A TRIUMPH OF IGNORANCE

Bible Belters and their red state ilk don’t often infiltrate America’s cosmopolitan coast (the occasional befuddling health care reform protests aside). The righteous and religious have Branson and Dollywood; Hollywood and New York remain the destinations of the decadent and the depraved. The denizens of these opposing poles have little to do with each other, except for within the disappointing realm of politics.

That’s what makes the dispute surrounding “Creation”, a film about the life of Charles Darwin (in British cinemas on September 25th), so surprising. The biopic, which stars Paul Bettany as Darwin and Jennifer Connelly as his wife Emma, has yet to find an American distributor. This may have something to do with the fact that only 14% of Americans polled by Gallup in 2008 agreed that “man evolved over millions of years” (up from 9% in 1982, at least). The BBC film has unleashed a torrent of criticism from some American Christian websites, which evidently wield some power. According to a story in the Telegraph:

Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as "a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder". His "half-baked theory" directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering", the site stated.

The Christian chorus does include some moderate voices, but it seems that scientific ignorance is now dictating what makes it to the country’s cinemas. One can only hope that this is a fleeting industry miscalculation, and that an American film distributor will soon come to its senses.

"Creation", in British cinemas on September 25th

~ CORBIN HIAR

Picture credit: Anderson Mancini (via Flickr)