Bill Nye: Science Guy gets interesting when the documentary turns awkward and disorganized. For a while, the film paints Nye in heroic form. He makes entrances before crowds of adoring fans, who take selfies and marvel that the guy who charmed them with science on television when they were children, is now right in the same room with them.
In shots from the ‘90s early in the movie, Nye looks bouncy and bright in the face. In clips from the shows, he’s a guy who loves being on TV. He tosses a watermelon, a computer and a television over the side of a building to illustrate gravity. He’s full of flash and dazzle, and he’s full of himself. The show was a great hit; Nye won a flock of Emmy Awards in just a few years. But the images of Nye now have lost that shine. He’s not just older; he looks beat up, and he’s grown serious. The movie struggles to explain what happened, and it turns into something of a jumble that contains in its own difficulty the sense of what hit Bill Nye.
You might say Nye was forced to grow up, and take on the genuine responsibility for being that “science guy,” without the manic pace and celebrity. At the height of his stardom, Nye was not really a scientist. He may have known a lot, but he was a guy with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. He then got pummeled by people like television weathermen who were turning into deniers of the science on human caused climate change, as well as some religious anti-evolutionists. This was the moment when science came under attack and when many Americans decided that science was a matter of belief rather than actuality.
So, adult life for Bill Nye has been harsh, at least at first. He’s had a longstanding health concern about ataxia, a neuro-muscular disease that runs in his family. Attacks have rained down on him. He’s wound up in debates, formal and otherwise, with an Australian religious crusader named Tom Ham, and an American weather forecaster from Pennsylvania, Joe Bastardi, who’s loaded with misinformation about how carbon works in the atmosphere and a prediction that the Earth is now cooling rather than warming. From the look of things in the film, Nye is not a great debater. He tries to be serious and logical with people who may be serious, but are not logical and, while they are glib, don’t know their elbow from third base about actual science.
Nye was a playful and charismatic presence on television. But trying to explain the difference between science and belief, is not sexy. Yet that now seems to be Bill Nye’s great issue. He worries, rightly that America is turning away from science – from examining the actual physical world and universe. As he stresses over and over in Bill Nye: Science Guy, science takes a path that continually questions itself and searches for proofs of the facts of existence, while belief is forever in lockdown mode. Belief is a closed system that has no interest or mechanism for questioning itself.
In recent years, Nye fights that problem specifically on the issue of human-caused climate change. He’s a serious man; he’s made himself into a legitimate representative for the understanding of science and is now the chief executive of The Planetary Society, the organization founded by the famed Carl Sagan. But Nye’s fight, as with the film Bill Nye: Science Guy, is how to convince true believers about the difference between real science and falsified science, and that science and religion do not conflict. Somebody who claims complete certainty, can put on a more aggressive show than someone who wants to talk nuance.
But a scientist friend puts it this way: If you reject the workings of science, no fossil fuels for you, and no antibiotics either.
