Intellectual Oscars
It was nice to see the films about Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking doing so well at the Oscars, but I wonder if there would be anything like the same interest if the former had not been gay and the latter confined to a wheelchair. I yield to no one in my admiration of these two men, but it’s clear that the content of their minds was not the point. They are “human interest” stories, not stories about intellectuals. How many people, watching these two films, tried to find out about what these two geniuses actually thought? Perhaps they are the form in which people can accept intellectuals–they must be tormented or persecuted in some way. What about a film about an intellectual who did not have such problems? Or one that investigated the purely intellectual struggles of Turing and Hawking. Still, we should be grateful that these two great thinkers get the Hollywood treatment at all.