Expelled opened last Friday. On Saturday Friendly Atheist linked to a piece by Nikki Finke in the LA Weekly, quoting this passage approvingly:
Playing in 1,052 theaters, the pic distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures fell over the weekend from 8th to 10th place after earning $1.2M Friday and $989K Saturday for a $2.9M weekend. But the per screen average for Friday was a low $1,145 and for Saturday $940 (and $2,830 for the entire weekend), showing there wasn't much pent-up demand for the film despite an aggressive publicity campaign on right-wing media. So much for the conservative argument that people would flock to films not representing the “agenda of liberal Hollywood”.
Yesterday, Chris Mooney called Expelled “a box office success,” and Greg Laden quickly followed up with a post in which he suggested that Chris “every day seems to transmogrify more and more into a creationist apologist.”.
Time out!
I'll put my two cents in on how well Expelled has done in just a moment, but let me start by making this clear. Whether or not you agree with Chris' analysis of Expelled, Chris Mooney is not a closet creationist..I've only met Chris a couple of times,1 but it's clear to me that what he's trying to do is to suggest a different strategy for combating creationism than what we've tried in the past. He's trying to suggest that the way we've tried to do it in the past hasn't been very successful.2 Reasonable people could disagree with the strategies he suggests, but no one should doubt that he is deeply committed to ensuring that evolution is taught as the foundational principle of modern biology.
Flock of Dodos makes essentially the same point that Chris is trying to make. We evolutionists are lousy communicators. Here's how Randy Olson, the filmmaker who shot Flock of Dodos, characterizes our response to Expelled:
To counter the blockbuster power of “Expelled,” the National Science Foundation, NAS and AAAS are organizing a panel discussion about putting together a committee to look into the possibility of creating a brochure that tells the public how to make a website for a petition that says evolution is fun.That should probably take care of the problem.3
So there you have it. Two people whose profession it is to communicate with the general public, Chris Mooney (a journalist) and Randy Olson (a filmmaker), and they agree that Expelled is a success, or even a blockbuster. And look at how the paragraph containig the earlier quote from Nikki Finke began:
The only other newcomer in the Top 10 was conservative commentator Ben Stein's documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed which makes the intelligent design argument.
Now opening in the top 10 may not make it a blockbuster, like Passion of Christ, but opening in the top 10 ain't small beans. It's already shown in more theaters than An Inconvenient Truth, and it's the 8th ranked political documentary of all time (statistics from boxofficemojo.com).
Houston, we have a problem. We need to remind everyone how hypocritical the producers of Expelled really are, what a pathetic excuse for a scientific theory intelligent design creationism is, and how vital an understanding of evolution is to human health and well-being.
1I doubt that he remembers me. We met at annual meetings of the American Institute of Biological Sciences in 2006 and 2007.
2We've been fighting this battle for almost 150 years. If we had a successful strategy for fighting it, we would have won long ago.
3I trust that you recognize sarcasm when you see it.
OK, this is my second time trying to leave a comment here ... things went badly last time ...
Here's what you need to do. Read the last paragraph of your post. You are absolutely correct in what you say here. Don't you think that word should get around? About the hypocrisy of Expelled?
I'm not complaining to Chris about his view of Expelled's success. That is the tail end of a conversation in which he is obnoxiously thumbing his nose at his detractors, and thus earning their ire. The problem goes back farther in time when he told me, PZ myers, you, everyone out there blogging about how Expelled! is a fraud that we needed to shut up.
I guess you didn't hear him tell you to shut up. Or maybe you'd be pissed at him too.
The hypocrisy I'm referring to is exemplified by P.Z.'s expulsion from the showing at Mall of America. They claim to be interested in "teaching the controversy" or "widening the debate" when all they're really interested in is pushing their point of view into science classrooms where it doesn't belong. Similarly, Judge Jones recognized a couple of years ago that intelligent design creationism is a pathetic excuse for a scientific theory and a thinly-veiled religious doctrine. Fine. I'll bet that you, Chris, and I all agree on those points. The question is "What do we do about it?" That's what I'm struggling with.
I'm not convinced that massive outcry from the scientific community about what a pile of s**t Expelled is helps us for several reasons. (a) It's like negative advertising in a political campaing. It's at least as likely to turn people off as to convince them. (b) The entire premise of Expelled, as I understand it (I haven't seen it), is that the scientific establishment is beating up on poor defenseless creationists. What better way for them to make the point than to generate massive protests from the scientific community. (c) I'm a nerdy scientist, not a communications professional. Chris and Randy Olson are professionals. When they tell me that Expelled is a success and we're doing a lousy job of responding, I tend to listen to their advice on how to respond -- just as I listen to the advice of a geophysicist on how to interpret new findings in plate tectonics.
So that's what I'm struggling with. Some kind of response is clearly needed, but I don't know what kind of response that is. What I do know is that we're more likely to find it by working together than by pointing fingers at one another.