Barbara Creed,
Darwin’s Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema.
Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-522-85709-2
AU$49.99
232pp
(Review copy supplied by Melbourne University Press)

In the century and a half since the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, interpretations of Darwin’s ideas have informed, shaped, and, in some cases, tragically distorted thought about issues ranging from physics to economics to social policy. “In its imaginative consequences for science, literature, society, and feeling,” writes Gillian Beer in her seminal Darwin’s Plots (2000), “The Origin of Species is one of the most extraordinary examples of a work which included more than the maker of it at the time knew, despite all that he did know.” (p. 2) Beer extends this assessment of the cross-disciplinary robustness and productivity of Darwin’s theories by tracing the influence of Darwinian thought on Victorian literature.

Following Beer’s cue in her similarly-titled Darwin’s Screens, Barbara Creed constructs accounts of what she calls “evolutionary aesthetics” and “Darwinian narratives.” In studies of genres including science fiction, horror, and the musical, and of plot elements such as animal characters, femmes fatales, and Pacific-island settings, Creed develops an analysis of the effects of Darwinian thought on cinema. She thereby illustrates the different ways in which the cinema has engaged, and reengaged, with Darwinian narratives in response to changes in popular perceptions of evolution and evolutionary thought.

Particularly strong is Creed’s connection of Darwinism to the development of the uncanny as a concept in psychology, literature, and film. By rejecting “the dominant view of the human body as representing a unified, idealised form,” writes Creed:

Darwin saw the body as subject to change and transformation over time. The body pointed to its own origin in a more primitive world…Fin de siècle culture was both horrified and fascinated by the controversial aspects of Darwin’s theory of evolution, particularly by the possibility of reversion…Late Victorian society became obsessed with the possibility of degeneration. (21)

This perceived threat of degeneration, Creed argues, is directly related to the popularity of novels such as Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyl and Mr Hyde, and of their film adaptations. This was a formative moment in the young medium of film, and it has had a profound effect on the history of film genre.

Throughout Darwin’s Screens, Creed traces narrative and stylistic developments across time and across media, an approach that yields valuable insights both into the dissemination of popular thought about evolution and into issues of medium specificity. In a late chapter, she uses the three major screen versions of King Kong(USA, 1933; USA, 1976; USA/New Zealand/Germany, 2005) to illustrate ways in which popular thought about the relationships between humans and animals has changed and, in particular, how animals have been afforded more human-like consideration, moving toward a “unification of human and ape through community and mutual respect.” (192)

The relationship between sexual selection and cinema provides another running thread throughout the book. Creed argues that “The cinema, with its power to select and highlight specific images and parts of the human face and form, is perfectly suited to the representation of the erotic moments essential to sexual seduction.” (121) This line of argument could use further clarification; Creed seems to alternate, at points, between discussing the influence of sexual selection, the natural process, and discussing the influence of sexual selection, the Darwinian idea, without making an explicit distinction between the two. Both approaches offer compelling possibilities; Darwin’s Screens, for the most part, is oriented toward the latter.

A slightly earlier passage can help to illuminate this contrast:

More than any other contemporary art form, the cinema, with its power to transform an image into a spectacle, has responded to Darwin’s sexualisation of beauty in order to demonstrate what it is about beauty that is located outside the realms of the ideal and the spiritual…The power of the visual image and special-effects technologies…have combined with the cult of stardom to present beauty as erotic, alluring, and captivating, leading to a sexualisation of beauty. (111)

This passage posits film as a medium both especially suited to evolutionary aesthetics and (perhaps as a consequence) especially likely to respond to, reproduce, and magnify popular ideas about the role of sex in our aesthetic sensibilities. The passage illustrates the productivity of Creed’s approach of treating Darwin’s theory as a lens through which to read film form, even as it points to a potentially productive approach largely outside of the scope Darwin’s Screens.

If Darwin’s theories of aesthetics, beauty, and sexual selection are taken to be valid, they represent not only a Victorian-era reorientation of perspective, but an insight that applies, retrospectively, to humankind’s sexual behaviors, adornments, and aesthetic sensibilities prior to Darwin’s formulation of his theories. What we have in Darwinism (and especially in The Descent of Man, cited extensively by Creed), then, is not only a persuasive and influential thematization of the animal nature of humans, but also a powerful tool for understanding the formal aspects of media. Creed has written an excellent account of Darwinian narratives and of the aestheticization of evolution-oriented themes. Here’s hoping that she and other scholars continue this line of analysis, while also exploring the other side of the coin: the aesthetic evolution of the formal aspects of cinema. These two fields of inquiry, one expects, would form a productive mutualism. In their coevolution, we might hope to begin to divine the entangled relationships between our bodies, our minds, and our media.

Daniel Reynolds,
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

References

Gillian Beer. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 3rd ed. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Darwin, Charles, and James T. Costa. The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of The First Edition of On The Origin of Species. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.
Darwin, Charles, Adrian J. Desmond, and James R. Moore. The Descent of Man, and Selection In Relation to Sex, Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2004.

Created on: Monday, 23 August 2010