Graphics Designer Georgia Shattky captures The Science fall from grace
A revealing moment in the film about microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles is when she worries about funding her laboratory. Then she appears to find hope in a just-arrived message from an institution only to discover that it too has turned her down with a rejection slickly encased in condescending and patronising words that she finds the money elsewhere.
Nothing terribly unusual in this. Except that the nation is in the grip of the Covid pandemic and that one single category of resources that might reasonably have expected to be financed at this time might have been an infectious diseases research establishment.
Professor Wiles goes on to describe in a matter-of-fact way how she devotes much of her time to raising the laboratory funds herself notably through public appearances
The incident is crystallised forever in the film about the turbulent microbiologist MS Information.
It asks more questions than it answers. Why exactly at the height of the fear and trembling about Covid was a specialist research laboratory being treated, well, as if it were merely an irritating subset of a social studies centre?
The microbes of the Covid infection are too miniscule to be seen by the naked eye.
Yet Professor Wiles became the epicentre of a larger-than-life debate with on one side the great and the good celebrating her in gala evenings.
While on the other side of the urban spectrum the vile imprecations of an alternately screeching and thuggish faction using any and every communications channel available to them.
These bizarre multipliers of these extremes in the film become hyper exhibited when building facades become screens-within-screens, literally murals (pictured above.)
This technique enabled by the film’s graphic designer Georgia Shattky (pictured below) acting as the film’s general effects artist calibrates the grotesque scale of the fervour of the frenzies evoked by the microbiologist.
The public narrative now surrounding Professor Wiles instead of concentrating on infectious diseases especially in their mass infection form now became firmly focussed on the microbiologist as a gaudy character.
The film depicts how in an extraordinary inversion of sociology’s hierarchical theory Professor Wiles’ medical status faded the more established society in the form of urban intelligentsia gave her public approval by in short order crowning her Woman of the Year and then New Zealander of the Year.
The film traces how all this made her the target of increasing vitriol for her perceived role in the vaccination and lockdown schemes for which she was now seen to be personifying.
The film witnesses how Professor Wiles as someone who might reasonably be considered a bona fide practitioner of The Science became viewed instead as an exponent of numerous cults such as the climate one and somehow an adherent of “Bill Gates.”
Professor Wiles has to point out that the word “Lucifer” with which she remains routinely coupled in fact is a description of light and its luminescence.
The film portrays her as a counterpuncher; one who gives as good as they get.
Underneath the polychromatic giggly exterior there is a firm upholder of the science resolutely determined to eliminate anything or anyone who deflects her from her purpose.
The film emphasises the way in which medical doctors such as Siouxsie have become components of street-level public debate when in contrast barely a generation ago they filled in as antipodean versions of the gentry, even a localised aristocracy.
The film defines the way in which the words and actions of this so recently Olympian class are now so routinely challenged.
Those believing that their own views on things such as microbes, viruses and pathogens in general are deserving of a public airing nowadays elbow aside clinicians and expects their utterances to be taken as gospel- which they often are.
Information for screenings nationwide available at https://www.msinformationmovie.com/screenings
Georgia Shattky
