Black Sabbath, Dana Scully and a Nun Walk Into a Bar
Dana Scully can make scientists. Black Sabbath can apparently make nuns. Culture expands the possible. Power has always had a problem with that.
A while back, I stumbled across an interview with Sister Dorothea. She’s a Carmelite prioress at a monastery in Christchurch, New Zealand, a life she found most unexpectedly through the rock band Black Sabbath. Living what she describes as a “hippie lifestyle” in her youth, she went to a concert with the band. The music pounded through her, and there was a burning cross.
The experience caught her off guard, making her question her life and eventually turn to a contemplative one. From what you can tell from the interview, it doesn’t seem like the rockers scared her into a religious life. If anything, it seems like they unlocked something deeper and more meaningful in her. And yes, I really, really hope this story reached Ozzy Osbourne in some way. I think he would love it.
I can’t say that Ozzy has changed my life, even though Sharon Osbourne once indirectly paid my bills for a couple of months when I translated her autobiography into Swedish. But Sister Dorothea’s unlikely story made me think about what has nudged me along in my life and career. I already knew there was a big before and after I read Jeanette Winterson the first time, but as I delved a bit deeper, I realised that more often than not, a book, film, TV series, or song has been instrumental in my choices.
It makes sense. If you want to get things done, you do better by taking advice from Janeway or Xena than from your fifty-five-year-old neighbour who still lives in his mother’s basement. And, it turns out, a lot of people do this.
I just read about The X-Files reboot and realised that the original series premiered 33 years ago. It made me feel old, but got me thinking about the Scully Effect. If you haven't watched every episode of The X-Files twelve times, an explanation may be useful. The Scully Effect is the supposed impact that Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) had on encouraging women to pursue STEM education.
There's been a lot of talk about the Scully Effect over the years. There seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence, but that's not enough. The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media didn't think so either, so they decided to dig deeper together with J. Walter Thompson Intelligence. They found a pretty strong link between looking up to Scully and choosing to enter a STEM field.
"A vast majority of women who know Scully’s character on The X-Files see her as a role model for girls and women, and nearly two-thirds of women in STEM say that Scully was their personal role model. When asked about Scully’s impact, most women in the survey agree that she’s a strong, smart, and intelligent character who boosted their confidence to succeed in a male-dominated profession." (The Scully Effect: I want to believe in STEM.)”
This isn't a massive study, but until some bright grad student gets the resources to do a more extensive thesis on the Scully Effect, I still feel pretty comfortable using this as an example of how good role models really do matter - not just on an individual level, but on a societal level.
It would also be interesting to read a broader study that doesn’t just focus on Scully and STEM. My gut feeling (totally unscientific, hence the need for further scientific research) tells me that many of us have learned by looking up to strong role models - like Sarah Connor, Ellen Ripley, Xena, Buffy, Janeway, and, of course, Scully - that nothing changes if you sit quietly and nicely in a corner. If you want to get things done, being a timid wallflower isn't the way to go.
And speaking of action heroines - one of my absolute favourite topics - you might have paused when you read about the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. If you did, good for you. That's the same Geena Davis who brought us characters like Charlie Baltimore in The Long Kiss Goodnight and Thelma in Thelma & Louise.
In the early 2000s, Davis decided to work her action heroine magic off-screen, and she’s been doing it ever since. And here she is doing it again, paying it forward from one action heroine to another. Ah, if this isn’t poetry in motion, I don’t know what is.
What can we learn from all this? That culture doesn't simply show us the world. It shows us possible selves. Scully can make a scientist imaginable. Janeway can make leadership imaginable. And somehow, wonderfully, Black Sabbath can make life in a Carmelite monastery imaginable.
And once you accept that art expands the range of lives we can imagine and pursue, it becomes much easier to understand why those who want to control other people are so interested in controlling culture.
Control what people can imagine, and you have already begun to control what they can become. That’s why a banned book is never just a banned book.