I DON’T think I realised how cool it was to have a forensic scientist for a father until he gave a careers talk at my school. At least three of my classmates had to make a hasty exit from the room, their school lunches threatening to make an unscheduled reappearance after Dad, the forensics expert Rodger Ide, showed a particularly horrible slide of a crime scene.
The picture depicted a body that had been hanging in a deserted wood for several weeks. The girls were struck by the ghastly purplish tinge of the skin and the way the flesh seemed to slide from the corpse like melted cheese. Dad, however, being something of a world authority on such things, was more interested in the knot in the rope.
Studying the knot could reveal whether it was tied by a right or left-handed person, Dad explained brightly, oblivious to the deathly silence that had come over the class of queasy 15-year-olds, and could indicate whether the case was murder or suicide.
I had a new status after that. I may have had a cardigan that bobbled and the wrong shoes, but my Dad had the power to make my fellow students vomit.
At that time, the word forensics was inextricably linked with the American television series Quincy ME. I would try to explain that, no, Quincy was a pathologist, whereas my father’s areas of expertise were fire scenes, explosions, knots and ligatures. It worried me that people couldn’t seem to make the distinction, particularly as Dad had little time for Quincy, dismissing him as a showboating charlatan.
Advertisement
I wasn’t tempted to follow in my father’s footsteps. Being rubbish at chemistry would have probably precluded it anyway. But I did take on board the way Dad managed to incorporate his lifelong interests (knots, setting fire to things) into his career. Dad’s idea of perfect after-dinner entertainment is to take his guests into his laboratory and set fire to some strontium nitrate for their amusement.
Ultimately, although the joys of science eluded me, as a film journalist I too managed to make a career of my favourite pastime. However, the plan — to look at the place where Dad’s world of forensic science and mine of cinema meet — ran into a few problems before it had even started.
First, Dad tends to fall asleep in films. Secondly, he is rather cynical of fictional depictions of forensics. In cinema, the forensics expert is usually little more than a plot device, someone in a white coat whose two minutes of screen time nudge the plot along with a couple of fortuitous discoveries. In reality, says Dad, analysis of a piece of evidence would be more likely to take weeks or months than minutes. He does, though, accep t that showing analysis in real time would play havoc with narrative pacing.
The first film we look at is Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow. Not an obvious choice, perhaps, given that it is set in 1799 and has a decidedly supernatural bent. However the central character, Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp), favours a kind of proto-forensic analysis over the then usual method of crime investigation (torturing a confession out of someone).
Swayed by Ichabod’s passion for science, Dad is initially inclined toward benevolence: “His techniques are rudimentary but you can’t expect him to be using scanning electron microscopy.”
Advertisement
But then Ichabod oversteps the bounds of scientific credibility by claiming that a chemical reaction proves a victim died from a “powerful singular sword thrust to the neck”.
“That’s nonsense,” says Dad, going on to note that the blood that spurts from an incision into a recently exhumed corpse would actually have congealed days ago.
All the same, he enjoys the film, getting carried away enough to make a completely unscientific appraisal. “He should have used a silver bullet,” he says sagely as one character tries to shoot the headless phantom that plagues the village.
Our next film, Out of Time, a thriller set in the sweltering Florida Keys, stars Denzel Washington as the police chief who is sucked into a sting that threatens to destroy his life. The film features a “medical examiner” who seems to be a cross between a forensic pathologist, a scene-of-crime officer and the film’s comic relief. Dad is immediately suspicious: “He’s wearing a baseball cap indoors.”
My father is in his element when it comes to the film’s pivotal fire scene. I’m incredulous that homicide detective Eva Mendes would risk her lovely cream and white outfit in a burnt-out building. Dad would rather see the fire scene protected from her: “They’re leaving DNA everywhere.”
Advertisement
He winces when a fireman brandishes a mysterious-looking object and declares the fire to be “definitely arson”.
“It doesn’t look like any incendiary device I’ve ever seen,” says Dad. “It hasn’t been hot enough to be at the seat of fire — the insulation is still on the wire.”
Later, at another crime scene, the comedy pathologist steals a beer from the fridge. “I would enjoy going up against him in court,” says Dad grimly.
Despite the manifold scientific inaccuracies, we end up rather enjoying the film and watch it until the end rather than fast-forwarding between the crime scenes. Schlocky crime films are my guilty pleasure. Sue me.
We both have a bit of a secret weakness, too, for Our Man Flint, the ludicrous Sixties psychedelic Bond spoof starring James Coburn.
Advertisement
The first instance of forensics is when a lab test on a poisoned dart reveals garlic, saffron and fennel, which Flint recognises as vital ingredients in bouillabaisse. He then tastes the fish soup in every dive bar in Marseilles until he recognises the one with the correct ratio of ingredients.
I’m expecting Dad to be scathing, but no. While he disputes that the lab would have been able to identify garlic, saffron and fennel in the first place, he says he has used taste testing in a case himself. “It’s called organoleptic analysis and I did it once in a case of some stolen cherry wine.”
Our final film is Backdraft, Ron Howard’s movie about sibling firefighters who have to put aside their differences to solve a series of arson attacks. I suspect that this is not going to prove popular.
“That’s just unbelievably wrong,” says Dad of the first dramatic explosion. He also notes, of the scene where firefighters frolic with the hosepipe: “That’s extraordinarily dangerous. People have been killed by nozzles.”
But things really get bad when Robert De Niro, playing a fire investigator, arrives at the scene. “He’s destroying evidence,” says Dad. “When we go into a fire scene we go with a paintbrush and a trowel.”
Advertisement
De Niro, in this instance, is equipped with a crowbar and an axe.
We hit breaking point when De Niro starts taunting the fire scene: “C’mon, tell me where you started!”
“I don’t think I can take much more of this,” says Dad, disappearing into his lab, probably to set fire to something.