#people thought they were remaking birth of a nation for a little bit

[jheselbraum]

Birth of a Nation revitalized the KKK in America and is perhaps the only piece of "irredeemable media" I can think of that's actually like. You know, a story, and I don't know of anything else off the top of my head that had that kind of lasting, palpably harmful impact that isn't like, direct state mandated propaganda like Mein Kampf. In 1915 the KKK was effectively dead, they'd slowly dissolved around the 1870s (particularly after the introduction of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871) and Birth of a Nation led to the most notorious American terrorist group reforming. As far as I'm concerned, DW Griffith has actual blood on his hands, for murders committed at the very least through the 40s (they disbanded temporarily in 1944 after America's most effective violent crime task force, the IRS, got involved, though it could be argued he's only responsible for murders committed by the KKK through the 20s, as membership declined rapidly after that once people saw that being part of a terrorist organization wasn't like how it was in the movie).

And like, look I generally don't think the word "irredeemable" can really be applied to art in any form, but there is something viscerally reprehensible about Birth of a Nation that makes us not want to watch it. Like it (arguably) pioneered a lot of film techniques but that's more of the science side of film than the art side, I'm completely certain that people would have figured out that contrasting long shots with close-ups made movies more interesting if Birth of a Nation was left on the cutting room floor. (In fact, several of the techniques 'pioneered' by Birth of a Nation were actually from earlier films, it's just that DW Griffith was more popular and his films are the ones that were remembered). But like we don't screen this movie publicly, we don't like it, we don't like the what DW Griffith had to say. Birth of a Nation just... repels people away from it. Its in person screenings are relegated to a few film classes and maybe some klan meetings, though I'm certain there are some racists on 4chan who've downloaded a copy. If you ask normal people to pick one movie to stop existing, there's no way out of it you have to pick one, chances are they'll pick Birth of a Nation, assuming they've even heard of it (my first exposure to it was in high school, some people might not get to it until college, or even later, that's just kind of what happens with something like this. It's not like you can learn about something through cultural osmosis when the culture is trying like hell to osmosis that thing out of itself). It's an acceptable loss.

Meanwhile, from what I've read, I'd say the decision to use A Serbian Film alongside Birth of a Nation is actually a reasonable one, not because of the graphic nature of it's content, but rather its themes and message and how flat it can feel because of who's saying it (DISCLAIMER: I haven't watched it, I'm not going to watch it, take this with a grain of salt). It's about a man who's forced to commit horrific crimes to survive (economically, though he may be directly threatened with death I'm not sure, he's doing it as a job basically). If you'll recall, Serbia committed genocide during the Bosnian War in the 90s, the targets being primarily Bosniaks but also including anyone in Bosnia and Herzegovina that wasn't Serbian.

The director of the film, Srđan Spasojević, had this to say when asked if the acts depicted in the film were related in any way to crimes committed during the Yugoslav Wars:

A Serbian Film does not touch upon war themes, but in a metaphorical way deals with the consequences of post-war society and a man that is exploited to the extreme in the name of securing the survival of his family.

Additionally, he described the film as "a diary of our own molestation by the Serbian government ... It's about the monolithic power of leaders who hypnotize you to do things you don't want to do. You have to feel the violence to know what it's about."

A Serbian Film is an exploitation film that's apparently considered one of the most disturbing of all time, but the film is not a snuff film as many people have claimed. A snuff film is the filming of actual gruesome crimes like murder, torture, and rape, committed for the purpose of selling the resulting film and making money. It's not "a movie that depicts gruesome crimes like murder, torture, and rape through the use of special or practical effects."

Based on the quick read-through of the Wikipedia article I did, it seems like most of what the film is trying to say is through the lens of the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars, or at least that's how the audience largely interpreted it. The script writer, Aleksandar Radivojević, said this about the process of securing funding for the film and the state of the Serbian film industry in general.

you had this EU arts council funded production using Serbia for EU's political agitprop agenda of 'promoting tolerance and reconciliation in the post-war Balkans' by boosting sappy local projects of no aesthetic value whose sole reason for receiving EU financing was their respective authors' willingness to amplify the EU-approved message, i.e. to express 'Serb contrition over what happened in the Yugoslav Wars' via essentially making victim porn, showing small miserable Serb people who are struggling mightily while nevertheless simultaneously 'doing their part in search of collective redemption' by being extremely remorseful

Now, I'm a white American who does not experience racism of any kind, let alone the violently dehumanizing prejudice necessary to convince a group of people to commit an ethnic cleansing, but if my people had been the victims of a genocide, and I heard someone from the group of people that committed that genocide complain about media depicting his people's remorse, and saw that that guy also wrote a movie where the plot is a man is forced to commit gruesome rapes, and again, my people were gruesomely raped as a part of that guy's country's plan to wipe my people from existence, I'd be fucking pissed. Like again, I haven't seen A Serbian Film, and Radivojević wasn't the only person in the writer's room, so maybe in practice it reads less as "our government was controlling us we did nothing wrong" and more "our government is controlling us and we're monsters for listening." And we can argue the merits of the latter another time, but at least the latter acknowledges that genocide doesn't happen in a vacuum because some schmucks at the top said so, that the people bear as much responsibility as their government.

Now, is A Serbian Film actually trying to say anything about the Yugoslav Wars at all? I don't know. I haven't seen it. Maybe it isn't about the Bosnian genocide at all. But then what is it saying about Serbia? Serbian actor Dragan Bjelogrlić said this about the film and its director, a year after its release:

I have a problem with A Serbian Film. Its director in particular. I've got a serious problem with this boy whose father got wealthy during the 1990s—nothing against making money, but I know how money was made [in Serbia] during the '90s—and then pays for his son's education abroad and eventually the kid comes back to Serbia to film his view of the country using his dad's money and even calls the whole thing A Serbian Film. To me that's a metaphor for something unacceptable. The second generation comes back to the country and using the money that had been robbed from the people of Serbia, smears the very same people by portraying them as the worst scum of the earth.

OP was right, it's fucking insane that this site only uses words like irredeemable media to talk about cartoons for children. Like, no, Steven Universe or The Owl House or My Hero Academia or whatever TV-Y7 cartoon you're hyper focused on that week isn't irredeemable media. Your bar for even discussing it as a possibility is "did this story's public existence revitalize a terrorist organization and lead to several murders," a qualification which A Serbian Film, despite its content, themes, and possible interpretations, does not meet. It's offensive, and disturbing, it possibly excuses genocide, but as far as I've read, no one has gotten physically hurt because it exists.

A Serbian Film is more violently graphic than Birth of a Nation. Birth of a Nation did more to physically harm real people than A Serbian Film ever could.

It's fucking wild that the above reaction to A Serbian Film mentions next to nothing about what it's trying to say, how well it works, who's saying it and in what context, but focuses purely on the graphic and violent scenes depicted in the film. It's probably why they slapped Salo on at the end even though a cursory glance through Wikipedia (I don't care enough to read thoroughly on the plot and themes you get the point graphic exploitation films aren't inherently evil for depicting murder or rape or whatever I don't want to read about more graphic shit it's not something I personally enjoy doing) reveals that that film is strictly antifascist, though several actors were actually injured during filming. Notably, the director of Salo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, was gruesomely abducted, tortured, and murdered in 1975 shortly before Salo's release at the Paris Film Festival. He was openly gay, and a Marxist, and while his death was initially contributed to one Giuseppe Pelosi (17 at the time of the murder) after he confessed, he later retracted his confession claiming that he made it under the threat of violence to his family (which unfortunately tracks, Americans may recall the more recent case of Amanda Knox, who was arrested in 2007 for the murder of her friend and forced by Italian police to confess to a crime she didn't commit and was later exonerated from). The case was reopened after Giuseppe's retraction in 2005 and other evidence that had come to light, and as of 2023 the Italian authorities are looking at the far right group Banda della Magliana as possible suspects. While I agree that "I hear it's kind of. nasty" is frankly an understatement when attempting to discuss the graphic content of Salo, and really fucking hilarious in the context of trying to argue that Salo shouldn't exist at all, I don't know that that's really a fair criticism to make, considering the other two examples are if not directly far right (using the term because of the changing political landscape between 1915 and 2010, like I can't really call Birth of a Nation fascist because it was made before fascism was a fully congealed political ideology, even if it upholds the ideology of fascism) then at least debatably so. As previously established, the actual content of the film, as in, the acts depicted, don't immediately make a work reprehensible. Remember, A Serbian Film is more graphic and disturbing to watch than Birth of a Nation, but Birth of a Nation is worse than A Serbian Film.

Tldr; op is right, and the person whose tags have been drowned is exactly the kind of person op was talking about

'Irredeemable media' is such a funny concept to me because it's never used for stuff like Birth of a Nation or A Serbian Film. It's always The Owl House or My Hero Academia because these people only watch things for children and can't stand any conflict more complex than Super Mario Brothers.

[oscopelabs]

From Script to Screen: The Strange Alchemy of ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans’ by Soheil Rezayazdi

The word “iguana” doesn’t appear in the shooting script of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. And why should it? Written by veteran TV writer William Finkelstein, the script unfolds with the cause-and-effect logic of a tight police procedural. Prior to penning Bad Lieutenant, Finkelstein wrote more than 50 episodes of L.A. Law, created and wrote on Brooklyn South, and contributed to such cop show staples as Law & Order and NYPD Blue. The man knows how to write a coherent crime drama. He’s devoted his career to the genre, mastering its plot points and character arcs for network television.

So why, in Bad Lieutenant, does a routine scene of police surveillance devolve into a full minute of shaky close-ups of iguanas? Why do scenes end with mystifying non-sequiturs like “Shoot him again...his soul is still dancing”? Why does its protagonist enter a bar shouting, “Sup! Sup! Sup, motherfucker!” for no reason? And why does he aim a gun at an old lady’s head and seethe “Maybe you should drop dead, you selfish cunt!” long after a director should have shouted “cut”?

William Finkelstein wrote none of that. His script originated in the early 2000s as a New York-set TV pilot. Over time, he reworked the material—first into a feature, then into a New Orleans noir. He finished revisions on the script in 2008 as the film was in production. The final script, which he sent me prior to our recent meet-up at an Italian bakery in the West Village, bears the signature of a police procedural master craftsman. Over espressos and lemon ices, I implored Finkelstein to discuss the brazen changes made to his script by the erratic tag team of Nicolas Cage and director Werner Herzog.

Our discussion, along with a close look at the unpublished shooting script, reveals how many of Bad Lieutenant’s most singularly strange moments were born.

“I always wanted to pull back to the procedural nature [of the script],” Finkelstein said, “and Werner basically didn’t give a shit about any of that.”

---

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is a true curiosity. Neither a remake nor a sequel to Abel Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant, the film attempts to turn that film’s premise—a cop with a severe drug problem—into a franchise. Finkelstein likened the connection between his film and Ferrara’s to the Bond series. “From Russia with Love is not a sequel to Dr. No,” he said. “It’s a different movie with different bad guys and settings, but there’s a character in the midst of it—who’s played by different people over the years—who has certain traits that make James Bond James Bond.”

And so the refined Bond martini, shaken not stirred, becomes the bump of coke before work, the hit of crack with your local dealer, the shot of heroin to end the night. Take your pick. Both bad lieutenants love it all. Not surprisingly, there’s no word yet on a third installment to a film franchise whose trademarks include hardcore drug use, gambling debts, and sexual bribery.

The 2009 film is a gleeful exercise in provoking head scratches, raised eyebrows, dropped jaws. Where to start? That a Nic Cage cop drama is the biggest budgeted film of Werner Herzog’s career? Or how about its supporting cast, a grab bag of the formerly famous (Val Kilmer, Fairuza Balk, Xzibit) that gives the film its straight-to-video flavor? Or maybe we focus on the title, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a name as indecisive and unwieldy as the film itself?

Above all, though, we have the enchanting interplay between three distinct voices: Herzog, Cage, and Finkelstein. The three operate as something of a jazz trio— Finkelstein keeps time while Herzog and Cage solo over his material. Each player takes turns taking control of what’s on screen. Cage brings the Tourettic outbursts of a repressed superstar unchained. Herzog injects the film with lyrical (and often very goofy) interludes. And Finkelstein gives contrast to his partners’ more self-indulgent noodling. Together, the three don’t exactly harmonize; their agendas clash on the screen, birthing moments of wondrous strangeness. You either dig the contrapuntal pleasures, or you hear nothing but noise.

This piece focuses on the film’s noisiest moments: those flashes of improvisation and left-field obsession smuggled into Bad Lieutenant. I select four scenes where the film erupts into delicious chaos. These are the scenes where a genre picture, penned by an industry veteran, morphs into a kind of madness no screenwriter could dream up.

---

“You’re the fucking reason this country’s going down the drain!”

A police officer investigates a homicide while battling his own demons. Bad Lieutenant, for all its digressions, hinges on a fairly straightforward premise. As the film’s tagline cutely puts it, the only criminal Lt. Terence McDonagh can’t catch…is himself. Our protagonist stumbles around New Orleans, getting into all kinds of trouble, as he gathers evidence against the likely perp, a local drug dealer named Big Fate (Xzibit). McDonagh has shades of the great stoner detectives—The Dude, Doc Sportello, Altman’s Philip Marlowe—only he doesn’t shy away from conflict; he seeks it out like a commuter with low blood sugar.

His biggest meltdown arrives in a luxury nursing home. McDonagh’s there to interrogate Binnie, a nursing home assistant, on the whereabouts of her grandson. In the script, he badgers Binnie and a patient in her care, an elderly woman in a wheelchair. Binnie refuses to talk—until McDonagh cuts off the patient’s oxygen supply. Aghast, Binnie gives up her grandson’s location. McDonagh reattaches the oxygen tubes, having extracted the information he needs to move the plot forward, and leaves. End scene.

This two-page exchange runs a sadistic three minutes in Bad Lieutenant. The unscripted touches start right away: Cage hides behind the old lady’s bedroom door as she enters, surreally shaving with an electric razor. He attacks this material with the whisper-or-scream volatility of his famed freakouts. Dialogue-wise, he sticks to Finkelstein’s words for the first two minutes, drawing out lines like “Children...were executed” for maximum menace. From there, he transforms the moment into macabre humor. Cage introduces a gun into the scene, shoving it up against Binnie’s temple as he fumes, “Where the fuck is he?” Once he gets his answer, Cage extends the scene with a virtuoso verbal assault on the old lady. “Maybe you should drop dead you selfish cunt!” he erupts after a few seconds of silence.

It’s too much to print here in full. You can find it in any Nic Cage supercut worth your time.

“You’re the fucking reason this country’s going down the drain!” he screams to close the scene, a head-spinning non-sequitur from a character who’s never expressed concern for the state of the nation.

For Finkelstein, the scene was way too much.

“When I first saw it I thought, ‘Wow, we can’t do this,’” he said. “‘This is terrible. It’s so extreme. It takes us out of the scene.”

Finkelstein wrote the sequence as an homage to the 1947 noir Kiss of Death, in which Richard Widmark shoves a woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs. He saw an early cut of the film and dined that night at Herzog’s house. He decided, rather than suggest a dozen small edits, he would focus on two or three big asks. This scene was one of them. Cage’s assault serves no real purpose. It’s just a full minute of over-the-top Cage rage. I’d imagine most writers would question the inclusion of such a tone-shattering addition to their script. Herzog overruled him.

“I saw it again at the premiere, and I’m sitting there in the theater and I just loved it,” Finkelstein said. “I thought it was funny as hell. The extreme nature of the annunciation is what sold it. I think I was a little conservative, a little cautious.”

“I was so happy that nobody listened to me in the end,” he said.

---

“What’re these fucking iguanas doing on my coffee table?”

Little can prepare first-time viewers of Bad Lieutenant for the iguana interlude. In perhaps Herzog’s most ostentatious addition to the script, he stretches less than a page of script action here into two minutes of on-screen delirium. It’s the film’s most infamous scene, a narrative and aesthetic sideswipe of the highest order.

On the page, the moment unfolds without much incident. McDonagh arrives in an apartment being used to surveil a drug dealer. He has a routine exchange with two officers about the suspect’s whereabouts. McDonagh and Stevie (Val Kilmer) disagree about whether to call the SWAT team. Soon, all five cops leave to apprehend the suspect. No outbursts, no obscenities, no iguanas.

In the film, Herzog opens this sequence with a shot of Cage snorting heroin in a bathroom stall. This bit appears elsewhere in the script; Herzog moves it here, we can presume, to prime us for the psychedelic journey to come.

Cage enters the surveillance site with an un-holstered gun comically bulging out of his pants. Finkelstein was on set the day Cage decided to wear his gun like this throughout the film. Initially, he felt compelled to protest.

“There’s times when an actor wants something like this, and you got to say no,” Finkelstein said. Having worked on cop dramas for decades, he took pride in getting these details right.

“Cops don’t carry their guns like that,” he said. “But as extravagant as this was as a gesture, Nic understood something about this character. He was playing this guy bigger than I’d imagined, but in fact he was right and I was too cautious.”

Heroin in his veins, gun in his groin, Cage storms into the scene and spots two iguanas matter-of-factly lounging on a coffee table. He stutters in extreme agitation, turning script lines like “Let ’em stay there” to “Naw! No...just no SWAT, let ’em stay there.” He then drifts into a fugue state with the invisible iguanas. Amid a story of cops and criminals, Herzog asks us to stare at garish close-ups of the animals for 60-some seconds. Louisiana native Johnny Adams wails on the soundtrack. To make the narrative rupture even more pronounced, he films the ordeal in ugly, consumer-grade digital video.

I’m not so concerned with what this all means. Animals and nature have long fascinated Herzog, from the “fiendish stupidity” of chickens to the “obscene, explicit malice” of the jungle. Animals permeate Bad Lieutenant—fish, iguanas, gators—and almost all of them were introduced by Herzog. As a viewer, a part of me wants to rationalize these moments. Perhaps Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters brought the wilderness into the city, turning New Orleans into a literal asphalt jungle? Or maybe it’s more intuitive: “There is nothing more wondrous,” Herzog has said, “than seeing Nicolas Cage and a lizard together in one shot.”

Finkelstein gave his blessing for the iguana hallucination, despite its total disruption of the story. The scene came at the expense of an action sequence Finkelstein had written. In the shooting screenplay, Cage’s character has a coke-fueled fight with some strangers at a gas station. Herzog refused to shoot the scene to ensure his iguanas made the final cut. Finkelstein tried to sell him on the merits of the rest stop melee, and lost.

“Herzog said ‘I think we’re going to go long, and then [the producers] are going to make me lose my iguanas—and if they make me lose my iguanas I feel like I can’t be a filmmaker anymore,’” Finkelstein recalled. “And I thought ‘Whoa, this cat is serious. He’s not fucking around.’ I just had so much respect for him as an artist. I didn’t give a good goddamn if he shot the scene or not once he said that. That beats anything.”

---

“To the break of daaaawn, baby!”

Bad Lieutenant’s script detours tend to arrive at the start or end of a given scene. Consider the above examples: Herzog and Cage hit the scenes’ narrative beats, and then they start riffing. As Finkelstein put it, the two “always knew what had to happen in the scene.” Once they hit those notes, they had carte blanche to treat the script like mere bullet points to a freeform lecture of their choosing.

“Nicolas knew that sometimes after a scene was shot I would not shut down the camera if I sensed there was more to it,” Herzog wrote in 2009. “I simply would not call ‘cut’ and leave him exposed and suspended under the pressure of the moment.”

The film’s catchphrase grew from this loose set dynamic. Toward the end of Bad Lieutenant, Cage’s character cons Big Fate to both gather evidence against him and score some of his drugs. In the script, McDonagh, Big Fate, and his men share a moment together after a successful drug deal. McDonagh demands his cut of the money and a cut of the drugs. He pulls a gun on Big Fate and wins the exchange, closing the scene with an unambiguous threat to a car full of drug dealers: “I’ll kill all of you.”

Cage doesn’t end the scene there. To begin, he colors the exchange with spastic ad libs like “Sup!” to get the men’s attention. The actors stray from the particulars of the screenplay, but they convey all the key information to move the story forward. Then the scene trails off into loopy nonsense. Cage waves his gun around like a toy and, sensing radio silence, mutters—and then roars—“I’ll kill all of you...to the break of dawn. To the break of daaaaawn, baby!”

You can see the smirk sneak onto Cage’s face just before he opens his mouth. Clearly pleased with himself, he delivers the line with the Elvis-like drawl he used in Wild at Heart. All four actors erupt in laughter, and suddenly it’s as though we’re watching a closing credits gag reel. Cage swings the mood from sinister to silly; Herzog, the enabler, lets him get away with it.

“This was pure Nic,” Finkelstein said. “That was one of my favorite moments because he can’t help but get this smile on his face when he says it. He’s so enthused.”

I smiled, myself, upon hearing this. As a viewer, I’d long wondered if Finkelstein found moments like this offensive. Here’s Cage, after all, undercutting his words, cracking up fellow actors for kicks. It could be interpreted as mockery. For Finkelstein, though, Cage’s untethered rambles “all seemed to work of a piece.” Finkelstein had years of experience making on-set changes to other writers’ scripts as a TV showrunner. His words, he told me, need not be “cherished” by an actor struck with inspiration.

“The story felt like it could incorporate all that,” he said. “There was a basis for it because this guy was fucked up all the time.”

---

“Shoot him again...his soul is still dancing.”

The script revisions get downright operatic by the film’s climactic shootout. Over an eternal five and a half minutes, Cage and Herzog here transform the script’s most violent moment into a surreal and comic medley of their wildest impulses.

They make far too many edits to detail them all. In Finkelstein’s text, the scene begins as a meeting between Big Fate, his henchmen, and McDonagh. Spirits high, McDonagh smokes crack with the men to test out their new product. He proposes that, in lieu of his cash payment, he gets a cut of the dope. The men agree, and McDonagh spoons his share into a baggie. He then invites Big Fate to take a hit from his “lucky crack pipe.” McDonagh, we later learn, will plant the pipe at a crime scene to seal his case against Big Fate.

A trio of thuggish debt collectors arrives at Big Fate’s home to shake down McDonagh for the money he owes them. McDonagh suggests they take his dope as payment; the head gangster, Dave, threatens to take all of the dope, Big Fate’s included. A tense moment follows. The debt collectors reach for the dope on the table; Big Fate and his men shoot all three of them. “Clean this shit up,” Big Fate says to close the scene.

Cage and Herzog’s gonzo take on this material is at once faithful and ludicrous. The scene begins, as in the script, with the characters in a celebratory mood. The four men smoke as Xzibit orders his men to “light the Caucasian’s rock”—the first of many ad libs smuggled into the scene. For Cage, the drugs are a green light to go berserk. He proposes a business idea and explodes into a pipe-bursting laugh few on this earth could imitate. From there, the floodgates open. Cage runs through a nonsense story about a football player who sprouts antlers. We’ve all been there: loaded, desperate to tell a story with no point. Wild-eyed and blissed-out, he ends the unscripted monologue with another abrasive laugh. Pure Cage, uncaged.

Xzibit and his men worry Cage might die from the crack intake. Here, the actors use snippets of Finkelstein’s dialogue about other drug users dying and apply it to Cage, given how feral he’s decided to play the scene. “Easy, easy, easy...cuz I’m not Eazy-E!” Cage retorts, another improv line that makes Xzibit laugh.

From there, the scene plays out as written for two minutes. Finkelstein, a native New Yorker with an agreeably gruff voice, plays Dave, the lead debt collector. The confrontation between him, Xzibit, and Cage ends in a shootout set to “Lost John,” the same song Herzog used for the dancing chicken sequence in Stroszek.

Cage then passes the freak flag to Herzog. Instead of “clean this shit up,” Herzog has Cage implore the gangsters to shoot Finkelstein again because “his soul is still dancing.” Cage erupts into his asthmatic laugh as Herzog pans to reveal a breakdancer dressed like Finkelstein spinning near his dead body. Cage stares ahead, transfixed by the breakdancing soul. An iguana saunters through the room, an emblem of his hallucination. A shootout has devolved into a freakout.

None of this, of course, was scripted. It’s all too perfect: A screenwriter gets his work butchered, and then he gets killed on camera. Finkelstein called these edits “happy bastardizations.”

“Some of that big shootout was improvised, yeah,” he said. “That thing about the gazelle sprouting antlers, Cage made that up. The breakdancing was Werner. Absolutely Werner.”

Finkelstein compared Bad Lieutenant to other gangster films freed from the shackles of genre, from Breathless to the crime dramas of Jean-Pierre Melville. He also likened it to Cop Rock, a short-lived ABC show he co-created. A true curio, the 1990 show operated as part cop drama, part musical. It was a fascinating, supremely awkward marriage. “Audiences were not happily startled,” as Finkelstein put it. Though he didn’t write it that way, Bad Lieutenant became a similar experiment in police procedural storytelling.

“There’s a tradition of being able to take the form and blow it up and make a movie that’s more lyrical and not realistic,” he said. “I think that’s what we all wound up doing.”

---

Who captains this ship? The answer changes from scene to scene, shot to shot, line to line. A big-name actor, an art-house iconoclast, and a veteran TV writer each take turns steering. Finkelstein guides much of the first act; his instincts as a successful writer/producer orient viewers into this world. Herzog takes the film on its strangest journeys, refashioning this material into an exploration of what he calls “the bliss of evil.” And Cage grabs the mic like a drunk wedding guest, holding viewers hostage to his artful, overlong eruptions. Each contributor has his marquee moments. Like a stoner pizza topped with cream cheese, bacon, and Nutella, it shouldn’t work—but it does.

Bad Lieutenant reveals cinema for what it is: a messily collaborative medium. Every film is the work of many voices. What makes the film wonderful is that, despite their strong and distinct personalities, Cage, Herzog, and Finkelstein’s voices don’t compete; they complement. They produce a sound neither could create on his own.

Finkelstein stressed this point throughout our talks. His impulses did, at times, conflict with the liberties taken to his work. He returned several times to Cage’s unhinged attack in the nursing home. Finkelstein’s voice, calibrated over decades on television, couldn’t make sense of such excess. Of course he came around. Had he been in charge that day, though, he “almost assuredly would have pulled back,” he told me. “That Nic didn’t is a testament to one of the joys of a collaborative process.”

The word “alchemy” feels appropriate for a film this volatile. To watch Bad Lieutenant is to witness a bizarre and unlikely combination of elements collide on a screen. We’ve seen these elements before, in isolation: Cage’s tantrums, Herzog’s lyricism, Finkelstein’s cop drama chops. Together, they produce something new, unclassifiable—a drug you’ve never taken before. As with all great cult films, my recommendation comes with a warning: Be careful. It’ll mess with your head.

[blackfilm]

The interview with Malachi Kirby on his role as Kunta Kinte in the Roots remake - “I Am Kunta Kinte”: 

“What do you think the remake of Roots will mean to people in 2016?

I remember when I first watched the original, the impact that it had on me was profound. It changed my whole outlook on life and the world I was living in at the time. Who I was, where I came from and just how I fit into the society right now. For those who don't know that part of history, I believe it will have a very different impact as opposed to those who do. But even for those who have seen the original and for those who have done their own research into that time, I believe that the show will have an impact on them regardless. We did not hold back with the truth.

The conversations that happen after that will be just as important if not more. I think that a lot goes unsaid. I don't think it's a coincidence that Birth of a Nation and Underground and other projects are coming out with a similar narrative in regards to slavery in that same time period. There's a reason for it, you know? There's a discussion that needs to be had and there are changes and actions that need to be made.

Lupe Fiasco described his thoughts on how A&E should handle the conversations surrounding Roots and the discussion that needs to happen on camera before and after the show airs; some of those you have retweeted. What are your thoughts on his comments and his suggestions for the remake?

I think that's very important. I remember speaking to people from my mother and grandmother's generation who had seen the original. I remember sitting down with them and hearing them describe how after they saw the original movie, they would go into school the next day and get into fights.

It's very easy to take this kind of subject matter out of context especially for a younger generation of kids. Kids under, I'd say 14, are still maturing, they are still growing, they are still understanding themselves. To hit them with something like Roots, to hit them with this particular period of time, it's important, to discuss the matters beyond the program itself.

I remember when I watched the first one. I had to pray about some of the feelings I was feeling. There was inequity in my heart, there was a lot of pain, there was a lot of hurt; there was a lot of confusion. You need to know how to deal with those things. That's not just for black people; it's for white people too. Understanding how to deal with that type of guilt and shame and understanding that that was the past and this is right now. All across the board, especially for young people, there are mental issues that need to be addressed when watching something like this.

You touched on how your spirituality played a part. Along those lines, what type of preparation was required for this role: mind, body, and soul?

The first decision I made was to not go anywhere near the original when trying to begin this journey. I felt like the only way that I could tell the truth of this project is by telling my own truth and not trying to recreate another performance. There wasn't a lot of time to do everything that needed to be done. It was learning how to speak Mandinka, the language and the dialect and the accent. It was an understanding the culture, the tradition, and the religion of the Mandinka people. Understanding how they sat, how they ate, and how they would greet an elder, just how they conducted themselves.

I wanted to know these things so that I could portray them with that same pride, same respect and understanding; that same truth. Then there was something else that I just didn't know how to prepare for. Which was, what is it like to go through slavery? What is it like to be on a boat in chains taken away from your family? Kunta Kinte was not born into slavery; he was born a free man. He was an African man. He was a Mandinka warrior. He was at the beginning of his manhood. Then he gets kidnapped and taken onto a boat. Possibly one of the most vulnerable positions you can ever be in as a man, you know?

How does it feel to want a son your whole life but then get a daughter, but not only that but you're having a daughter in the midst of slavery when you're aware that as she grows up, she most likely will be raped and you most likely will just have to deal with it? I have no idea how to process that on a human level.

So for me, the most important thing for me to do and the most helpful thing that I found was prayer. I felt like there was a story that needed to be told that was bigger than me and bigger than what I can do by myself. There was information that I needed that I didn't have access to and I just believe that God does. So I asked him to help every single day. On the set I got down on my knees, prayed, and asked God to help me to tell the truth. A truth that was bigger than my experience and bigger than my knowledge.

When Kunta eventually submits from the whipping posts and he says the name Toby. I learned that it wasn’t a form of submission it was a form of survival.

What was the most difficult scene that comes to mind?

There wasn't one day that didn't present a challenge. There were scenes in the boat that I thought to myself the Africans that were actually in enslaved and put on that boat, would have been in that slave hold for at least 3 weeks before they came up to see any daylight. So I thought the least that I could do is stay in there for a whole day. And so I do, when we did those scenes I did not come out of the hole, I did not come out to the toilet and I did not come up to eat.

We had the benefits and the challenge of them actually building a real ship to the real dimension that it would've been at the time. They put 150-200 people into that hold and they chained us all up in real chains. You're basically in this thing for the whole day wailing and screaming and singing. You don't have to imagine what that feels like because you're there. If you're in that environment then you're responding to it. When you're in there for even half-an-hour you forget that this is a movie. In coming out of it, it is hard to interact with people; it's hard to shake that off.

Then we have the whipping scenes. Again there is the pain that I was never actually going to physically feel. I don't know what it's like to be whipped physically. I don't know what its like to have your identity directly forced out of you. I don't what that feels like to have that all happen in the midst of all these other witnesses. Again, it was a day I asked God for help, and I got more help than I was expecting and more help than I was prepared for.

I remember there was a point where I felt like I could feel the pain of every ancestor that had ever come before me and have ever gone through that. I can hear their screams, I could hear their wails. I could feel their pain although I was never there, I could feel it. And it almost broke me; mentally and physically. It was the strangest experience and I wasn't sure that I would be able to get up from it.

What was the most interesting scene?

As a human and as an artist, the most interesting for me was learning how to remain a Mandinka warrior and a father and a husband and keep that integrity whilst in the midst of surviving, that was the most interesting for me. When Kunta eventually submits from the whipping posts and he says the name, Toby. I learned that it wasn't a form of submission it was a form of survival.

What is the feeling you get when you see a billboard for Roots knowing that you are the main character?

You know what, it hasn't really hit me yet. I think I'm in a little bit of a bubble. Just being Malachi and just kind of getting used to being me again. I don't think it's really kicked in yet. I could pretty much still walk down the street without being pointed out or recognized or taken a picture of so it's still very normal for me right now.”

[aurimeanswind]

Fearful Endeavors—Sunday Chats (1-29-17)

To Disclose Up Front

So. I’m afraid. It’s a thing I think goes without saying as a very empathetic United States citizen. I’m really, really afraid. 

It may seem crass, or tone-deaf, or ignorant, but I don’t genuinely have the energy to enter in the national dialogue against the seemingly facist regime that is beginning to plague my great nation. I have a lot going on in my life, and not a lot of time and resources to compromise in order to assist in this thing I also care greatly for. That may make me a bad person, or at the very least, a worse person than who I could or aspire to be.

I’m aware of that, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry most specifically to the people who are directly affected by this disgusting situation we find ourselves in.

It is not excuse, but as I’ve talked about multiple times before, I have a very overactive sense of self-empathy, and seeing this torment has begun having a very detrimental effect on my personal well-being and health. It is absolutely in no way and excuse, but it is very much the honest reason I find myself shying away from the dialogue and discourse that is plaguing many of my social media feeds, my friends’ conversations, and beyond. I can’t be a part of that, as a selfish, 20-something year old, who wants to make his dream come true, and wants to figure his life out.

I wanted to put this here, up front, as a full reveal of my position, as Sunday Chats is and always has been your peak into my psyche, my well-being, from worst to best, and what my week has been.

This has been my week. I will attempt to keep reading, to keep learning, to keep watching, and stay attentive. 

With this said... Onto the game-talk.

Twitter in the gaming space has blown up in a fun way recently from this little piece that’s been making the rounds:

I managed to get over 30 likes when I tweeted this out, and I didn’t want to bog-down my followers with all my replies to this, but I thought it was fun, so why not participate! I did the first 9 of these on Twitter, and here is a link to that thread to see those replies and those first 9:

THREAD

So for my editorial today, and I’ll try and keep this succinct, I am going to do my 10-30. STRAP IN!

30 Likes, 30 Games

#10

Best gameplay is tough. I may ultimately have to give it up Spelunky. But Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix is a close second. With Persona 4 being a close third.

But Spelunky is a game I continue to play and play, not for any particular reason, save for the fact that it plays so damn well.

#11

My current gaming system of choice is the PS4. The Dualshock 4 is maybe my favorite controller ever made, and the system is a comfortable, easy to use and navigate platform with a bunch of great deals and exclusives. Where the Super Nintendo or PS2 are probably my favorite platforms of all time, the PS4 is a comfy go-to right now.

#12

Journey is by no means hard, and is in no way off-putting. It’s beautiful, and simple, and it’s mechanics and gameplay are a great showcase of what video games can do. If I were to say a game of my all-time favorites that everyone could and should play, especially those who have no context for video games as an art form, and what they can accomplish, it’s unquestionably Journey.

#13

A game I’ve played more than five times? Haha, that is actually not a short list.

The big ones, though, would be The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. Played each of those at least six times each. A Link to the Past maybe 12 or so times, to completionist levels of finished. But the big one, because of how much time it is in my life, is Kingdom Hearts 2. I’ve “FULLY FINISHED” that game maybe five or so times, with a couple additional playthroughs on top of that. Love those games

#14

I have multiple desktops on my computer, and for the past quite-a-few months years the first three have been Persona 3, Persona 4, and Persona 5. On my phone Rise Kujikawa also occupies my lock screen, as she has since I first finished P4G in 2013.

#15

Since I can’t play until I finish this

#16

Easily it’s The Last of Us.

#17

This one is actually really hard.

For all of his dumb BS, I do love Xehanort in Kingdom Hearts. He is a great antagonist.

In the same vein, Liquid Snake/Ocelot is right up there from Metal Gear.

But maybe ultimately it’s Duke, from Tales of Vesperia. He is a really great villain, and such a wonderful contrast to Yuri, the protagonist.

#18

Maybe not my #1 favorite but always an inspiration to me and one of my all time heroes: 

Samus Aran

#19

Never Not the Normandy

#20

JRPGs

All my anime boys (and girls!)

#21

Persona 4 Golden. Best story, about finding the truth and true friendship along the way.

#22

This one hurts. The biggest for me is easily Alundra 2

The first game was masterful, and it’s sequel had literally nothing to do with it and was a total cash grab on the cult following of the original.

Breaks my heart :(

#23

Plenty of things fit here. I mean, Uncharted 4 or The Last of Us or Witcher 3 could hit here on a technical level, but Journey, Kingdom Hearts, or Tales of Vesperia could also hit in the style department.

Pick your poison.

#24

Does Super Nintendo fall under classic? If so, then A Link to the Past.

If we’re trying to go older and older, than probably Mario Bros or Pac-Man.

Sooner than that, Super Mario Bros 3

#25

Haha, how about all of them. A game I plan on playing is all of them. A few at the top of my mind: Battlefield 1, because people won’t shut up about it. Nier, the original, because I’m really curious about it, and 999, because Nabeshin really loved it.

#26

Persona 4, Mass Effect 1-3, The Witcher 3, The Last of Us (the best of all 4).

#27

Two here:

One, the final battle with Xemnas in Kingdom Hearts 2.

But even bigger is the FIRST FIGHT ON TOP OF A BATTLESHIP FROM METAL GEAR SOLID 4 HOLY SHIT.

The literal definition of “epic” distilled down to a video game scene. Holy shit. The music from all the games. The style changes. My heart is racing just thinking about it.

#28

The Zelda team and Naughty Dog are close behind.

#29

Honestly probably something weird like Dead Space or P.T. I used to hate horror so much, but those two are some of my absolute favorites of the last handful of years. Dead Space is a bit older, sure, but I adore that game.

#30

No words need to be said. Not an original statement, but I stand by it.

Whats on Tap

Resident Evil 7

Hey why don’t you just watch me play this game!

Loving it so far and I talk about everything I’m loving in that video!

The Division

Once more you can look so i don’t have to tell you. Got dragged back into this weird nightmare by friends and I’m having a blast.

Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep 0.2 A Fragmentary Passage

Other than having maybe the best worst name ever, HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS

KINGDOM HEARTS 3

I BELIEVE AGAIN

It’s really good.

Tales of Zestiria

This is becoming a bummer of complex, weird emotions.

It really feels like a mostly-misstep for that series, and the open world parts of it are contrived and actively bad.

But I want to finish it. There are cool, interesting parts about it.

Questions

Weird. It’s very physically exhausting, because I have to walk a lot. And I have to drive a lot to get there. And I’m not used to that.

It’s really stressing me out.

I don’t have a lot more to say about it right now, but we’ll see how things develop.

Hi Roger.

Clearly you’re asking the wrong person.

Thank you for your follows.

Love you, brotha.

SO EXCITED.

But seriously, PAX East is my favorite show, as you know Harold. Can’t wait to go again, talk to folks, make some connections, and really work that show again. It’s the only show out of the year I get to work, and it’s a ton of fun.

Heh, well, about that.

I’ve never played Resident Evil 2! Or Resident Evil 3! Or Zero! Or Code Veronica!

I’ve only ever played 4, 5, and about half of 6. I have recently for the first time EVER been playing that Resident Evil 1 remake on PS4, which has been FASCINATING. Resident Evil 7 seems super great so far though!

Uh, to go? Hopefully? I mean, I am going under the assumption that I am approved for my press badge, which is the only way I can make it.

I don’t know who all is going, but I sure hope it’s a bunch of cuties like usual! Right now, myself, Tony, maybe Scott, Jarrett, and Logan Wilkinson are going for IrrationalPassions.com. More stuff on that soon. I know Kaylie is going because she told me so! I really hope Joey Noelle goes. Danny Juarez really wants to go. Trevor Starkey will be there!

Sure we can hang out Xyger. 

I personally don’t like pineapple on pizza. But I love pineapple! I’ve had it before and it’s not like I hate it or anything. Like what food you like! Im not a fan of mustard but a whole bunch of people really like that, so people can just like different things and enjoy them and that’s great because it makes us all different and that’s a good thing! 

Uhh... I don’t know?

Danny you need to pay all your debts off first. I’m worried about you. Like, on a near constant basis I am worried about Danny Juarez. For sure.

But yeah maybe we can do that sometime. I don’t know. You keep saying “when I come visit” to Vegas and I have no clue when something like that could happen, but we’ll see!

Okay, I think that’s all I have in me, emotionally, for today.

Shoutouts

Shoutouts to all these incredible people that give me hope:

via The New York Times

That’s all I’ve got. I’m gonna go play Kingdom Hearts now byeeeeeee~~!❤️

[makingscipub]

Moral Dilemmas in Science Journalism about Genetics Research: The case of gene drives

Guest post by Rebecca Hardesty, Ph.D.

Rebecca Hardesty is a postdoctoral scholar in science education and communication at UC San Diego in its Division of Biological Sciences and the Teaching + Learning Commons.

***

The New York Times Magazine rang in the New Year with a featured piece by Jennifer Kahn recounting the promises and perils of one of the newer advances in genetics research: the gene drive. As someone who has worked alongside biologists of various stripes for the past six years as a social scientist and modest historian of genetics, I found this article particularly striking. On the face of it, the journalist presented a compelling account of: a) the gap in understanding between the geneticists and general audiences; b) how gene drives could support the eradication of malaria; and c) the moral dilemmas associated with this kind of research. However, this story is more than just a well-researched and provocative piece – it is a paradigmatic example of what accepted science journalism is, and has been, for the last fifty years.

The standards this genre of journalism upholds support journalists writing informative and thought-provoking accounts of scientific advances. However, they also privilege reporting that abstracts biological work from the historical context which informs its significance. Even more significantly, this sort of journalism continues to uphold the view that scientists are always a bit removed from ordinary life and its accompanying moral concerns. This is not to take away from the article or the accuracy of its information on gene drives. However, I bring up this particular article as means of showing how the conventions of science journalism skew what goes on in actual scientific practice.

I encourage you to read the article itself, but I will relay the information it presents on gene drives as a means of first showing how the ethical issues the author identifies are understandable. Then I will show that they are not concerns specific to gene drives, but ones that have pervaded reporting on genetics research since the 1970s with little change.

About Gene Drives

Kahn begins with a surreal account of “Science Speed Dating,” an event that people in the entertainment industry attended in the summer of 2018 to learn about science so that its cinematic depictions were somewhat accurate. It was at this event a UC Irvine biologist, Anthony James, presented his work on mosquito-borne diseases, including malaria. In his research, James uses gene drives. Gene drives are a genetic engineering technology that changes the likelihood of a particular gene variant being transmitted throughout the population of a species. Gene drives are fairly flexible as a technique and one can use them add, delete, or modify genes. In the context of malaria research, in 2015, James and his laboratory genetically modified mosquitoes to resist the parasite that causes malaria.[1]

However, as Kahn shows, gene drives are still in their infancy and have not been tested outside of laboratory settings. And this is for good reason. They have the potential to fundamentally disrupt the genetic evolution of a species. This is because, when a gene drive works properly, it affects not only the current generation of an organismic population, but all of its subsequent generations. The Hollywood framing of Kahn’s piece makes a lot of sense.

This technology immediately conjures up narratives of science-gone-wrong where a group of well-meaning scientists accidentally create mosquitoes that spread especially virulent forms of the diseases they carry. Or perhaps an entire ecosystem is affected in unforeseen and horrible ways because of a seemingly innocuous modification to one species. There are also the predictable storylines of this technology being weaponized or used to wipe out an entire species. This is not a new trope in science fiction. For example, the Mass Effect video game trilogy contains a species which was involuntarily genetically modified to limit the number of live births, and this gene was propagated to all future generations of the alien race.

Kahn continues by recounting the rocky road gene drives have had gaining trust and acceptance from activists and general audiences. Significantly, the author highlights the comments that came out of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in 2018 in which activists “compared gene drives to the atomic bomb” (Kahn, 2020).  While the activists frame gene drives in a highly-charged way, it is not dissimilar to Kahn’s own framing of this genetic engineering technology as an immediate moral dilemma. Nor is this a new way of conceiving of the morality associated with genetics research. Part of my own research has focused on journalistic work on disease-oriented genetics research. To highlight the persistence of this approach to science journalism, I will take as a comparative example the April 1971 Time magazine special issue, “The New Genetics: Man into Superman.”

Disconnects between Scientists and the Media

I came across this Time magazine special issue when I was reviewing the transcripts of a meeting of the Salk Institute’s Council for Biology in Human Affairs that took place in Cold Spring Harbor on June 11 and 12, 1971. During this meeting, founding members of the Salk Institute, as well as external members of the Council, met to discuss several things. These included the recent developments in genetics research, how the public might respond to them, and how to inform the public about the significance of these developments. The conveners were particularly concerned with cloning, reimplantation, prenatal genetic diagnosis, and gene therapy.

The Council was split on whether the public was sufficiently educated on genetics research to make informed decisions about domains of life that the recent advances could, one day, affect. Some members were particularly concerned that the public’s lack of understanding would lead them to fear this branch of biological research and group it in with ongoing chemical warfare research that resulted in the gases being used in Vietnam, or even the kind of research in physics that lead to the atomic bomb in World War II. This issue of fear and public trust was set aside after the Council members referred to this Time magazine issue as evidence for why they did not need to engage in future efforts to educate general audiences. I tracked down this issue and was surprised to see that this was not the reassuring set of articles I assumed they were. In fact, they painted quite an alarming portrait of geneticists.

The cover of this issue shows human figures consumed by red DNA double helices against a dark background. The color palette is similar to radiation warning posters and signs used during the Cold War. The New York Times Magazine article has similarly disturbing imagery. In this case, it is an enormous black fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) with glowing red eyes that would not be out of place in a Giger-inspired horror film. While these were fruit flies that James, the biologist, modified to have fluorescent eyes, the magazine could have chosen to feature a less sinister fly with green or blue eyes. Still eye-catching, but less demonic.

Portrait of the Scientist as Outside Everyday Life

Textually, the Times magazine and the New York Times Magazine articles start with embedding their discussions of genetics research in fictional portrayals of moral dilemmas in science. The Times piece begins with a quote from Dr. Zhivago which, in the context of the article, brings together fears of communism, nuclear war, and science’s ability to change the nature of life,

“Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself” (Pasternak, 1957).

While Kahn does not draw on the still-relevant quote from Dr. Zhivago, her early introduction of the “Science Speed Dating” as well as use of the voices of television producers, gives weight to the fictionalized version of science. Even though Hollywood isn’t a litmus test, as Kahn says, for how people outside of the sciences and the entertainment industry will evaluate gene drives, media representation is influential.

By using the cinematic version of genetics research as a contrast with biologists’ statements about their technical work, it does not make them more relatable. For the majority of people, fictional depictions of science are much more familiar than scientists own descriptions of what they do. And along with these depictions comes the sensationalized versions of the moral issues that are associated with technological advances.

Contributing to the depiction of biologists and geneticists as apart from the familiar and everyday, both articles show researchers operating outside of ordinary life. The Times magazine article uses quotes from researchers abstractly speculating about the moral implications of genetics research in their other work, which was not representative of academic sentiments at that time. One example is Robert Sinsheimer proclaiming that because of their increased understanding of genetics, scientists now understand the origin of life and have the ability to design humanity’s future (Time, 1971, p. 53). The article continues by reflecting on the potential genetic damage caused by the radiation from the atomic bombs used in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It then quotes Theodosius Dobzhansky’s ethical dilemma,

“If we enable the weak and the deformed to live and to propagate their kind,” he says, “we face the prospect of a genetic twilight. But if we let them die or suffer when we can save or help them, we face the certainty of a moral twilight” (Time, 1971, p. 53).

This is a portrayal of scientists abstractly and coldly speculating about how they ought to dictate who lives and dies. The New York Times Magazine article is not sensationalistic; however, it shows scientists divorced from mundane concerns or responsibilities. In one photograph, Valentino James, a biologist at UC San Diego, stands imposingly in front of a refrigerated storage unit. In a vignette, researchers casually work all Christmas day debating the ethical and safety ramifications that their research may produce. While this goes by quickly, it does paint a portrait of scientists being removed from everyday concerns like holiday cooking, dealing with relatives, needing to take a vacation, childcare, or spending time with family.

In Kahn’s article, scientists are defined by their work, not the human feelings and drives that motivate us all to act as we do. Having spent years working alongside biologists, there is always a rich story to be told about how they care about involving their students in their research, their concerns about teaching (even if they are research faculty), why their work matters to them. Relatedly, it is usually compelling to hear why they chose to stay in academia as opposed to pursuing more lucrative (and possibly less stressful) careers in industry. There are also humanizing little stories to be told of how an experiment went wrong in a surprising way, how a lab decided on cleaning duties, or that meeting where the whole lab debated about where in their conference room they ought to hang a painting.

Not only would it be nice to hear these stories, science journalism needs them to revise the portrait of the scientist as an eccentric researcher who is unlike you or me.

Reconceiving Scientific Dilemmas

Finally, I want to take a step back and look at the context of these two articles. Half of the Time magazine issue was devoted to news and anxieties about the Vietnam war, the Middle East, continuing fallout from WWII, socialist uprisings, and disapproval of president Nixon. The New York Times Magazine issue had a similar tone. There was a focus on the US’s involvement in foreign conflict, changes in the Middle East’s political landscape, and there was also an article devoted to WWII and another focused on concerns about the Republican party. While much as changed in the world, much has remained the same. This includes the structure of both these articles and the way in which they are pitched. Both focus on the grand moral concerns concerning genetics research when there are more immediate issues such as:

How can this work, which requires national and international collaboration and successful communication, occur?

How can the significance of health-focused research be communicated to diverse and, potentially, justifiably skeptical audiences?

How can we support the development of clear ethical guidelines that protect genetic information while still allowing it to be shared across research groups?

While the recent New York Times Magazine article is, in my opinion, fantastic and highlights the excellent work at the University of California, it is time to rethink science journalism’s preoccupation with the most abstract and extreme moral issues associated with scientific research. Not only are they not particularly urgent issues, focusing on them occludes the realities of genetics research. Two of which are: being able to do small modifications consistently in a controlled setting is different than doing large-scale modifications to a genetically diverse species in the wild – and biologists know this. Second, there needs to be a massive and coordinated effort between researchers, governments, and industry to pull off something like eradicating malaria by genetically modifying mosquitoes. This would be a possibly unprecedented act of international communication and coordination.

With all this in mind, I’d like to see more on the following challenges of gene drives: a) the difficulties communicating between researchers in different sub-specialties; b) the challenges of industry/governmental/academic collaborations; and c) issues of recruitment for diverse human genetic material.

They’re not as flashy, but these are pressing dilemmas.

References

Kahn, J. (2020, January 8). The Gene Drive Dilemma: We Can Alter Entire Species, but Should We? Retrieved from https://ift.tt/2ZYqab9

Man into Superman. (1971). Time, 97(16). Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=53806187&site=ehost-live

Footnote

[1] See “’Gene drive’ mosquitoes engineered to fight malaria” in Nature news : https://www.nature.com/news/gene-drive-mosquitoes-engineered-to-fight-malaria-1.18858

Image: By Qimono on Pixabay.

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