The Mad Hero of Cinema: Scientist as a Mirror of Existential Fears
This article is dev oted to one of the archetypal images in cinema, which have been presented in this art from the first years of its appearance. The author considers the image of a mentally inadequate scientist not only from the point of view of his dual goal-setting (the search for personal immortality and the desire for total power), but, for the first time, his different semantic content is associated with a stable visual embodiment, reproduced in films over the past hundred years. The author argues that despite the «external» (historical-political) and «internal» (figurative-stylistic and technical) conditions, this type of media-hero preserved its semantic functions and visual characteristics. According to the author, this is an objective phenomenon, because the image of a mad scientist is an archetypal image and acts as a reflection of collective fears that reflect the drama of human existence, namely, the insoluble contradiction between his desire for immortality and at the same time, the fear of losing all that is the essence of man.
