Mad, Bad and Dangerous? : The Scientist and the Cinema

Since its origin cinema has had an uneasy relationship with science and technology: scientists are almost always impossibly mad or impossibly saintly, and technology is nearly always very bad for you. In Mad, Bad and Dangerous, Christopher Frayling explores the genealogy of the film scientist - especially in Hollywood - showing how the filmed scientist has often been used to represent the prevailing phobias of the time. In the 1950s, for example, films were dominated by the fear of botched atomic research, and were a showcase of mutated, outsized creatures and radioactive zombies. However, since the 1970s the role of the scientist has been less straightforward, with damage to the environment and the spread of diseases becoming the predominant consequences of science gone wrong. Scientists - and the corporations that controlled them - became the baddies.