What’s so Wrong with Rocket Science?
The Trap of Easy Answers — for Filmmakers and Anyone Else
Of all human activities, ‘rocket science’ surely takes the biscuit for the most casually and regularly dismissed endeavor. There you are, faced with some new activity, challenge, skill to be gleaned, task to be performed, perhaps knitting your brow at the daunting prospect, or you’re involved in a discussion about some issue you reflect might prove complex, nuanced, deserving of painstaking research and analysis, and what do you hear from your interlocutor…?
That fateful mantra, ‘It’s not rocket science’, as common in everyday speech as SUVs on the 405 freeway between Sunset and Wilshire, is meant, of course, as reassurance. ‘Don’t worry yourself too much! It’s easy! You don’t need to think. Don’t need to educate yourself. Don’t need to be one of those egghead kids you and your pals mocked at school. Etc., etc., etc.…
But what if it is ‘rocket science’ or more likely, some other daunting enterprise suggested by the metaphor? What are you supposed to do? Give up? Do something else? Something that isn’t?
Poor rocket scientists! Deposit a man on the moon, shoot a helicopter over to Mars, direct a probe to the far reaches of the solar system and beyond, and you think they’d be hailed as heroes. No such luck! They find themselves pariahs, banished to the far reaches of the social universe, just as their lonely module spins around Jupiter to commence the icy voyage to Alpha Centauri, or wherever its destiny has determined… Their fellow earthlings meanwhile — those of us absent from the jet propulsion lab in Pasadena — happily ground ourselves in the foothills of our neighborhood — not even the foothills but the declivities — of easiness.
Reject complexity, challenge, learning, intellectual exertion, and we can all band together, safe from those brainboxes and their brainy pursuits. Stick with what’s easy to understand and there’s no reason to feel stupid when confronted by what isn’t. Odd, isn’t it, that we talk about the work ethic, another SUV on the freeway of daily discourse (although what has work to do with ethics?) but we never speak of a thought ethic (the two are perhaps more compatible). Banish the thought — of thought! Critical thought especially…
And while rocket science is dismissed by the idiom parrots, the concept of science itself is rejected by many. The anti-vaxxers, anti-evolutionists, climate deniers, covid deniers, the populists who go for the simplistic, for the sensational conspiracies, for the eschewal of evidence and analysis. Sadly, this populism isn’t limited to the aforesaid groups. It’s evident in general day to day conversation. In the populism of anti-intellectualism, of conformism to common thinking, of the dumbed-downness that masquerades as cool anti-elitism.
Reductivism. So seductive. It’s all about the three-act structure. All about rising tension. All about badass. You can’t have a passive protagonist (no more Hamlet). Show don’t tell. Cut to the chase (no — cut to the suspense). It’s not rocket science! You need go no further: know these simplistic absolutes and you have the recipe for success. Contradiction, complexity, doubt, the questions that brook no answer, innovation, invention, subversion, mischief, heart, intuition, instinct, voice — trouble yourself not with such irritating trifles. Too uncertain. Too confusing. The lines have been laid down. Err from them at your peril!
I beg to differ.
I’ve bever heard a filmmaker ask as many questions in pre-production and production as Martin Scorsese. The science, and art, of directing is for him rocket each day. How many ways are there of shooting something? Camera placement, angle, framing? How many ways of staging a scene? What are they? What of the nuances of performance, the permutations of shot selection? What will cut and what won’t? The exploration never ends…
If you want to be a filmmaker — and by that I mean a screenwriter, a director, a cinematographer, production designer, costume designer, editor, sound designer, composer, producer then you might consider cleaving to rocket science rather than tossing it aside. Treasure the endless possibilities of story, storytelling, the language of the moving image and its practical aesthetics that facilitate transporting emotion, thought, and visceral sensation into the hearts and minds of the audience.
Explore, question, experiment, transgress, awaken, discover. Make mistakes and learn from them. Watch films from cultures not your own and see other approaches to forming stories and making their telling work.
Understand the science of the rocket you are constructing, climb board, hold your breath — and take off…
Peter Markham June 2021
Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)
