Jurassic Park

(Steven Spielberg, USA, 1993)

There are no big themes anymore, they’ve all been turned into theme parks.
     –  Pump Up the Volume (1990)

A ruthless capitalist entrepreneur, Hammond (Richard Attenborough), opens a theme park boasting genetically engineered dinosaurs. (These creations are truly hybrid mutants – spliced together with frog DNA, they have the ability to spontaneously change sex!) A team of experts including scientists Alan (Sam Neill), Ellie (Laura Dern) and Ian (Jeff Goldblum), plus a few kids, checks it out.

Soon enough, it’s Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973) all over again: the park breaks down, the dinosaurs are out and mutating, the humans are scrambling for cover, and the perverse madness of Western science is held up for moral inspection.

Critics (especially the more theoretically-inclined ones) have, in my opinion, been concentrating on the least developed or intriguing element of Jurassic Park. It has been taken as a Baudrillardian or deconstructive sort of allegory: the merchandising around the film turns out to be the merchandising in the film. The logos are exactly the same!

In this respect, it’s a fairly run-of-the-mill postmodern blockbuster, mirroring its own conditions of existence. A bit of typical Goldblumian patter underlines the point (”Have they got King Kong in there?” – but it’s a pity we don’t get any Kong/Godzilla rampaging in the Big City); and an early shot actually shows us a worker wearing a Jurassic Park hat. As well, the idea of a ‘directed’ park attraction can remind one of Hitchcock’s thriller-ideal of movies as a roller coaster ride (an idea enthusiastically embraced by the entertainment industries of the ‘90s) …

None of this, really, goes anywhere. Interpretive schemas/templates of this kind don’t amount to much if they’re not dynamic, if they can’t follow change and movement in a film.

The only preliminary point worth keeping from that hyperreal account is the way Spielberg so clearly marks his favourite self-thematic: the target audience of children (“Hi, kids!”, booms Hammond) ­– including the children-within-adults – as that endlessly endangered species which needs protection. As Sam Rohdie has suggested (in a lecture to 6th Form teachers in Hong Kong):

The journey from the ordinary to the fabulous, which Spielberg has repeatedly made in his films – and he has done it through protagonists who are children and who can more easily enter into fantasy – is a mirror of the film situation itself. […] Spielberg’s commentary on issues is relatively uninteresting compared to the commentary he makes about the cinema. (Metro Education, no. 4).

We hear a lot of guff, in general, about Spielberg’s childlike vision. Jurassic Park is in many respects one of the least artistically satisfying films of Spielberg’s blessed career. His typical way of trying to drum up an uplifting emotion – by having his otherwise blank characters yelp in triumph or gaze in epiphanic awe as stirring music clobbers viewers into senselessness – has never looked so contrived or soulless. And – according to the Law of the Franchise – many loose ends are left dangling for a likely sequel or three.

On another hand, however, the action scenes serve to remind us that, back in the days of Jaws (1975), Spielberg was a purveyor of intricately honed terror equal to that served up by John Carpenter (The Thing [1982]), Ridley Scott (Alien [1979]) or Dario Argento (Suspiria [1977]). Terror, for this family of filmmakers, is less an old-fashioned matter of atmospheric suggestion, thematic frisson or (still less) our sympathy/concern for characters, than a purely cinematic species of shock, the terror of what we see, hear, anticipate and imagine on literally a frame-to-frame basis. At that level, popular culture links up to the avant-garde exploration in, for example, latter-day theorist Manuel DeLanda’s Raw Nerves: A Lacanian Thriller (1980). [2025 postscript: I elaborated on this transversal network of films, in relation to Philippe Grandrieux and others, in several sections of my later book Mysteries of Cinema.]

Spielberg has not lost his horror-terror knack in his apparently more ‘humanistic’ period post-The Color Purple (1985): everything to do with the sheer mechanics of shock, horrifying creatures faintly visible or lurking one centimetre outside the frame, is executed with immense flair – the hors champ (off-screen space) rules! And all the work with scenic or architectural space, with the relation of inside to outside (the characters tearing from one to the other), remains impressive. He can turn it on, for sure. Let’s try to enumerate, in passing, the showman’s tricks.

Vision that is variously blurred, impaired, obscured, veiled: the first attacking dinosaur is seen though rain, Perspex, leaves ... The Hitchcockian ‘stain’ effect of the uncanny (see the 1992 [updated 2010] book Everything You Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock): what is spooky, or sets you up for violence, is the absence of a creature ... and later (twice) the small disturbance of an otherwise normal picture: the trembling of water in glass or pools responding to distant rumbling of the creature. Eyeblink-glimpses of bits of the monster: especially in the prologue, where it remains caged, murdering in the off-space. Crowded frames that create a chaotic density and weight of physical, inhabited space. The constant deframing effect of lurching, being off-balance (scene of the car in a tree, which recalls the little-known British terror-piece The Appointment [Lindsey C. Vickers, 1982]). The pure intrusion into a space where and when you least expect it: particularly the moment with Ellie after she has successfully restored power. And, finally in this inventory, the amazing ‘Am I really seeing this?’ moments in a synthetically continuous space, such as when girl just manages to be whisked away before the dinosaur snaps.

As Serge Daney suggested in his perceptive Cahiers du cinéma review of Jaws back in ’76, Spielberg’s cinematic language is built (quite rigorously) on an “identification with the couple hunter/hunted”, creating a “specular oscillation, a short-circuit between knowledge and point of view, a loss of any point of reference”. And the pay-off of this ingenious craft? “A complete removal of any responsibility”. That textual-analysis argument (amplified at the time by Stephen Heath across several texts) requires some unpacking.

For there is what I take to be almost a smokescreen of familiar themes on the surface of Jurassic Park: technology, ecology, visionary scientists versus greedy capitalists (all the bad guys come a cropper), some fashionable blather (from the mouth of Goldblum the ‘chaotician’, naturally) about “unpredictability in a complex system” … And some typical ideological prevarication manœuvres: the extremely token feminist lines given to Ellie about “sexism in survival situations” and “woman inheriting the earth” after dinosaurs have wiped out Man … Balanced out, on the kids’ side, by the conventional typing of scaredy-sensitive girl vs science nerd boy who’s into death and destruction – but with the twist that it’s she who gets to be a saving, master computer hacker. Sigh … If there’s irony intended in any of these tricky moves on Spielberg’s part, it’s never very clear or pointed.

If we accept that all films – even mega-buck merchandising schemes like this one – reflect the conscious and/or unconscious make-up of their directors, we must wonder what this movie really reveals about Spielberg under that distracting surface. One facet is absolutely clear: for all its clout as a whizz-bang family entertainment, and not withstanding the pious homilies contained in the script about good parenting, Jurassic Park positively revels in the slow, sadistic torture of defenceless children.

This is the naughty, anti-social side of Spielberg’s vision – and without it, the film would probably never have been a hit. So, let’s look more deeply at this phenomenon – not only as it pertains to this one auteur, but also as a general socio-cultural problematic of the 1990s.

Aggression, in its darkest fits, touches a level of home and hearth deeper than the merely materialistic trappings. For parents in popular cinema (and particularly, it seems, for browbeaten, breadwinning fathers), the whole burden of responsibility of raising a child in a scary and confusing world creates an enormous backlash of illicit, murderous fantasy. John Hughes’ comedies tap fleetingly into the adult desire to kill one’s kid; but the undisputed master of this particular phantasm on screen is Spielberg. The formula to his enduring mixture of tear-jerking pathos and feel-good uplift is evident from E.T. (1982): if you want the audience’s collective heart to go out to a character, kill him or her off for a minute … and then magically resurrect them! This strategy of emotional manipulation can be described as calculated, maybe even cynical; but, more tellingly, it provides a perfect way to both indulge and disavow some fairly sinister desires.

(Note the curious twist on this adult phantasy-scenario from the viewpoint of the kids themselves: a girl’s rabid fear at being once more “abandoned” to terror by adults, and Alan’s assurance that he’ll leave, but “not like” the other guy … because he’ll return!)

It is unsurprising, in light of the preceding analysis, that Spielberg’s career alternates overtly sentimental tales (like Always [1989]) with chillingly terrifying ones (like Jaws and Poltergeist [1982] which he produced and closely supervised) – or that individual films (such as those in the Indiana Jones series) mingle cute homilies about family life and protracted, spectacular scenes of torture within the same narrative. There is a vein of inchoate, destructive aggro (as Australians say) running through all his work: directed at home, women, children, the nuclear family, benign authority figures, the American way of life – everything, in fact, that threatens to fence a man in.

Jurassic Park merely takes this aspect of Spielberg’s work to its logical extreme. On the linear, moral surface of the tale, it’s all about Alan’s passage from an intense, indeed violent dislike of kids (he scares the hell out of one of them) to his adoption of the loving, paternal role. In between, however – where the elements of the film’s deep phantasm swirl – what we get, over and over, are scenes of children terrified, threatened and attacked … with Alan looking on, stock still, unable to intervene but perhaps not even wishing to. It’s an allegory of the cine-spectator’s position that’s reminiscent of a recurring structure in Brian De Palma’s cinema (where such perversity generally comes unrestricted by sentimental alibis!).

In the absolutely cruellest moment of his delicious dream, Spielberg cuts, in high-suspense style, between a boy caught at the top of a wire fence, Alan and his sister safely on the ground, and Ellie’s hand in another location inadvertently about to turn on the fence’s electric juice – and then, instead of the last second aversion we expect, the film actually zaps the kid. His body shoots through the air, hits the ground; he appears dead for a terrible, prolonged minute ... but no, he’s alive!

With such gruesome reveries is Spielberg’s much touted wellspring of dreams filled. At the very end, there are even cute dinosaurs who eat leaves and fly over water. What a turnaround!

MORE Spielberg: Catch Me If You Can, Hook, The Lost World, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, The Terminal, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Munich, The Fabelmans

MORE Jurrassic Park: The Lost World, Jurassic Park III

MORE on Jaws: TV series Voir

© Adrian Martin September & December 1993 / September 1994