Reel engineers: Portrayal of engineers and engineering profession in the feature films

Abstract

Portrayal of certain professions in the popular media has a deep and lasting effect not only on general public's understanding of these professions (with all potential misconceptions and attitudes), but also has an impact on future career choices of adolescents (teens and tweens). While movie screens and television shows put a spotlight on lawyers, doctors and policemen (and occasionally also on forensic scientists), they rarely (if at all) pick engineers as the characters of interest. This brief study has reviewed a selected number of known and available portrayals of engineers in feature films (with an effort to clearly distinguish between images of "engineers" and "scientists"). The paper also assesses specific character and professional attributes, stereotypes (profession-, ethnicity or gender-based) and attributes known to facilitate viewer's identification with on-screen characters, of engineering professionals portrayed in selected films. In particular, the key research question of "How are engineer(s) and their work portrayed in the feature films?" was broken down to more detailed sub-questions: • What types of engineering work are represented? How is creative component of that work shown? How successful (or unsuccessful) are the outcomes? • Is the distinction between science and technology, and scientist and engineers depicted? • Are any characters females or minorities? • What are the artifacts (physical attributes) of the engineering endeavor? • What are typical professional and personal traits of the characters shown? • How overall depiction of engineers can be categorized (wizard/hero-tinkerer/mechanic-Frankenstein/villain)? • How are engineers/engineering depicted through dialogue? • Are any contributions to society shown or hinted? The results of such analysis are presented for 2 example films. Future work involves examination of identification with specific attributes of engineer's portrayals in audiences consisting of high school students and university freshmen, and attempting to correlate the viewers' identification with attitudes towards science, technology, gender/ethnic roles in engineering, and future interests and attitudes towards engineering and science. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.