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Stony ground
When you start watching a film, there are some characters you can confidently predict will die. A minor character joining two major characters for an action sequence? Dead to illustrate the stakes. Wise old mentor in an epic fantasy? Sure to die at the end of act two.
Feedback knows these cliches and more, but it hadn’t previously occurred to us to consider geologists as being at risk. Nevertheless, it turns out they have a life expectancy only marginally better than characters played by Sean Bean.
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We learned this from a delightful analysis in Geology Today. Geologist Erik Sturkell at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and his colleagues have amused themselves over the past decade or so by compiling examples of geologists in films: who are they, how are they portrayed and what tends to happen to them?
Sturkell’s team has now documented “141 movies, spanning the period 1919–2023 and starring 202 geologists”. It turns out geologists mostly appear in films centred on adventure, drama, action and science fiction. “Geologist movies are rarely comedic,” write the researchers. Only 11 per cent of movie geologists are female, though this has apparently picked up a bit since the 1990s. Furthermore, cinematic geologists are, if not consistently heroic, “at least not guilty of any professional misconduct”.
And yet they are frequently rubbed out. “Geologists die at an alarming rate in the movies, often very early on,” the authors write. Depending on the decade, the death rate varies between 31.6 and 35.7 per cent. Of the 202 geologists, 69 die, 30 by murder. The authors cite the 1967 film The Money Jungle, which Feedback hasn’t seen, but which involves multiple oil companies scheming for control of a rich field. During this unseemly squabble, five geologists are murdered, mostly by creative means, “such as being electrocuted by a golf cart, poisoned when taking medicine, gassed by the fireplace and killed when his toy train explodes”. This, the authors note, is “the worst serial slaughter of geologists in any movie”.
Across the years, a further 12 geologists died of “work related” causes, such as “being hit by a volcanic bomb, falling into a crater or an opening fault, drowning in quicksand or lahar, and incineration in an oil pit”. Equally common are deaths involving extraterrestrials, such as the geologist in Prometheus who is assimilated by aliens and “consequently killed by former colleagues”.
This is all fascinating, but Feedback finds ourselves consumed by follow-up questions. What are the cinematic death rates for other branches of science? We can’t help but suspect that palaeontologists must be absolutely getting it in the neck, because they only show up in stories where extinct creatures come back to life and start eating people. On the other hand, movie solid-state physicists are probably having a pretty chill time.
Can anyone point us to a dataset?
Me, me, me
Feedback is alarmed to learn that the lyrics of pop music have become significantly more self-centred over the past few decades.
This is true in the US and Germany, according to a study in PLoS One, which looked at the 10 most popular songs each year from 1970 to 2019. The analysis revealed an increase in the use of first-person singular words like “I”, “me” and “mine”, compared with first-person plural words like “we” and “ours”. Curiously, this didn’t occur in Japan and Hong Kong, which the study describes as “more collectivist”.
The paper treats this in near-apocalyptic terms, noting that “contemporary societies are increasingly self-focused, as reflected in levels of greed, narcissism, and social disconnection”.
Feedback certainly isn’t going to mount a “greed is good” defence, but we do have questions. For starters, how much of the trend is driven by the highly entrepreneurial US, as opposed to the more moderately capitalistic Germany? Second, how much of the increase in “me” words can be explained by the rise of solo artists and the total collapse of bands? Do K-pop groups – at this point basically the only remaining successful bands – also exhibit this egotistical trend?
She’ll be back
Last month, New Scientist reviewed the book We Are Not Machines: The fight for the future of work, which argues that artificial intelligence is not exactly coming for our jobs, but rather that our jobs are being contorted to fit AI (20 June). The result is that jobs that were once interesting are becoming boring and companies’ products and services are getting worse.
Readers Ian Williams and Erik Foxcroft both got in touch to flag the spooky near-coincidence that the book’s author, a journalist at the Financial Times, is named Sarah O’Connor. “O, how close to perfection,” says Erik.
Having a name that is almost but not quite that of the lead human character in The Terminator has previously caused ripples. In 2015, O’Connor was the FT‘s employment correspondent and tweeted: “A robot has killed a worker in a VW plant in Germany.” The combination of seeming cyborg-murderer news and O’Connor’s name went viral. The irony was that she had never seen the film and didn’t get the reference. Feedback assumes she has since watched it, and hopes she concluded her book with a three-word promise of a sequel.
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