Jan 07 2008
Common areligious tropes of TV and film
Distractions don’t come more idle than looking up the TV Tropes wiki. It’s such fun.
The page on the stereotype of Hollywood atheist is quite interesting. It gets to the core of the “bitter atheist” — you know, the one that used to believe in God but doesn’t any more because his wife died in a car accident? It has this to say of Battlestar Galactica (the new series):
…features two prominent atheist characters, both of them wildly different: Admiral Adama, who views humanity as flawed but inherently good, and ultimately accountable to nobody but themselves for their mistakes in life, and Gaius Baltar, an egocentric technocrat who ultimately comes to consider himself a god.
Interesting summary. I haven’t seen enough BSG to be sure, but I’d always pegged Adama as being on the wishy-washy liberal theism fence. You know, Church of Scotland rather than Church of White Jesus From Texas. They forgot one character though — President’s aide Billy, who died in the very next episode after explicitly saying he was an atheist. But that’s what happens when you enter politics looking about 14 years old…
It is sad that the one atheist character who’s super-intelligent, a media personality, a hit with the ladies and a good-humoured guy also happens to be out of his tiny little mind. But you can’t have everything, right? ;-)
More interesting to ask, why are there so few positive role models of scientists in film and TV? The balanced scientists are as few and far between, and there is a lot of cross-over: the cold, calculated, “logical” scientist who can’t understand/engage with human emotion.
And then there’s the total lack of depiction of women scientists (apart from Sara in CSI, of course)…I tried once to get a good clip art cartoon pic of a girl scientist, someone cool and funky looking….they simply don’t exist on the net.
When did you last see a film with a female scientist who was anything other than a sales prop/evil vixen out to fox the leading man?
There are few enough strong female characters anyway. Joss Whedon can be relied upon, but the only sciencey stuff he’s done that I know of is Firefly. And I don’t know if Kayleigh counts as a scientist, as cool as she is.
What was Ellen Ripley’s job? Was she a pilot?