MythBusters
Posted by Kushana Torumekia at 11/1/2007 5:04 PM 
Categories: Baghdad Battery, MythBusters, Dead Sea Scrolls, Bible, Dead Languages, Science in Antiquity, Hebrew Bible, New Testament
Categories: Baghdad Battery, MythBusters, Dead Sea Scrolls, Bible, Dead Languages, Science in Antiquity, Hebrew Bible, New Testament
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I just sat down and watched all the videos of MythBusters straight through. My conclusion: Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman need couples counseling. (A quick spin around the internet shows they are each married with families — I mean this as a metaphor, only.) That said, their conflicts seem to be 'domestic' ones ... Mr. Savage has come into Mr. Hyneman's 'home', his shop, and isn't following Mr. Hyneman's rules. I'd imagine Mr. Savage doesn't feel those rules are necessary or perhaps they seem overly stringent to him. The way their personality conflicts work — by their own accounts their priorities and values don't mesh — are just the ways that other relationships don't work. Mr. Hyneman (as befits who attended military school) wants to be tough and orderly; Mr. Savage is moved by enthusiasm and delight.
I'd guess they might also have different artistic styles: it may be that Mr. Hyneman is one of those creative types who plans a project and all its variable out before he starts, while Mr. Savage may be the creative type who discovers things as a project unfolds. Both are legitimate ways of going about art but they don't necessary mix well in collaboration.
Mr. Savage and Mr. Hyneman do seem to appreciate each others' strengths and weaknesses. They do seem willing to work around their differences. They do seem committed to their common endeavor, the show. (The 'kids', the viewing public, want to see them remain together on it. The hosts have acknowledged this fact in interviews.) That said, as I watched the show on video I sometimes wished there was a qualified professional just off camera: they're both in the business of building potentially deadly machines, a bit of misplaced hostility (even excused as a 'practical joke' or an 'oversight') could turn things particularly ugly.
(Bear in mind that I do not know either host and I am not a psychiatrist — that department is
down the hall, to the right, out the front door, and two buildings over. This is my completely
unqualified free associations that should be listened to by nobody.)
What watching so much of the show at once did turn up was the importance of editing. The hosts
seems to like each other more in the first season ... in the second season three co-hosts are
brought in and Mr. Savage and Mr. Hyneman spend less time together in front of the camera and
less time interacting when they are in front of the lens. The videos make it clear that some of
what's in the first season is the product of editing: the conflicts existed even then but the
episodes were edited to reduce it. Some of the things left out were very unexpected (I'm still
disturbed by Mr. Hyneman driving Mr. Savage into the fence). Some of them were pretty much
what's in the show, already. For a show based on trial-and-error experiments, editing is an extremely important part of how it comes across on the screen.
Editing is also an important factor in reading; the Bible was edited. (No, not to lop out the
presence of space aliens or reincarnation, although people have asked me about both ...) This is
what makes the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint (the ancient translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek) so wonderful: both show the process of biblical re-writing and revision in action. (In Hebrew and in Greek — but only for the Old Testament/Jewish Bible: Jesus hadn't been born, yet.) The Bible was not, in fact, too holy to alter ... it was too tempting to revise it so that God Himself supported one or another theological position. (See The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture for how this worked in the New Testament.) Nowadays this sort of thing is done by what one reads (or doesn't read) in the Bible and how one goes about interpreting it: but part of the thrill of being a historian is watching the very Bible, itself, change. (For a concise glimpse of this read The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible
To connect this back to Mythbusters, see the Baghdad Battery episode (and hope that that was
the last time the new co-hosts were so cruel: five people building potentially deadly machines
could bring the show to a very sudden end.)
-Kushana
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