Sure. But an engaging story with compelling narrative and complex characters can be diminished by jarring references to bad science. Stuff like “for the good of the species” claptrap in a plotline may be worthy of no more than an eye roll or it may reduce an important plot element to rubbish. For example:
If a reader or viewer is reduced to laughing out loud at what is supposed to be a dramatic development, it’s hard to argue that the story has not suffered, at least for those who laugh.
So true! I kind of wish Bald Eagles really did make the Red-tailed Hawk calls that every movie assigns to them.
In a sentimental moment, male character in movie reaches to a large bouquet, saying, “Angelica for my angel.” Four botanists in a row sit up straight! Angelica is usually not put in bouquets, but maybe this time? No, of course not. Four botanists sit back with annoyed sighs.
The movie was Legends of the Fall, where I never did understand because near the start the boy who will grow up to be the Brad Pitt character counted coup on a grizzly bear, an action so profoundly stupid that he was crossed off my list of potential romantic partners immediately. Result? I really couldn’t get into the last half of the movie.
Oh, of course! And there’s no way to tell which elements will take one viewer out but be overlooked by another. Or even the same viewer. I just don’t believe knowledge alone automatically takes one out of the narrative.
Side note: I’ve never watched that show anyway, so it was never going to take me out of the drama. That YouTube clip (and the “Enhance” jokes online) are the only familiarity I have with CSI.
Haha! I just thinking about that. Poor red-tailed hawks, not getting their due in entertainment and July 4th commercials for decades.
I totally feel you on this.
A while back, I read Ken Kesey’s masterpiece “Sometimes a Great Notion”. It’s set on the Oregon Coast somewhat in the vicinity of where I grew up. There are fantastic beautiful and lyrical descriptions of those coastal rivers and ravines and forests. But I found some of the descriptions centered on birds to be a little off. Basically the correct species but sometimes the behavior and habitat seemed a little wrong. He does much better than a lot of novels that barely even try to get things right. In any case, great book! But I know what you mean.
“Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy ( a seriously intense book!) really gets nature right as far as I can tell. I think McCarthy is obsessed with science and detail.
Authors have every right to fudge on the details, but they need to own up to their mistakes when they make them. Mixing up some species names or habitats or behavior in a setting description is no biggy. But when the book turns around a “fact” about nature, and when the author is confidently proclaiming “THIS IS TRUE!” , but it’s wrong… that ruins a novel or a movie.
Sometimes they have some (fictional) tech worth aspiring to, though. I’d love to have an ‘Angela-tron’ from the series ‘Bones’. Who wouldn’t want a 3D holographic display that can run complex simulations with barely any input? Or a computer that can magnify images without losing any resolution?
Botanists can have a field day with any movie or tv show. Southern California landscapes frequently fill in for any required landscape in a movie. Plants often give it away. I’ve also heard tha pacific chorus frog calls are frequently used in night scenes in movies regardless of where it is.
@andy71 so pacific chorus frog calls are the Wilhelm Scream of frog sounds? XD
Nick Lund was on the American Birding Association Podcast a while ago, and they discussed at length how a little knowledge of bird calls goes a long way toward ruining all media. I can attest that my slight study has given me the superpower of pointing out bird calls to any hapless audience member nearby/my family. Someone sent me a video diatribe about how the coronavirus was caused by 5G, and I appreciated the Northern Flickers audio-bombing the background.
https://blog.aba.org/2018/12/american-birding-podcast-birds-at-large-with-nick-lund.html
I envy you the time you didn’t waste. I tried watching an episode with my kids back when the show was new but gave up before it was half done. The script was written by somebody’s 12 year old nephew, I’ve seen better acting in highschool productions and the director was apparently drunk.
The Revenant is a great movie but I had a hard time getting past the images of flora of the supposed Upper Missouri River basin, especially since some scenes in the movie were shot in southern Argentina. A lot of movies and TV shows are being shot here in New Mexico where I live and are often set in other locations which I know don’t have the familiar (to me) flora you see on the screen.
Dancing with Wolves: Our hero finds himself alone in a ruined building in the Dakotas in 1800’s. To emphasize movie themes, that symbol of wildness and innocence the Eurasian Collared Dove lands on the window. (This dove was introduced to North America in the 1900’s, and isn’t really known as a wild bird anywhere except where introduced.)
Children lost in the wilds anywhere, at any season, whether there’s a lake nearby or not: eerie laughter of the Common Loon. Common Loons are strictly aquatic and their laughter is seasonal. (Movie directors luck out in that Great Horned Owls and close relatives live almost anywhere, so their spooky calls aren’t jarring.)
Any jungle scene anywhere: Kookaburra laughter. (Australian bird of savanna habitats)
TV programs Lonesome Dove, a western. Each time the people rode from the dry uplands into a riparian area, the change was emphasized with a tape of bird calls. This was actually very effective – at first – despite the whip-poo-will included in the tape. (It was daytime; whip-poor-wills call at night.) However, the season progressed and still the same tape played, during the time the real birds were molting and mostly quiet, into the autumn when most of the birds featured had migrated south. It got so I tensed up each time the riders headed toward a river.
I was enjoying a mystery series set in Alaska when the author went on and on about morels (edible fungi) growing out of a concealed human body, thus revealing it and starting the plot. Morels grow around dead TREES because they have a symbiotic relationship with tree roots. I gave up on the whole series after that.
I was enjoying the novel Gorky Park, set in Moscow and supposedly very realistic, but the author totally mis-described the dermestid beetles being used to clean the flesh off the mutilated human heads. I have used the beetles and the author could have seen them in many museums in the U.S. He lost credibility at that point. I mean, how could I believe he knew about a city he’d never visited if he couldn’t even get the dermestid right?
I recall watching some science fiction film or maybe an episode of Star Trek which has a scene at night on some alien planet … and, yes, there are Pacific Treefrogs calling. Those little frogs get around.
Like the entire chapter devoted to Ishmael insisting whales are fish in Moby Dick?
Invasive species? 
Do you have a recommendation for which to read first?
I love that part because it’s so emblematic of the era.
But I gotta cut Mellville some slack–Moby Dick published in 1851, Origin of Species published in 1859. Without the theory of evolution who’s to say what’s a “fish”?
I’ve read about a dozen of her books, PM me and I’ll recommend based on your tastes :)
My personal favourite is The Left Hand of Darkness. The Telling is a later book that I liked a lot. The Dispossessed is probably her best known politicized novel. The Earthsea trilogy is a beautifully imagined fantasy pitched toward younger readers but satisfying to a general fantasy reader and subsequent books set in the Earthsea universe are adult reads. She’s also a pretty fair poet.