One of my favorite movies of the last twenty years is Ridley Scott’s The Martian. It’s a science-fiction/adventure movie about an astronaut (Matt Damon) who becomes stranded on Mars after his comrades leave him for dead. Marooned on a barren, hostile world, he has to use his brains and ingenuity to survive until his friends come back to rescue him. By the end of the movie, he has survived dust storms, explosions, freezing temperatures, and starvation.
How does he overcome all these challenges?
Science.
The story is familiar, of course. It has many antecedents, including with the original stranded-on-an-island novel, Robinson Crusoe, and also (more directly) to a great B-movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars. In that classic 1964 cheese-fest, the hero survives by finding a Martian cave full of air where plants still grow, water still flows, and there’s a steady source of light (which is never explained). He even befriends an alien who is also trapped on the planet.
Damon’s film lies on the other end of the scientific spectrum. His character might have the firm jaw line of an old-style movie star, but he uses his brains more than his brawn. He’s a scientist. A botanist, no less, able to keep himself alive by growing potatoes in the mission’s Martian habitat. He creates water from rocket fuel and fertilizer from how own feces. He even repurposes an old nuclear reactor. In the end, it’s his scientific knowledge that keeps him alive.
By any standard, The Martian is a good movie. Well-acted and cleverly written, it’s an adventure story worthy of Frank Capra. But what really struck me it represents a new cinematic archetype: the Hero Scientist.
The Hero Scientist doesn’t have to be a scientist, technically speaking; he just has to use scientific knowledge to beat his foes. The past decade has given us movies about brilliant inventors (Iron Man), mathematicians (The Imitation Game, A Beautiful Mind), physicists (The History of Everything), entrepreneurs (The Social Network, Jobs), investors (The Big Short, Margin Call), and even baseball coaches (Moneyball).
The writer Michael Lewis has made a career of the Hero Scientist in bestselling non-fiction books like Moneyball, Liar’s Poker, and The Big Short. In each of these, he presents us with men who have seen through the fog of conventional wisdom to some deeper reality, which allows them to succeed wildly in their various fields (baseball, finance, and investing, respectively). That is a hallmark of the Hero Scientist—he uses his intellectual powers (math prowess being the most magical one), to improve himself and society.
The rise of the Hero Scientist in popular culture is not really surprising, in retrospect. He appeals directly to the modern 19-to-39 demographic, much more so than the traditionally laconic, muscle-bound heroes of bygone eras (that is, the 1980s). In our modern post-industrial American economy, so many of us work in high-tech jobs in which science and math are at least tangentially relevant. Everybody uses a computer, and even jobs that were not originally associated with math have become math-heavy—business administration, marketing, human resources, medical management. “Big Data” is a palpable thing. And the “Tech” part of I.T. penetrates every aspect of our existence, from our jobs to our social lives.
I have worked as a software developer for much of my adult life, and so I am particularly susceptible to Hero Scientist-worship. Although I was never particularly into math or science at school, I was the kind of kid who watched reruns of Nova on PBS and read stacks of “hard” sci-fi novels by frustrated engineering types like Larry Niven and Hal Clement. Having consumed so much popular science culture over my lifetime, I have an opinion of what is the ultimate example of the Scientist Hero narrative. It is Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Enigma, a non-fiction book about the mathematician who cracked Fermat’s infamous last theorem.
The mathematician’s name is Andrew Wiles, and Singh chronicles how he labored in isolation s on the world’s most famous unsolved math problem, Over the course of seven years, Wiles faced various setbacks and dead-ends as he chipped away at the theorem. In Singh’s telling, Wiles’ efforts to finally crack the theorem (or, rather, to make it “succumb to proof” in John Wheeler’s wonderfully elegant phrase) is an adventure of Homeric proportions: a true Math Odyssey.
Speaking of Homer, I’m struck by how many of these narratives take the form of primordial hero tales—what Joseph Campbell called the monomyth. The monomyth is the archetypal adventure story, and it usually revolves around an archetypal hero—that that odd member of society who ventures beyond the boundaries of the culture, whether physical, spiritual, or intellectual, and faces Death in search of some magical boon.
In the Bronze Age, the hero was usually a man of awesome physical prowess: Gilgamesh, Heracles, Beowulf. But in older, Paleolithic cultures, there was a different kind of hero: the Trickster. Tricksters are usually clever animals like the rabbit, the fox, the monkey, and the coyote—physical weaklings in the brute-force, kill-or-be-killed world of nature, but survivors nonetheless. Tricksters use a combination of intelligence, imagination, and guile to get the better of their enemies (usually a plodding, muscle-bound predator). Being underdogs, they hold enormous appeal for ordinary working people throughout the centuries and even today. What is Bugs Bunny if not an archetypal Trickster? Or the clever raccoon in Marvel Studios Guardians of the Galaxy films?
I would argue that the Scientist Hero is actually an extension of the Trickster mythology. Even when he looks like Matt Damon, the Scientist Hero still has a lot more in common with Bugs Bunny than Heracles. That is, he doesn’t fight his way out of a tight situation; he thinks his way out.
As Damon’s character says in The Martian, “I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this,” thus transforming the word science as a verb for all posterity (in the same way that Facebook make friend a verb).
There’s only one problem with the current popularity of the Hero Scientist.
Most of us aren’t scientists.
Yes, we are technologically fluent, and perhaps even technologically obsessed, but we aren’t scientists. We don’t spend our evenings manning a telescope or monitoring a petri dish, and we don’t write papers for science journals. Rather, we are scientist wannabes. We watch some great movie like The Imitation Game or a PBS biography about Jonas Salk, and we can’t help but wonder: could I have done that? Could I, as an average American techno-geek, have perhaps achieved some great scientific insight, had I devoted myself to the discipline and pursuit of Big-S Science?
That is, in some alternative universe, might I have been a real scientist?
Well, it’s fun to think so.
(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)
Ash Clifton, Writer 