MovieChat Forums > Inherit the Wind (1960) Discussion > 55 years and people still didn't get the...

55 years and people still didn't get the point of this movie


It's not about who's right, God or Science.
Or religious x atheists, agnostics, scientists, evolutionists, darwinists.

It's not about what's right or wrong and that's so emphasized across the film it almost kills its capacity of bringing people to wonder, which is the most powerful and magnetic feature of this movie.

It's about having a position, using your free will to chose and not being smashed by fanatics.

Down with fanaticism, that's the point of this movie.

Let people be.

And the major and glaring, obvious symbol of such philosophy it's the final dialog between Drummond and Hornebeck.

He was religious, after all. And he even appreciated the burning faith of those who stuck to the Bible, but maybe not in the way and in the spirit of Brady. The same words and ideas said by him were appreciated by Drummond when said by Brady's wife.

It was the manner, the hammering of beliefs that was wrong. And that comes both ways, also from scientists.

And as a closing, even more obvious way to demonstrate the movie's message, Drummond piles the Bible over Darwin's book and he leaves with them both like it, combined...after all, he was always trying to conciliate science with the Holy Book since the beginning. In the end of the day, that was his choice, his stand, and there was no one there to keep him from it.

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I absolutely love your comment! Well said!

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Notice that because of the charge [violating a statute] there was no debate allowed on evolution itself [nor have most folk actually READ Darwin].

But the press/public honed in on just that [gimme that old time religion] with all-american fierce patriotism [the version that stood at the time].

Now Darwin himself explains why proof of "Descent of Man" will never be found in the fossil record but that never stpped the super power of the time England in trumping up Piltdown Man as the "Missing Link" described as the greatest ever scientific fraud [1912 to 1954].

BUT Scopes was in 1925 in the time when the missing link WAS accepted by the scientific community EXCEPT for America which was firmly in the corner of "God" [ie the Christian one].

It was not for another decade or so that McCarthy had to step in to STOP Americans THINKING and that was done via putting a gag on Hollywood [see Guilty by Suspicion], though of course the school statute WAS an early form of McCarthyism.

I won't go on just now about the PRESENT McCarthyism but What a mess folks with what Nietzsche termed Ultimate Man

http://www.kindleflippages.com/ablog/

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I agree! Very well said. We are free to believe anything we want to believe, hopefully without pressuring or persecuting others.

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Sadly some of us are even further removed from these ideals than every before. It's utterly amazing to watch a couple of groups of big money political goose-steppers fight to see who can screw over the common citizen the hardest in the desire to do fist pumps and proclaim how righteous they are.

Garbage human beings playing pathetic games that will only devalue the human condition.

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