Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
of life like the ill meaning scientist and/or the experiment going out of
control can be found just the same way in recent productions like
God-
send
(2003),
Blueprint
(2003), and
The Sixth Day
(2000). The impression
is that the underlying anxieties about new knowledge reflected in the
products of popular culture are much more fundamental than the images
which link them to the respective worlds familiar to their audiences.
Table 2: Alchemy movie titles from the
twentieth
century
•
The Hallucinated Alchemist
(1897, USA)
•
The Clown and the Alchemist
(1900, USA)
•
The Alchemist
(1913, USA)
•
Homunculus
(1916, Germany)
•
Der Alchimist
(1918, Germany)
•
The Alchemist's Hourglass
(1936, USA)
•
Alchimie
(1952, France)
•
Une Alchimie
(1966, Belgium)
•
Alchimisten
(1968, GDR)
•
Alchemik
(1990, Poland)
•
Des alchimistes / Alchemists
(1991, Canada)
•
Alchemy
(1997, USA, TV)
4. Conclusions
To stress once again: these results are impressionistic and cannot claim
statistical representativeness. But they are stable enough to allow the
general conclusion that chemistry is among the fields of science that, in
spite of all the benefits that it may have brought to mankind or perhaps
because of them, has difficulties communicating with the lay public if the
anxieties and ambivalences expressed in popular fiction movies are being
taken as an indicator. Chemistry is not alone in this position. Medicine
fares worse, and physics not much better. It may be concluded that the
most powerful scientific disciplines - powerful in terms of shaping our
environment and thus ourselves - are also those that are seen with the
greatest suspicion. As far as the immediate PR needs of the discipline are
concerned, the crucial question for the chemistry community is if the
images of the field communicated through movies do have an impact in
particular on young people, and what this impact is like.
