Mythcrafting in Cosmos

The new reboot/reimagining of Carl Sagan’s seminal TV series Cosmos premiered this past week, starring Neil deGrasse Tyson as our guide through time and space. If you’ve read my past entries on this blog you know I’m something of a Tyson fan – I find his approachable demeanor and down-to-Earth discussion of astrophysics to be engaging and enlightening. I’ve been looking forward to the premiere of Cosmos ever since I’d heard that it was being revived in 2012. Well, the wait is finally over, and boy howdy was it worth it. If you haven’t taken the opportunity to watch this show, I highly recommend it. Nothing else on television right now offers such a compelling exploration of the history of the universe, and I sorely hope Cosmos does well enough to be renewed by FOX when it finishes its first season run this summer.

I had already planned to write up my impressions of Cosmos before I even saw the episode, but as luck would have it I was handed a perfect opportunity to tie the show in to the themes of this blog. It is entirely unsurprising to me that Cosmos would employ some of the methods I’ve talked about to frame scientific research in such a way as to be interesting to laypeople, but some of the stylistic and narrative choices made by the show’s writers and producers will serve extremely well to highlight the way stories convey meaning that pure information wouldn’t – for better or for worse. The show opens with the introduction of “The Spaceship of the Imagination,” a conceit borrowed from the original Cosmos to make it conceptually easier to move our viewpoint around in space and time. The sleek, fluid form of the ship  is unlike most spaceship design utilized by humans, either in reality or fiction, and the lone figure of Tyson standing on the craft’s “bridge” frames him as a nearly omniscient observer, traveling the known universe with no more than a thought. I have to say, I can see the benefit of using this particular trope. It draws viewers in in a way that a simple voiceover or talking head never would.

If you’ve watched Cosmos already – and if you haven’t, you really should. I’m serious. Stop reading this and go watch it. Okay? I’ll wait. … Awesome, right? I told you – if you’ve watched it, and you’re reading this, you probably know precisely what segment I’m most interested in talking about. That would be the story of Giordano Bruno, the 16^th-century Italian monk who began teaching heretical views on the universe and was ultimately burned at the stake. Cosmos portrayed Bruno as a deep, soulful man who discovered the idea of an infinite universe and was evermore persecuted for it. Bruno is portrayed as sad but convicted, preaching his infinite universe in the face of ridicule from his peers and punishment from his superiors. What caught my eye in particular was the depiction of the Roman Catholic Inquisition. Their visual design was cartoonishly evil – deep, black eyes, horrid scowls, sharp lines, etc.

As I watched this segment, I couldn’t help but feel that there was something more to the story that wasn’t being talked about. On top of that, I got the distinct impression that the stylistic choices could ultimately do a disservice to Cosmos’ attempt to invite traditionally anti-science people to reconsider their position. As it turns out, Cosmos left out a fair bit of Bruno’s background. While the events in the story are basically accurate, I would have to say that Bruno himself was somewhat over-idealized into the perfect scientist martyr. In real life, Giordano Bruno was ill-tempered, argumentative, and arrogant. He also preached a number of things that ran deeply counter to the Roman Catholic Church – he was ultimately convicted of eight different heretical teachings, of which his infinite universe was only one, and far from the most important one.

So why did the writers and illustrators of Cosmos  take these artistic liberties with Bruno’s life? I think the answer is fairly apparent, actually – like the vast majority of mythmakers, their goal was not simply to tell a story, but to communicate a certain truth to their audience. In this case, I think their intended message was fairly anti-Church, as in “look at this poor faithful man who just wanted to show everyone the infinite universe. He’s getting unfairly murdered by the evil Church just for daring to teach something different about science!” And therein lies the problem. The writers of Cosmos were so eager to claim Bruno as a true martyr to the cause of Science that they end up glossing over some important details and simplifying the story considerably from its complicated origins in history. It’s very risky to do something like that, especially on a topic this touchy, because there are always going to be people who take it a certain way – the lesson you want to convey in your story may not be the same lesson that people hear. I can easily imagine a person of devout faith and on-the-fence about science coming away from watching Sunday’s Cosmos seeing scientists as underhanded opportunists just trying to sully the Church’s reputation. That’s not true, but the way they chose to tell their story tell does indeed reveal something about their agenda. 

The segment on Giordano Bruno was obviously written and illustrated with a specific political goal in mind. It wasn’t simply a conveyance of fact, it was a carefully-constructed Myth designed to impart a particular wisdom to its listeners. Whether that wisdom is accurate or not, it was woven into the tale – if the writers hadn’t wanted to make the point about the Church being anti-science, they wouldn’t have included it. There were many other scientific pioneers who contributed to our understanding of the universe in more direct and valuable ways than Giordano Bruno, but none of them were burned at the stake for doing so.

All this is not to say that the segment wasn’t wonderfully produced and visually stunning. But still, its important to look for the hidden narrative threads in the stories we hear. Stories, particularly mythic ones, are told for specific purposes, and as consumers of media it is ultimately up to us to filter these myths and discern the purposes in their telling. It is either greatly ironic or greatly appropriate that the best way to approach the series Cosmos is with a healthy dose of skepticism – which I would like to think is how a scientist like Carl Sagan would have wanted it.