People go to the movies for a variety of reasons: escape, catharsis, inspiration, a date, an air-conditioned room on a muggy Sunday afternoon. Rarely do we go in order to learn something. And we’re okay with that. We sacrifice science and accuracy in the name of entertainment. Hollywood has a hard time getting physics right: do bullets spark when they hit a metal surface? Can a bus traveling at 55 MPH jump a forty-foot gap? And just how long does it take a kid to fall from Niagara Falls, anyway?
But Hollywood has an even harder time depicting genius.
By “genius” I don’t just mean exceptional technical ability or artistic talent. I mean that insane burst of creativity that breaks conventional boundaries. A genius is not just someone smarter than us, but someone so much smarter that we can’t even recognize what they’re doing. The word genius itself, in Latin, refers to a guardian spirit; someone who created a great work was said to be inspired by such an entity. “Talent hits a target no one else can hit,” wrote Schopenhauer. “Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
To put it concretely: every heist movie has its techie guy. Every Bohemian romance has its tortured artist. Every business drama has its self-made billionaire. These people are not geniuses. The fact that we can recognize the tropes they inhabit proves it. Richard Feynman was a genius. Leonardo DaVinci was a genius. Warren Buffett is a genius. And I submit that Hollywood could not produce a satisfactory depiction of them.
Why do I say that? Let’s look at a few examples.
Latrell Walker (DMX, Exit Wounds)
In Exit Wounds, Steven Seagal and DMX team up to take down a posse of crooked cops. Steven Seagal is a Detroit policeman who doesn’t play by the rules, but still gets results (stop me if you’ve heard this one before). He initially suspects DMX of being a crook, since he spots him snooping around some evidence locked up in an off-site facility. But it turns out DMX is actually running a sting on the corrupt badges. Clever of him.
How is DMX bankrolling this sting? Through his wildly successful Internet startup!
The guy’s a computer wiz. Started up a dot com out of Virginia called NineNinetyNine.com. “Anything you want under $9.99.” And he did great. Lucky bastard cashed out just before the bubble burst.
Even taking some of the ludicrous successes of the dot-com era for granted, how well would an e-commerce site that specialized in items costing $9.99 or lower do?
The BE operating system: lost in the Struggle.
- Nobody searches for “something that costs below ten dollars.” People search for books, or cheap CDs, or weird little gadgets for around the home. But nobody logs onto the Internet and decides, “I just need to spend $8.75 today” (the success of woot.com notwithstanding).
- Even as early as 2000, Amazon.com already owned a significant chunk of the online retail market, so DMX isn’t likely to have made a significant return on investment.
- Finally, it doesn’t take a computer wiz, or really any degree of computer savvy at all, to start up an online retail site. It takes a great deal of business acumen and supply-chain management. You’ve got to control inventory, market yourself aggressively and keep an eye on competitors. DMX certainly displays many of these skills in the course of Exit Wounds; you can’t pass yourself off as a drug dealer to corrupt Detroit cops on instinct alone. But none of this lends credence to his being a world-class hacker.
Ultimately, DMX’s character Latrell Walker is not a genius because his get-rich scheme – NineNinetyNine.com – is a combination of luck and good branding. Nowhere in his business plan do we see the breakthroughs that characterized the tech bubble’s few successes, like Amazon’s long-tail marketing or Dell’s just-in-time inventory and negative cash-conversion cycle. His business is simultaneously too picayune and too outlandish to be considered genius.
Montgomery Scott (Simon Pegg, Star Trek)
Starfleet Engineer Montgomery Scott has been assigned to an uninhabited rock, somewhere near Vulcan, as punishment for testing out his theory of transwarp beaming:
Had a little debate with my instructor on relativistic physics and how it pertains to subspace travel. He seemed to think that the range of transporting something like a… like a grapefruit was limited to about 100 miles. I told him that I could not only beam a grapefruit from one planet to the adjacent planet in the same system – which is easy, by the way – I could do it with a life form. So, I tested it out on Admiral Archer’s prized beagle.
So apparently he doesn’t have all the kinks worked out.
For the three people who read this site who aren’t familiar with Star Trek, a short recap: starships get from one end of the galaxy to the other by warping, which lets them exceed the speed of light. Starships send people from aboard a ship to a planet’s surface, or to another ship, by beaming: breaking them down into a glittering field of light and reassembling them at the intended target. Transwarp beaming, then, would be a means to beam someone aboard a vessel that is already in warp speed. Not only would this revolutionize space travel, it’s essential for the plot, as Kirk needs to reunite with the Enterprise.
I trust this man with my molecular structure at supraluminal speeds.
Fortunately, Scott gets a hand from Spock – who comes from a future in which Scott has already discovered the secret of transwarp beaming. Spock copies out the last bits of the transwarp beaming equation. Scott looks at the equation in awe. “Imagine that! Never occurred to me to think of space as the part that’s moving.” He finishes his calculations and beams Kirk and himself aboard the Enterprise (though not before some slapstick ensues).
Is this an example of genius? It’s certainly revolutionary, even by the sci-fi standards of Star Trek. Sadly, though, we must conclude that it’s not for the following reasons:
- The insight isn’t technically Scott’s – it’s Spock’s. Spock tells Scott how to solve the equation that he started working on. Of course, Spock only knows this equation because he comes from a future in which Scott solved it long ago. So, in one of those confusing temporal headaches that plagues every time-travel story, the breakthrough belongs to neither of them.
- “Never occurred to me to think of space as the part that’s moving.” Really? Isn’t that fairly standard relativity theory: that motion can only be described in relation to another object? That technically everything’s moving, even the parts that look like they’re hanging there?
- How many really transcendental breakthroughs hinge on one equation, or even a few lines of equations? If I went back to the Bern patent office in 1904 and wrote e=mc2 in front of a young Albert Einstein, would he look at it and say, “Of course”? Or would the concept of mass-energy equivalence be meaningless to him until he’d done the theoretical work necessary to understand the relativistic mass of objects approaching the speed of light? And if he’d already done all that theoretical work, the equation would be superfluous. Few acts of real genius hinge on formatting.
- But ultimately, and most importantly, Star Trek takes place in a setting where ships can travel faster than the speed of light, teleport living beings from orbit to atmosphere and create black holes in the centers of planets. Even if such things are possible, the theories required to make them work are so far beyond us that we cannot yet comprehend them. “Transwarp beaming” is a breakthrough in Star Trek only because the characters all call it a breakthrough. If we the audience had been told, “Oh, we’ll simply beam Kirk aboard the Enterprise using transwarp beaming,” we would have no grounds to be shocked. Everything in Star Trek is already handwaved for the sake of plot; calling this latest act of handwaving “genius” does not make it so.
In the world of miracles that Star Trek already inhabits, Engineer Scott’s miracle of transwarp beaming does not quite count as genius.
Yes, fine, you’re saying. But these are very artificial examples of “genius.” What if a movie tackled a type of genius we all recognized?
Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson, Stranger than Fiction)
Kay Eiffel is a reclusive novelist. Critically acclaimed and wildly successful, she has been working on her most recent book for several years. Her publishing company sends her an assistant – played with a beautifully straight-faced delivery by Queen Latifah – to prod her into writing more. So, eventually, she begins writing about a boring man named Harold Crick.
Harold, however, is a real human being. As Eiffel writes, Harold hears her narrating in his head. What Eiffel writes happens to Harold out in the street. And Harold has no idea what’s going on.
Stranger Than Fiction is entertaining enough up to the Ghost Ship Moment where Harold realizes he’s a character in a novel. But after he realizes he’s the subject of a manuscript by world-famous writer Kay Eiffel, the audience has to start asking some serious questions. Such as: why exactly is Kay Eiffel so famous?
Here’s a sample of Eiffel’s writing:
This is a story about a man named Harold Crick and his wristwatch. Harold Crick was a man of infinite numbers, endless calculations, and remarkably few words. And his wristwatch said even less. Every weekday, for twelve years, Harold would brush each of his thirty-two teeth seventy-six times. Thirty-eight times back and forth, thirty-eight times up and down. Every weekday, for twelve years, Harold would tie his tie in a single Windsor knot instead of the double, thereby saving up to forty-three seconds. His wristwatch thought the single Windsor made his neck look fat, but said nothing.
Not bad, but not as clever as it’s trying to be.
Unfortunately, this guitar said, “When I get back to Georgia, that woman gonna feel my pain.” This one said something along the lines of, ‘Why yes, these pants are lycra.” These said, “I’m very sensitive, very caring, and I have absolutely no idea how to play the guitar.”
Not very clever either, and there’s no excuse here.
Little did he know that this simple seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death.
That’s just bad. There’s foreshadowing and then there’s Dan Browning. To say nothing of the sloppy construction of “simple seemingly innocuous” – using three words where one would do.
Most writing workshops save the Cultivating Eccentricities seminar for the last day.
Stylistic complaints aside, the substance of Kay Eiffel’s novels merits little more praise. “Every book I’ve ever written ends with someone dying,” Eiffel laments to her assistant Penny. Really? Every single one? That’s gone from a commentary on the postmodern world to just being trite. And while I won’t spoil the plot of Stranger Than Fiction by saying how the novel Eiffel’s writing ends – the novel that may kill Harold Crick – I will say its theme leaves a saccharine aftertaste: that strangers’ lives are connected by dozens of implausible coincidences, and isn’t it fascinating when you think about it, etc.
As a critically acclaimed recluse, Emma Thompson’s character is clearly meant to evoke novelists like Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger. If any writers from the Twentieth Century have claims to being geniuses, they are near the top of that list. Unfortunately, the literary stylings of Kay Eiffel show neither the trenchant wit of Pynchon, nor the salient insight of Salinger. It’s not transcendent enough, or human enough, to be literary genius.
John Nash (Russell Crowe, A Beautiful Mind)
So perhaps Hollywood can’t invent a genius. But can the movies depict a real one?
A Beautiful Mind is the Ron Howard weeper depicting the life of the brilliant and schizophrenic mathematician John Nash. An ingenious analyst, Nash was recommended to graduate school at Princeton with a one sentence letter from his adviser at Carnegie Mellon: “This man is a genius.” Not only did he excel in abstract math – creating a theory in which Riemann manifolds could be depicted in “real” Euclidean space – but he did important work in cryptography and economics as well.
But it was Nash’s work in game theory that won him the Nobel Prize. Game theory studies the outcomes of limited scenarios between strategic decision-makers. John Nash grew famous by writing a thesis at Princeton proposing a documentable equilibrium in any game involving two or more players. Suppose we have two players, Albert and Betty. If Albert has made the best decision available to him, taking into account Betty’s decision, and Betty has made the best decision she can, taking into account Albert’s, then Albert and Betty are said to be in a Nash equilibrium. What made this revolutionary, and worthy of getting named after him, is that Nash did the math to prove it.
Write on a blackboard? Any fool can do that!
A Nash equilibrium is interesting because it does not always result in the best possible outcome. Rather, a Nash equilibrium always results in a stable outcome – an outcome that no one has any reason to later change.
Here’s a good example of a Nash equilibrium:
Wrather, Fenzel and Perich are sitting around the apartment, wondering what to eat. Perich suggests pizza, but Fenzel is more interested in subs. The economics of ordering a pizza are such that it really only makes sense to get one if all three of us want one. Even if I sway Wrather to my side, that’s still more than either of us would be willing to pay. Thus, we all end up getting subs.
Got it? Now here’s a bad example of a Nash equilibrium:
If we all go for the blonde and block each other, not a single one of us is going to get her. So then we go for her friends, but they will all give us the cold shoulder because no one likes to be second choice. But what if none of us goes for the blonde? We won’t get in each other’s way and we won’t insult the other girls. It’s the only way to win. It’s the only way we all get laid.
Why is that not a Nash equilibrium? Because let’s say everyone agrees that, yes, we should go after the blonde’s friends. Now I have every incentive to go after the blonde, since no one else is. Of course, everyone else is probably thinking the same thing, so they all make the same decision. We have not reached a stable outcome – this is not equilibrium.
Where did that second example come from? A line of dialogue from A Beautiful Mind, of course.
Akiva Goldsman’s adaptation of A Beautiful Mind drew lots of criticism for glossing over Nash’s homosexuality, supposed anti-Semitism, and the particular details of his schizophrenia. But only a few academics cared about its inaccuracies in depicting game theory. John Nash may come off as a tortured and confused soul, but his real genius gets short shrift.
Four points don’t make a curve, but I hope my examples illustrate a trend. Hollywood has a hard time capturing the essence of real genius.
Why is that?
One theory: as mentioned above, genius is a hard thing to quantify. The creations of genius – the “Mona Lisa,” the general theory of relativity, Berkshire Hathaway – seem obvious in retrospect, but still esoteric and inaccessible. Creating not only a fictional work of genius, but the genius who created it, may be beyond the ability of art to display. Perhaps it succeeds only when the works of genius are kept off screen (e.g., Sean Connery’s novel in Finding Forrester, which we never actually read).
Another, more cynical theory: if Hollywood screenwriters were geniuses, they wouldn’t be writing films. This is a bit harsh, as geniuses get work in Hollywood all the time: Hitchcock, Goldman, Lean, Woo-ping, and the like. But if someone could compose an opus for Mr. Holland truly deserving of the name, they wouldn’t be composing for film – they’d be arranging for prestigious symphonies. Ditto breakthrough economics; ditto critically acclaimed novels.
Whichever is the case, Hollywood consistently fumbles the ball on this issue. Great movies can inspire us to heroism or charity or great feats of creativity. But genius remains that untouchable spirit, flickering by too fast to capture at 24 frames per second.
