According to the Sydney Morning Herald, a new film about Charles Darwin has failed to find a distribution deal in the US. The article suggests that this is because Darwin’s work is still a rather contentious subject in the US. They quote the christian film review site MovieGuide describing Darwin as “a racist, a bigot and 1800’s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder” (although they don’t point out that the quotation is taken from a book review and was not written in reference to this film).
On Pharyngula, PZ Myers has a slightly different theory. He says that the US’s antipathy to evolution is only part of the story and suggests:
One reason it probably isn’t getting picked up is that it isn’t a blockbuster story — it’s a small film with a personal story. That’s not to say it’s a bad movie, but it’s not a Michael Bay noisemaker with car chases and explosions, or giant robots, or a remake of a 1970s cheesy TV show. That makes it a tougher sell.
Whilst I usually agree with PZ, I think he’s wrong here. It’s obvious that the film isn’t a blockbuster and I agree that the blockbusters are what the US (and, indeed, much of the rest of the world) audiences want to see. But films still win distribution deals if they’re not blockbusters. And I think that this film would have found a deal had it not been for the subject matter. Oh, and the title. I haven’t mentioned the title yet. And I think the title is a direct attempt by the film-makers to grab some publicity by annoying the American creationist movement.
The film is called Creation.
I mean, come on. Nothing could have been more calculated to garner publicity in the US. It’s not even an appropriate title for a film about Darwin. Darwin’s ideas say nothing at all about creation, they only cover the creation of new species of life. Darwin had nothing to say about how life originally came into existence.
There’s a common creationist misunderstanding about evolution. When they talk about “Darwinism” (as they like to call it) they are usually covering a far larger area of knowledge than the one that Darwin wrote about. Because they see Darwin’s work as an opposing theory creationism, they assume that it must cover the same ground as their nonsense. They therefore assume that “Darwinism” tries to explain the creation of the universe, the creation of the solar system, the creation of the Earth, the beginnings of life on Earth and the diversity of life found on Earth. And, of course, it doesn’t.
Obviously people who agree with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection will tend to also hold non-biblical views on the rest of the subjects in my list, Darwin’s work only ever covered the last item on the list. So to say that something you’re calling “Darwinism” addresses all of these subjects is nonsense. So to call a film about Darwin’s life and work “Creation” is equally nonsensical.
I don’t know if Darwin ever did any research into the earlier items on my list. I’ve certainly never read anything by him where he discusses the origin of either the universe or the Earth. But creationists like to bundle all of these topics together so that “Darwinism” can be seen as being in direct opposition to their fairy stories.
This new film sounds very interesting to me. It looks at how Darwin realised that his work explained the existence of so many different species on Earth without the need for divine intervention. It also examines how that knowledge effected his relationship with his deeply religious wife. I think that if more people in the US saw this film then it would help people to see that Darwin was a just a man doing his best to explain the natural world rather than the antichrist that creationist groups like to portray him as.
So it’s a shame that more people in the US won’t see this film. As I said before, I feel sure that the film-makers deliberately chose the title to court controversy. There’s no other explanation – the title makes no sense. It seems that their scheme has backfired on them. They might have gained some more publicity for the film (although notice that the original story I linked to was from Australia), but appears that very few people in the US will get the chance to see their film.