Obama Funny if Morgan Freeman God
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Morgan Freeman Goes From God to Science
One of the many things I've learned from watching the Science Channel documentary series "Through the Wormhole With Morgan Freeman" is that someday, maybe, quantum physics will tell us conclusively whether God exists. If that happens, we'll be able to put that question aside and devote ourselves full time to pondering the existence of Morgan Freeman.
Here are some generally accepted, Google-verifiable facts about Morgan Freeman: He was born in Tennessee in 1937. He started acting young but made the transition from the New York stage to movies relatively late — he didn't make his first credited feature-film appearance until 1971, when he was 34 and played a character called Afro in a Jack Klugman vehicle called "Who Says I Can't Ride a Rainbow!" By then, he was already on his way to becoming a TV star, albeit in the parallel universe of children's television, as part of the cast of the PBS program "The Electric Company," the funkiest educational kids' show of all time. He was on that show from 1971 until 1977, which meant that throughout the blaxploitation era in Hollywood — when many black actors of his generation found work playing pimps and hustlers out to stick it to the Man — he was playing characters like Easy Reader, a bell-bottomed word hippie bridging the gap between Hendrix and Hooked on Phonics.
He has occupied a unique position in the universe of screen acting ever since. He did eventually play a pimp, in 1987's "Street Smart," opposite Christopher Reeve, and garnered the first of five Academy Award nominations. (He has won once.) He said that, in a way, that pimp, Fast Black, was his favorite role, because it allowed him to access a part of himself on-screen that he has never been called upon to use again. Instead, he went on to more virtuous roles. He had a great 1989, playing a Civil War hero in "Glory," the baseball-bat-wielding high-school principal Joe Clark in "Lean on Me" and Jessica Tandy's kindly chauffeur in "Driving Miss Daisy." He described that last one as "the big mistake," because although it got him an Oscar nomination, it also led to his being pigeonholed as Wise, Old and Dignified. As typecasting goes, that's a pretty benign box, particularly for an African-American actor, but it's still a box. "Freeman could play Iago as easily as Othello," the critic David Thomson wrote. "But can he expect that offer?"
Even Henry Fonda, with whom Freeman has often been compared, got to use his noble, serene screen presence against itself on occasion, like when he played a coldblooded villain in 1968's "Once Upon a Time in the West." He kills kids! Nobody has found a way to use Freeman as effectively in a bad-guy part (see "Wanted" or "Lucky Number Slevin." Or don't. Seriously, don't.) His IMDb page is a roll call of avuncular, tough-yet-benevolent authority figures — generals, presidents, veteran police detectives; the director of the C.I.A.; Nelson Mandela; and, in "Bruce Almighty" and "Evan Almighty," a wry, white-suited God. A couple of years ago, some Internet wags created a funny, instructive org chart of "The Morgan Freeman Chain of Command," which power-ranked his major roles, from God to president (in "Invictus," as Mandela, and in "Deep Impact," where he was totally believable as a black chief executive 10 years pre-Barack Obama) on down to prison inmate (Red, in "The Shawshank Redemption," the film that made Freeman a weekend-TBS omnipresence); freed slave ("Amistad") and, at the bottom of the chain, Miss Daisy's driver. All these characters, regardless of their social standing, seemed equally noble because they were played by Morgan Freeman.
At this point, there's a little bit of God in everything Freeman does. It's as if he has transcended race by transcending human frailty. He seems less like an actor and more like an emissary from some higher, more decorous plane, which makes him the ideal host for a show like "Through the Wormhole," a brisk and accessible primer on the various ways that today's way-out-there science is becoming indistinguishable from science fiction.
In the hands of a goofier host — and let's face it, anyone other than Freeman would by definition be a goofier host — the series could have been "Ripley's Believe It or Not" with string theory, or a bottomless can of mind-Pringles for freshman-dorm Castanedas. (Representative episode titles include "Does Time Really Exist?" and "Beyond the Darkness"; presumably, the producers are saving "Have You Ever Looked at Your Hand — I Mean, Really Looked at It?" and "No, Seriously, What if Our Whole Reality Is Actually Just a Cat's Dream" for next season.) And given that it's a show about math and particle physics and speculative neuroscience built around interviews with prominent academics, it could also have been as dry and airless as deep space.
Instead, it's the best pop-science TV show since Carl Sagan's "Cosmos: A Personal Journey" — a whirlwind tour of the fourth dimension with a sense of wonder and a sense of humor. And a lot has to do with Freeman. He's one of the show's executive producers, and supposedly a lifelong space buff, but he's also clearly in on the meta-joke of recruiting President God to narrate a show about whether there's a Creator. Can we travel through time? Is our universe just one bubble in a sheet of cosmic Bubble Wrap? Are there aliens? Are we all just Sims? Maybe, Freeman says, in that familiar cracked-leather baritone, and you can't not believe him a little bit.
The show's focus on actual mathematicians, physicists and neuroscientists helps distinguish it from the various strains of paranormal crackpot-tainment with which it shares the cable landscape — all those bro-friendly ghost-hunters running around with night-vision cameras, all those fleece-clad Bigfoot-ologists tracking Sasquatch in the woods. And "Through the Wormhole" avoids the old science-doc cliché of brainiacs in book-cluttered offices by filming its subjects doing something physical (playing the drums or surfing or walking in nature) in order to establish them as edge-pushing explorer types. Or they're doing something prosaic/sensual, like eating in a restaurant and using bananas or chocolate soufflé to illustrate the basic forces of the universe, the way Harold Ramis used a Twinkie to explain psychokinetic-energy buildup to Dan Akroyd in "Ghostbusters."
This is important, because despite the continuing efforts of some of the smartest people who have ever scribbled an equation on a dry-erase board, there's currently no physical evidence to support the existence of dark matter, alternate dimensions or an afterlife. All the outdoorsy-restauranty stuff serves as a visual metaphor for adventurism that's essentially philosophical.
But rendering the abstract relatable is always the first job for science-themed TV. Sagan had it relatively easy, because he had a context. "Cosmos" had its premiere in 1980, when Pluto was still a planet and the possibility that we might use nuclear weapons to commit mass suicide as a species was still entirely plausible; the show advanced the very PBS-ish idea that we'd be less likely to blow ourselves to hell if we understood that we were all made of stardust.
And the show was groovy, in that inadvertently groovy, early-PBS way. It had majestic, lambent theme music by Vangelis, and it had Sagan, a cosmic Magellan in a tan corduroy sport coat, pretending to set the controls of his moodily lighted spaceship for the heart of the sun. If you got bored with the mysteries of creation, you could always contemplate the question of just how your host, a Ukrainian Jew from Bensonhurst, came by that Kermit-meets-Plimpton accent. Punching the B in "billions" to emphasize just how big the universe was, he inspired billions and billions of hack impressionists — but he also became a pop-culture icon, infecting TV watchers worldwide with his boyish enthusiasm for pulsars and white dwarfs. When he died, the Beastie Boys ran a story about him in Grand Royal, their magazine; in 2009, the composer John Boswell ran some of his "Cosmos" narration through an Auto-Tune filter to create a haunting techno-pop song, "A Glorious Dawn," which the White Stripes' Jack White later released as a special-edition 45.
Since then, science has failed to produce a spokesman with Sagan's reach. Stephen Hawking came close. These days, the author and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the strongest contender; he's hosting a reboot of "Cosmos," set for broadcast on Fox in 2013. (Its producer is Seth MacFarlane, the creator of "Family Guy"; there is probably a parallel dimension in which this makes sense.) Tyson has displayed a garrulous, coolest-science-teacher-ever presence as a frequent guest on shows like "The Colbert Report," but can he sell space dust in prime time? It's a weird moment for pop science in this country. If you tuned in to "Through the Wormhole" over the summer, you probably saw promos for the Science Channel documentary special "Last Shuttle: Our Journey," a misty-eyed ode to the shuttle Atlantis's final voyage and the git-r-done American know-how of the grease monkeys and calculator jockeys who made Atlantis's final voyage possible.
The day after Atlantis touched down safely, an estimated 2,000 NASA contract employees lost their jobs. Economic downturn seemed to have brought about the end of manned spaceflight in America and by extension, this country's greatest science experiment — an endeavor that framed science in mythical terms, linking the efforts of Mission Control nerds in short-sleeved dress shirts to a tradition of exploration and cowboyish adventure.
Future generations will have to make do, inspiration-wise, with ventures like the Large Hadron Collider, which — unless it produces a black hole that swallows Switzerland — just doesn't sing in the same emotional key as the space program. It's a cool-looking, important yet ultimately esoteric project that produces hard-to-understand results — the Radiohead to the space shuttle's Springsteen.
Now that we've decided, as a society, that dreaming of the final frontier is a luxury we can't afford, a show like "Through the Wormhole" takes on new significance. It uses trippy animation and soufflé metaphors to make science seem relatable, even hip, but at heart it's really a commercial for wonder, something real life seems to offer less and less of with each passing day. When was the last time you actually felt wonder? The campaigning-in-poetry part of Obama's run? Sully's Hudson River landing? The Chilean-miner rescue? "Avatar"? Sometimes it seems as if the only amazing thing about our world is how infrequently it amazes us. But with the help of Freeman, pop culture's most reliable narrator, "Through the Wormhole" advances the appealing notion that our universe isn't as small as it feels.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/magazine/morgan-freeman-goes-from-god-to-science.html
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