The film’s screenwriter, David Koepp, doubling as an extra, gets gobbled up by the T-Rex in San Diego. He is listed as ‘Unlucky Bastard’ in the credits, and that could stand for the writer in this sort of movie, destined to be upstaged by Spielberg and special effects.1
This is not science fiction; it’s science eventuality.2
Why do Spielberg’s dinosaurs hold our attention and fascination? One potential answer is that they are not simply fictional, but exist in what philosophers of modal logic call a ‘possible world’. A possible world is a modal extension of the ‘actual world’. Fiction, on the other hand, we can think of as a purely imaginary world that runs parallel to, but is autonomous from, the actual world. Due to the scientific research underlying both Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and The Lost World (Steven Spielberg, 1997) – extraction of prehistoric DNA from insects fossilised in amber – I will argue that both films articulate a possible world because they show one possibility that can emerge from a state of affairs in the actual world. Moreover, beyond Spielberg’s dinosaurs, possible world theory can enable film theorists to rethink the nature of filmic fictionality and representation by clarifying both the meaning of concepts such as mimeticism, realism, depiction, deception, and illusion, and the way these are actualised in the cinema by techniques and technologies such as linear perspective, editing and special effects.
This process of rethinking and clarification is timely because of the transition taking place in the film industry – from cinema’s nineteenth-century technologies (optics, mechanics, photochemistry) to digital technology. I shall limit myself to: examining the unique way special effects in the post-photographic (that is, digital) image articulate possible worlds; identifying the aesthetics of this digital image – or, more precisely, an image that is a composite of the photographic and the digital. I also want to argue that special effects in the digital image have a function to perform beyond the creation of spectacle. Of course, special effects are employed in many films precisely for this purpose. They are also employed to create funny ridiculous effects (as in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! [1996]). But some films, such as Jurassic Park and The Lost World, go beyond spectacle by employing special effects to articulate a possible world. Yet critics and theorists of contemporary Hollywood cinema ignore this difference and see no function to special effects beyond the creation of spectacle. Such critics and theorists are unwittingly reproducing the rhetoric of auteur criticism of the late 1950s (particularly the extreme positions of François Truffaut and Fereydoun Hoveyda in Cahiers du cinéma) who fetishised mise-en-scène, except that contemporary Holly-wood critics are fetishising digital special effects. To divorce digital special effects from their representational function in films such as Jurassic Park and The Lost World negates their articulation of a possible world.
Mise-en-scène and special effects
Contemporary Hollywood cinema is frequently identified as promoting the image at the expense of narrative. Typical of this approach is the following comment by Jean Douchet: ‘[Today] cinema has given up the purpose and the thinking behind individual shots [and narrative], in favour of images – rootless, textureless images – designed to violently impress by constantly inflating their spectacular qualities’.3 In this recent statement, Douchet is being dismissive of a cinema that, for him, emphasises the image over narrative. This is quite unusual, because in the 1960s he advocated, along with other critics writing for Cahiers du cinéma, a reading strategy that placed emphasis on mise-en-scène rather than narrative, or the script:
Auteur criticism : mise-en-scène/script
The exemplary instance of this exclusive emphasis on mise-en-scène is Fereydoun Hoveyda’s paper on Nicholas Ray’s Party Girl (1958). Hoveyda wrote: ‘Party Girl has an idiotic story. So what? If the substratum of cinematic work was made up simply of plot convolutions unravelling on the screen, then we could just annex the Seventh Art to literature, be content with illustrating novels and short stories … and hand over Cahiers to literary critics’.4 This type of extreme argument extends from Truffaut’s paper, ‘A certain tendency of the French cinema’,5 in which he attacked the French ‘cinema of quality’ for its privileging of the script rather than the cinematic dimensions of film (precisely, mise-en-scène, or mise-en-shot, if we want to be pedantic). In the 1970s, contemporary film theory translated the auteurists’ opposition between mise-en-scène and script into the opposition between image (or spectacle) and narrative:6
| ‘contemporary’ film : |
image-spectacle/ |
| narrative |
theory |
The views of the extreme elements within auteurism are too well known and would be of little importance today if their views were not being reproduced in critical discourse on contemporary Hollywood cinema. In other words, many of today’s critics and reviewers are unwittingly reproducing the same rhetoric that Truffaut, Hoveyda and others used to discuss Hollywood cinema in the early 1960s, except that today’s critics have replaced a fetishisation of mise-en-scène with a fetishisation of special effects and spectacular action sequences. The rhetoric from Hoveyda that I have just quoted can be found in numerous reviews and essays on films such as those of Spielberg. Representative of this position is Derek Malcolm’s review of The Lost World: ‘But the special effects brook no argument, being marginally better than those of the first time round and wrapped around the camera like chocolate around an ice-cream. That is all. The rest is amazing dross from the man who made Jaws, Close Encounters and ET – and Schindler’s List’.7 However, that is not all. The critics’ almost exclusive emphasis on mise-en-scène and special effects is specious at best. It clouded Hoveyda’s judgements, since he ended up arguing that ‘Party Girl is Ray’s most interesting film to date’8 – that is, better than They Live by Night and Rebel Without a Cause. The elements of mise-en-scène that make Party Girl an important film for Hoveyda include the following: the moment when Canetto goes into Vicki’s dressing room and burns himself on one of the light bulbs that decorate the mirror; the shot of the man sketching during the courtroom scene; the drops of water from the bouquet of roses that cling to Vicki’s face; the little flame in the grate reflected in the corner of the mirror as Vicki and Farrell kiss; the scene where Vicki visits Farrell in his apartment: soon after Vicki arrives, Farrell has to leave in order to meet his gangster boss Rico; when Farrell returns later in the evening, Vicki comes out of the bedroom wearing all her clothes but is barefoot.9
In contrast to contemporary critics and reviewers, I will attempt to argue here that Jurassic Park and The Lost World cannot be reduced to special effects. To reduce it in this way is similar to Hoveyda talking about light bulbs, drops of water, flames reflected in mirrors and Vicki barefoot in Party Girl.10 In Jurassic Park and The Lost World, an emphasis on special effects divorced from narrative ignores the film’s articulation of a possible world:
| Contemporary : |
special effects/ |
| Hollywood |
possible worlds criticism |
Moreover, I shall be arguing that the film’s representation of a possible world motivates the special effects and action sequences.
‘To be existent without existing’
– Thomas Pavel
The theory of possible worlds challenges the philosophy of logical positivism. For logical positivists, the actual world is all there is, and non-actual objects or possible states of affairs are meaningless because they do not correspond to immediate experience. It was only with the rise of modal logic (the study of possibility and necessity) that analytic philosophers broadened their horizons to analyse the possible as well as the actual.
Modal logic studies the range of possible – that is, non-actual – states of affairs that emerge from an actual state of affairs. These possible states of affairs have a different ontological status, or mode of being, to the actual state of affairs. Possible worlds form part of the actual world but have a different ontological status to the actual world. Whereas logical positivists would argue that non-actual possibilities are meaningless, because they do not correspond to the actual world, possible world theorists argue that non-actual possibilities correspond to an abstract, hypothetical state of affairs, which has an ontological status, but one different to the actual world.11
The basic premiss of possible world theory is that the world could have been otherwise. David Lewis argues that:
It is uncontroversially true that things might be otherwise than they are. I believe, and so do you, that things could have been different in countless ways … I therefore believe in the existence of entities that might be called ‘ways things could have been’. I prefer to call them ‘possible worlds’.12
Possible world theory has also entered the historian’s domain. It may seem paradoxical that a discipline concerned with what has been can learn anything from the counterfactual philosophical position of possible world theory. Yet the work of R. W. Fogel in the 1960s and, more recently, Niall Ferguson’s Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals,13 propose that possible world theory is able to illuminate what actually happened, propositions that cannot be drawn from the consultation of historical records alone. For example, the proposition that ‘Napoleon did not die on St Helena but escaped to New Orleans’ contradicts a fact in the actual world (that Napoleon did die on St Helena). For this reason, logical positivists would classify this proposition as empty and meaningless. But in possible world history, that proposition is meaningful in an alternative possible world – a world in which Napoleon escaped to New Orleans. This possible world is not simply fictional because it is grounded in the actual world – namely, the historical figure of Napoleon; and arguably, he remains the same historical figure in the alternative possible world, even though his life story is altered. Because they are grounded in the actual world, possible worlds cannot simply be dismissed as a jeux d’esprit, an entertaining diversion from the determinism of thinking only about what already exists or existed. Possible world theory enables us to see the contingency of both historical and cultural events, and even natural laws such as biological evolution.
From the perspective of possible worlds, reality is not simply made up of a fixed realm of facts open to immediate experience, but a complex structure of sub-systems, only one of which is actual. In opposition to logical positivism, the theory of possible worlds stipulates that ‘non-actual possibilities make perfectly coherent systems which can be described and qualified, imagined and intended and to which one can refer’.14 The notion that one can refer to a non-actual – possible – world has a significant number of consequences for theories of filmic representation, some of which I shall examine later in this paper.
The actual and the possible
Michael Crichton’s novels Jurassic Park and The Lost World, as with most of his other novels (such as Congo and Disclosure, as well as his films Westworld [1973] and Coma [1978]), do not operate in the realm of pure fantasy, imagination or fiction, but present a possible world, by drawing out extreme consequences from a non-fictional state of affairs in the actual world. When Spielberg’s film of Jurassic Park was released in Britain in July 1993, much of the media speculated on the actual possibility of cloning dinosaurs. In the BBC programme Spielberg and the Dinosaurs one of the first questions asked was: ‘With genetic engineering advancing at a startling speed, what if scientists were able to recreate the extinct species?’15 The programme suggested that Jurassic Park is based upon a credible scientific foundation – the extraction of prehistoric DNA from bloodsucking insects fossilised in amber. In the New Scientist, the palaeontologist Douglas Palmer briefly summed up the research carried out by George Poinar of insects trapped in amber, and noted that: ‘There is an enormous potential for research in molecular palaeontology … two American research teams have independently extracted tiny fragments of insect DNA from fossils embedded in amber. … Just a few weeks ago, one of the teams led by Poinar obtained fragments of the oldest yet known DNA, extracted from a Cretaceous plant-eating beetle found in amber from Lebanon’.16 However, he sounded a sceptical note concerning the possibility of extracting dinosaur DNA from bloodsucking insects and genetically engineering dinosaurs from it: ‘Speculation on the viability of recreating dinosaurs from fossil DNA endures despite its extreme improbability’.17 Nonetheless, in The Times Ben Macintyre wrote: ‘Despite the assurances of experts that the ‘science’ expounded [in] Jurassic Park is only tenuously based on reality, the film has had an effect on America in some way reminiscent of Orson Welles’s 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds’. He went on to write ‘Even the relentlessly serious-minded New York Times felt moved to reassure its readers in an editorial that ‘scientists will not have the capability any time soon of resurrecting the dinosaurs’’.18
The reason for this intense media speculation is that dinosaurs (unlike many aliens and monsters found in other films) did actually exist, and the research into fossilised DNA is actually being carried out, only not on the level articulated in Crichton’s novels and Spielberg’s films. For Nigel Hawkes: ‘The power of the book [Jurassic Park] rests not on puff but plausibility. Like most of the best science fiction, it hovers on the very edge of science fact, creating a nightmare out of the kind of gentle speculation that scientists enjoy’.19 It is this non-fictional dimension to Jurassic Park and The Lost World that enables us to characterise them as articulating a possible world. Both the novels and the films are taking new scientific ideas to their logical (or illogical) conclusions. In other words, Jurassic Park and The Lost World begin from scientific fact (the actual), and then take these facts to their furthest consequences (the possible). Because it takes as its starting point the actual, then it is not pure fantasy (the impossible). The novels and the films therefore present a possible world, which exists between science fact and science fiction. Below I shall begin to distinguish the presentation of a possible world in novels and films, since film (or, at least, the post-photographic, or digital image) has the unique capacity to present access to possible worlds, and to combine seamlessly the actual with the possible, by means of digital special effects. The specificity of film’s presentation of possible worlds therefore lies in its digital capacity.
Others have theorised a similar concept to possible worlds. In Hauntings Joseph Natoli outlines the relation between the in-conceivable and conceivable in popular film, and suggests that the ability to make the inconceivable appear conceivable is one of the main attractions of a film. He writes:
the film [can make] conceivable what the culture had not itself held as conceivable. The film [can bring] to the level of representation what has not already existed as a ‘something’ within the culture. The culture couldn’t give us the means to categorise … popular films do put off and play with the as-yet inconceivable. And we are, as viewers, the ones toward whom all of this putting off and taking on is directed.20
Similarly, in a discussion of the difference between imagination and fantasy, Ernst Bloch argues that only imagination possesses what he calls ‘an expectable not-yet existence … [that] anticipates a real potentiality’.21 Likewise, in The Fantastic Todorov identifies a form of literature he calls the ‘instrumental marvellous’, in which ‘we find gadgets, technological developments unrealised in the period described but, after all, quite possible’.22
The reference world in Jurassic Park and The Lost World is not the actual world (these films are not documentaries), nor is it a purely imaginary world (these films are not purely fictional either). Their reference world is a possible world that is very similar to the actual world. Previously we saw how possible world historians altered the laws of historical fact to produce counterfactual histories. Jurassic Park and The Lost World mark their difference to the actual world by altering a scientific law of nature – namely, biological evolution by means of genetic engineering. The fact that this genetic engineering is being carried out in the actual world, only not on the scale depicted in Jurassic Park and The Lost World, demonstrates that there is a strong accessibility relation, or compatibility, between the actual world and the possible world of Jurassic Park and The Lost World. The research in molecular palaeontology mentioned previously has not discovered any dinosaur DNA; it has discovered prehistoric insect DNA. Jurassic Park and The Lost World represent a possible world from the extremely small probability in the actual world of eventually finding dinosaur DNA in a bloodsucking insect fossilised in amber and then ‘growing’ dinosaurs from this DNA. However, Spielberg has actualised this extremely small probability on the movie screen with the aid of digital special effects.23
Contemporary Hollywood: a composite cinema
We currently see before our very eyes in contemporary Hollywood cinema a composite – a composite of the optical (or photographic) and the digital (or post-photographic) image. In the following section. I shall attempt to determine the aesthetics and epistemic status of the composite.
Photography is dependent upon the presence of pre-existing real objects, whose appearance is automatically reproduced by means of optics and photochemistry (or electronics, in the case of video). The photographic image is therefore indexically bound to the actual world. The photographic is an analogue of the real. However, the digital (or post-photographic) image is not determined or limited to the actual world in the same way. Whereas the photographic image is an analogue of the pre-existing real objects whose appearance it reproduces automatically, the digital image is produced by numerical digital codes, each of which is then realised on screen as a pixel, on point of light. The continuous lines, masses and contours of the analogue are divided up into discontinuous, discrete fragments of information, or pixels, on a monitor. Lucia Santella Braga points out that:
Each pixel corresponds to numerical values that enable the computer to assign it a precise position in the two dimensional space of the screen, within a generally Cartesian coordinate system. To those coordinates are added chromatic coordinates. The numerical values [the digital code] transform each fragment into entirely discontinuous and quantified elements, distinct from the other elements, over which full control is exercised.24
The crucial phrase here is ‘over which full control is exercised’. The ‘filmmaker’ has the potential to transform each pixel into an entirely different value, for each pixel is defined in terms of a numerical matrix that can be modified and transformed by a mathematical algorithm. ‘The result’, writes Braga, ‘is that the numerical image is under perpetual metamorphosis, oscillating between the image that is actualised on the screen and the virtual image or infinite set of potential images that can be calculated by the computer’.25
Practitioners of the special effects industry distinguish between invisible and visible special effects. Invisible special effects, which constitute up to ninety percent of the work of the special effects industry, simulate events in the actual world that are too expensive or inconvenient to produce, such as the waves in James Cameron’s Titanic (1997). As their name implies, invisible special effects are not meant to be noticed (as special effects) by film spectators. Visible special effects, on the other hand, simulate events that are impossible in the actual world (but which are possible in an alternative world), such as the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and The Lost World. The crucial aesthetic point in relation to the digital special effects in these two films in particular is that, while clearly visible, these effects attempt to hide behind an iconic appearance; that is, they are visible special effects masquerading as invisible effects. In other words, the digital images combine the aesthetics of both visible and invisible special effects, since they have the potential to replicate the realism and illusionism of the photographic image by conferring a perfect photographic credibility upon objects that do not exist in the actual world.
From this discussion it is possible to determine the motivation for the digital special effects in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park and The Lost World: namely, to simulate the actuality of dinosaurs living in the present day. This actuality is of course an illusion – or, more accurately, what Richard Allen calls a sensory deception,26 which shows dinosaurs inhabiting a world that otherwise looks like the actual world. In accordance with Allen’s term, we see something that does not exist, but this does not necessarily lead us to believe that it actually exists. Of course, such deceptions have been created before by optically printing two separately filmed events onto the same strip of film. The result is a composite, or layered image. In theory, this optically produced composite fabricates a spatio-temporal unity, giving the impression that the two separate events are taking place at the same diegetic space and time. The first event may be of live actions, and the second event may consist of stop-motion animation. However, the optical and photochemical equipment used in this process has inherent limitations that cannot be disguised, such as loss of resolution, grain and hard edge matte lines. Therefore, although optical composites can always give the impression that the two separate events occupy the same screen space, they eventually fall short in convincing the increasingly sophisticated spectator that the separate events occupy the same diegesis. Digital compositing equipment does not have the technical limitations inherent in optical printers, and so it can create a more seamless blend of live action and animation, leading to the deception that the composited events do occupy the same diegesis.
In Jurassic Park and The Lost World, this deception is heightened even further in the moments when the digital dinosaurs and live-action characters interact. In these shots, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) has created a seamless fusion of live action and computer-generated dinosaurs. Such a fusion and interaction greatly contributes to the realism of these films. We can even argue that (however paradoxical it may sound) the shots showing the humans and digital dinosaurs interacting are the digital equivalent of the long takes and deep focus shots praised by André Bazin for their spatial density and surplus of realism, in opposition to the synthetic and unrealistic effects created by editing. Accord-ing to Bazin, there are three types of realism in the cinema: an ontological realism, which (to paraphrase Bazin) restores to the object and the decor their existential density, the weight of their presence; a dramatic realism, which refuses to separate the actor from the decor, the foreground from the background; and a psychological realism, which brings the spectator back to the real conditions of perception, a perception which is never com-pletely predetermined.27 For Bazin, all three types of realism are achieved via the long take and deep focus, because these techniques maintain spatial unity.
In light of the exponential advances in film theory since Bazin, we need to discuss a fourth type of realism in the cinema: the impression of reality, developed in the 1970s within a psychoanalytic (read Lacanian) framework, of which Stephen Heath’s work on suture is representative.28 As is well known, suture designates a process whereby the spectator is continually positioned and repositioned in an imaginary, as opposed to symbolic, relation to the image. Positioned in an imaginary relation to the image, the spectator enjoys a sense of mastery and pleasure, since she/he gains the impression of being an all-perceiving eye (analogous to the child at the mirror phase). The result of this imaginary positioning is that the spectator perceives the space of the image as unified and harmonious. For Heath, this position of imaginary plenitude and spatial unity constitutes the cinema’s impression of reality. This impression is not, therefore, based on the image’s relation to profilmic reality, but on the cinema’s ability to conceal from the spectator the symbolic dimension of the image (the image as signifier, as representing lack). Inevitably, the symbolic dimension of the image becomes apparent to the spectator when this illusion of all-seeingness is broken – most notably, when attention is drawn to offscreen space. The spectator’s perception of spatial unity and harmony in the image is similarly broken. But a cut to this offscreen space realigns the spectator to an imaginary relation to the image (that is, sutures the spectator back into the film), and restores to the image the sense of unity and harmony – at least until the symbolic dimension of the image becomes noticeable to the spectator once more. According to this theory, realism is nothing more than an effect of the successful positioning of the spectator into an imaginary relation to the image, a position which creates a sense that the film’s space and diegesis is unified and harmonious.
Heath and Bazin share this privileging of spatial and diegetic unity, despite the many differences that otherwise distinguish their respective accounts (Heath’s emphasis that this unity is imaginary, that it has ideological effects, and so on). Bazin privileges spatial unity throughout his work, but I shall look at the long footnote to his essay ‘The virtues and limitations of montage’.29 He refers to a scene from the film Where No Vultures Fly (Harry Watt, 1951). The film is about a young family who set up a game reserve in South Africa. In the scene that Bazin discusses, the young son of the family picks up a lion cub in the bush and takes it home. The lioness detects the child’s scent and begins to follow him. The lioness and the child with the cub are filmed separately, and the shots are simply edited together. But as the child reaches home, the director abandons his montage of separate shots that has kept the protagonists apart and gives us instead parents, child and lioness all in the same full shot. ‘This single frame’, writes Bazin, in ‘which trickery is out of the question gives immediate and retroactive authenticity to the very banal montage that preceded it’.30 In this particular example, the realism of the shot for Bazin is a matter of spatial unity, in which the child and the lioness clearly occupy the same diegetic space. Indeed, Bazin concludes his footnote by writing that: ‘Realism here resides in the homogeneity of space’.31 More specifically, the realism resides in the fact that this homogeneity of space is created optically.
In the digital images of Spielberg’s dinosaur films, trickery is of course employed to bring together in the same full shot humans and dinosaurs. The first sighting of the digitally created dinosaurs in Jurassic Park is significant in this respect. Approximately twenty minutes into the film, Grant (Sam Neil) and Sattler (Laura Dern) are given a tour of the park, where they see the dinosaurs roaming around. The dinosaurs, however, do not simply ‘appear’ in the film; instead, they are depicted through a strongly orchestrated point-of-view sequence. The jeep transporting Grant and Sattler is brought to a sudden halt. In the back, Grant looks off-screen right and the camera dollies in on his face. The camera cuts to a new position as he then jumps out of his seat, takes off his hat and sunglasses, maintaining his face full frame. But instead of cutting to what he sees, the camera instead cuts to Sattler, sitting in the front seat of the jeep looking at a large leaf. Two additional shots then depict Grant’s hand as he forcefully turns her head away from the leaf and towards off-screen space. She similarly jumps out of her seat, mouth agape, and takes off her sunglasses. Only then do we cut to this offscreen space – of a brachiosaur. Furthermore, Grant and Sattler appear in the shot, which therefore only represents their awareness, rather than their actual point of view. Or, in Edward Branigan’s terms, the shot is externally (rather than internally) focalised around the collective gaze of Grant and Sattler, since they are present in the shot of the brachiosaur.32 Numerous shots of other interactions between humans and dinosaurs populate both Jurassic Park and The Lost World. What this means is that ILM has created a seamless composite of both the digital and analogue image in the same shot – that is, layers, combines and merges the digital and the analogue into a single coherent image, resulting in a unified diegetic space. The films that ILM has worked on during the 1990s (not only Spielberg’s dinosaur films, but also Hook [1991], Terminator 2 [1991], Death Becomes Her [1992] and Dragonheart [1996]) constitute an authentic composite – or a mixed-media – cinema.
Contemporary Hollywood has thus combined features of digital special effects with narrational procedures of illusionist realism. Another instance of this can be seen in respect of camera movement which, rather as it did with the advent of sound, poses special problems for the composite mode. Initially, it was impossible to use camera movement when compositing live action with special effects or animation. But ILM was able to overcome this fundamental principle of compositing in their breakthrough film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Robert Zemeckis, 1988). This film created a seamless fusion of cel animation and live action while using extensive camera movement:
The commandment of locking down cameras [that is, keeping them stationary] for effects photography was particularly strict in filming and compositing live action and animated elements. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? would not only break the mold and have a lively camera tracking both live actors and animated cartoon characters, it would be up to ILM to see that the twain would meet to create through optical alchemy a world where humans and cartoons could live together.33
In previous attempts to combine live action and cel animation, the live action had to be filmed using a stationary camera to provide the animators with fixed reference points around which to integrate the animation. However, this resulted in a static composite in which the live action and animation, although occupying the same screen space did not fabricate the impression that they are interacting with one another in the same diegesis. With Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, ILM created a more believable composite partly by means of camera movement, which gave the impression that the camera is equally following the live action and cartoons, resulting in the illusion that they are occupying the same diegesis. This impression is created through the compositing of digital special effects and live action by means of motion control.34
Advances in computer technology and software enabled Spielberg to use more complex camera movements in The Lost World that in Jurassic Park, as well as more intricate interactions between the digital dinosaurs and the live action. The result was a believable composite of live action and computer generated dinosaurs. The Lost World begins with an intricate interaction between a young girl and dozens of small compys. When Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and his team visit Site B on Isla Sorna, they first encounter a herd of stegosauruses which, significantly, pass in front of, as well as behind the team. And when the second team, headed by Roland Tembo and Peter Ludlow, invade the island in an attempt to catch the dinosaurs we see 3-D interaction between them and the digital dinosaurs. And this is the primary difference between Jurassic Park and The Lost World: it is not a matter of fifty percent more dinosaurs in the second film, but a more complex series of composited interactions between the live action and computer-generated dinosaurs.
What are the consequences of this process of compositing the photographic and post-photographic images using digital rather than optical technology? The interactions created between the digital dinosaurs and live action/real backgrounds within a single shot help to create a new realism in the digital image, for the effects create the illusion of spatial and diegetic unity. This is analogous to Bazin’s discussion of spatial unity in the shot from Where No Vultures Fly. Moreover, ILM’s digital compositing creates all three types of realism identified by Bazin: ontological realism, in that the digital dinosaurs appear to have equal weight and density as the photographic background and live action characters; dramatic realism, in that they are seamlessly blended into, and interact with, the photographic background and live-action characters; and psychological realism, in that they are seen to occupy the same space as the photographic background and live-action characters. Finally, Heath’s discussion of the impression of reality – in which this impression is created by suturing the spectator into an imaginary relation to the image, producing the impression that the image’s space is unified and harmonious – is also applicable to the new digital technology, since it conceals the symbolic mechanisms from the spectator more seamlessly than optical technology, thus suturing the spectator into this imaginary relation. It is in the reproduction of the three types of realism central to the Hollywood feature film as conceived by Bazin, together with Heath’s theory of suture, that digital cinema continues the practices of realism and illusionism.
As a final point, the composite mode has also developed a digital effect that reinforces the impression that digital and analogue events take place in the same unified space and diegesis: the illusion that spectators are watching movement. This effect is the motion blur. In live-action shots, when people and objects move, they become blurred. However, when objects are moved via stop-motion animation they are not blurred; instead, the animated model simply consists of quick, hard movements. As each frame is exposed, it photographs a still model. Before the next frame is exposed, the model is moved very slightly. The next frame then records the result of that motion, but it does not photograph the motion itself. The result is that the model is always pin sharp, however fast it is meant to be moving. But in producing motion in Spielberg’s digital dinosaurs, motion blur is added to the image. In the composites, the live action characters have optical blur when they move, and the digital dinosaurs have digital blur when they move. This ‘limitation’, which is automatically generated in the photographic image and simulated in the digital image, strengthens the illusion that the humans and dinosaurs occupy the same diegesis.
We are now in a better position to consider the spectator’s investment in the realism and illusionism of the image in the composite mode. As we have already seen, the special effects in films such as Jurassic Park and The Lost World attempt to combine the aesthetics of both visible and invisible digital special effects – to repeat what I said above, they have the potential to replicate the realism and illusionism of the photographic image by conferring a perfect photographic credibility upon objects that do not exist in the actual world. In other words, digital special effects simulate realism and illusionism as theorised by both Bazin and Heath, whereas in other films, visible special effects by themselves are used to create totally synthetic, futuristic worlds. For the moment, we are only concerned with the digital image’s simulation of realism and illusionism and, more particularly, in the way spectators react to this simulation.
Firstly, we can look at the two approaches to the way the film spectator’s set of beliefs regarding the realism and illusionism of the fiction film have been theorised – the psychoanalytic theory (epitomised in Heath’s theory of suture, discussed above) and the more recent cognitive theory (of Joseph Anderson, David Bordwell, Noel Carroll, Murray Smith and Ed Tan).35 The difference between these two theories of fictional representation concerns the ontological com-mitment the spectator is regarded as investing in the fictional objects. In psychoanalytic theory the investment is high, to the extent that it involves a modification of consciousness (the spectator is positioned in an imaginary relation to the image), whereas in cognitive theory the investment is low or zero. For cognitivists, the spectator simply knows that fictional objects are unreal; there is no need to resort to systems of belief regarding the spectator’s investment in the ontology of fictional objects. For this reason, cognitivists tend to reject the illusionistic theory of realism altogether.
Whether either the psychoanalytic or the cognitive theory offers an accurate or plausible account of fiction is a moot point. What I want to emphasise here is that theories of fictional representation cannot adequately characterise the belief system that spectators require to comprehend the worlds articulated in films such as Jurassic Park and The Lost World. When presented with a possible world on screen, spectators do not make a high ontological commitment to the reality of the objects on screen, but neither do they simply reject them as imaginary. The digital image can, by means of special effects, make the possible believable. The spectator’s system of belief can be characterised in terms of ‘What if’, ‘As if’, or ‘What might have been’ propositional attitudes. The modality of these propositions indicate that (pace the modal realism of David Lewis), the existence of possible worlds is mind dependent. This conceptual approach to possible worlds reveals the hierarchy set up by possible world theorists, which posits that only actual states of affairs exist – that is, are mind independent. Possible, or unactualised states of affairs are mind dependent. Possible worlds exist in so far as they are thought of, hypothesised, imagined or assumed. Nonetheless, possible world theory is not merely concerned with the possibility in thought of unactualised states of affairs, but with the probability of occurrence of the unactualised but possible state of affairs. This is what makes films that articulate a possible world so compelling: the probability of occurrence of scientists finding dinosaur DNA and ‘growing’ dinosaurs from it, are presented as if they were mind independent – that is, actual states of affairs. The power in the presentation of a possible world is increased when it is actualised on the movie screen with the aid of digital special effects, which create the perceptual illusion that the possible world is actual. The spectator’s belief system regarding films that articulate possible worlds can therefore be characterised as a combination of modal propositions (descriptions of possible worlds) and declarative propositions (which describe the actual world).
One advantage of the theory of possible worlds to film theory is that it explores the interface between a film and social reality, but without returning to any naive theories of mimeticism. Marie-Laure Ryan points out that: ‘The pragmatic purpose of counterfactuals is not to create alternative possible worlds for their own sake, but to make a point about [the actual world]’,36 namely, to emphasise that the actual world is not necessarily the best of all possible worlds, and that the actual world can be otherwise if a different set of conditions prevail.
Hopefully, the value of the theory of possible worlds in understanding the huge attraction of Crichton’s novels and Spielberg’s films is more evident. Jurassic Park and The Lost World, the books and the films, represent a possible world, which can be summarised as follows: ‘If dinosaurs could be resurrected by scientists using dinosaur DNA extracted from prehistoric blood-sucking insects fossilised in amber, then these books or films show one possible outcome’. Spielberg’s films go one step further than Crichton’s novels because digital special effects create a new aesthetic realism by making visible and believable a possible world.
As with the best science fiction, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park and The Lost World are grounded in science fact, but they go beyond those facts to create a possible world where the extreme consequences of the social and economic exploitation of contemporary technology are graphically illustrated using digital special effects.
Many film critics and theorists give the impression that special effects and action sequences are unmotivated in contemporary Hollywood cinema. In some films, of course, they are. But in Jurassic Park and The Lost World, digital special effects are motivated by the attempt to make the possible believable. Critics who discuss these films in terms of unmotivated special effects are unwittingly continuing the auteur criticism of the early 1960s by ignoring or by-passing the script in favour of mise-en-scène. The extremist mem-bers of Cahiers du cinéma fetishised mise-en-scène. In a similar vein, contemporary film critics and theorists fetishise special effects.
Spielberg’s two films are not representing in a neutral manner the world of Crichton’s novels, since the production technology of the digital image is actualising that world through the process of visual concretisation and intensification. In the end, Spielberg’s two films are not only representing what is technologically possible in genetic engineering in another world, but also what is possible in digital special effects technology in the actual world.
I would like to thank Thomas Elsaesser for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Notes