Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema [Book Review]

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard has given us the simulacrum as one of the defining characteristics of (post)modern society. A simulacrum is a representation that has completely displaced the original it is meant to represent; it has come to seem much more real than its underlying reality (1). Christopher Frayling’s Mad, Bad and Dangerous?—according to the author, the first fulllength book to tackle the portrayal of the scientist in popular culture—neatly reflects Baudrillard’s conception. Frayling argues that the current popular image of science and the scientist is almost entirely defined by the cinema and other mass media. The power of cinematic images to penetrate the collective psyche, coupled with the fact that scientists have generally been unwilling and/or unable to compete with convincing narratives of their own (culture, like nature, abhors a vacuum), has brought us to the point where “the public’s view of science is shaped more by film and television and newspaper headlines than by anything else.