Alleged

A Welcome Contrast to "Inherit the Wind"

A welcome contrast to Inherit the Wind is the 2010 movie Alleged, which offers a different take on the Scopes trial. Putting the two movies in conversation can be a helpful way to complicate the science-versus-religion narrative which says that science vanquishes superstition and bigotry, always and forever advancing the cause of truth. Anyone who knows a lick about the history of science knows that science is a much more contingent enterprise than that, one that is filled with fits and starts and once-reigning hypotheses that proved to be quite wrong and were eventually overthrown.

In fictionalized form, Alleged brings home this reality in relation to the famous trial that framed much of the 20th century’s evolution-versus-creation debates. Alleged provides a more variegated picture of the trial, hinting at the gaps in Darwin’s theory while highlighting the power of the media more generally. Famed journalist H. L. Mencken plays the villain in Alleged, pushing a local reporter, Charles Anderson, to distort the truth and paint the fundamentalists as backwards Bible-thumpers. Lured into Mencken’s inner ring, Anderson goes along for a while. But thanks to his fiancée Rose, he eventually comes to his senses as he sees the connections between Darwinism and eugenics. While this storyline represents artistic license, it does provide a powerful counterpoint to Inherit the Wind, which exercises plenty of artistic license in the opposite direction. The movie ends happily ever after, as Anderson both takes the high road in journalistic truth-telling and marries Rose.

Frequently, I must admit, I find “Christian movies” (whatever that means) overbearing and off-putting—and just generally second-rate. This movie didn’t come across that way, which is no small feat. There were a few parts of it that I found historically implausible for the time period (the way race relations are depicted perhaps too serenely, for example). But putting this movie in conversation with Inherit the Wind is a worthwhile exercise that reminds us of the power of media, the fact that history is always an argument about the past, and that every story has at least two sides.