Down With... Evolution

 


In December of 1903, the Wright Brothers made their famous powered flight on the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

It wasn't much of a flight, by modern standards. The whole thing lasted about twelve seconds, and  the vehicle travelled a total of 120 feet (less than the wingspan of a modern jet). And Orville's luggage never did turn up.


Still, first is first, and however humble their experiment might be, it has earned its place in history (and in textbooks around the world) as the birth of powered aviation.

Except it isn't quite as simple as that.

Several other pioneers were experimenting with similar technology around the same time, and there has been some controversy over the years about which one of them actually succeeded first.

In 2013, the American State of Connecticut passed a law declaring that Gustave Whitehead was really the first person to achieve powered flight, in 1901 (in Connecticut, unsurprisingly).


In retaliation, the State of Ohio (where the Wright Brothers had built their machine) passed a Resolution repudiating any other claim to the first powered flight. 

It's officially the Wright Brothers. Thus spake Ohio.


I mention all of this, not for its own sake (although it is supremely weird) but because the question of who made the first successful flight (and when) is not really a matter of opinion. These are historical events: they either happened, or they didn't happen. Passing a law is not going to have any impact on what is true.

It's amazing how many people apparently disagree with that.

In 1925, an American schoolteacher named John Stokes was arrested in the town of Dayton, Tennessee, charged with violating the "Butler Act". 

The Butler Act was a Tennessee law that made it a criminal offense to teach anything that contradicted the story of Creation as laid out in the Book of Genesis:

 ...it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.

The subsequent trial (a high profile media circus that came to be known as The Tennessee Monkey Trial) is the subject of our next film.


Inherit the Wind was originally a stage play (first performed in 1955) by Jerome Laurence and Robert E. Lee (no relation). In essence, it is a fictionalised re-telling of the 1925 "Monkey Trial" although all the names have been changed.

Before we go any further with this, let's get one thing out of the way:

Evolution is an observable phenomenon, like gravity. If someone chooses to disbelieve in gravity, that is their absolute right. But if they then step off a building, gravity isn't going to care what they believe.

Gravity. Don't make me tell you again.

Evolution is the reason why antibiotics are becoming less effective, and why insects are developing resistance to pesticides. It's also the reason why there are so many variants of COVID.

This is not like Peter Pan's "Clap if you believe in fairies" where something is only true if enough people think that it's true. 

Simply no.

Making Evolution illegal does not make it false, any more than passing a law about the Wright Brothers' flight had any impact on what might (or might not) have actually happened.

But anyway, enough about that.

Inherit the Wind dramatizes the court battle between the Creationist William Jennings Bryan and the famed liberal attorney Clarence Darrow (here referred to as Matthew Harrison Brady and Henry Drummond, respectively).


Religious advocates in the US have been quick to point out that the real William Jennings Bryan was not as fundamentalist as he is portrayed here, but the playwrights were deliberately using the Monkey Trial as a metaphor (again!) for the McCarthy anti-Communist era. Thus, the story becomes a parable for the dangers of making ideas illegal.

Fredric March and Spencer Tracy, both passionate liberals, give the performances of their lives. Gene Kelly (in a slightly atypical role) plays the acerbic journalist E K Hornbeck who covers the trial for his Baltimore newspaper (nothing whatsoever to do with H L Menken; I don't know what made you say that). Kelly's wife, Betsy Blair, was blacklisted and had been forced to flee to Europe, ending their marriage of sixteen years.

It's worth noting that Evolution was actually less controversial in 1925 than it is now (at least in the US). Tennessee's "Butler Act" was widely ridiculed at the time, and dismissed as an embarrassing relic of an outmoded world-view (hence the contemptuous and dismissive term "Monkey Trial").

In any event, the 1960 film adaptation of Inherit the Wind stands as a passionate and powerful celebration of the freedom of expression, and a cautionary tale of the dangers of criminalising ideas.


We will screen Inherit the Wind at 7.30 on the 16th of February at the Victoria Park Baptist Church!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Carry On... #Don't Trust Anyone over 25

Image
Please note that this week's film has been rated  12  in the UK. Last week's film ( Logan's Run ) is a prime example of a science fiction film that was emphatically a product of the era in which it was made. If anything, its very relevance proved to be its vulnerability. By the time it reached the theatres in 1976, many of the social trends it was responding to were already starting to fade. That may also be why attempts to produce a remake have consistently failed to make any headway. Hollywood studios have repeatedly attempted to reboot Logan's Run over the decades, and at least six different directors have embarked on such a project over the last 30 years. Multiple writers have been approached, and in some cases have written complete screenplays - but to no avail. Logan's Run has remained stubbornly and imperviously un-remade. If you think about it (and I have, trust me) remaking Logan's Run is easier said than done. After a decade of hippie culture, you...
Read more

The Best Bond Film of All Time; Thursday the 14th of October

Image
 James Bond has been in the news quite a bit recently, following the much-delayed release of No Time to Die , the most recent offering in this (almost) 60-year-old film franchise. No time to die, indeed. Like all self-respecting zombies, the James Bond character is steadfastly refusing to lie down and stop breathing, despite (or perhaps because of) six decades of sexism, racism, casual violence, jingoism and sexism (sexism is a very big thing in the Bond franchise). It should really have been called  Enough Already. Still, the Bond Movie has become an important cultural icon, and each offering follows an instantly recognisable style and pattern: a suave hero in a tailored suit, a smooth-talking but quietly menacing villain with a dangerous and (devotedly) faithful henchman, a beautiful, sexually available girl, a wide variety of exotic and photogenic locations and an endless parade of increasingly complicated and implausible assassination attempts. What's not to love? With all...
Read more

The Feast of "Stephen"

Image
If you're a Christian, you might know "The Feast of Stephen" as St. Stephen's Day (the 26th of December) when young men dress up in vaguely nightmarish straw costumes and wander around the town playing alarming music while carrying a dead bird. This is not about that. If you're a Doctor Who fan, you might know The Feast of Stephen as the first ever Doctor Who Christmas episode (broadcast on Christmas Day in 1965).  This is not about that either. For our purposes this week, The Feast of Stephen  concerns a small but pivotal character in the beloved Noël Coward/David Lean classic Brief Encounter .  Brief Encounter is remembered today as perhaps the most famous unconsummated love affair in cinema history. Released in 1945 (but without so much as the slightest hint of a war or its effects) it tells the story of two (married) individuals who meet by chance on a train platform and proceed to teeter on the brink of having an affair for a few weeks. They do not, in fac...
Read more

Another Cold War Movie. A very, very Cold War Movie.

Image
 Last week we saw a film about the Cold War as seen by a director who experienced it as a young teenager. The International situation may have been apocalyptic and grim, but none of that mattered as much as the newest monster movie. This week is going to be another film about the Cold War, but viewed through the very different lens of a director in his mid-fifties who had lived through the eras of World War Two and The Holocaust. Billy Wilder may be (quite rightly) remembered for films like Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Some Like it Hot etc. but One, Two, Three is one of his most cynical, savage and unforgiving comedies. Berlin in 1961 was a divided city. The East and West were controlled by the Russians and Americans respectively, but travel between the two regions was still possible. It was in fact during the making of this film that the infamous wall went up, sealing East Berlin off from the West for almost thirty years. I'm not going to attempt to expl...
Read more

And So, the 70's...

Image
 Raging Riders, and Lots of Bull Depending on who you ask, the ten-year period of 1965-1975 was either one of the best eras in American cinema, or one of the worst. While it was certainly a Golden Age if you were a straight white male who loved extreme violence, casual sexism, xenophobia and homophobia, it was far less enjoyable if such things tended to make you uncomfortable. (Three guesses how I feel about this era.) To some extent, Cinema was merely reflecting the tone of Society itself during that decade. After living through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of  President Kennedy (and, two years later, Malcolm X; and a few years after that , Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King) there were the almost daily news reports of  violent suppression of  Civil Rights campaigners and (if you wanted some relief from the vicious and bloody domestic news) there was the ongoing horror show of the Vietnam War. Eventually of course the 1960s came to an end, and Ame...
Read more