Cinema and Brexit: The Politics of Popular English Film by Neil Archer

Author:Neil Archer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

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Genius of Britain: The English scientist film and other science fictions

Introduction: Brave old worlds

Genius of Britain was the name of a five-part series produced and screened on Channel 4 in 2010. Though its title suggested a brainier version of Pop Idol, the series proved to be a detailed and sober appraisal of the life and work of numerous British scientists, from the seventeenth century to the present day, with contributions from a range of British public intellectual figures. As the book accompanying the series noted, its aim was to show how ‘the genius of British scientists has kept Britain at the forefront of scientific progress for four centuries’. In turn, the series would celebrate how such geniuses ‘changed our world’, giving us ‘a history to be proud of – and an exciting future’.1

Statements from the same book, such as ‘science has quite literally created the modern world’, without contextualizing or evaluating what it has done for this modern world, effectively tell us nothing: the claim in itself is a circular description of the terms and conditions science has already shaped for itself.2 This viewpoint exemplifies what some have called ‘scientific realism’: the idea that truth, or what can intrinsically be known about the world and the universe, proceeds from scientific enquiry: hence the potential tendency towards tautology in pronouncements about science’s impact.3 Modern science, the sceptical attitude suggests, creates its own criteria for judgement because it sees no higher authority. Beginning with Isaac Newton and his apple, scientific realism flips the Garden of Eden narrative around. As Yuval Noah Harari writes, in this new myth ‘nobody punishes Newton – just the opposite. Thanks to his curiosity humankind gains a better understanding of the universe, becomes more powerful and takes another step towards the technological paradise’.4

Harari’s broader point is that this revelation of scientific possibilities was fundamentally a humanist discovery. Where, though, does this trust in science’s humanist basis reach a threshold? And more specifically, what definitions and boundaries shape our understanding and value of the human? The film Never Let Me Go (2010), adapted from British writer Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel, carries scientific realism to disturbing yet, within the film itself, seemingly unquestioned lengths. The film posits an alternative history in which Britain, after the Second World War, experienced a technological breakthrough in genetic medicine. The outcome is that quantities of children cloned, it transpires, from the social ‘underclass’ – ‘prostitutes and drug-addicts’, as Keira Knightley’s Ruth defines them in the film – are effectively farmed to serve as donors for the ill and ageing. When they reach adulthood, their vital organs are systematically removed until, in the Orwellian newspeak of the film, they ‘complete’. The impact of this, as an inter-title at the film’s beginning tells us, is that average life expectancy in Britain has reached 100 years. Never Let Me Go in this way sketches a hypothetical scenario of applied biotechnologies, and its use in the human pursuit of longevity, that is as much a discussion within contemporary scientific research as it is a scenario for future science fictions.

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