Science in TV/Film

Liza Johnson’s Return introduces something new to the familiar story of military service members adjusting to life back home after deployment.

Following a recognizable trajectory, the film opens with Kelli (Linda Cardinelli) returning to small-town Ohio following a year-long tour of duty in the Middle East as a National Guard Reservist. After a happy homecoming with family and friends, her once-normal life begins to unravel. She grows bored of the factory warehouse job that she held for 12 years before her deployment and abruptly quits: “This is a giant waste of time. I can’t do it anymore.” She struggles to reconnect with her husband Mike (Michael Shannon). Their marriage suffers and she begins to drink. Trouble with the law ensues.

I wish I had a sexy story to explain why I began to study romantic love. But my interest most likely stems from the fact that I am an identical twin. Long before I learned about the nature/nurture debate in college, I was busy examining how my sister and I were alike. This fascination then transformed into a life-long drive to understand human nature – all those traits we share as human beings. Among these predispositions is our penchant for romantic love. Indeed, I have come to believe that humanity has evolved three different brain systems for mating and reproduction: the sex drive, romantic love, and feelings of deep attachment. Sometimes these brain systems work in symphonic harmony to sweep us to the altar. Sometimes they work at cross purposes instead. You can lie in bed at night and swing from feelings of deep attachment for one person to feelings of intense romantic love for another. No wonder the ancient Greeks called romantic love the “madness of the gods.” 

On March 3, 2012, Dr. Seuss’s famed book The Lorax will come to the big screen. The trailer, released a couple weeks ago, gives a glimpse into the expanded adaptation. The film version of The Lorax follows Ted, a young boy on a mission to find a living tree for the girl he likes. It is a journey that leads him to the Once-ler (and some trouble with Thneedville’s villainous owner). The trailer opens up Thneedville to show residents pumping plastic bushes and driving large one-wheeled SUVs, not to mention the barren treeless landscape outside the town’s walls.

Short of destroying a whole world with planet-breaking weapons, the most action-filled moments in science fiction come when opposing spacecraft clash. As phasers fire and missiles launch, ships frantically maneuver, attack, or spectacularly explode. But sometimes the aim is to capture a spaceship intact, or if she has superior speed, to grab and hold her while battering down her defenses. That is the space version of a fighting technique from the days of wooden sailing ships, which is to pull an enemy ship close and hold her with grappling hooks and ropes, then board her, or pound her into wreckage at point-blank range.