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I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, The Origin of Speciousness Edition.

This is also the daily podcast from slate.com for Wednesday, January 27th, 2010.

On today's program, Creation, the new film about Charles Darwin and the creation of

on the origin of species, liberal outrage and the airwaves, and finally, the New York Times

behind a paywall.

Will it survive there?

Joining me today is Dana Stevens.

Hey, Dana.

Stephen?

And our very special guest, Mike Peska, NPR reporter, and of course, a co-panelist on Hang Up and Listen, our sister-slash-brother podcast. Mike, welcome. Hey. It's great to have you here. I'm glad to be here. Dana, you have not reviewed the movie creation. You're not, I take it going to review it. No. But let me just quickly say it tells the story of Charles Darwin living with and coping with the revelation that the universe is essentially atheistical and that all species evolved by a process of natural selection.

And I'm just very curious what you made of the movie.

We saw it together yesterday.

And I just kind of want a crude thumbs up, thumbs down from you first. Yeah, we didn't get much of a chance to discuss it afterwards as we were both going our separate ways. I think that you liked it more than I did. I felt that this movie, sadly, because Darwin had such a fascinating life, and this is a great period to put in a biopic. But I thought it fell victim to every one of the biopic pitfalls,

that, for example, Bright Star, the movie about John Keats, we talked about earlier last year, somehow managed to avoid. In fact, I felt that the Darwin of this movie was more the stereotyped romantic poet than the John Keats of Bright Star. I don't know. What about you, Mike? Yeah, I thought that it had the elements of a period piece and a biopic, but also a real kind of lifetime psychological weepy because the center of the movie was, I mean, if there was a theme to the movie, it was in order to write this great book, he first has to grieve over the loss of his daughter.

And that's kind of hard to put on the screen.

I mean, so the most obvious thing to do to put that on the screen is you invent the daughter of his daughter. And that's kind of hard to put on the screen. I mean, so the most

obvious thing to do to put that on the screen is you invent the daughter as a ghost. That's exactly what they did, which is weird since Paul Bettney played the ghost or the figment of the imagination in a beautiful mind. Yeah, it was a switcheroo from the beautiful mind completely. And so you'd think that, I guess everyone who saw a beautiful mind said, well, I don't know, maybe in retrospect, it seems to be one of those movies that people make fun of, but it did win the Academy Awards, so some people must have liked it. And afterwards, everyone said, although the part with the figment of the imagination didn't really work. And I guess the one guy who didn't say that was Paul Bettney, who said, yeah, we need to create a figment of my imagination, and then I'll start wailing, and there'll be so many scenes of my anguish, and then through my anguish I'll be able to create the origin of species or on the origin of species. Well, it's very hard to dramatize. It's almost as if the great Victorian thinker they were really attributing or doing paying tribute to in this movie was Sigmund Freud and not Charles Darwin, right? I mean, it's such a psychodrama, the moment that he has to literally return to the scene, the place that his daughter died. It is true that Darwin's daughter died at the age of 10 and that it was this horrible life-changing event for him and that he was actually, for the time, a father who was very close to his children. But the way that that gets turned into the, you know, the classic, as you say, Mike, lifetime psychodrama, I thought it did a real disservice to the intellectual work of creating that book. Let me, in my own defense, say that I did think that there were there was, there were at least two or three too many shots of Paul Bettany's quaking, you know, palsied hands, you know, hovering over the manuscript and, you know, will he be able to bring it to...

Oh, the shaking hands. Come on. There was a couple moments that I could almost hear the director in the background saying, shake your hands more, shake your hands more. As you grab the quill pen.

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