einstein and other American scientists believed that Nazi Germany was further advanced towards developing atomic bombs than was actually the case. Later Einstein said that, believing this, he had had no other option than to support the development of atomic bombs, but that it was, according to Linus Pauling’s diary, his “one great mistake” (Livio 2013: 233). Roslynn Haynes and Raymond Haynes 204 If solved, it could break through encryption protection and permit hackers to access bank accounts, personal correspondence, and government secrets and annihilate enemies. A Department of Defense official offers them U.S.- $10 million for the algorithm, but one mathematician rejects the offer and is forced to reveal a dark truth about his portion of the solution. They must all struggle with the ethical consequences of what had formerly seemed an intellectual game. In the Spanish psycho-thriller Fermat’s Room (2007), four mathematicians, one a woman, assuming the names of famous dead mathematicians (Pascal, Galois, Hilbert and sixteenth-century philosopher Oliva Sabuco), are lured to a warehouse at the invitation of a person who calls himself Fermat. Here, they are required to answer maths problems within a limited period. Each time they exceed the deadline, the walls move inward, threatening to crush them. As they try to discover which of them is responsible, they finally realise that their mutual hostility over who solved Fermat’s Last Theorem is of no consequence. ‘Pascal’ scatters the pages of ‘Hilbert’s proof’ in the river because “the world is the same with or without the proof” (Piedrahita & Sopeña 2007). f) The Use of Audio-Visual Media by Real-Life Mathematicians We have noted already the very different styles that Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, and Cédric Villani have used in audio-visual media to educate a non-specialist public about maths. Other examples developed to popularise maths to a wider audience include three documentaries presented by Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at Oxford: The Story of Maths (2008) narrates seminal moments and people in the history of mathematical thought and how it affects the world today; The Secret Rules of Modern Living: Algorithms (2015) deals with the question of what algorithms are, how they work, and how we are unsuspectingly relying on them every day; and The Code (2011) explores the mathematical code underlying all life on Earth and the universe itself, governing everything from lunar eclipses to criminal behaviour. These three documentaries follow a similar pattern - an historical account of the development of maths, centring on specific moments and people, some familiar to a general audience, and a liberal number of references to contemporary practices and experiences to emphasise the necessity of maths to our understanding of the world. Other notable documentaries concentrate on aesthetic and philosophical implications of maths. Fractals: The Colours of Infinity (1995), presented by Arthur C. Clarke, covers the discovery of the Mandelbrot Set and its significance for maths, exploring the beauty of the ubiquitous fractals and the new ideas that have emerged from Mandelbrot’s elegant equation. In The Great Math Mystery (2015), astrophysicist Mario Livio investigates whether maths is human-made or a natural part of the universe. The signature of maths is everywhere from the whirlpool of a galaxy to the spiral The Mathematician as Hero in Audio-Visual Media 205 at the centre of a sunflower, to the swirl of a nautilus shell. Maths is also essential for radio transmissions, successful landings on Mars, and the prediction of the Higgs boson. This raises the unresolved philosophical question of whether mathematics is invention or discovery, or both. Conclusion The period from the 1990s to the present has seen an unprecedented number of films, documentaries, and YouTube talks featuring maths and mathematicians. The earlier, longstanding stereotype of the mathematician as a colourless and socially awkward introvert, lacking interest in, or from, nonmathematicians, might appear to have been superseded, insofar as mathematicians have become the main characters of a significant number of films, documentaries, and even sitcoms. Indeed, our survey suggests that film directors now see the potential for presenting mathematicians as interesting characters, who are not necessarily figures of fun, but rather rounded characters with interesting personae. Their psychological and social problems, so far from reducing them to ridicule, are presented empathically, and become a necessary part of their heroic role in overcoming them. Nevertheless, in many of the cases discussed above, mathematicians are still portrayed as socially introverted because they are confronted with schizophrenia, mental illness, or autistic spectrum disorder (as in the case of A Beautiful Mind, Proof, X+Y and Beautiful Young Minds), or are so obsessively involved in their intellectual quest that they have no time or wish to engage in social events. However, instead of being treated dismissively, these characteristics are now presented as a major interest, not only of the characters themselves, but also in the impact they have on the family or friends of the mathematician (A Beautiful Mind, Gifted). The logistical problems involved in balancing a realistic presentation of obscure mathematical information with a credible private life, while entertaining a lay audience and securing adequate box-office success are considerable. It is therefore not surprising that most directors have veered towards presenting these characters as involved in personal, even heroic, quests. Exploring the social and human struggles over which mathematicians must triumph to succeed in their passionate quest indicates to a wider public the extent to which maths matters. For real-life mathematicians, however, there can be a danger in becoming too popular in audio-visual media. As well as appearing in The Big Bang Theory and Star Trek, 13 Stephen Hawking, at his own request, made four 13 In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Descent” (season 6, episode 26; 1993), Data plays a game of poker with holograms of Newton, Einstein, and Hawking, who plays himself. Roslynn Haynes and Raymond Haynes 206 guest appearances in the high-rating, American animated series The Simpsons (1989-), of which he was an enthusiastic fan. Beginning with the episode “They Saved Lisa’s Brain” (1999), in which he delivers the memorable line, “Your theory of a doughnut-shaped universe intrigues me, Homer. I may have to steal it” (Groening, Brooks & Simon 1999), he later made three more appearances, 14 which he apparently enjoyed, but later regretted for the surprising reason that “[p]eople think I’m a Simpsons character” (Hawking & Cox 2010). Ironically, this brilliant physicist was quoted as feeling that he was “sometimes not properly recognised for his contribution to our understanding of the universe” (Hutchison 2010), a statement corroborated by Sherman Young, who has noted that most people know Hawking from his appearances in The Simpsons, rather than from anything he has written (2007: 12). It would seem that in appearing too ‘human’ and too ‘ordinary’, mathematicians may lose that mystique and power arising from their unique knowledge that has set scientists apart from the time of the alchemists (cf. Haynes 2003). 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Starting from the idea that scientific practice is always embedded in, and shaped by, specific socio-material constellations and thus needs to be understood as situated, it argues that the series’ laboratories, as sites of science, articulate different conceptualisations of science and scientific practice while contributing to modelling the series’ main characters through their respective set-ups. By analysing this mutual interdependence between the spaces and settings of the laboratories and the ways of both doing science and becoming a scientist, the contribution demonstrates the potential of serial television in the production of, and critical reflection on, notions of scientific practice, its settings, and its subjects. The award-winning television show Breaking Bad, aired on AMC from 2008 to 2013, portrays high school chemistry teacher Walter White, who, after having been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, decides to enter the drug business, cooking crystal meth to pay for his medical treatment and to secure his family’s financial future. Both in public discourse and in scholarship, the serial depiction of the protagonist’s breaking bad, told in 62 episodes organised in five seasons, has been celebrated, among other things, “for its compelling storytelling” (Guffey 2013: 155), its complex character development, and its critical engagement with then-current social and political discourses. Moreover, reviewers and scholars have focused on the role of science in and for the show, explaining the series’s success by highlighting its very specific form of representing science and its functions. Ben Wetherbee and Stephanie Weaver, for instance, argue that “the show has rhetorically used science to its own advantage, to garner AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 47 · Heft 2 Gunther Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2022-0012 Martin Butler 210 praise and credibility as a distinctive and ‘serious’ television programme” (2013: 2). For them, “the show’s science functions […] as a narrative catalyst”, as Walter White’s “chemistry provides the opportunity for Breaking Bad’s storyline to probe the social and economic issues of the American family, capitalism, the War on Drugs, and American-Mexican border relations” (2013: 2). “Chemistry”, they point out, “is a point of access into the show’s ‘serious’ subject matter” (2013: 2). Morgan Fritz sheds a different light on science in Breaking Bad and reads the show’s protagonist as an epitome of what Nicos Poulantzas has called “the new petty bourgeoisie” characterised by an “experience of exploitation in spite of its dislocation from the site of  class  struggle” (qtd. in Fritz 2016: 178). For Fritz, Walter’s aporia is representative of this experience, and his “meth production liberates him from exploitation and meaningless work, for which he substitutes scientific work bordering on art in its quest for perfection and purity” (2016: 181). In my contribution, I would like to add to this discussion of the show’s forms of representing science. To do so, I focus on the ways in which the space of the laboratory - i.e., the space where Walter and his assistant, Jesse Pinkman, cook their meth - is produced through means of audiovisual representation, and, at the same time, affects the characters’ practice of ‘doing science’. In other words, I ask how different locations, ranging from a recreational vehicle to a fully equipped meth kitchen, are transformed into what Steven Shapin (1988) has called “sites” of science through the show’s portrayal of practices of drug engineering and production, and how these practices are, in turn, represented as being shaped by their specific socio-material environments. 1 I start from the assumption that laboratories, as the (alleged) “linchpin of scientific experimental practice” (Landbrecht & Straub 2016: 23 2 ), are not (necessarily) “buildings set apart” (Landbrecht & Straub 2016: 23), but ‘produced’, or installed in and through processes of redefining space through specific practices. They are, in other words, “a hybrid moulded by its social environment and in interaction with other social settings” (Landbrecht & Straub 2016: 23). By focusing on a selection of these “hybrids” in Breaking Bad, I would like to illustrate that the show depicts the lab both as a “placeless place” (Kohler 2002a: 476; see also Kohler 2002b) imagined as a site for the accurate and meticulous (re)production of scientific practice and as a site which is shaped by, and gives shape to, this very practice and its subjects. Specifically through its serial form, I argue, Breaking Bad allows for a detailed depiction of this mutually constitutive relationship 1 David Livingstone (2003: esp. ch. 2) has elaborated on this mutually constitutive relationship between the location and the practice of science. 2 Landbrecht and Straub (2016) provide an excellent survey of research on the laboratory; see also David Pithan’s recent book Corporate Research Laboratories and the History of Innovation (2022). For a comprehensive study of the history of the chemistry laboratory going back to the sixteenth century, see Morris (2015). Laboratories, Scientific Practice, and Its Subjects in Breaking Bad 211 between place-making and subjectivation both over time and in different spatial arrangements. My argument draws on an array of existing scholarship, some of which has been specifically helpful in and for my argument: Wetherbee and Weaver (2013), for instance, have provided an insightful examination of the role of science in Breaking Bad, also referring to the laboratory as a space of science, while Alberto Brodesco has analysed the development of Walter White’s “scientific rationality” (2013: 56-59) in the series, also taking into account different contexts of scientific practice and their normativities. I will draw on some of their arguments in my contribution, which sets out to expand on their analyses through my decided focus on the laboratory as a site of producing science and ‘scientificness’. Ensley F. Guffey has included the laboratories in his exploration of place-making practices in Breaking Bad (2013: 164-169), showing “the manner in which Breaking Bad uses experience of place and space to create a more fully realized diegetic world” (2013: 155). My focus, however, is on the process of turning these spaces into sites of science, while also illuminating how these sites, in turn, affect the praxis of science and its subjects. To begin with, there is perhaps a simple reason why the narrative of Breaking Bad is particularly apt to render the process of transforming different places into what we would usually identify as laboratories: The production of crystal meth is illegal and thus needs to happen in a space which is generally not used as a laboratory and which, more importantly, must not be identifiable as such. For this reason, it is a recreational vehicle, a 1986 Fleetwood Bounder, to be precise, which is turned into a laboratory in the first season of the show, as Walter and Jesse start cooking meth in the desert of New Mexico. The conditions in this vehicle are far from the stereotypical cleanliness of the laboratory (see also Wetherbee & Weaver 2013: 8); however, the RV is produced as a laboratory through the detailed depiction of Walter’s scientific expertise and skills, which adds to what one may call the ‘scientification’ of the meth-cooking process and, accordingly, to the ‘laboratoriness’ of the vehicle. As Walter combines various ingredients (Illustration 1), the audience gets involved in “experimentation in progress” (Straub 2016: 57), a topos established in the visual depiction of lab life at the turn of the twentieth century (Straub 2016: 57). Viewers see close-ups of chemical reactions and their preparation as well as the technical apparatus needed to make them happen, as Walter elaborates on what is happening. In his field of expertise, Walter appears highly confident and despite the confined space and limited resources produces high-quality crystal meth and becomes a central player in the regional drug trade, working under the pseudonym of Heisenberg. Martin Butler 212 Illustration 1. ‘Doing science’ in the RV. Screenshot from the episode “Crazy Handful of Nothin’”, season 1, episode 6. Breaking Bad © Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2015. Walter’s skilled scientific practice contributes to re-signifying the mobile kitchen into a site of science, while, as Wetherbee and Weaver point out, “it is through this messiness  …  that Walt emerges as something close to a classic, masculine protagonist” (2013: 8) at the very same time. The image of science produced in this interplay between car and characters thus turns out to be an amalgamation of a particularly white and male spirit of testing the limits of what is possible, and the idea that these limits can even be crossed through the application of scientific principles. 3 This exploratory gesture is emphasised by the setting of the RV-lab, which is frequently shown as part of a scenery easily associated with what has come to be known as the Frontier in American cultural history. In accordance with the specific notion of masculinity (both of Walter and of science itself) communicated by staging the chemistry teacher as the “individualist masculine anti-hero” (Wetherbee & Weaver 2013: 8), the geographical location articulates a specific imaginary of science as a practice of transgression, both with regard to the limits of knowledge and in view of ethical constraints. In contrast to the institutionalised and highly restrained setting of the classroom, Walter’s scientific activities can unfold freely in the desert, “where anything can happen and everything is allowed” (Guffey 2013: 169). As his “small” science as a teacher “returns 3 For a more detailed discussion of the gender dimension of meth-cooking in Breaking Bad, see Lowry (2019). Laboratories, Scientific Practice, and Its Subjects in Breaking Bad 213 big”, as Alberto Brodesco puts it, “his chemistry majestically gets back its strength and creativity” (2013: 54). 4 Illustration 2. At the frontiers of knowledge: New Mexico as liminal place. Screenshot from the episode “Crazy Handful of Nothin’”, season 1, episode 6. Breaking Bad © Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2015. Moreover, it is not a coincidence that the first season prominently features the landscapes of New Mexico as a background to the narrative, with “Albuquerque, the surrounding indigenous pueblos, the mountain and desert scenery, and the big Southwestern skies becom[ing] dynamic forces in the visual language and thematic significance of Breaking Bad” (Hunt 2016: 33). 5 An outlandish and ‘outlaw-ish’ place invested with a history of secret scientific endeavours “far from prying eyes” (Hunt 2016: 33) and from the urban centres of the United States, New Mexico might well be conceived as what Christina Landbrecht and Verena Straub, referring to Karin Knorr- Cetina, call “an ‘other’ environment” (2016: 29), a liminal place with “its own social and cultural codes” (2016: 28; Illustration 2). 6 4 Lisa Weckerle expands on this frontier imagery with regard to the RV and its setting (2019: esp. 124-125) and reads other constellations in the series as renderings of the Frontier myth. 5 See Hunt (2016) for a comprehensive analysis of the significance of space and place in Breaking Bad that specifically elaborates on the (trans)formations and intersections between the local, the regional, and the global aspects of the drug trade, as represented in the show. 6 Guffey also discusses the role of the RV in the series, yet not primarily in terms of the representation of science and scientific practice, but rather in view of its symbolic value for Walter and Jesse as “a place with deep meaning” (2013: 166). Also, Guffey describes the RV as “a complicated study”, as it is “inherently mobile, yet it Martin Butler 214 Sure, and perhaps in the first place, the New Mexico setting marks the genre of the Western critically negotiated in Breaking Bad (see Bitar 2022: 60-61 and 65-66, Hunt 2016: 35, Weckerle 2019), which, in turn, “significantly impacts the show’s gender representation” (Bitar 2022: 65). At the same time, however, the desert setting in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands reinforces the popular image of lab life happening “in a place remote in terms both of its location and architecture” (Landbrecht & Straub 2016: 27). This image of New Mexico as such an ‘other’ place of scientific progress, which Breaking Bad draws upon to invoke a notion of science as a crossing of boundaries, has been shaped by the (hi)story of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and its involvement in the development of the nuclear bomb during the famously infamous Manhattan Project. “Los Alamos scientists”, as Joseph Masco has it in his study on what he calls “nuclear borderlands”, “created much more than a new technology with the invention of a military atomic device in 1945; they engendered new forms of consciousness, new means of being in the world distinct from those that came before” (2006: 1). 7 Los Alamos has thus become a site embodying the “utopian belief in the possibility of an unending technological progress” and as such, the “beginning of American big science” (Masco 2006: 1), framed by what Flannery Burke has called “the Cold War climate of secrecy” (2017: 246). During the Cold War, as Sandra Kaji-O’Grady and Chris Smith point out, “remote places became the sites of science” (2019: 4). No wonder, then, that Los Alamos - as one of the most secret and, at the same time, most prominent sites - soon entered the American popular imagination, e.g. through the adventures of the Incredible Hulk, whose alter ego, Bruce Banner, built nuclear weapons in a secret lab in New Mexico (Burke 2017: 258), or in a range of cases of livestock mutilation in the area which, as a report has it, were interpreted as side-effects of “the work of Los Alamos laboratory scientists” (Burke 2017: 259). Walter White’s meth-cooking in the RV, then, continues this image of borderland science, combining it with the romantic self-conception of pre-war scientists as “essentially solitary in their confrontation with nature” (Peter Galison qtd. in Klonk 2016: 5). Moreover, the improvised nature of the laboratory, exposing the DIY character of Walter’s and Jesse’s endeavour, connects the scientificness of their also includes essential elements of home and permanence” (2013: 165). This provisional nature of the RV lab, as one might argue, adds to its liminal status as a place ‘in-between’, or at the border. 7 The Laboratory (referred to as “National Atomic Laboratory”) is actually featured in the pilot of the series, as Walter asks his wife to visit an exhibition there (Sharrett 2021: 60). Sharrett (2021: 57-64) explores the semantics of Los Alamos in closer detail, but, apart from pondering the nuclear bomb tests that defined that area, is not concerned with its implications for an understanding of the practice and functions of science in the series. Laboratories, Scientific Practice, and Its Subjects in Breaking Bad 215 practice with an entrepreneurial spirit of innovation and creativity reminiscent of recent ‘start-up’ and ‘maker’ cultures. 8 In season 3 of Breaking Bad, Walter and Jesse produce crystal meth for Gustavo Fring, who is in control of the meth trade in the region. For this purpose, the basement underneath an industrial laundry is transformed into a laboratory. This time, the lab space is less defined as such through the showcasing of scientific practice than through its technological equipment, producing a specific notion of science as characterised by cleanliness and accuracy as well as being embedded in a cycle of industrial production (Wetherbee & Weaver 2013: 9, 12, Guffey 2013: 166). The messy lab of the RV, in which science is performed on the basis of minimal resources (Wetherbee & Weaver 2013: 8), is replaced by a space which seems to be controllable by both Walter and Jesse, who can now draw on a reliable technical apparatus that, as we learn, was installed by a German engineer called Werner Ziegler, but is, in fact, controlled by Fring, who can observe the drug production through cameras installed in what is often referred to as the ‘superlab’ of the series (Illustration 3). Illustration 3. The superlab as factory-laboratory. Screenshot from the episode “Fly”, season 3, episode 10. Breaking Bad © Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2015. The superlab represents another design, or architecture, of and for scientific practice, which was put into place by large-scale endeavours such 8 Pierson elaborates on the neoliberal elements of the show and, with reference to the meth-cooking activities, argues that, as a “successful gangster, Walt exemplifies the tenets of neoliberal entrepreneurism” (2013: 23). Martin Butler 216 as the Manhattan project. As Galison puts it: “Physical plants, social ordering, and a new subject position entered together in the government-sponsored factory-laboratory exemplified by Oak Ridge, Hanford and Los Alamos” (qtd. in Klonk 2016: 10). Although this form of organising science has long been replaced by yet another, more decentralised structure of scientific practice (Klonk 2016: 10), Breaking Bad picks up on this idea of the “industrial style, hierarchically organized laboratories” (Klonk 2016: 10) in order to emphasise the mechanical reproduction of scientific practice within the constraints of the drug trade, thereby confirming Karin Knorr- Cetina’s observation that “the laboratory itself limits the scope and the form of scientists’ activity” (Landbrecht & Straub 2016: 25). At the same time, in what Angelo Restivo describes as a strikingly “untimely” way of representation, the depiction of the superlab as a factory-laboratory contributes to signifying “both an (outmoded) faith in the utopian national project of modernization, and the dark reminders of its potentially lethal consequences” (2019: 94). Whereas in the RV, the enterprise of meth-cooking is linked to passionate engagement with science and its procedures, the superlab affords a division of labour and, consequently, a rearrangement of subject positions. Walt surveys the procedure of meth-cooking, while Jesse develops routines of emulation, which do not need any specific scientific expertise but require an exact reproduction of what Walt tells him to do. Jesse, as Ian Dawe puts it, “learns the art from Walter, not the science” (2015: 142; see also Guffey 2013: 164-165). In other words, while Walter knows about the why of chemical reactions, Jesse acquires the know how of meth production. “  Jesse’s  take-home message is always practical, focused on little technical details rather than scientific principles. This artisanal approach differs sharply from [Walter’s] scientific approach” (Dawe 2015: 142). For both men, working in the superlab becomes a daily routine, visualised through recurring sequences in which the different steps of meth production are displayed in a highly repetitive manner. Upon entering the lab, the two characters change their apparel, thus adding to their appearance as just two parts of highly sterile equipment, being subjected to the logic of serial meth production, which increasingly strips the two characters off their individual agency. Yet, their division of labour in the lab reproduces what Livingstone has called the “epistemological chasm dividing the scholar from the mechanic” (2003: 24). As the scholar, Walter tries to maintain his position as the authority in the lab. He repeatedly stresses that his “formula”, a term he uses to describe his scientific approach to meth production (Adkins 2017: 27), is at the very heart of Gus’s business. This emphasis on the “formula”, on the one hand, is part and parcel of Walter’s “adamantine insistence on respect for the chemistry” (Guffey 2013: 164), which, as Guffey has convincingly argued, articulates Walter’s “own self- Laboratories, Scientific Practice, and Its Subjects in Breaking Bad 217 image as a professional scientist” (2013: 164). 9 On the other hand, Walter’s maintaining of scientific precision seeks to keep up the scientificness of the factory-laboratory he is trapped in. In this vein, the insistence on his “formula” signals Walter’s efforts to detach himself from the actual results and effects of his doings in the lab, while at the same time, being fully aware that he cannot really escape the situation he has put himself in, which reduces him to a worker. At this point of no return, in what seems to be an act of compensation, he develops an almost neurotic obsession with technicalities (see also Adkins 2017: 22-25), at times combined with a hypersensitivity towards any disturbances of the procedure. The representation of this hypersensitivity is pushed to the extreme in the season three episode “Fly”. In this episode, Walt becomes obsessed with a fly that has entered the clean space of the laboratory and threatens the perfection of the production process. 10 Walter’s compulsive hunt for the fly, whose perspective is sometimes represented in point-of-view shots, highlights the insect as an analogy to his own situation. Like the fly, he is trapped in the lab, both spatially and ethically, becoming increasingly aware of the consequences of his applied science, while constantly trying to avoid being concerned with them too directly (see also Guffey 2013: 166-167). The site of the lab, which, for obvious reasons, needs to be kept a secret place, turns out to be a trap on another level, too, as it confronts Walter with the limits of his scientific authority. In the ‘outside world’, he is but a chemistry teacher who even has to work in a second job to make ends meet for his family. Due to his cancer, he cannot even continue this career and seems to be stuck in a situation in which his scientific expertise, though regularly acknowledged by family and friends, does not really matter anymore. Walter’s increasing frustration, as viewers learn early in the series, goes back to an unsuccessful claim to fame in the scientific community that reaches far back into the past, when he had partnered with his colleague and friend Elliot Schwartz to open a business called Gray Matter Technologies. Walter left this company, cancelling his relationship with his thenlab assistant Gretchen, who, after they had split up, decided to start dating Elliot Schwartz instead. Gretchen and Elliot, then, further advanced Gray Matter Technologies, which was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Prize, and 9 To claim and hold this position of authority, as Fabio L. Vericat has argued, Walter also draws on the elaborate discourse of science: “His powers largely rely on his control over words as written signs, but whose pronunciation becomes occult and only he can legitimately enunciate” (2019: 155). 10 In his reading of the episode, Vericat points out that the ‘threat’ of the fly to the sterile atmosphere of the superlab and, eventually, to Walter’s control over it, is not only rendered on a visual level (e.g., through close-up shots of the insect and the dramaturgy of Walter’s desperate attempts at catching it) but also on an acoustic level: “The fly’s indefinite buzz defeats Walt because it upsets his control over acoustics as univocal inscription” (2021: 161). Martin Butler 218 drew on Walter’s scientific expertise without sufficiently acknowledging his contribution. This experience of personal disappointment adds to Walter’s desire to let people know about what he does in secrecy - a desire, which, as Steven Shapin (1988) describes in his account of science in seventeenth-century England, is driven by the fact that scientific knowledge, to be acknowledged by the community, needs to be ‘showcased’. In other words, the “creditworthiness” (Shapin 1988: 404) of scientists is gained and maintained by what Shapin calls the “‘discoursing’ upon” an experiment (1988: 399). “The career of experimental knowledge”, he continues, “is the circulation between private and public spaces” (1988: 400), before concluding that, in modern societies, “we believe  scientists  because of their visible display of the emblems of recognized expertise and because their claims are vouched for by other experts” (1988: 404). This public demonstration of expertise, however, is virtually impossible in a situation in which the ‘site of science’ needs to be hidden from the public. Walter is well aware of the consequences should he showcase his meth-cooking beyond the laboratory in an attempt to demonstrate his scientific ingenuity. At the same time, he seems to be constantly tempted by the idea of letting people know about him being the author, and the authority, of his formula. This urge, which not only grows due to Walter’s equally growing hubris but also results from the economy of attention and acknowledgement characteristic of the field of science, increases during the series (see Echart & García 2013: 207-209). As Pablo Echart and Alberto García argue, “[T]he ever more pathological personality of Walter demands public recognition, he needs others to be aware of his talent” (2013: 208). That is why, more often than not, Walter is dangerously close to revealing what he does in secrecy. One decisive instance of this ambivalent temptation can be witnessed when Gale Boetticher, Walter’s laboratory assistant, is murdered, and the police identify Gale as Heisenberg, Walter White’s alter ego. Through his brother-in-law Hank Schrader, who works for the Drug Enforcement Agency and is involved in the investigation, Walter - as a specialist in chemistry - gets involved, too, and is asked for assistance. Instead of confirming the police’s suspicion that Boetticher is Heisenberg, which would easily bring Walter relief, as he would be taken off the line in the ongoing police investigation, Walter seems to be urged to set things right and, eventually, cannot resist to point out to his brotherin-law: “This genius of yours. Maybe he’s still out there” (Walley-Beckett 2011), thus making the ever-sceptical Hank keep the case open rather than closing it. Walter’s wish to be acknowledged as “a genius” is also the starting point of his downfall. Flattered by his lab assistant Boetticher, who, at one point, gives him a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a present, and dedicates this book to “his other W.W.” (Walley-Beckett 2012), Walter does Laboratories, Scientific Practice, and Its Subjects in Breaking Bad 219 not erase this trace of his meth cooking activities, but keeps the book as a constant reminder of his scientific excellence. He even goes so far as to leave the Whitman book in the bathroom of his family home, where, eventually, Hank discovers it and quickly identifies Walter as the true Heisenberg. As expected, this identification does not at all go along with the acknowledgement of Walter’s scientific genius, but rather with the instant wish to hunt down Walter. In this vein, then, the “‘discoursing’ upon” (Shapin 1988: 399) his experiments in the lab does not at all lead to the effects that Walter may have wished for. Accordingly, in Breaking Bad, the laboratory is a highly ambivalent space - “a chemist’s paradise, but also a factory, a prison, and a tomb” (Fritz 2016: 182), in which Walter and Jesse can exercise their skills and in which they are - both literally and figuratively - trapped at the very same time. The laboratory produces Walter as a self-confident expert equipped with authority but at the same time adds to his frustration, as the outcome of his genius has to be kept a secret. That is, his scientific expertise cannot be showcased to a community which, as he believes and repeatedly remarks, would be impressed by what he has achieved and would pay the respect he so desperately longs for. So, the dilemma he faced as an underestimated teacher comes back with a vengeance when he enters the business of meth-cooking. Over the course of the series, this dilemma puts an ever-increasing pressure on Walter to reveal what he has been doing in order to earn the credentials he thinks he deserves. In contrast to Walter’s (claim of) ingenuity, Jesse’s expertise in methcooking, as I have hinted at above, rests on knowing how rather than on knowing why, and turns him into an indispensable agent in the production process and a target of both the police and competitors in the drug trade. For him, too, the laboratory is thus both a safe space and, as the final season of the show emphasises, a highly dangerous one. Indeed, towards the end of the show, a white supremacist gang kidnaps Jesse and forces him to cook meth. He is trapped in, and chained to, what looks like an assembly line in a meth factory (Illustration 4). Martin Butler 220 Illustration 4. Trapped: Mechanical Reproduction in the Lab. Screenshot from the episode “Ozymandias”, season 5, episode 14. Breaking Bad © Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2015. Whereas the opening of the series stages the ‘scientification’ of methcooking, as Walt’s and Jesse’s RV transforms into a lab, its conclusion ‘descientifies’ the illegal activity, as Jesse’s face is covered in blood, signifying a degenerate body being stripped off its subjectivity and abused as means of production. As Cheryl Edelson argues, this disturbing image of Jesse as a slave working for the supremacists’ drug industry calls forth memories of “the slave-labor of Third Reich factories such as the Dora-Nordhausen” (2015: 196), and with it, the instrumentalisation of science for ideological purposes: “Here”, as she puts it, Jesse is compelled through torture, terrorism, and outright muscle memory to shuffle mindlessly, on a track, through the procedures of the meth cook. He has been debased into what Foucault would call a ‘machine-man’ robbed of agency and identity through ‘disciplinary mechanization’. (2015: 196) While the explicitness of the show in its depiction of both the white supremacists and Jesse’s installation as part of the mechanics of an automated production sequence lends itself to be associated with the Nazi atrocities, it also, in a more general sense, articulates a sinister critique of capitalism, in which the human body and its knowledge are both subjected to a regime of economic efficiency and constant optimisation, as a radicalised form of the factory-laboratory in which Walter and Jesse were imprisoned by Gustavo Fring earlier in the show. * * * * * Laboratories, Scientific Practice, and Its Subjects in Breaking Bad 221 Apart from the RV, the superlab, and the Nazi meth factory, the show offers a range of other constellations in which spatial arrangements and processes of subjectivation interact. Walter acts as a teacher in school, where he is subjected to the classroom and the curriculum and is not able to showcase his genius; the basement of Jesse Pinkman’s home is turned into a temporary lab that, as Guffey argues, corrupts Jesse’s home as “the most intimate of places” (2013: 157-158); and Walter and Jesse install a mobile lab in different houses they illegally enter at night, disguised as a pest control company, which turns them into “invaders who violate the most intimate places of people whom they have never met” (Guffey 2013: 168). Specifically through its serial narration, Breaking Bad reflects on the different dimensions of what Shapin calls the “siting” (1988: 373 et passim) of science. By drawing on different set-ups which, through the characters’ actions as well as due to specific arrangements of props, are turned into meth-cooking labs, the show negotiates different notions of science and scientific practice, ranging from science as an exploratory endeavour that pushes the limits of knowledge and its applicability under highly adverse circumstances to science (or rather: its application) as a highly routinised procedure deeply embedded in socioeconomic constellations of power, both on an illegal and a legal level. Moreover, in as much as the protagonists of the show contribute to the creation of their labs through practice, the “local circumstances of the laboratory” (Latour & Woolgar 1986: 173) contribute to the production of their specific subject positions - from masculine authority to a dehumanised slave in the machinery of meth production at the end of the show. Depicting this mutual constitution of spaces, subjects, and their scientific practices, which I illustrated by focusing on three sites of science in the show, the show draws on the traditions, or ‘genres’, of visualising laboratories. In other words, lab life in Breaking Bad - be it in basements or in factories - is rendered in terms of an established repertoire of images (re)produced specifically in photography, but also in the making of movies and television shows. In her historical account on visual representations of the lab, Verena Straub uses Breaking Bad as a starting point to argue that the image of the laboratory as reproduced on television and in film “is rooted […] in a centuries-old iconographic tradition that remains predominant in our cultural imagination to this day” (2016: 49) and which, especially since the “standardisation of laboratory architecture” in the second half of the nineteenth century (2016: 56), has regularly featured “the figure of the solitary genius” (2016: 53), the “alchemist-philosopher” (2016: 55; italics in original) surrounded by the technical means that enable him to pursue his scientific endeavour. Moreover, it was the visual staging of laboratories at the end of the nineteenth century which contributed to what Straub calls a “second modern myth” (next to that of the solitary genius), “namely that of the laboratory as factory” (2016: 55). In Breaking Bad, this idea of the single scientist is articulated through the character of Walter Martin Butler 222 White and amalgamated with another traditional image of the laboratory, which emphasises the “interaction between man and machine” and puts the lab in direct analogy to a “factory” (Straub 2016: 53, 37). The show’s depiction of different laboratories not only negotiates wellestablished images of science and its subjects, but also reverberates with what Kohler has called the “placelessness” of the laboratory as “a social form that travels and is easy to adopt” (qtd. in Kaji-O’Grady & Smith 2019: 43). Placelessness, for Kohler, is a “rhetorical fiction” (Kaji O’Grady & Smith 2019: 43; see also Livingston 2003: 185) connected to a universalist idea of science as a mode of knowledge production detached from nature; that is, removed from any disturbing, irritating, or corrupting external influences. Breaking Bad picks up on this placelessness but also contests it by emphasising the diverse entanglements of lab life and its specific (geographical, institutional, economic, ideological, etc.) contexts. Labs, as sites of science, are thus shown as being placeless and placed at the very same time, with the procedures of scientific endeavour and engineering - as “situated practices” (Wershler et al. 2022) - contributing to the formation of (ideas of) science and the scientist. References Adkins, Karen (2017). Eichmann in Albuquerque. In: Kevin Decker et al. (eds.). Philosophy and Breaking Bad. New York: Springer. 17-34. Bell, Erin et al. (eds.) (2019). The Interior Landscapes of Breaking Bad. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Bitar, Sharif (forthcoming). The Representation of Disability in Contemporary American Television Series. Dissertation. University of Oldenburg. Brodesco, Alberto (2013). Heisenberg: Epistemological Implications of a Criminal Pseudonym. In: Pierson (ed.). 53-69. 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Excursions 4 (1). 1-17. Wershler, Darren et al. (2022). The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies. Minneapolis: U of M P. Martin Butler University of Oldenburg Creating a Market for Technology through Film: Diegetic Prototypes in the Iron Man Trilogy Rudolf Spennemann and Lindy A. Orthia Fiction presents a version of reality that can affect an audience’s perceptions and beliefs. This effect is amplified in audio-visual media, where the medium helps convince the viewer that what they are watching is real. Scientists consulting on films have used this effect to promote their own agendas, including using what David Kirby has called ‘diegetic prototypes’ - fictional instances of not-yet realized technologies. These operate like a regular prototype, demonstrating the technology’s function, uses, and implications. They can build anticipation for, and acceptance of, emerging technologies, and can even attract funding to construct those technologies in real life. There has, however, been little scholarship to determine what makes an effective diegetic prototype. We used the Iron Man trilogy of science-fiction films to investigate this. Through a survey and focus groups we explored which futuristic technologies viewers remembered from the films, and whether they anticipated and encouraged those technologies’ development. We found that film-making concerns such as a depicted technology’s relationship to the plot or main characters, and its capacity for spectacle, were more important in fixing the prototype in the audience’s mind than the nature of the technology itself. We also found audiences anticipated and encouraged the development of technologies they saw as morally good. We recommend people wanting to use diegetic prototypes design them to have both a significant on-screen presence and to be depicted as being generally benevolent, the upsides outweighing the downsides. A major obstacle to the development of new technologies is obtaining funding for research. Often, engineers and scientists must show that there is a need for their work in order to receive the backing they require, and a prototype may demonstrate that need. Yet building prototypes itself requires funding, creating a vicious circle hindering development. As an alternative to producing real-world prototypes, some scientists and engineers have used fiction film to showcase potential new technologies. David A. Kirby coined the term ‘diegetic prototypes’ to describe such AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 47 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2022-0013 Rudolf Spennemann and Lindy A. Orthia 226 fictional technologies (2010: 193-218). ‘Diegetic’ is a term used to describe elements of a film that are part of the world that the film is set in (Elam 1980). As an element in a fictional work, the technology is a completed, functioning product, but to the audience, the depiction of the technology is a prototype, illustrating what the technology will do and how it will affect the world (Kirby 2010: 193-218). Kirby thus states that audio-visual fiction can be used as a vehicle for “establishing a technology’s necessity, its viability and its benevolence within society” (Kirby 2010: 44). Kirby has investigated historical examples of scientists and engineers inserting their undeveloped technologies into fiction films, and gaining funding and support by doing so. For example, he has described the case of John Underkoffler, consultant on Minority Report (2002), who was tasked with developing the film’s gesture-controlled computer system. Underkoffler wrote an entire language of hand signals for the system, creating a self-consistent and believable diegetic prototype. In the film’s wake, Underkoffler and production designer Alex McDowell were approached by individuals and organisations wanting to know if the system was real and, if not, if they would be able to fund its creation. Underkoffler started the company Oblong Industries with resulting funds and produced a real-world prototype of the system (Kirby 2011). We also see adaptations of this principle in the form of “vision videos” (Kinsley 2010: 2773) created by the computer industry, in which potential future computer technology is showcased in fictional situations. Samuel Kinsley argues that these videos form part of the “politics of anticipation”, their visions engendering desire in viewers (2010: 2774). There are further parallels between diegetic prototypes and technology scenarios used in futures research: Dominic Idier (2000) argues technology scenarios and science fiction are similar in that both anticipate changes in technology and explore implications of the changes (see also Delgado et al. 2012). Previous research shows that audio-visual fiction such as film, television programs, and theatrical productions can sometimes influence audiences’ real-world beliefs and knowledge about science and technology, a necessary precondition for diegetic prototypes to work. Generally speaking, audio-visual fiction is more likely to set agendas for viewers to think about the ethical aspects of science and social roles of technology than to teach viewers science ‘facts’ (Brodie et al. 2001, Lowe et al. 2006, Shelton et al. 2006, Orthia et al. 2012, Donkers & Orthia 2016, Li & Orthia 2016, Orthia 2019). As a result, fiction’s impact is not easily predictable for a specific person or fiction text, instead varying with context, as might be expected for social and ethical topics (Orthia 2019 and references therein). In addition, most audiences interpret fiction aware that it is fiction, rather than naively accepting a fiction text’s messages wholesale (Kitzinger 2010, Orthia et al. 2012, Green 2019). This may enhance the potential for audiences to extrapolate technological concepts from fiction to real life, using what Carolyn Michelle (2007) terms the ‘referential’ mode of reception in Diegetic Prototypes in the Iron Man Trilogy 227 which audiences compare how a fictional world is like life. Science facts can become memorable to audiences under specific conditions: repetition is important (e.g. Hether et al. 2008), as is contextualisation within familiar social scenarios (e.g. Levy 2015). Given this body of research, audiences responding to diegetic prototypes seems highly plausible. Diegetic prototypes capitalise on one of the key affordances of fiction by depicting technologies in social and ethical contexts, setting agendas for viewers to remember and think about them. Repeated use of new technologies in fiction may further enhance their memorability. However, previous work, including Kirby’s, has only studied successful examples of diegetic prototypes, so it remains to be seen how diegetic prototypes work from the audience’s perspective. For example, are diegetic prototypes always successful? If they are not, what conditions are likely to foster success? In this study, we investigated such questions. We conducted a social study to find out whether audiences of the technology-rich Iron Man film series recalled any non-existent technologies from the films. We also explored whether they felt those technologies were desirable, feasible, and morally appropriate (building on Kirby’s concepts of necessity, viability, and benevolence). In other words, we sought to identify potential diegetic prototypes from the films, which technologists might plausibly develop in the real world. We then identified what technological or diegetic traits the memorable technologies possessed. We use the results to offer practical suggestions to professionals wishing to use the diegetic prototype approach to gain support for undeveloped technologies in the future. The Iron Man Trilogy We chose the Iron Man trilogy as the focal set of fiction texts for the study because it functions as a series of technology scenarios, contains many futuristic technologies from the fantastic to the mundane, it has gained a wide audience, and is relatively recent, so most technologies forming the diegetic prototypes have not yet been realized or rendered irrelevant. Iron Man is a superhero originating in Marvel Comics who was realised onscreen in a series of films by Marvel Studios, including the trilogy Iron Man (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010), and Iron Man 3 (2013). Iron Man is the alter ego of Tony Stark, a genius inventor, billionaire, and owner of the American weapons manufacturer Stark Industries. Wounded and captured by terrorists after a weapons demonstration, he installs an electromagnet in his chest to prevent shrapnel from working its way to his heart. He creates a miniaturised free energy device - the arc reactor - to power both his electromagnet and a powered armour suit that he uses to escape. Upon returning to the U.S., Stark refines his designs and creates the Iron Man suit, using it to uphold world peace. This leads him into confrontations with various technologically themed villains. Rudolf Spennemann and Lindy A. Orthia 228 Aside from the suit and arc reactor, other technologies of note in the films include JARVIS, an artificial intelligence who serves as Stark’s butler and co-pilot, and DUM-E and U, a pair of semi-sentient robotic arms who assist Stark in his workshop. Many computer technologies in the movies use holographic displays, including the computer in Stark’s workshop and the head-up display in the suit, and most of these are controlled using hand gestures and voice commands. The gestural and voice command interfaces were designed by John Underkoffler (Weinberger 2015), mentioned above regarding Minority Report, so this example is a direct test of Kirby’s concept of diegetic prototypes. If the holographic displays engender a positive audience reaction indicative of anticipation and support, more weight is added to Kirby’s case. At least one Iron Man technology created by Underkoffler has already borne fruit. In 2013, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk announced on Twitter that his company was using a gestural control technology to design rocket parts (2013b). In response to a query by Iron Man director Jon Favreau (2013), Musk confirmed that the technology was inspired by that in the movie (2013a). While this shows Underkoffler’s diegetic prototype works in the context of industry, the focus of the present study is on the efficacy of diegetic prototypes on the viewing public as potential future consumers of the technology. Table 1 contains a list of futuristic technologies in the Iron Man series and the number of scenes in which each appears. For technologies like the arc reactor - which is technically present in every scene with Stark after it is created - only scenes where characters or plot draw attention to the technology were counted. We defined a scene as a film section set in a single location at a single time. Note that the list is organised using categories we created from the survey results discussed below, to enable comparisons. Number of scenes in which the technology was present Participants who recalled it (total n=76) Technology Category Iron Man Iron Man 2 Iron Man 3 No. % Advanced Aircraft 1 0 0 2 2.63 Advanced Computers 3 1 1 5 6.58 Advanced Manufacturing 1 0 0 2 2.63 Advanced Materials 1 0 0 8 10.53 Advanced Medical Sensors 0 2 2 4 5.26 Advanced Medicine 1 0 1 2 2.63 Advanced Robotics 5 1 1 9 11.84 Advanced Weaponry 5 2 2 19 25.00 Arc Reactor 7 6 1 57 75.00 Diegetic Prototypes in the Iron Man Trilogy 229 Artificial Intelligence 11 7 11 62 81.58 Artificial Intelligence - Generic 0 0 0 24 31.58 Artificial Intelligence - DUM-E and U 5 3 3 3 3.95 Artificial Intelligence - J.A.R.V.I.S 6 4 8 35 46.05 Automated Object Scanning and Analysis 4 1 1 1 1.32 Communications Technology 0 0 1 3 3.95 Electric Whips 0 4 0 16 21.05 Extremis 0 0 10 32 42.11 Facial Recognition 0 0 1 1 1.32 Formula 1 Car 0 1 0 1 1.32 Friend/ Foe Recognition Software 1 0 0 4 5.26 H.A.M.M.E.R. Drones 0 2 0 7 9.21 Holographic Displays 8 5 8 38 50.00 Holographic Displays - Generic 4 1 1 19 25.00 Holographic Displays - Gestural Interaction 2 2 1 11 14.47 Holographic Displays - Suit Heads Up Display 2 2 6 8 10.53 Home-Made Particle Accelerator 0 1 0 4 5.26 Immunity to Hangovers 0 0 0 1 1.32 Inertia Control 0 0 0 2 2.63 Iron Man Suit 5 7 11 51 67.11 Iron Man Suit - Generic 5 6 3 39 51.32 Iron Man Suit - Remote Control (Mk. XXXXII) 0 0 8 9 11.84 Iron Man Suit - Suitcase Armour (Mk. V) 0 1 0 3 3.95 Jericho Missile 2 0 0 8 10.53 LaserWeapons 0 1 0 13 17.11 Mental Interface 0 0 2 3 3.95 Nanotechnology 2 0 0 2 2.63 New Element 0 1 0 8 10.53 Paralysis Device 2 0 0 6 7.89 Powered Exoskeletons 5 2 0 7 9.21 Repulsor Blasts 4 3 2 12 15.79 Repulsor Technology 5 1 4 30 39.47 Shrapnel Electromagnet 1 0 2 5 6.58 Rudolf Spennemann and Lindy A. Orthia 230 Superconductors 0 0 0 1 1.32 Television Broadcast Hacking 0 0 2 1 1.32 The Tesseract 0 0 0 1 1.32 Transparent Touch Screens 1 1 1 6 7.89 Vanko’s Suit 0 1 0 1 1.32 Vibranium 0 0 0 2 2.63 Voice Activation 1 0 0 4 5.26 War Machine Suit 0 2 8 1 1.32 Wearable Technology 0 0 1 1 1.32 Table 1. Recurrence of technology categories in the Iron Man films and level of recall. Authors’ illustration. This list demonstrates the significant potential the Iron Man trilogy has to showcase diegetic prototypes to viewers. The question is: did viewers remember these technologies afterwards? Which were the most memorable? And how did viewers feel about them in terms of feasibility, desirability, and morality? Method To test the concept of diegetic prototypes, our primary aim was to determine if audiences recalled futuristic technologies from our chosen fiction text. If audience members do not recall the diegetic prototypes, the concept becomes invalid. Different diegetic prototypes may have different levels of audience impact. If so, different technologies are expected to have different levels of recall. A secondary aim was to find out what factors affect recall, including potentially:  recurrence - the number of scenes the technology appeared in;  feasibility - the technology’s perceived feasibility or plausibility;  desire - how much the audience wants or needs the technology; and  morality - the moral perception of the technology. We chose two data gathering strategies to provide answers to these questions. First, an online survey gathered broad patterns of audience response to the chosen fiction text. A smaller scale focus group study then elicited longer responses to clarify and expand on survey results. Diegetic Prototypes in the Iron Man Trilogy 231 Survey We recruited survey participants in several ways. We displayed physical posters in the local study area on shop and community notice boards, and advertised through online forums associated with comic books and popular culture including IGN and Reddit. Some additional recruits were sourced from a popular fiction course offered by a local university. Recruitment material simply asked if people had seen the Iron Man films, to avoid priming participants to start thinking about its technologies. To maximise the potential pool, anyone who had seen at least one Iron Man film could participate. Once recruited, we asked survey participants to nominate up to twelve futuristic technologies from the Iron Man movies. No prompt examples were given to ensure the answers were a genuine indication of recall. We then asked participants to answer questions related to our factors of interest, for each technology they listed: whether it was feasible, and if so, how long it might take to be realised in the real world; if they wanted to see it in the world (societal want); if they thought society needed it (societal need); if they wanted to have it (personal want); if they needed it (personal need); and how they would rate it morally (good, evil or neutral). We also asked demographic questions: participants’ nationality, age, and which Iron Man films they had seen. 76 participants completed the survey. While this sample size may seem low, it is comparable to similar mixed-methods studies in this field (e.g. Barnett et al. 2006 had 82 participants), and the number of technologies identified comprised a substantial dataset for analysis as described below. Most completing participants were from Australia (77.6%) and the U.S.A. (14.5%); 80.3% were 18-25 years old, the rest older; 92.1% had seen Iron Man, 86.8% Iron Man 2, 76.3% Iron Man 3, and 67.1% had seen all three films. After closing the survey, we grouped the nominated technologies into categories based on trends in the responses (Table 1). For example, all aircraft were grouped into a single category, ‘Advanced Aircraft’. Some prominent technologies were listed both in a group and individually, e.g. JAR- VIS was grouped under ‘artificial intelligence’ but was sometimes analysed separately in its own category. We performed statistical analyses on the survey data to test for correlations between recall and the factors that potentially affect it. We primarily used the Pearson correlation coefficient, or where that was not suitable, more appropriate tests were used. In all cases, one variable was the proportion of contributing participants who recalled a technology category. The other was the proportion of participants identifying that technology category who also nominated the factor being investigated. For example, in the case of arc reactor feasibility, the first variable is the proportion of participants who recalled the arc reactor, and the second is the proportion Rudolf Spennemann and Lindy A. Orthia 232 of them who thought it was feasible. Proportions were used to avoid a false dependence created by the differing recall levels between technology categories. In short, less recalled technologies are likely to have fewer participants who think they are feasible than more recalled technologies, based purely on the difference in sample size. Focus Groups We conducted three focus groups with a subset of nine survey participants to give context to the survey results, through a 20-40-minute guided discussion on the same topics broached in the survey. Participants were each rewarded with a movie ticket. Discussions were recorded and transcribed verbatim with participant names anonymised. Major themes responding to the research questions were identified, and a diverse set of the most informative quotes selected for reporting. Despite every attempt being made to avoid influencing participants’ responses in the discussions, some topics, especially the discussion on morality, may have led to ‘socially desirable’ responses. The effect this slight bias may have had on the results is negligible, however, as public support for proposed technology is also constrained by social norms. Results The 76 participants each identified between one and eleven technologies in the survey, with most (71.1%) identifying between four and seven. Together, the participants listed a total of 443 separate technologies. From these, we defined 42 technology categories and grouped the responses into them (Table 1). If the same participant identified both a generic technology (e.g. artificial intelligence) and a specific subset of that technology (e.g. JARVIS), only the specific subset was counted. This was to ensure that the total measure for that technology was the number of individual participants who identified it. Since different numbers of participants recalled each technology category, clearly some technologies are more memorable than others (Table 1, Figure 1). The most recalled technologies (with over 50% of respondents identifying them) were:  artificial intelligence: 81.6%  arc reactor: 75.0%  Iron Man suit: 67.1%  holographic displays: 50.0%, with 12.5% mentioning gestural interaction. Diegetic Prototypes in the Iron Man Trilogy 233 Other significant technologies (with over 25% of respondents identifying them) were:  JARVIS: 46.1%  Extremis: 42.1% (a technology from Iron Man 3)  repulsor technology: 39.5% (used to make the Iron Man suit fly)  advanced weaponry: 25.0% It should be noted that a specific subset of artificial intelligence, JARVIS, was more memorable than several more generic technologies such as advanced weaponry and repulsor technology. This indicates that some aspects of JARVIS were conducive to recall, as is perhaps unsurprising for a named character who talks (discussed further below). A one-way ANOVA test found participants who had seen all three movies recalled more technologies than those who had only seen one or two (r=−0.204, p<0.05). Accordingly, when analysing quantitative data to investigate relationships between influencing factors and audience recall (below), we only used data from participants who had seen all three films. Additional testing found that there was no significant relationship between the age or nationality of the participant and the number or type of technologies they recalled. Hypothesised Factors Potentially Influencing Recall One factor we hypothesised to influence audience recall of a fictional technology is the number of scenes in which it is present, since increased exposure to a technology and repeated reminders via more scenes may improve recall of that technology. We tested this by calculating Pearson’s correlation coefficient for the number of scenes a technology appeared in and the number of participants who identified it. The two were strongly correlated (r=0.702, p<0.01), supporting this hypothesis (Figure 1). Rudolf Spennemann and Lindy A. Orthia 234 Figure 1. Recurrence of technology categories in the Iron Man films and level of recall. The data mirror the numbers reported in Table 1, but with the number of scenes combined for all three films in this figure. Diegetic Prototypes in the Iron Man Trilogy 235 Another possible influencing factor on memory is the technology’s feasibility. Audience members may be more likely to remember technologies they think are possible, discounting those that are too fantastical. Alternatively, audiences may remember the more fantastical technologies because they are inherently unfeasible. In the survey, 62.1% of technologies identified were deemed feasible. While participants tended to recall feasible technologies, a Pearson’s correlation found recall was not connected to perceived feasibility (r=−0.282, p>0.05). Rather than recalling feasible technologies more than unfeasible ones, it seems audiences generally saw the technologies in the films as feasible. One measure of a diegetic prototype’s success is that audience members support or anticipate the realisation of that technology. If diegetic prototypes work as intended, participants will desire them. We defined four kinds of desire (societal vs personal x want vs need) and tested each for impact on recall. While 74.7% of participants stated that they generally wanted to see the technologies they identified in the real world (societal want), there was no correlation between this and recall (r=−0.209, p>0.05). This result was mirrored for the other three desire categories (64.2% societally needed; r=−0.181, p>0.05; 51.3% personally wanted, r=−0.183, p>0.05; 23% personally needed, r=−0.118, p>0.05). This indicates considerations of want and need have no generalisable effect on recall, but there is desire for futuristic technology in general. It is possible that most recalled technologies from the Iron Man series were too futuristic, so participants had difficulty finding reasons to desire them. This was reflected in group discussions regarding the Iron Man suit. Most participants who did want an Iron Man suit wanted it for transport: G3P1: It’d be handy for flying and, you know, flying around, like, going home for the holidays without having to get on an economy flight. Some participants did not want a suit: G2P2: I’m content with the way I live at the moment. Cars are fine, transport’s fine, um, I’m not in poverty or anything, I don’t need to sell it for money, so, like, I’m pretty content the way I live. G2P1: I’m generally capable at fending off the constant ninja attacks on my life. Participants also listed the downsides of having a suit: G2P3: I recognize it as one of those that’d attract more trouble than it would be worth. Unless everybody had one, then no one would care. Rudolf Spennemann and Lindy A. Orthia 236 It seems that, when deciding if they want or need a piece of futuristic technology, participants considered how the technology would fit into their current life rather than how their life would fit around that technology. Participants also had difficulty working out if there was a societal need for the suit, partly due to a perceived lack of applications for it. Some decided that there was a societal need because it provides protection to its wearer in dangerous environments, but only half-heartedly: G3P2: I can think of, like, you make a list of certain things that we could use. I dunno, maybe not an Iron Man suit but robots for that, situations which are too dangerous for humans to operate in or stuff like that. It may be the case that the Iron Man suit, and other technologies in the films, are too far out of the ordinary for many participants to find applicable wants or needs for them. This suggests relatively mundane technologies, and technologies with a clear niche, may make better diegetic prototypes. An example of this may be Underkoffler’s holographic displays. They were particularly societally desirable to viewers, with 94.7% of participants who recalled them wanting to see the technology in real life, and 92.1% claiming a societal need for it (plus 65.8% personal want; 39.5% personal need). This high level of desirability may be related to feasibility since an overwhelming majority - 84.2% of participants - thought the technology could be realised, compared to the 2.7% who said the displays were not possible. This suggests that participants believed the holographic displays were extremely likely to be part of their future and they expected this technology to be implemented. Thus, this diegetic prototype was successful. The cinematic presentation of the technology inspired the audience to a significant degree, with one focus group member particularly enamoured with it: G3P3: I just, like, love all his holographic projections that you can grab, and turn around, and throw and all that stuff, it’s really cool. Another factor we hypothesised to influence recall is the morality viewers ascribe to the technology. If a viewer believes that a diegetic prototype is ‘good’ on the moral spectrum, they may be more inclined to support and remember it, while ‘evil’ technologies may be recalled for their infamy. Of the 443 technologies, 41.4% were said to be good, 40.8% neutral, and 15.7% evil, indicating participants were more likely to remember technologies they thought were good or neutral. However, Pearson’s correlation showed recall was not related to this (good r=−0.230, p>0.05; neutral r=−0.198, p>0.05; evil r=0.083, p>0.05). Diegetic Prototypes in the Iron Man Trilogy 237 This can be explained by participants’ general views on technology. Focus groups revealed most participants felt technology was, on the whole, neutral, and the way it is used determines the morality: G2P4: Neutral would be the starting point and whoever controls it could do either good or bad with it. G1P2: I’d say that neutral depends also on who’s using it and what it’s being used for. Others felt technology averaged out good based on their progressivist concept of human history: G2P1: I would say it’s generally good. If it was neutral, then we wouldn’t be much better than we were three-hundred years ago. I think we are much better and if it was generally evil, we wouldn’t be here anymore. In specific cases, however, different moralities were assigned. For example, participants only categorised technologies as evil if they felt there was no way for it to be put to positive use: G2P3: All the other technologies we’ve discussed have the potential for good things. With weapons, I don’t think there’s much potential for good things. G3P3: Probably bad, just because the, like, something like the Jericho missile was sheer volume of destruction. I can’t really see it being put to a positive use. These results suggest the criteria participants used to determine morality is independent of the depiction of that technology in the films. This means diegetic prototypes cannot depend on a fictional portrayal as morally good if the technology could be put to other, less moral uses in the real world. Alternative Factors The above analysis demonstrates that, apart from the number of scenes in which the technology appears, none of our proposed factors affected participants’ recall of specific diegetic prototypes. The survey and focus group results together, however, indicated some alternative factors that increase recall. Rudolf Spennemann and Lindy A. Orthia 238 Iconic technologies. Focus group participants stated some technologies were easier to remember because they were iconic. These are technologies that appear in all the films and are central to the Iron Man character: the arc reactor that keeps him alive and the Iron Man suit that makes him a super-hero. G3P2: I included the suits as one of the futuristic technologies. So, that is the main prominent feature in the films so that is what first came to mind. G2P1: You’ve always got that symbol of the shining heart there. That’s something that’s constantly hitting you and that’s why the first thing I listed was the power source. Without these technologies, Iron Man would not be Iron Man. Thus, recalling the character is likely to recall both technologies. This is reflected in the survey results where the suit was identified by 67.1% of participants and the arc reactor by 75.0%. Some technologies are so iconic that they have seeped into popular culture, expanding the level of exposure audiences have to them, further increasing recall. G2P2: Also, like, the suit was pretty popular, like, pretty much everyone online probably has seen it or like Googled it at one stage of their point in their life. […] You have these constant reminders because it’s popular as well. Technology as a character. If technologies central to a character are more likely to be remembered, what of technologies that are characters in their own right, such as artificial intelligences? Audience members are inclined to pay attention to characters because they contribute to the plot, leading to greater recall of those characters after the film. As noted above, artificial intelligence was the most recalled technology (81.6%), with JAR- VIS specifically having recall prominence (46.1%). Being a character in the narrative may have improved audience recall of the technology. Our results further suggest that to maximise the potential for recalling artificial intelligences, those characters should be able to speak. In the movies, JARVIS is able to, and does, speak, interacting verbally with other characters. DUM-E and U, on the other hand, are mechanical armatures and cannot speak, instead communicating via ‘body language’ as it were. Despite being present in all three films, the two assistants were only specifically mentioned by 4.0% of participants. Their inability to speak seems to have been a factor in this reduced level of recall, and viewers are likely to have placed them under the umbrella of ‘artificial intelligence’ rather than being singled out as JARVIS was. Diegetic Prototypes in the Iron Man Trilogy 239 Relevance to the plot. Another factor influencing recall was how critical the technology was to the plot, which audiences are generally inclined to pay attention to. Aside from the plot-central arc reactor and Iron Man suit discussed above, the Extremis treatment - critical to the plot of Iron Man 3 - was recalled by 42.1% of participants. This was also reflected in group discussions: G1P2: Because they were mentioned many times throughout the movie, it was like the main thing that held everything together. G2P2: For mine, they were in both movies, so that was JARVIS and the power source, which was the heart, and the suit, so that’s pretty much all, in all the story lines of the three movies. This is related to the number of scenes: if a technology is central to the plot, it is likely to appear in more scenes than technologies tangential to the plot. Spectacle. Another factor is how ‘spectacular’ a technology is. If a technology is visually impressive or showcased in a memorable scene, it is more likely to be remembered. This is especially true for weapons technologies: G2P4: I remembered what I remembered because of the spectacular destruction which they [caused], all the weapons and whatnot, so, the explosions stick in your mind. Further evidence for the role of spectacle is the number of survey participants who identified laser weapons as a technology category. Tony Stark uses a laser weapon in a scene towards the end of Iron Man 2; the laser has approximately five seconds of screen-time and yet it was remembered by 17.1% of participants. By contrast, the enemy the laser was used to fight (the HAMMER drones) was only recalled by 9.2%. The drones had significantly more screen-time than the laser but were not as visually impressive. Other ‘spectacular’ technologies include the electric whips used by Ivan Vanko in Iron Man 2, the holographic displays in all three movies, and Iron Man’s repulsor blasts. Consistent with this, Kirby alludes to the role of spectacle for diegetic prototypes without naming it. In Fritz Lang’s film Frau im Mond (1929) - mentioned by Kirby as an early use of a diegetic prototype - the spectacular rocket take-off convinced the film’s audience that space travel was not merely possible but held “tremendous possibilities” (2010: 57). What makes a technology ‘spectacular’ is not firmly defined, but there are a number of factors that contribute. Analysing the technologies recalled in the survey, ‘spectacular’ technologies can be inferred to be those which Rudolf Spennemann and Lindy A. Orthia 240  are the focal point of a particular scene or shot;  emit bright, coloured light;  are associated with quick motion;  cause above-average amounts of destruction; and  are accompanied by witty or otherwise memorable dialogue. Discussion Our results demonstrate that people do remember some non-existent technologies they encounter in audio-visual fiction. Fictional technologies can also engender desire in viewers to see those technologies in the real world, or in some cases to personally possess them. In many cases, viewers felt the technologies were feasible to create and had the potential to do good. The Iron Man films thus made a case for the implementation of the futuristic technologies therein and their audience was, in most cases, convinced by those arguments. These results support Kirby’s concept of diegetic prototypes and the possibility that they will demonstrate a technology’s necessity, viability, and benevolence. However, viewers also recalled technologies they felt were not feasible and that they did not want or need, including morally suspect technologies. Therefore, not every technology in a film will function as an effective diegetic prototype by attracting public support. In particular, if people cannot see an obvious real-world application for an undeveloped technology, or if the application is destructive, they are less likely to desire it. Viewers will evaluate a technology’s value with respect to such social and ethical factors, drawing on real-world factors and fictional scenarios. This indicates that audio-visual fiction can be used to spark ethical debate about scientific and ethical issues, often setting the agendas for debate as discussed by Delgado et al. (2012) and Donkers and Orthia (2016), but its influence is not deterministic. As with previous studies discussed in the introduction, what people remember will vary somewhat from one individual to another. There is undoubtedly an aspect of personal context to this. However, we did also identify some traits that can contribute to making a technology more likely to be recalled, maximising the possibility that it will be an effective diegetic prototype. The key factors affecting recall are all related to film-making rather than to the technology’s inherent properties. We recommend that if professionals want to use visual fiction to present their prototypes, they should make those technologies ‘big’. They should be central to the plot or the characters or, if tangential, they should dominate the scenes they are present in. The technologies should also appear in a large number of scenes, the one factor we found was statistically significantly related to recall. While the technology does not necessarily have to be physically big, it should have a large Diegetic Prototypes in the Iron Man Trilogy 241 on-screen presence. ‘Big’ technologies become a memorable part of the story and may even become iconic. Once a diegetic prototype is iconic, any moves toward an implementation will be inevitably associated with the fiction text. This can be seen in the development of gestural interaction technologies, referred to in the online press as ‘Minority Report-style interfaces’ (e.g. Baldwin 2013). This further raises the profile of the innovator who created the prototype, increasing the chances of funding to realise the technology. The results of this study show that diegetic prototypes portrayed in audio-visual fiction are effective in creating support and anticipation for future technologies. While the factors that make a diegetic prototype memorable may not match those that build support and anticipation, on the whole, diegetic prototypes are a useful and powerful tool. Data Availability Statement Raw survey data are available at https: / / lindyorthia.files.wordpress.com/ 2022/ 08/ iron-man-survey-results.xlsx. References Baldwin, Roberto (2013). Asus and Leap Motion Bring Minority Report-Style Gestures to Life. Wired. http: / / www.wired.com/ 2013/ 01/ leap-motion-asus/ . [Feb. 2021]. Barnett, Michael et al. (2006). The Impact of Science Fiction Film on Student Understanding of Science. Journal of Science Education and Technology 15 (2). 179- 191. Brodie, Mollyann et al. (2001). Communicating Health Information Through the Entertainment Media. Health Affairs 20 (1). 192-199. Delgado, Ana et al. (2012). 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Musk, Elon (2013b). Will Post Video Next Week. Twitter. 24 Aug. https: / / twitter.com/ elonmusk/ status/ 371032852101484544. [Feb. 2021]. Orthia, Lindy A. (2019). How Does Science Fiction Television Shape Fans’ Relationships to Science? Results from a Survey of 575 Doctor Who Viewers. Journal of Science Communication 18 (4). A08. Orthia, Lindy A. et al. (2012). How Do People Think about the Science They Encounter in Fiction? Undergraduates Investigate Responses to Science in The Simpsons. International Journal of Science Education, Part B 2 (2). 149-174. Shelton, Donald E. et al. (2006). A Study of Juror Expectations and Demands Concerning Scientific Evidence: Does the ‘CSI Effect’ Exist? Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law 9 (2). 331-367. Weinberger, Matt (2015). The Guy Who Designed the Computers in Iron Man Says Elon Musk Is Wrong to Worry about Killer AI. Business Insider. https: / / www. businessinsider.com.au/ john-underkoffler-elon-musk-iron-man-ai-2015-12. [Feb. 2021]. Rudolf Spennemann Lindy A. Orthia Australian National University Capturing the Shark White (Eco-)Masculinity and the Pursuit of Science in the Docuseries Expedition Great White 1 Michael Fuchs Expedition Great White is a docuseries that follows a crew composed of professional fishermen and scientists who conduct studies about great white sharks. This article explores three interrelated dimensions of the series. First, while the series repeatedly suggests that the actions performed in front of the cameras ultimately aim to study and protect great whites and that for both the fishermen and scientists, the well-being of sharks is of the highest priority, this masculine care is not only subjected to the pursuit of new scientific insights about sharks but also embedded in a discourse of competition. Second, this pursuit of new knowledge is coded in masculine terms, as traditional notions of masculinity (i.e., confronting and catching the dangerous animal as well as making scientific progress) become re-negotiated in view of the animals’ well-being and, ultimately, their protection. Finally, while the first two dimensions bespeak the desire for human control of the natural world, the digital lives of tagged sharks challenge this human control. In his influential essay “Why Look at Animals? ” (1977), John Berger suggests that nineteenth-century capitalism jump-started a process that led to the effacement of animals from the lives of people inhabiting the Global North: some animal species have been exterminated or driven close to extinction, while others have been displaced due to suburbanization, which has erased considerable swaths of wilderness areas from maps. However, animals have not simply vanished; instead, domesticated animals and pets have replaced wild animals, production and supply chains have effectively removed animals from the production of meat, and wildlife has “reced[ed] into a wilderness that exist[s] only in the imagination” (Berger 2009: 28; italics in original). Sparked by the developments of photography in the 1 I would like to thank the Volkswagen Foundation for funding received in the context of the research project “Fiction Meets Science II: Varieties of Science Narrative”. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 47 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2022-0014 Michael Fuchs 244 mid-nineteenth century and motion pictures in the latter stages of the nineteenth century, animals have entered the realm of representation as they have disappeared from material reality; they have found, Akira Mizuta Lippit quips in his book Electric Animal, “a proper habitat in the recording devices of the technological media” (2000: 25). “The capacities of the technological media in general and the photographic media in particular to record and recall”, Lippit continues, have “allowed modern culture to preserve animals” (2000: 25). Joel Sartore’s ongoing National Geographicsponsored project Photo Ark, in which he photographs animals before their species vanish from the face of the Earth, makes this process of trying to capture animals’ spectral doubles in storage devices and representations (and sometimes also their DNA in cryo-frozen form) explicit. Like other animals, sharks are trapped in human discourses; they are not perceived as animals but rather as symbols that speak to human desires, dreams, and ideas; they are “stand-in[s] for humans” (DeMello 2012: 334). “[R]epresentations of animals in visual culture”, Randy Malamud has accordingly noted, “are inherently biased and self-serving”, which is why “[i]t is difficult, if not impossible, to find in these human representations an objectively true account of who animals are” (2012: loc. 232). Dan Rubey remarked in an early response to the representation of sharks in Jaws, both the novel (1974) and the movie (1975), that “Jaws is an expression of the society’s consciousness […]. Spielberg’s film and Benchley’s novel have cashed in on the emotions already attached to people-eating sharks by creating fictional and filmic structures which involve audiences with the shark as an image” (1976: 20). Ultimately, “representations of the shark repress that which they are meant to express: the fish, the animal itself, the shark” (Neff 2016: 52). In this article, I will draw on this idea to explore the docuseries Expedition Great White, in which sharks play an important role but are ultimately displaced, for the series is more interested in the hunt for, and capture of, sharks, and how equipping sharks with tracking devices may advance science and help us understand these marine predators. These focal points, in turn, reflect questions surrounding particular practices in the sciences and negotiate the masculinities on display. Expedition Great White is what Cynthia Chris has labelled “Fang TV”: wildlife programming “featur[ing] top predators such as sharks, tigers, crocodiles, and grizzly bears”, whose “violent natures” attract viewers (2006: 105). The series follows a group of professional fishermen and scientists studying great whites. Expedition Great White became Shark Men for its second and third seasons on National Geographic (the title subsequently also used for the first season and international broadcasts) before moving (in slightly altered form) to the History Channel as Shark Wranglers for one more season. I use the programme’s original title to stress that I will focus on the first season because starting with the second season, the docuseries becomes less coherent: all seasons revolve around a group of (primarily) Capturing the Shark 245 men (primarily white men, as a matter of fact) trying to attach satellite trackers to sharks, but, for example, whereas season one solely centres on catching and tagging great whites, season two even includes two episodes in which the Shark Men try to catch giant squid (with Australian colleagues, including two female PhD students), and season three features a new a chief scientist - a change that introduces new strategies of catching sharks and new conflicts aboard - and the Shark Men expand their range by catching and tagging other shark species, including tiger sharks and hammerheads. Finally, in season two, the frequency of using reality television conventions (in particular ‘confessionals’ in which crew members sit down and address the camera to comment on the goings-on aboard the ship) increases dramatically - a development that, admittedly, begins in the second half of the first season. Whereas Iri Cermak has reprimanded “pseudoscientific TV content” such as the Great White Serial Killer series of documentaries for “pos[ing] a real risk to sharks for its potential persuasiveness when coupled with particular entertainment techniques and the objectivity-based claims common in documentary” (2021: 585), 2 I will not interrogate the ‘factuality’ of Great White Expedition, even if popular television may be “the most common source of scientific information for the public” (Evans 2015: 271). Assessing the effectiveness of edutainment to teach its audiences about, and make them interested in, science is difficult, to say the least. As marine biologist David Shiffman has pointed out, Shark Week “inspires the single largest temporary spike in Americans paying attention to any ocean science or conservation topic. It therefore has the potential to be an amazing force for good in terms of promoting science, conservation, and public understanding of sharks” (2022: 50). However, Shark Week tends to botch this potential by relying on spectacle and stereotypical representations that effectively turn sharks into monsters (see, for example, Lerberg 2016). Instead of focusing on Great White Expedition as a means for science communication, my article is interested in two interconnected layers of the programme’s meaning: how the series negotiates what Antoine Traisnel (2020) has described as the development from the hunt to the capture regime, as sharks are caught before they are transformed into little more than dots moving across screens, and how both catching sharks and expressing concerns about the animals’ well-being perform particular (eco-)masculinities. 2 The Great White Serial Killer documentaries have been a semi-regular feature of Shark Week, the annual, week-long special on Discovery Channel that has been running since summer 1988. The first Great White Serial Killer documentary was broadcast in 2013, and the series returned in 2015, 2016, 2020, and 2022. Michael Fuchs 246 Catching the Shark The first episode of Expedition Great White opens with shots of the research vessel MV Ocean, accompanied by a foreboding score. As the ship casts anchor, the voice-over narrator opens the series with dramatic intonation, saying, “Forget crabs” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). By thus referring to Deadliest Catch (Discovery Channel, 2005-), the series about king crab fishermen in the Bering Sea (purportedly the deadliest job on the planet [National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health 1997]), the first few words of Expedition Great White stress the risks that all men involved in the expedition to Guadalupe Island accept. Then, viewers catch a first glimpse of a shark, seen from the ship and accompanied by an excited voice exclaiming, “White shark! Right underneath your feet! ” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). The voice-over continues, “They are going after something bigger: the great white shark! ” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). In this moment, the camera provides underwater shots of a great white approaching, with its jaws wide open, before a shark bites (somewhat calmly) into a boat (Illustration 1). Illustration 1. A shark is first seen from the ship, before underwater shots revert to stereotypical shark imagery: jaws wide open, first biting into the boat and then taking a bait. Screenshots from Expedition Great White © National Geographic, 2010. “Catching [the shark] takes a team of expert anglers” (Christensen & Butler 2010a), the voice-over explains, as Chris Fischer, leader of the expedition and founder of the non-profit organisation OCEARCH, whose mission is “conducting unprecedented research on our ocean’s giants in order Capturing the Shark 247 to help scientists collect previously unattainable data in the ocean” (OCEARCH 2022), is introduced. Fischer stresses, “This is gonna finally allow us to actually get to know the shark” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). “Understanding it requires a renowned shark expert”, the voice-over notes and introduces Dr Michael Domeier, who wants to “crack open and solve the puzzle of the great white shark” by “us[ing] the newest technology” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). “They’re joining forces to protect the sharks’ dwindling numbers”, the voice-over continues, “but it’s going to take a revolutionary plan” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). This ‘revolutionary plan’ centres on towing sharks onto a cradle that lifts them out of the water, which allows the crew-members to measure the ocean predators and attach satellite trackers to the sharks; this tag is where ‘the newest technology’ comes into play, as traditional pop-up tags, which detach after some time, are replaced by tracking devices that are bolted into the sharks’ dorsal fins and transmit data for up to six years. About ten minutes into the first episode, the crew spot the first great white whom they want to catch on their current expedition. In the bombastic language characteristic of this type of television programme, the voice-over describes the great white as “bigger than anything they’ve caught before” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). Unfortunately, the female shark does not take the bait; however, misfortune quickly turns to blessing because “what shows up next is even more astonishing” (Christensen & Butler 2010a), the voice-over remarks. Fischer’s voice expresses this astonishment, saying, “Oh, my god! That is a giant […]! […] That’s a bigger one! ” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). As the hunt begins, the pace of the extra-diegetic music quickens, as do the movements of the shark in the water - after deliberately, nearly pensively, circling the ship, she suddenly bursts forward to swallow the bait (at least, that is what the editing suggests). The action stops for a moment when Domeier believes that she has (literally) got off the hook, but as one buoy after the other is pulled into the water, it becomes clear that they have successfully hooked the shark. As the “main battle” ensues (Christensen & Butler 2010a), Fischer, Brett McBride (the Ocean’s captain), Jody Whitworth (the ship’s co-captain), and the late actor Paul Walker (who, according to Fischer, “is a real adventurer and someone who really cares about the ocean” and who “has [thus] earned […] his spot on this crew” [Christensen & Butler 2010a]) man a small chase boat to tire out the shark in safe distance from the main vessel. Fischer muses, “This doesn’t make a lot of sense - being in the twenty-fivefoot inflatable, battling the great white shark”, which makes Whitworth grin and wonder, “What’s the line from Jaws? ‘You’ll need a bigger boat’? ” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). This explicit reference to the iconic shark movie is one of many that draw on shark representations in popular culture to evoke the terrors typically ascribed to the carnivorous fish. In this particular instance, the quotation serves to create suspense as the small boat Michael Fuchs 248 continues approaching the large predator. The mist surrounding Guadalupe Island combines with the slow, foreboding music to create an eerie atmosphere as the boat gets closer to the shark. With the exception of Fischer, who controls the wheel and assigns tasks, there is an uncanny silence and composure on the boat, as if this was the silence before the storm. However, the storm never really comes. Although both the crew-members and the narrator repeatedly stress how hard it is to manoeuvre the shark into the lift, the entire procedure unfolds rather unspectacularly. With the shark out of the water, the crew’s main interest quickly turns from catching the shark to not seriously injuring her. “It’s a fine line, with catching him, keeping him alive, and keeping him healthy”, McBride explains (Christensen & Butler 2010a). Somewhat surprisingly, the crew’s work on the lift, with the shark out of the water, becomes the real action of the sequence: taking measurements, attaching the tracker, extracting samples of the shark’s body tissue, drawing blood, and removing the hook become the spectacle (featuring close-ups, quick cuts, and all) that the actual catching of the shark lacks. Here, Expedition Great White tries to impress upon viewers that the programme obeys the expedition’s creed, as spelled out by Fischer: it’s all “in the name of science” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). Performing White (Eco-)Masculinity The script consisting of baiting sharks, catching them, measuring them, taking samples from them, tagging them, photographing them, and releasing them is the key component in the serial structure of the programme. These sequences spotlight two different notions of masculinity that the docuseries presents as simultaneously in conflict with one another and similar in terms of their care for nature: the learned and somewhat feminised white-collar masculinity embodied by the scientist and the hands-on, bluecollar, ‘manly’ manhood represented by the fishermen, who are united in their desire to study and protect sharks. Expedition Great White is not subtle in how it introduces the different types of masculinities represented by the crew-members. In the first few minutes of the opening episode, Fischer’s evocative name is made explicit when the voice-over narrator describes him as “a giant at catching […] big fish” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). Fischer, in turn, labels his captain, Brett McBride, “the single greatest ocean predator” (Christensen & Butler 2010a), suggesting that while the crew might be after the most feared ocean predator, men tower above the great white shark in the food chain. Tellingly, the clips accompanying the introductions of Fischer and McBride show them in action: Fischer visibly sweats as he fights a marlin, while images of McBride standing on the bridge are intercut with marlins struggling on hooks and him getting uncomfortably close to a marlin’s spearlike bill while placing a tag (Illustration 2). In a later episode, the voice - Capturing the Shark 249 over narrator remarks, “When it comes to catching great whites, a rod and reel is of no use to these guys. It’s the sheer muscle power of hand-lining, sometimes for hours” (Christensen & Butler 2010d). Illustration 2. Physical activity characterises Chris Fischer and Brett McBride. Screenshots from Expedition Great White © National Geographic, 2010. Domeier, on the other hand, is instantly figured as a typical scientist, as he stresses, “Ecosystems are changing fast today, with the amount of overharvesting. We don’t wanna see white sharks wiped off the face of the Earth” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). The fast pace, established both by cuts and movements in the clips, that characterises the introductions of Fischer and McBride is replaced by a longer take of a great white peacefully swimming in the ocean as Domeier speaks. Whereas Fischer and McBride engage in physical labour, the scientist sits and types on his laptop (Illustration 3). Notably, as the introductions conclude, Domeier takes a more active role, drilling holes into a shark’s dorsal fin to mount a tag. Although the biologist seems to be in a hurry (because he does not want the shark to be out of the water for too long), the docuseries’s visual language remains calm: there is little movement in the frame and the shark seems to be asleep (even if she is not). Domeier’s work is precise and calculated (‘scientific’, if you will), while the professional fishermen react quickly, relying on their physical attributes and ‘instincts’. Michael Fuchs 250 Illustration 3. Dr Michael Domeier is working on his laptop. Screenshot from Expedition Great White © National Geographic, 2010. This basic opposition established in the opening minutes of the first episode defines Expedition Great White. Later in the episode, Domeier stops McBride from tossing bait into the water because “he wants to be more selective and cautious” (Christensen & Butler 2010a), highlighting their different approaches to catching sharks. Fischer notes in another episode that “[b]ecause [Domeier]’s so smart, […] he’s trying to be helpful, but he’s really creating a lot of confusion” (Christensen & Butler 2010c). Fischer understands that despite their shared goals, in various respects, there’s a gulf separating a scientist from a fisherman - and the biologist most definitely agrees with Fischer on this point: “The angle that [Fischer] comes from is very different from the angle that I come from” (Christensen & Butler 2010c). Notably, from the way that the docuseries frames Fischer’s critique, viewers are likely meant to side with the fishermen’s hands-on experience that contrasts with the scientist’s book knowledge. However, the clear dividing line separating the scientist from the fishermen, with the fishermen being depicted in ‘manly’ fashion and the scientist portraying a more feminised masculinity, becomes blurry over the course of the season. As the first expedition in the waters off Guadalupe Island nears its end in the fourth episode, Domeier has one satellite tag left with just a few hours remaining on their permit. To better their chances, the crew decides to fish from the Ocean and their chase boat at the same time. Domeier boards the latter, which spurs Fischer to exclaim, “He’s not some guy who hangs out in a lab coat, waiting for some data to come in. He’s ready to get busy with some white sharks” (Christensen & Butler Capturing the Shark 251 2010d). The expedition leader clearly evokes one stereotype of ‘the scientist’ here; however, he does not challenge this particular stereotype. Rather, his emphasis on how Domeier, as a very specific example of ‘the scientist’, does not correspond to this stereotypical image - and notions of masculinity attached to it - highlights the biologist’s exceptionalism while simultaneously perpetuating the stereotypes that Fischer draws on. Whereas Domeier’s difference from ‘typical’ scientists and his willingness to “get[…] his hands dirty” (Christensen & Butler 2010d) allows him access to a more traditional type of masculinity, Fischer’s and McBride’s characters are also enriched by various layers that seem to challenge their hegemonic masculinities. After the initial expedition to Guadalupe Island (covered in episodes one to four), the team embarks on a journey to what Domeier calls ‘SOFA’, the shared offshore foraging area, a region between Guadalupe Island and the islands of Hawaii that “extends between approximately 32° and 16° N latitude and approximately 128° and 142° W longitude” (Domeier & Nasby-Lucas 2008: 230). The expedition is expected to last nearly four weeks. Episode five, the first of two episodes focusing on the trip to the SOFA, features scenes of how the crew prepares for the journey, including how they say good-bye to their families. The camera puts a particular focus on McBride’s daughters and him hugging his wife, showcasing his feelings for his family. Similarly, when the team returns to Guadalupe a year after the expedition covered in episodes one to four, Domeier decides to name one of the male sharks they catch Tairua, after an engineer who died the night they returned from Guadalupe the year before. Fischer first plays it cool, saying, “Cool. That just gave me the chills. Thank you for that, doctor, thank you very much” (Christensen & Butler 2010g). However, when he looks down on his clipboard to record the name, he begins to get emotional and wipes away his tears. The camera turns to McBride as he tries to keep his composure and looks in the other direction, tearyeyed and sniffling. After they have returned the shark to the water, Fischer explains, “We love everybody on this boat like family” (Christensen & Butler 2010g). The scenes surrounding the naming of Tairua are important because they showcase how Fischer and McBride try, to draw on Rebecca Solnit, to kill their emotions (2017: 30). To be sure, the homosociality aboard the ship (though Domeier’s longtime collaborator, Nicole Nasby-Lucas, joined the men for that particular trip) and the fact that the men have cameras stuck in their faces likely impacted Fischer’s and McBride’s urge not to display emotions, but these contexts only further highlight that Fischer and McBride seek to conform to the “rigid set of expectations and performances associated with the accomplishment of everyday masculinity” (Twine 2021: 125). Although the image of the man cut off from his emotions may well represent an “outmoded style[…] of masculinity […] built on simple masculine myths” (Braudy 2005: 86), the idea has far from vanished from the popular imagination. The scenes testifying to the love in the McBride family and Michael Fuchs 252 Fischer’s comment on why he appreciated Domeier’s gesture so much, on the other hand, exemplify that “[m]en can and do assume caring roles in society” (Hultman & Pulé 2018: 31). One of these traditionally accepted caring roles is fatherhood. In this context, Fischer’s emphasis that the Ocean’s crew functions as a family is notable. As the expedition leader, Fischer performs the paternal role in this construct. I do not mean to delve into the potentially queer implications of this notion (as there is no maternal figure in sight), 3 but conceiving of the crew as his family allows Fischer to care for his crew-members and to become emotionally attached to them, while simultaneously explaining his (short) emotional outburst. Significantly, Expedition Great White includes nonhuman life-forms in the realm of masculine care - great whites, in particular. However, the discourse of care that the crew-members repeatedly tap into alternates with a discourse of dominating the animal. As Fischer puts it very explicitly, “You go from trying to conquer this beast and break its will to caring for it like a baby” (Christensen & Butler 2010c). Fischer figures the shark as a baby here, in need of paternal protection. This symbolism ties in with the figurations of fatherhood mentioned above; however, Fischer’s statement reveals that violence undergirds this masculine role. What Hannah Hamad has labelled “protectorate fatherhood”, which she describes as “ideal masculinity in postfeminist […] culture” (2014: 65), may be extended to the more-than-human world in Expedition Great White, but its violent character highlights the undercurrent of domination that often underpins this role. Connected to the principle of domination that feeds into hegemonic masculinity, Fischer, in particular, repeatedly employs a discourse that “institutionalizes competition” (Connell 2017: 6). For example, when reminiscing about an expedition two years prior, he contends that they “were going out there to do something that had never been done on this scale” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). This rhetorical strategy takes its most extreme example toward the end of the first expedition to Guadalupe. After having caught, tagged, and released Keiko, whom Domeier estimates to weigh 4,000 pounds and whom Fischer describes as “the biggest [bleep; Fischer clearly says “fuckin’”] white shark ever caught” (Christensen & Butler 2010d), they hook another shark whom they believe to be even bigger. Excitedly, Fischer announces, “We’re gonna catch the biggest fish of all time right after we just got the biggest fish of all time” (Christensen & Butler 2010d). Indeed, she measures just over five metres in length and “help[s] set [a] team record[…] for size and girth” (Christensen & Butler 3 There is another potentially queer dimension whose exploration would lead this essay into a very different direction: Domeier’s and Fischer’s fascination with shark sperm and how a group of (primarily) men studies shark reproduction while the topic of human reproduction is largely ignored (except for the reference to McBride’s daughter for a few moments in the fifth episode). In episode seven, Domeier even points out that “being a male”, taking sperm samples “is a bit of an awkward situation” (Christensen & Butler 2010f). Capturing the Shark 253 2010d). Studying and protecting sharks increasingly takes a back-seat not only to the experience of catching sharks but also to besting themselves by catching bigger and bigger sharks. Writing about Shark Week, Stephen Papson has remarked that since “[o]vert displays of domination are less acceptable” in an ecologically aware cultural environment, “the destruction of the predator” is transformed into “the experience of domination. […] Consequently, environmental, educational, scientific and aesthetic discourses serve as justification for the encounter” with the shark (1992: 74). Although Papson’s essay was published in the early 1990s, his observation applies to Expedition Great White, too. While the fishermen and scientists seem to care about the sharks, worried that “entangling [the sharks] in anchor lines or propellers could spell disaster” (Christensen & Butler 2010a), the longer one watches Expedition Great White, the more one begins to wonder whether the performances of care are guided by practical concerns. After all, the sharks need to survive in order to ensure the success of Domeier’s study; in addition, killing a shark would likely mean that they would not be able to obtain a permit in the future. That practical concerns guide the masculine care for sharks becomes most apparent when Domeier explains how the satellite trackers work. He first notes, “The best place to attach the tracking device is the dorsal fin. It probably has less blood flow, fewer nerves, and less sensitivity” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). One is tempted to read a causal connection here: the trackers are attached to the dorsal fins because the sharks may not feel pain there. However, several times over the course of the first season, Domeier, in fact, stresses that the main reason for placing the tracker on the dorsal fin is because it is “the highest point on the shark”, which ensures that “every time it breaks the surface, the tag will relay its position in real time” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). In addition, even if the choice of the dorsal fin were driven by considerations of the sharks’ well-being, the explanation that “from what we know of their nervous system, they can’t feel pain like humans feel pain” (Christensen & Butler 2010a) is rather simplistic. While elasmobranchs lack nociceptors, which are key to the experience of pain in humans and other primates, this criterion alone can only explain that sharks and other cartilaginous fish experience pain differently (see, for example, Rose 2016). To be sure, this article is not the place to review research on whether fish can feel pain, but I may refer to Matthias Michel, who has summed up the division among researchers, concluding that those who believe that fish can feel pain and those who don’t “will most likely never be able to convince each other” (2019: 2412). However, what is significant about Domeier’s casual remarks is the anthropocentrism on display - that drilling holes into the sharks’ dorsal fins is reasonable because sharks “can’t feel pain like humans” (and - implicitly - that it does not really matter because having the trackers attached to them is in the sharks’ best interest, as it should eventually lead to ensuring the species’ survival in a Michael Fuchs 254 human-dominated world). In this way, he does not even entertain the possibility that sharks may feel pain in a way that is categorically different from how humans feel pain. This anthropocentrism, in turn, reveals that human interests drive the entire project - “unravel[ling] the mysteries surrounding these vulnerable giants” (Christensen & Butler 2010a). Capturing the Shark At one point, Fischer explains the thought process unfolding during “the thrill of the hunt” (Christensen & Butler 2010e): “Do we have this shark subdued? Do we have control of it? ” (Christensen & Butler 2010c). The domination of the individual shark is the basis for studying sharks, reducing them to data and knowledge. The combination of these two dimensions echoes a process that Antoine Traisnel has identified to have taken place in the course of the nineteenth century, the development from “the hunt, which targets individual animals” to “capture[, which] attempts to seize something intangible, something presumably inherent to all animals” (2020: 2). “Rather than simply enabling their preservation and study”, Traisnel continues, “new aesthetic, scientific, and technological methods for pursuing live animals produced them as increasingly fleeting and endangered, making them all the more susceptible to new forms of biopolitical management” (2020: 2). “The regime of capture”, Traisnel explains, “privileges control over conquest” (2020: 4). Part of how the scientists in Expedition Great White gain control over the sharks is through photographs, which not only help identify individual sharks and draw conclusions about migration routes (among others), but also speak to how developments in (audio-)visual media have played a key role in “[p]rivileging knowledge gained through vision” (Traisnel 2020: 1). Although bloodless, the practice of taking photographs of sharks, to draw on Susan Sontag, “is to violate them” because photographing (and, consequently, documenting) them means “having knowledge of them they can never have” (2005: 10). To be sure, Sontag did not consider animals in her elaborations, but rather only humans. However, the implications about the predatory nature of taking photographs applies to nonhuman subjects as well. Indeed, as Brett Mills has provocatively put it, the question whether “animals assent to being filmed” (or photographed) is easily ignored (2010: 196). After all, “[t]o look at an animal - and to decide that humans have a right to look at animals because animals don’t have a right to privacy - is an act of empowerment, reinforcing the moral hierarchy which legitimizes the act in the first place” (2010: 199). In Expedition Great White, human moral superiority is supported by the notion underpinning the expeditions (and, arguably, the programme): ‘doing’ “real science, trying to solve the Capturing the Shark 255 puzzle of the white shark, figure out these multi-year, complicated migratory routes, figure out where they breed, where they feed, where they pup” (Christensen & Butler 2010b). However, Expedition Great White also more explicitly integrates the hunt into capture: catching great whites is not a bloodless endeavour. The wounds inflicted upon the sharks’ bodies by the hooks may be rather insignificant compared with the scars and gashing wounds from confrontations with other sharks, getting entangled in fishing lines, and other bloody encounters that many sharks bear; nevertheless, shark blood is a constant presence on the platform once the sharks are out of the water. The “thrill of the hunt” mentioned above, combined with expressions such as fighting the aquatic predator until “the shark surrenders” (Christensen & Butler 2010a) and “conquer[ing the] beast” (Christensen & Butler 2010c) highlight the conquest of the shark as part of the goal. This conquest is epitomised by the tracking devices, which scaffold human superiority over the nonhuman animal. Attaching these satellite trackers to sharks may be considered “utterly continuous with the technologies and dispositifs that are exercising a more and more finely tuned control over life” (Wolfe 2013: 96-97; italics in original); however, drawing on Donna Haraway, one may wonder whether the sharks are “just objects for the data-gathering subjects called people […], just ‘resistance’ or ‘raw material’ to the potency and action of intentional others” in this naturalcultural assemblage (2008: 262). Writing about Crittercam (i.e., video-cameras attached to animal bodies), Haraway concludes that “the hermeneutic agency of the animals is not voluntary, […] not intentional, not like that of coworking or companion animals” (2008: 262). The same may be said about the shark-tracker assemblages produced as part of Domeier’s study. Nevertheless, the sharks play an important role in data collection. Exploring tagged sharks’ digital lives on Twitter and websites and apps such as SharkTracker (run by OCEARCH, but launched a few years after Expedition Great White), Sean Morey explains that “[s]cientists certainly collect data from these sharks, but the sharks themselves now have a certain amount of digital agency in their data submission, even if they are unconscious of the fact” (2017). Similar to how human-technology assemblages endow humans with new abilities, “these sharks, to however small an extent, have abilities they otherwise would not” (Morey 2017). The shark’s dorsal fin, Morey continues, opens up a wormhole to another environment that [the shark] cannot see as she writes herself onto online maps and enters into new relationships with far removed environments that can nevertheless feedback into her environment, for good or ill, as new laws and scientific theories are written based on her own feedings. (2017) Michael Fuchs 256 The dependence on the sharks to break the surface repeatedly takes centre stage in Expedition Great White, as some sharks ‘ping’ instantly, while it takes others weeks to do so. Significantly, the tracker is not just an ‘innocent’ technology separate from the animals: it is the shark-tracker assemblage that allows Domeier to conduct his study. And, theoretically, the numerous shark-tracker assemblages roaming the oceans might help the sharks change their future - with the help of humans. To return to the very beginning of this essay, John Berger remarked that “animals are always the observed. […] They are the objects of our everextending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power” (2009: 27). Although Expedition Great White stresses that the ultimate goal of Domeier’s study is to protect sharks, this very idea exposes the underlying notion of being in control of the sharks’ lives. The techno-scientific tools employed in the series not only expose the ‘natural world’ as a human construct (because tagging the sharks transforms them into naturalcultural hybrids, among others) but also support the belief in human dominance over the natural world and, along with that, having power over sharks and their collective fate. However, some of these tools, in fact, subvert human control (at least to some extent) by endowing the techno-natural shark-tag assemblage with an agency outside of human command: the researchers not only depend on the technology to operate but also on the sharks’ swimming close to the surface. Even though related to a later OCEARCH expedition, this lack of control became apparent in spring 2022 when a Twitter user tracking the sharks’ movements noted that one shark’s route between the North American Basin and the Atlantic Coast resembled the sketch of a shark (Marie 2022). 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Gallagher, Mike Hannay, Lachlan Mackenzie Writing in English: A Guide for Advanced Learners 3., vollständig neu bearbeitete Auflage 2022, 526 Seiten €[D] 29,90 ISBN 978-3-8252-5658-6 eISBN 978-3-8385-5658-1 This book offers practical advice and guidance to German-speaking undergraduates and academics who aspire to write in English. It also provides valuable assistance to editors, examiners and teachers who conduct English courses for intermediate or advanced students. It consists of four modules and is rounded off with a subject index and a glossary. Making extensive use of authentic texts, the authors adopt a contrastive approach and focus on the major problems encountered by Germans writing in English. This second edition has been revised, updated and expanded to include, among other things, a new section on coordination and listing as well as new lexico-grammatical material that writers can put to immediate use and benefit. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97 0 \ Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97 11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de BUCHTIPP Jody Skinner Anglo-American Cultural Studies 3., vollständig überarbeitete Auflage 2022, 430 Seiten €[D] 34,90 ISBN 978-3-8252-5940-2 eISBN 978-3-8385-5940-7 The third edition of Skinners well-established introduction to Anglo-American Cultural Studies has been thoroughly revised to include Brexit, Trump, the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. Furthermore it includes new full-color graphics as well as updated recommendations for further reading and watching at the end of each chapter. Anglo-American Cultural Studies refreshingly breaks with the tradition of dry impersonal summaries of facts and figures to provide German students with first-hand experience of the personal tone and humor that can characterize academic discourse in Britain and the US. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97 0 \ Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97 11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de BUCHTIPP This book offers a nuanced, integrated understanding of EFL learning and instruction and investigates both learner and teacher perspectives on four thematically interconnected parts. Part I encompasses chapters on psychological aspects related to teaching and learning and presents the latest research on positive language education, teacher empathy, and well-being. Part II deals with EFL teaching methodology, specifically related to teaching pronunciation, language assessment, peer response, and strategy instruction. Part III addresses aspects of cultural learning including interand transculturality, digital citizenship, global learning, and cosmopolitanism. Part- IV concerns teaching with literary texts, for instance, to reflect on social and political discourse, facilitate empowerment, imagine utopian or dystopian futures, and to bring non-Western narratives into language classrooms. Carmen M. Amerstorfer, Max von Blanckenburg (eds.) Activating and Engaging Learners and Teachers Perspectives for English Language Education AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 1. Auflage 2023, 356 Seiten €[D] 64,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-8460-1 eISBN 978-3-8233-9460-0 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97 0 \ Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97 11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de narr.digital ISBN 978-3-8233-1001-3 ISSN 0171 - 5410 Mit Beiträgen von: Michael Fuchs and Martin Butler (Guest Editors) Roslynn Haynes and Raymond Haynes Martin Butler Rudolf Spennemann and Lindy A. Orthia Michael Fuchs