GELFAND’S WORLD-Long ago, a man named Poulos wrote a book about mathematical illiteracy, which he dubbed innumeracy, and he got a best seller out of it. About ten years ago, I wrote one of my first columns on innumeracy, but concentrating on how it had infected and infested journalism. It turned out that journalism majors and the people who ended up working at daily newspapers were seriously deficient in quantitative understanding. That part doesn't seem to have changed much, except that there are fewer and fewer daily newspapers, and those that continue to survive have fewer and fewer pages. The understanding of math certainly hasn't gotten any better.
Something a little different happened in broadcast television over the same period. We had a television show called Numb3rs, which featured a young fellow who was a math whiz at a thinly disguised Cal Tech. There were a few things that were distinctive about that show. First, the story line never denigrated math or those who practice it, and the show studiously avoided making its lead characters into nerds.
In fact, the male lead, aka Charlie, was apparently considered to be quite attractive to the opposite sex, and the female love interest who was eventually written into the show was herself portrayed as a brilliant mathematician who was also attractive.
The other thing that I began to notice about the show was that it never really made any attempt to communicate mathematical concepts to the audience. There was a stereotypical moment written into each episode in which Charlie would explain some concept to the non-mathematicians, who were typically law enforcement people. But the explanation was always done in pictorial form using some simple animation.
Still, Numb3rs at least maintained a level of respect for intellect, particularly as it was put to virtuous use.
More recently we have The Big Bang Theory, and now the newest in this canon, Scorpion. Superficially, The Big Bang Theory and Scorpion are different. TBBT is a comedy with lead characters who are parodies of intellectuals. Most of you know these characters by now, so there isn't much need to describe them in detail. To me, they look like the colorfully attired folks who used to hang around on Fairfax Blvd in the mid '60s and who called themselves freaks. Frank Zappas without musical ability.
Scorpion is a police drama which involves a group of high IQ people who have been recruited to solve the kinds of problems that regular law enforcement can't. Scorpion has a mechanical whiz kid (played by the Asian female), a human calculating machine played by the fat guy, a psychiatrist played by somebody who doesn't seem psychiatric at all, and an all purpose smart guy with an IQ near 200. And of course, at the start of the show, they're all broke and unable to make a living. It takes the FBI to get them in harness and put their powers to good use.
And finally there is Elementary, the takeoff on Sherlock Holmes, in which the lead character is a modern day Sherlock Holmes who has self-transplanted to New York City, and has his own Dr. Watson as sidekick, in this case played by an Asian female.
Ignoring Numb3rs for the moment, and thinking about TBBT, Scorpion, and Elementary, there are a couple of things that writers and audiences seem to be demanding of their hyper-intelligent television characters nowadays.
First of all, they are, to a man (or a woman), seriously unhappy people, with grave psychological problems, embarrassing mannerisms, and family issues. Mainly, they are all, to one extent or another, social failures. They are, to be precise, something to be laughed at.
The social failure issue is the central story line in TBBT and it is a developing story line in Scorpion. In Elementary, Sherlock is not only wracked with physical tics, he is obsessively manipulative and is chronically caught out in his psychological game playing.
But then there is the magical earth mother figure brought to life. (This is not the manic pixie dream girl, but is derived from the same stock.)
What is she and what does she do? What all three shows offer is a more or less psychologically normal female who brings the geeks and nerds back to some semblance of social reality, as needed. In two out of the three shows, the female lead is played as a blond beauty of great patience, but even greater timing. She is the one who is given the good lines during some dramatic moment in which it is shown that human empathy is superior to that boring old intelligence. Or in the case of Scorpion, at least a necessary element to go with intellectual brilliance.
And needless to say, the beautiful blond cannot be a high IQ presence like the geeks and nerds. She is there to provide a personification of the old writerly cliches that the teacher learns from his students, that intelligence is something that we can look down on, and that math is icky for normal people.
Elementary differs only in that the psychologically normal person is an Asian female rather than a blond female. Elementary is also a cut above the other two recent shows in that Sherlock has some rudimentary social skills and self awareness. He is a manipulative refugee from depression and addiction, but he is aware of his manipulative nature and revels in it.
When you look at these recent shows and contrast them with Numb3rs, you notice a big difference. The recent shows, sort of like a supermarket tabloid, provides the audience a message that apparently the writers think will resonate with current audiences. The message is that you don't have to be jealous of superior people, because their superiority (in brains in the tv shows, and in looks in the tabloids) is always balanced by inner misery, shame, and hidden failure. The TBBT character typically can't get a date, the Scorpion characters are more debt-ridden versions of TBBT characters, and Sherlock wears his troubles on his sleeve.
{module [862]}
{module [662]}
Supermarket tabloids play some of the same games, only they do it using real people as their targets, and the attacks are more vicious. Over the years, I've seen pretty nasty attacks on Prince Charles' second wife, and I've seen numerous covers that suggest that Queen Elizabeth is on her way out, even to the point of referring to her as the "dying queen." On days that the tabloids don't feature English royalty, they seem to revel in showing television and movie stars looking like normal people, pimply and overweight and wrinkled.
The story line seems to be the same, whether the victims are people with mathematical skills or television actresses. You as the average person can be reconciled with the fact that these pampered and lucky people are not to be respected or envied, but to be laughed at as less competent than ourselves. Admittedly they are less competent in social skills rather than solving partial differential equations, but apparently that's good enough for a half hour show.
It's all part of that vast undercurrent of anti-intellectual feeling that our leaders and politicians feed us. It's best illustrated in the elected Republican leadership, whose "war on science" has been discussed in many places. Funny how Hollywood and the Tea Party Republicans have managed to get together on this point, in spite of holding opposite views on politics.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
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CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 102
Pub: Dec 19, 2014
