The Making of Jurassic Park documentary – re-released with the movie on DVD, presumably under Spielberg’s supervision – commences with a clip of Grant (Sam Neill) removing sunglasses to gawp at a dinosaur. This definitive, self-reflexive Spielberg moment, comprising vision, simultaneous belief, disbelief and projective desire, cuts immediately to Grant asking, ‘How did you do this?’ Hammond (Richard Attenborough) replies: ‘I’ll show you how.’
Creating dinosaurs through advanced biotechnology, as – like movies – larger-than-life spectacles, parallels their rendition through advanced special effects: each utilises complex codes and virtual reality imaging. A respected director plays Hammond, visionary and impresario (likened, in the source novel, overtly to Disney), who as a former flea circus entertainer founded his career on special effects. (Spielberg asked Attenborough, whose Gandhi (1982) pipped E.T. at the Academy Awards, to supervise Schindler’s List temporarily so he could complete Jurassic Park’s post-production – eventually entrusted to George Lucas (Baxter 1996: 387)). Hammond’s primary interest is audience reactions; Spielberg’s bearded, bespectacled alter-ego, creator of a monster attraction, scrutinises his guests’ awe-struck horror as a velociraptor lunches on a cow. Jurassic Park, ‘a neat parable about Hollywood itself’ (Black 1993: 8), was, Spielberg said, ‘the story of any studio head having a bad year who needs a hit’ (in Kennedy 2001:94).
‘Welcome to Jurassic Park’
Hammond’s greeting to his guests, interpellating the spectator also, embraces his fictional project and the film, epitomising double-voiced discourse that reverberates throughout. The visitors, enthralled, observe cloned dinosaurs; we, enthralled, observe computer-animated dinosaurs. Hammond’s gift shop contains identical souvenirs to movie theatre foyers and the stores outside – including, centre-screen, the Making of Jurassic Park book – all sharing a distinctive logo. The movie, advertising profitable merchandise that itself promotes the movie, asserts – yet toys with – its showmanship and the proto-cinematic dream of realism.
Equating illusion with reality motivated fin de siècle novelties such as simulators, Phantom Rides and Hale’s Tours (films of tourist destinations viewed from mocked-up railroad cars). As attractions these existed for their own sake – sensations, celeb-rations of technology – as much as their ostensible content. Cinematic pioneers commonly filmed local sights and screened the footage publicly the same day; it was not the actual street scene, free of charge outside, which punters queued for. Parallels with Hammond’s Visitor Centre presentation (in which the lawyer, Gennaro (Martin Ferrero), mistakes working scientists for animatronics) and the rail-guided Jeep tours, are striking. These emphasise in microcosm Jurassic Park’s delivery of cinema as spectacle and visceral experience. They also anticipate Universal Studios’ Jurassic Park rides, utilising effects developed for the movie: ‘a theme-park ride based on the movie about a theme park, a ride that delivers the visitor conveniently to its retail outlet’ (King 2000: 42). Unprecedented synergies within MCA/Matsushita meant projected income from these rides underwrote Spielberg’s production budget, along with in-house tie-in merchandise (Bennett 1993: 10; Balides 2000: 145).
Reproducing life from different times and places – literally and metaphorically, through fictional cloning and actual computer-generated imaging – blurs artifice and reality. Dinosaurs and cars steered by electric tracks were, after all, popular toys before the film logo graced their packaging. In a postmodern conflation, logo and title signify intra- and extra-diegetically, playfully and with ruthless commercial logic, in and around a text that ironises its own values and conditions of existence. Spectators enjoy the ride or appreciate the craft, humour and paradoxes available; or both – concurrently or serially enthralled, decentred, pleasurably alienated, or pulled in and out of Imaginary subject positions and Symbolic awareness. Any movie theoretically procures such alternatives; few combine them so variably as Jurassic Park, which appeals widely by offering not a lowest common denominator but multiple potential pleasures. It sustains and extends inherent contradictions in special effects, between belief when they are convincing and wonder at their achievement.
The spectacle of the first dinosaur seen in entirety emphasises this. Grant then looks off-screen, cueing expectations, answered by a long shot of wading brachiosaurs and gallimimuses, accompanied by majestic music. The composition, divided by perspective lines into a separate background and a foreground containing dwarfed humans, stand-in observers, creates a mise-en-abyme of spectatorship.
Jurassic Park invites self-reflexive reading throughout. Original audiences, primed by months of hype, hearing ominous music and animal noises accompanying the black-screen title credits, confronted in the first shot something mysterious rustling through close-up vegetation. Promised convincing monsters – much was made of potential psychological damage to children and consequent debates over classification – audiences were tantalised by initial non-appearance of a creature metonymically (that is, inferentially) present. Cut to a worker looking up, anxiously, off-screen: an inscribed spectator wearing a Jurassic Park hat as though he had already bought the merchandise. Light beams through branches. An inscribed audience, all in hats with logos, backlit, look intently upwards, the central figure chewing as if devouring popcorn. Smoke or steam motivates a shot included only to feature the light beam. A big-game hunter, heavily armed, underlines danger. Not only are these characters intensely backlit, reflected front-lighting emanates from the suspended crate before them. Contractors’ lamps, rectangular, figure simultaneously as surrogate movie lighting, projectors and screens.
A point-of-view shot inside the crate confirms, yet defers the dinosaur’s presence: an inscribed widescreen frame. This aperture contains the frightened workers’ reaction shot, as if looking back out through the screen. To the extent secondary identification occurs, spectators feel, or imagine being, threatened. The unseen animal apparently sees them: the power of the gaze resides in the most powerful diegetic object – not where it is commonly supposed, in the spectating subject.
Light shafts improbably emanating from within the crate as well as projected onto it, reminiscent of Jean-Louis Baudry’s diagrammatic cinematic apparatus (1974/75: 41), compound this notion of enfolded spectatorship. Another point-of-view shot through a widescreen aperture, a worker atop the crate, presages imminent release of the spectator’s psychically ‘projected’, still unseen, dinosaur; in other words fulfilling desire implicated in the narrative image surrounding the film’s long-anticipated release. The game warden directs his crew, shouting conceivably the same orders at the same moments – ‘Step away! Gatekeeper! Raise the gate!’ – as Spielberg during shooting. Light beams move with the gate, seemingly projecting its movements. Horror unleashed coincides with projection, discharge of spectatorial desire. As the unseen dinosaur moves, an invisible force seemingly sucks in the gatekeeper, literally along a light shaft. His violent demise occasions rapid montage that disturbs by disorientation rather than explicitness: close-ups on the game warden’s and the dinosaur’s eyes, the victim’s hand and the warden’s mouth court comparison with Psycho’s shower scene as he screams, ‘Shoot her!’ – another cinematographic pun.
The power of light, associated with death as electric stun guns attack the creature, refracts through the next sequence, in an amber mine, which associates it with creation. If the Park is excessively fecund – luxuriant vegetation, water and initially female dinosaurs abound – mining, like the applied science it here supports, is masculine, acquisitive. Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) later calls discovery ‘a violent, penetrative act … the rape of the natural world’. While nature reincorporates the violently devoured gatekeeper, disappearing through slick, wet foliage in a reverse birth image, the miners seek the genetic origins of new life. Their helmet lamps probe the darkness for fossilised insects, while Gennaro, in the entrance, casts radiating shadows reminiscent of the projection theatre in Citizen Kane. Polishing the amber inevitably showers sparks, echoing Jim’s encounter with his quest objects in Empire of the Sun. When Gennaro and several miners group to examine a specimen, converging helmet lamps elicit a glow as from within. Flamboyant reframing, wide-angle to macro, accompanied by John Williams’ heavenly choir, reveals a preserved mosquito. Juxtapositions between scenes – horror/beauty, obscurity/clarity, darkness/light, nature/technology, fear/optimism, instinct/rationality, mass/diminutiveness, strength/delicateness, in the context of primal forces and religious connotations – recall dualities in William Blake’s poem, ‘The Tyger’, itself epitomising ambivalence concerning both natural and scientific creation.
Cut from the insect to a palaeontologist’s brush unearthing fossil bones matching the Jurassic Park logo: montage renders the film’s diegetic content congruent with the framing text and institutional context, all correlated with the might of evolution. Again, Spielberg’s director-figure presumes divine power, this time heading for a Promethean or, appropriately, Frankenstein-like downfall.
Grant on his dig is another character presented through filmmaking analogies. His palaeontologists – based, like a location crew, in trailers – literally take a ‘shot’ to image a buried fossil (firing a shell into the ground to generate seismic waves) and crowd around a monitor. ‘I hate computers’, Grant complains, as a degraded image slowly scans onto the screen, whereas his technician insists: ‘This new programme’s incredible. A few more years and we won’t even have to dig any more.’ Grant’s reply, ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ underscores similarities with the movie’s transitional status between traditional methods and computer animation. While Grant talks excitedly of velociraptors – a forceful contrast with Nedry (Wayne Knight), cynical designer of Jurassic Park’s computer control systems, greedy rather than visionary – the lens flares and wind agitates his hair.
Hammond’s ambivalence and hubris, as filmmaking metaphor as well as in terms of scientific ethics, register when his helicopter blows sand over the excavations on arrival to recruit Grant and Sattler (Laura Dern). A line of laundry buffeting violently – Spielberg’s solar wind – marks his presence metonymically as he carelessly destroys their painstaking efforts yet fulfils their professional dreams, initially by guaranteeing funding. Light shafts through a window behind them as they meet their benefactor, who glows in white clothing like a projection. This encounter, as he promises ‘attractions’ to ‘drive kids out of their minds’, pre-echoes his later presentation introducing ‘the most advanced amusement park in the world, incorporating all the latest technologies’ – effectively the movie and its spin-offs, even alluding to global marketing as he promises dinosaurs ‘so astounding that they’ll capture the imagination of the entire planet’. Grant’s comment, ‘We’re out of a job’, and Malcolm’s reply, ‘Don’t you mean extinct?’ were, according to the Making of Jurassic Park DVD extra, based on stop-frame animator Phil Tippet’s comments on seeing computer rushes.
The flight to the island, its landscape framed in ‘widescreen’ windows, resembles a Cinerama, IMAX or Dolby demonstration. The waterfall, down which the helicopter descends and before which Hammond steps out, resembles a light beam, reinforcing cinematic/religious parallels and establishing Edenic connotations. Following dinosaur sightings, in which the lawyer differentiates himself by commercial speculation rather than spontaneous awe, the party enters the Visitor Centre through sunburst-carved portals. They occupy a part theme park simulator, part movie theatre, its screen brandishing the logo within a proscenium containing receding frames: a mise-en-abyme. Hammond, wearing white, approaches his on-screen double, in black, in virtual perspective. When the on-screen figure greets them, Hammond urges his guests, ‘Say hello’; they do, affirming the need for active audience participation: a carnivalesque throwback to his flea circus. Like an actor leaving space for a special effect (as Attenborough, pro-filmically, is) Hammond forgets his lines and misses his cue. When he ‘pricks’ his double’s finger for blood, the latter becomes much larger, clearly a movie image. Beams project over the inscribed audience as Hammond’s virtual Other is repeatedly cloned, an overt association of genetic with cinematographic copying. (This splitting, moreover, into half-real, half-image, black and white, renders Hammond literally a ‘projection character’, an expression of authorial contradictions (Hawthorn 1994: 161).)
Hammond’s movie explaining computer-assisted cloning now fills our screen, positioning us identically to the diegetic audience. Drawn animation, based on an early cartoon, Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), underlines the analogy – Gertie’s creator, Winsor McCay, incorporated live-action footage so he could step behind the screen into the film – as do Hammond’s comments that ‘This score is temporary. We ought to have dramatic music of course’, as though we are viewing rushes. Stressing the creative process likens Jurassic Park’s exponential developments to innovative early cinema.
Science fiction is inextricable from the display of effects technology (Stern 1990; Pierson 1999). Garrett Stewart notes, ‘The genre’s typical mise-en-scène is replete with viewing screens that function not only as tools in the narrative but as icons of continuity with the present-day science of communication or surveillance’ (1998: 100): certainly true of the Park’s control centre monitors, via which action elsewhere appears on closed-circuit television or is inferred. ‘Alternatively in the genre’, Stewart continues, ‘a given film’s present visual achievement may be measured against its screen predecessors, as when DeMille’s parting of the Red Sea on the hero’s TV establishes a baseline for the one-upmanship to come in Close Encounters’ (ibid.). This applies with Gertie, and also with snippets of a 1950s flying saucer movie and Tom and Jerry watched by E.T.
Safety bars close down on the seats as what Hammond calls ‘the tour’ continues; this theme park adventure, as the auditorium rotates, reveals a laboratory, framed as though filmed, a postmodern conversion of reality into perceived simulacrum. The observers’ reflections inscribe a screen and indeed the Lacanian film theory metaphor of screen as mirror. For knowing audiences, even the robot hand that turns incubating eggs and delicately takes a shell from Grant’s hand is an assertion of cutting-edge mechanical effects, which comprise a substantial part of the dinosaur footage.
Lunch occurs explicitly among banked projectors, shining over the diners’ shoulders, displaying slides on the walls. Light beams figure characters’ desires: ‘We can charge anything’ encapsulates Gennaro’s limited vision, expressed as the pun ‘Projected Revenues’ flashes beside him; whereas for Hammond, like a populist moviemaker, ‘Everyone in the world will have the right to enjoy these animals.’ Gloomy prognostications from Malcolm, the philosopher – spoken against sunny images of flowers and children – warn against meddling with nature, according the movie a moral, educational dimension. Malcolm’s words avow entertainment’s idealised serious potential, always part of the Disney theme park ethos. Dialogically, they embody – though their inclusion refutes – criticism of Spielberg’s alleged superficiality and banality; some are particularly apposite in the knowledge that Jurassic Park secured Schindler’s List’s go-ahead:
I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here. It didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done, and you took the next step. You didn’t learn the knowledge for yourselves. You don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and you patented it and packeted it and slapped it on a plastic lunch box and now you’re selling it.
Hammond introduces his grandchildren, Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello), as ‘our target audience’. From here on, following the visit to the control centre that uses computers indistinguishable from those that made the movie possible, much narration occurs on monitors. A computer warns, for example, of stormy weather, the chance occurrence that triggers ensuing disasters.
‘Tour initiated’
‘Hang onto your butts!’ exclaims Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson), monitoring events from his desk like Close Encounters’ air-traffic controllers as ‘Tour initiated’ flashes on-screen: his advice is equally histoire, observed by the spectator, and discours, addressed to the spectator, as are the words ‘Welcome to Jurassic Park’ enunciated by the computerised guide. Reciprocally, the pan to a TV monitor, which shows automated cars moving, narrates what happens elsewhere but also establishes the control centre’s relationship to physically absent events. A dual chronotope emerges: increasingly enforced passivity, associated with directing and spectatorship, where Hammond follows events onscreen, using a keyboard and wearing a headset as if in an editing suite; and Jurassic Park’s fantastic ‘interior’ diegesis, associated with monster movies by dialogue explicitly likening the gates to those in King Kong (1933) as they resoundingly crash shut behind the tourists.
In the dilophosaurus paddock the party press against the Jeep windows, rather like Jim in Shanghai, excited by prospective close encounters. As the species spits poison, signs warn to keep windows closed, stressing the screen as both barrier and access to fulfilled desire as light flares off the glass. The characters’ anticipation cues the spectator to crane to see, equally unsuccessfully. Shared frustration functions realistically to convey an actual safari’s uncertainties, but also generates suspense, withholding fierce dinosaurs as well as setting up Nedry’s later shocking death by motivating his killer’s behaviour but deferring the creature’s recognition.
Light shines in front of the game warden Muldoon (Bob Peck) in the control centre as he announces the anticipated moment: the tyrannosaur paddock. The party stare raptly at a live goat left as bait, with off-screen space reflected in the Jeep windows, superimposing viewer and object, what would conventionally be shot/reverse-shot, as if this enriched Bazinian deep focus denies nothing. Intra- and extradiegetic audiences again share disappointment. The creature fails to show. In another shot integrating two scenes of action, Hammond voices dismay as Malcolm ridicules this letdown, looming grotesquely into the monitor, tapping the lens and then breathing on it in close-up. This reinstates awareness of the screen, the separating apparatus, and invokes The Big Swallow (1901) in which a character devours the camera and hence the audience, alluding perhaps to cinema’s capacity to incorporate viewers into its illusion.
Cameras feeding Nedry’s surveillance monitor obliquely relay important narrative information, such as the embryo storage banks and the quay where he intends to hand over genetic contraband. In contrast to these mediations Malcolm flirts with Sattler, his object of desire, by constantly touching her, as when explaining chaos theory by trickling water over her hand. Grant and Sattler jump out of their moving Jeep to touch a sick triceratops; Grant lays his body full-length against it and Sattler delves elbow-deep into its excrement. Lex takes advantage of stumbling to hold Grant’s hand. Physical contact abnegates distance inherent in spectatorship.
Graphic matches stress narrative causality and the moviemaking metaphor, including the amber tip of Hammond’s cane rotated before the light, like a piece of film edited against the revolving warning lamp at the T-Rex compound, and the intellectual montage from Nedry clicking on ‘Execute’ to Gennaro, the next victim, jumping at a thunder crash. Nedry’s reflection stresses another inscribed screen between a character and his desired object as he waits for the airlock to open into cryogenic tanks, implausibly lit from within like the Ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark or stolen isotopes in Kiss Me Deadly (1955). (A photograph of Oppenheimer tacked beside Nedry’s computer emphasises the force he unleashes.) As Nedry races to his rendezvous, his wheels splash mud onto the camera, obscuring vision and implying contempt for the spectator or anyone else. Tim, intercut, wearing night-vision goggles, contrasts with Nedry frantically wiping his glasses before losing the road, blinded by rain before dropping them and finally being literally blinded by the dilophosaurus. Nedry’s fatal blindness, like Gennaro’s, is failure to see dinosaurs as more than commodities. Tim embodies the direct vision retained by Hammond, Sattler, Grant and Spielberg’s implied spectator. Tim, indeed, is first to notice the approaching tyrannosaur. A human seismic monitor, as opposed to the computerised contraption Grant resented, he instinctively visualises its presence (signified by ripples in … a pair of glasses!). Gennaro’s fear registers in a close-up of his eyes in the mirror fitted otherwise illogically in the driverless Jeep, another internal widescreen frame to reflect audience apprehension.
Security screens
Tim dons the goggles again. The goat is gone. Active spectatorship, then, remembering the tattered harness after the raptors devoured the cow, aligns with Tim’s knowledge and vision rather than Gennaro’s. A severed limb thrown at the windshield answers Lex’s and our question: ‘Where’s the goat?’ Smeared blood recalls the chicken smashed against the car window, the transparent yet protective screen, in Empire of the Sun. Lightning flickers like early film. The T-Rex eyes the camera, affronting the Hollywood convention that affirms mastery by ensuring the gaze remains voyeuristic; a convention broken only rarely, when secondary identification is sufficient that the threatening Other’s returned gaze subordinates the potential threat to realism, as with traffic cops in Psycho and Thelma and Louise (1991) or Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Undermining realism works reciprocally in this instance, as in comedy: a knowing glance between text and adult spectator, recognising artifice and playfulness, just as the villain’s best lines in Hook address adults even while calculated to frighten children.
Hereafter threat scenes repeatedly toy with penetrating the cinema screen. The T-Rex’s first move is to breach the disabled electric fence separating exhibits from spectators. Through Malcolm and Grant’s windshield, it resembles the Jurassic Park logo. The veil of rain distinctly demarcates inside and out, safety and danger, the screen plane. Lex directs a searchlight to see better, succeeding only in attracting the creature’s attention. Concentric circles of light projected onto its close-up dilating eye again imply reciprocal vision. It pushes in the bubble roof of the children’s Jeep, violating spectatorial space; even then the screen that brings their nightmare within breathing distance doubles as a shield, while Malcolm wipes condensation off his own windshield to see. Grant’s conviction that the T-Rex senses only movement forces Malcolm and Grant into immobility, epitomising Metz’s powerless spectator. Later, injuries incurred while following Grant in distracting the creature literally disable Malcolm, reduced to pure spectatorship like James Stewart in Rear Window. Gennaro’s death features the animal from his perspective, bursting into his refuge.
Light and vision increasingly accrue conventional connotations. Light saves the children when Grant and Malcolm attract the tyrannosaur with flares; Gennaro, having abandoned them, perishes after hiding in darkness. Muldoon and Sattler bring enormous torchlights, casting beams directly into the camera, to redeem a desperate situation. When Hammond shuts down the system (because Nedry, who disabled the computers, has died with the password), the screens turn off and the lights extinguish. Without Muldoon’s torchlight, the cinema screen itself would be black. No light: no Jurassic Park. Let There Be Light. ‘Hold onto your butts!’ repeats Arnold. In a chaotic criss-crossing of beams, the final act begins, all but eliminating the voyeuristic gap.
Classical crosscutting follows as events in different locations mutually impinge, unknown to the participants but in overall view of the powerless spectator. During the T-Rex attack on the gallimimus herd – strangely the outdoor scenes are in broad daylight – Grant, Lex and Tim observe from a secure vantage. They have entered the dinosaurs’ space: their witnessing of the singing brachiosaurs, restful aesthetic contemplation and communion, ended with Lex sneezed on by one of the giants, while the gallimimus stampede placed them amid the action. ‘Look how much blood…’ says Tim, an inscribed child spectator, voicing what the movie in fact does not show but audiences willingly perceive.
Sun shafts through trees as Muldoon watches for raptors – respected and admired by the game hunter, although he first declared they should be killed – while Sattler searches for Arnold, still missing after going to reset the circuit breakers. Grant, unaware, alarms and amuses both the children and the audience by feigning electrocution on the fence – a performance within a performance – then actually suggests they slow down while climbing it even as Sattler approaches the switches. The camera tracks and tilts through the fence as they straddle it, an unusual and unmotivated movement except that it suggests transgression from spectatorial to exhibition space. In parallel, Sattler’s delight at reinstating the current (and, emphatically, lights, re-ignited individually) is controverted: Tim is electrocuted, Arnold is discovered, dismembered, a velociraptor attacks from the darkness as through a series of screens (a grid of pipes, then chain-link panels), and two more kill Muldoon as he pursues them along a spotlight beam Sattler has restored.
Repeated screen penetrations towards the camera bring these fictional dinosaurs ever closer to the extradiegetic world, culminating in the final shots showing pelicans, their descendants, winging from the island along a trail of reflections into the sunset. In the Visitor Centre a raptor’s shadow (its projection) overlays a mural of itself, collapsing different degrees of iconic-indexical representation. When a raptor eyes humans through a porthole its breath clouds the glass, again emphasising the screen as both barrier and access, the shape of which recalls an iris shot, commonly used in early cinema to concentrate vision. A rectangular frame traps Lex in the kitchen – a metal cabinet, figuring her narrative and diegetic situation – as raptors unwittingly attack not her but her reflection, an image on a flat surface they cannot pierce. In cinema’s topsy-turveydom instigated in Gennaro’s first shot, inverted on the water, she is saved because the dinosaurs, made real, attack her virtual Other. While raptors invade the control room’s physical space, she navigates the Park’s virtual space on a computer as effortlessly as the creatures move between areas, until she finds the correct site – picked out by a shaft of light – and the system locks the doors. While the humans escape, a raptor jumps onto a workstation indistinguishable from the one that produced it and has its computerised genetic code projected onto it. During the cliffhanging climax as humans manoeuvre along ventilation shafts, Lex falls through a ceiling hatch into the raptor’s space. It jumps up full to camera, through the frame, snapping, into our space, all barriers finally removed insofar as identification disavows the cinema screen. The T-Rex skeleton – historically the original form of reconstruction – which resembles the logo, indexical of a subsequent industry of depictions, collapses under the weight of escapees taking refuge on it, abnegating any containment of these monsters by means of mastery inherent in representation. The rib cage both traps and protects Tim, as did the overturned Jeep, metaphors for the security and risk cinema offers the regressed spectator. Climactically the raptor bursts through semi-opaque, backlit, white, plastic sheeting – the blank shot momentarily foregrounds the actual screen, as pure white light illuminates it rather than projects a representation onto it – seemingly into the auditorium. The tyrannosaur’s entrance saves the day, permitting escape through the sunburst doors to Hammond outside in his Jeep.
Jurassic Park – screen penetration
Computer animation and digital imagery
Jurassic Park constantly plays with the dichotomy of virtual and real: a self-reflexivity aligned with popular and theoretical discourses surrounding computer-generated images. The mid-production switch from stop-motion to computer animation, except where dinosaurs interact physically with humans, is well documented (for example, see Baxter 1996: 379), fuelling interest in whether the ‘joins’ were visible.
Celebration of special-effects technology accompanied the information age’s triumphant arrival, culmination of billions of dollars’ worth of research and development, as computers made highly visible incursions into homes and work places. This links, Constance Balides suggests, with the film’s ‘hypervisible’ display of its commercial motivation and potential: ‘the lustre of capital itself’, as much as dinosaurs, ‘is an attraction in a post-Fordist economy.’ Such display is apparent everywhere in the film and its merchandise, certainly not in need of theorised reading against the grain to expose its workings (2000: 160).
Resulting contradictions, between on one hand the film and its merchandising’s allure and on the other potential awareness (especially for adults) of interpellation as consumers, mutually reinforce contradictions within the regime of verisimilitude. Spectators, conscious of artifice, nevertheless succumb, Robert Baird claims, to ‘neurologically hard-wired’ responses, physiological and psychological schemata (1998: 91). While biological essentialism risks short-circuiting analysis of signifying practices, it does appear that, as in E.T., pre-conscious cognition stimulates pre-cultural reflexes. Less important than palaeontological accuracy is that the animations, based on existing animals, correspond to schemata which convince beyond rational perception (ibid.). This, Robert Baird argues, provides universal human recognition that prompted word-of-mouth support for promotional claims, and made theatrical attendance an event relatively unaffected by cultural difference (1998: 90). (Anthropomorphism too probably affected responses, as animators studied performance, dance, movement and mask work to internalise the motions and motivations of the creatures they strove to replicate (Magid 1993): the velociraptor coming through a door uncannily resembles Jack Nicholson in The Shining (1980).) Other computerised techniques reinforce the creatures’ ‘reality’: wildlife documentary conventions – telephoto lenses, aerial perspective, intermingled species grazing unaware of the camera (Baird 1998: 92) – and imposed motion blur and artificial film grain to match flawless simulations seamlessly with technically ‘inferior’ live action. These increase credibility by presenting dinosaurs not as they existed in reality but because they replicate how dinosaurs would look if we were able to see them on film.
Further reasons, unconnected with computers, that the dinosaurs appear realistic, are considered later. However, as already discussed, ‘the science fiction film can be seen as a genre focused precisely upon advocating and valorising its effects’; in doing this, nevertheless, ‘science fiction film intensifies the fantastic bent of cinema in general’ (Landon 1992: 89). Arnold’s repeated phrase, ‘Hold on to your butts!’ operates analogously to a line in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) that, Steve Neale argues, has ‘twofold status’:
It is on the one hand a narrative event: a fictional remark made by a fictional character about a specific, fictional entity … On the other hand, it is what one might call both a ‘textual’ and an ‘institutional’ event: a remark addressed to the spectator by the film, and by the cinematic apparatus, about the nature of its special effects. (1990: 160)
Neale argues that the remark conveys undisguised self-consciousness concerning the impressiveness of the film’s cinematic fabrications and of spectatorial awareness of watching special effects and of knowing now that the film knows too. It is pure showmanship, foregrounding – like the comment, ‘This is reality, stupid!’ in E.T. – the pervasive doubly-oriented discourse. As Geoff King puts it,
We can let ourselves go, surrender to the ‘wonders’ of convincingly-rendered dinosaurs … but at the same time retain an element of distance and control through our awareness that we are allowing ourselves to delight in an illusion; and, further, that we are delighting in it precisely because of its quality as illusion. (2000: 56)
Concurrently, however,
the special effects have had an effect … the effect and the awareness are interdependent. Indeed one of the keys to understanding the attraction, the pleasure – the lure – of science fiction lies precisely in the intricate intercalation of different forms, kinds and layers of knowledge, belief and judgement. (Neale 1990: 161)
As well as celebrating cutting-edge digital images, then, Jurassic Park presents itself and is feted as a supreme example of a ‘dinosaur’ entertainment mode: cinematic spectacle. As Paul Coates stresses in relation to King Kong, ‘monster’ – many science fiction movies’ attraction – derives from monstrum, something shown (as in ‘demonstrate’) (1991: 80). Repeated screen ‘penetrations’ in Jurassic Park, going beyond the 1990s action-movie tendency to throw objects towards the camera (King 2000: 94–101), seemingly eliminate the boundary between diegetic space and the viewers’ auditorium and, specifically, are a cinematic effect much diminished on video or computer monitor. Product placement, moreover, reinforces the effect not simply by referring to objects the spectator already knows but by creating new, ‘fictional’ commodities the spectator can actually possess (without transformation, like most toys or miniature models, into secondary imitations). This is realism so convincing it surpasses even 3D illusions, allowing you, at extra cost, to hold part of the diegesis in your hand.
Warren Buckland believes Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park surpass spectacle ‘by employing special effects to articulate a possible world’ different from fiction in being based on real-world circumstances (1999: 178). I question this distinction in that any fiction not rooted in perceptions of the real world, as Roland Barthes’ (1974) proairetic code emphasises, would be incomprehensible, and because – as Michael Stern maintains – all cinema is a special effect that happens to be naturalised in opposition to shots specifically declaring themselves effects (1990: 69). While Buckland, like Geoff King (2000), refutes common criticism that contemporary Hollywood spectacle stifles narrative, his case relies on separating articulations of possible worlds from ‘pure fantasy, imagination or fiction’ (1999: 181). This distinction is spurious, akin to opposing fact and fiction, insofar as it bypasses the notion that the realist effect derives from these modes sharing intertextual discourses of representation. Buckland relies on positing a ‘reference world’ that is neither the actual world nor a ‘purely imaginary world’ but a ‘possible world’ (1999: 183), as though signification (elicitation of signified from signifier) requires a referent.
Buckland privileges digital effects as uniquely capable of actualising the possible world, and dismisses live-action models as ‘profilmic’ effects shared with theme parks and therefore not ‘specifically filmic’ (ibid., n. 23). This is mystification. Mise-en-scène and editing create ‘effects’, which by definition are an effect on something, in this case spectatorial belief. Realistic models and digital creations are in fact equally causes, not effects, and as such operate identically if the spectator cannot distinguish between them. Buckland points usefully to the industrial distinction between invisible and visible effects: the former being the norm, such as removal of vapour trails from skies or creation of sets too difficult or costly to produce profilmically; the latter demanding notice. However, he asserts that visible effects ‘simulate events that are impossible in the actual world’ (1999: 184), overlooking the explosions, meteor showers, collapsing buildings and tidal waves that constitute much contemporary big-budget spectacle. Buckland also states that the digital dinosaurs, ‘while clearly visible … attempt to hide behind an iconic appearance; that is, they are visible special effects masquerading as invisible effects’ (1999: 184–5). Actually they are less stable than this. When the spectator accepts the dinosaurs’ diegetic existence they switch from visible to invisible effects; alternatively, they might initially be accepted, wonderment occurring subsequently. Rather than total commitment to realism as a function of suture, the spectator alternates pleasurably between Imaginary and Symbolic relations with textual effects. It is unclear why Buckland treats digital images differently from pro-filmic models, which after all are representations of non-existent objects – as indeed are acting, most sets and camera positions.
The verisimilitude of Spielberg’s dinosaurs depends not on ontology, as Buckland claims in a valorisation of digital images derived from Bazin’s championing of deep-focus sequence shots (CGI puts the dinosaurs in the frame alongside human characters). Rather it derives from convincing ‘specifically filmic’ techniques of direction and editing, irrespective of what technical means produce them. Realism in the tyrannosaur attack on the children’s jeep is not solely dependent on CGI. Both digital and live-action modelling are of sufficient quality not to undermine the creature’s credibility, hitherto established metonymically. It already possesses substance, mass and proximity (discernible in water ripples, the vibrating mirror and rustling vegetation), voraciousness (the goat) and tangibility (by association with the breathing, blinking, heavily textured live-action triceratops encountered earlier alongside its mound of excrement). The banality of rain drumming on vehicle roofs further naturalises the tyrannosaur, rather than dramatic music (in a Spielberg movie with a Williams score), while intercutting characters’ reactions in conventional shot/reverse-shots accentuates audience responses. Realism requires spectatorial synthesis of these devices, not a particular ontology. As most mainstream fare shares standard editing structures and inference of off-screen space, deviations would more likely detract from realism because of unfamiliarity than inaugurate a new regime of verisimilitude.
Intertextuality
Conscious intertextuality potentially reduplicates Symbolic/Imaginary alternations prompted by Jurassic Park’s special effects. Further instances include The Birds (Wollen 1993: 9), of which the dinosaurs are genetic precursors and generic descendants. The gallimimus herd imitates stampeding veldt animals in King Solomon’s Mines (1937), Spielberg’s touchstone when briefing animators (Magid 1993: 58); an example, possibly among many, that few would recognise. Douglas Brode notes that the kitchen where Lex and Tim hide resembles Steve McQueen’s sanctuary in The Blob (1958), and that the collapsing dinosaur skeleton in the finale echoes the end of Bringing Up Baby (1938) (1995: 224–5); a similar gag occurs in On the Town (1949). A notable quotation is the ripples heralding the T-Rex. This emphasises Spielberg’s audience-involving indirectness and understatement, derived from his admiration for British cinema, an influence generally eclipsed by his blockbuster effects. The second occurrence, involving water in a footprint, confirms this is in part a homage to Jack Cardiff, whose Sons and Lovers (1960) employed a trembling puddle to signify a mine collapse. Cardiff also, apparently, directed the first film to posit dinosaur cloning, The Mutations (1974) (Freer 2001: 209). Auto-citations include the truck plummeting toward Tim and Grant in the tree (with a ‘roar’, writes Baird (1998: 98): like Keys’ jeep in E.T.), and the close-up of the pursuing tyrannosaur in a side mirror; both echo Duel. (The mirror shot, later parodied in Toy Story 2 (1999), is a double auto-citation, resembling also an aeroplane in a car mirror in The Last Crusade.) Together with the words ‘OBJECTS MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR’, etched on the mirror in the dinosaur shot – realist detail that nevertheless, if perceived, switches modality from horror-adventure to comedy – such recognition and awareness of authorship serve reciprocally to enhance spectatorial self-awareness. If, as Buckland insists, Jurassic Park has a reference world, it is surely ‘the movies’, shifting, unstable, existing variously for different interpretive communities.
Psychoanalysis
While self-reflexivity and intertextuality offer detached, conscious pleasures (interpellation as an experienced, intelligent, alert moviegoer), Jurassic Park’s deep structure follows Spielberg’s typical Oedipal trajectory. A young boy, incongruously present at Grant’s dig, denies that raptors were ‘scary’. Grant delves deep into the front pocket of his jeans – phallic authority, after all, is at stake – producing a fossilised raptor claw. Sadistically describing its eviscerating function, he draws this across the boy’s abdomen, then genital area, while Sattler winces. Following the boy’s cowed deference, Grant expresses dislike of children, amazed that Sattler desires parenthood. The castrating, sickle-shaped claw, together with his attitudes – underlined when he tries to avoid sharing Lex and Tim’s jeep – confirms him as another Hook.
The narrative constructs Lex and Tim, however, visiting while their parents divorce, as needing paternal care. Their grandfather dispatches them, with strangers, as guinea pigs on an untested tour into a jungle full of giant carnivores. Gennaro, official custodian of patriarchy (‘the Law’), abandons them and is killed. Of the surviving men, one admits constantly seeking ‘the next ex-Mrs Malcolm’, marking him unsuitable to provide security, and undergoes symbolic castration when the tyrannosaur immobilises him with an injured leg. This leaves only Grant. The children sleep against his shoulders, while Sattler observes beatifically, as the helicopter whisks them to safety. This ‘family’ formation begins when Grant rescues the children from the tyrannosaur, and continues during their trek back to the Centre. Nursery music accompanies their resting together for the night, after Grant again rescues Tim (from the falling jeep). They share the spectacle of, and communion with, grazing brachiosaurs, and bond by exchanging jokes. During this idyll, significantly, Grant discards the claw, answering Lex’s question, ‘What are you and Ellie going to do if you don’t have to pick up dinosaurs’ bones anymore?’ with, ‘I guess we’ll have to evolve too.’ As Constance Balides notes, ‘evolution’ from childless professionals to family is inexorably naturalised by Grant and the children ‘nesting’ in a tree (resonant with the premise of dinosaurs evolving into birds) and subsequent discovery of hatched eggs despite scientific assurance of exclusively female cloning, to prevent reproduction (2000: 155).
Grant jettisoning the claw completes displacement of the castration threat onto the carnivores. In particular, the raptors, although female, represent the bad father (Wollen 1993: 8; hence the appropriateness of the similarity to Jack Nicholson in The Shining) contrasted with Grant. Grant’s recuperation, Balides suggests, functions ideologically to mask ethical implications of Hammond’s project, to co-opt the movie’s (unusually prominent) feminist discourse, and to ignore the environmental catastrophe global commercialisation wreaks on a third-world island (2000: 156). G. Thomas Goodnight similarly relates this supposedly escapist entertainment’s success to the Bush-Clinton ethos, marked by ‘desperate recovery of the personal sphere as survival strategy for escaping the predatory competition of institutional life and the resulting debris of the social world’ (1995:281).
Goodnight quips that Grant and Sattler, reconciled over procreation, are a ‘post-doc Adam and Eve’, returned to the Creation by Hammond’s enterprise (1995: 277–8). A close-up on a snake after Muldoon’s death confirms the Edenic sub-text, reinforced by the initials of their first names, Alan and Ellie. One might further assert that their names paranomastically suggest ‘A Land Grant’ and ‘Early Settler’. This would temper Balides’ and Goodnight’s readings by replacing family emphasis with the perennial myth of the New World as Eden. The movie, aligned with a dominant American cultural tradition (Smith 1950; Marx 1964), indicts rather than ignores the virgin land’s despoliation and corruption of the American Dream it inspired. King supports such an interpretation, noting that the palaeontologists, introduced in the Montana Badlands, wear frontier dress, engage in hands-on work, and as hero and heroine their ‘credentials are established … through direct engagement with the earth and through a distrust of technology’ (2000: 59). The lost Imaginary, then, equates with the pioneering experience; as King observes, Grant’s excursion into the beautiful yet dangerous wilderness, where the family is formed, is contingent upon electronic failure caused by a bloated, corrupt technocrat, ‘entirely unsuited to any kind of practical or survival skills’, who perishes (2000: 62). Contrasting the proxy family against Nedry, embodiment of consumerist, junk-food values and greed associated with Hollywood by its critics, the movie betrays profound ambivalence about its status while naturalising and ennobling family ideals.
Marek Kohn considers Jurassic Park’s ‘extraordinary achievement’ is its ‘vision of reincarnation around a prime cultural symbol of extinction’ (1993: 13). Kohn, of course, means dinosaurs. Yet his words apply to the family, with which Spielberg’s films over a quarter century play a fort-da game analogous to the intermittent presence of Hammond’s behemoths. It stands less for curtailment of Grant’s masculine freedom (Goodnight 1995) than nostalgic desire to restore and perpetuate frontier community and optimism, represented in America as the antithesis of cultural decadence.
Carnivore carnivalesque
Similarities between humans and dinosaurs in Jurassic Park go well beyond anthropomorphism – even if warm-blooded, heavy-footed raptors, intrusively opening doors and demanding food, are nightmare projections of Grant’s parenthood phobia. Hammond breeds carnivores and ‘veggiesaurs’, corresponding to human gender attributes (Wollen 1993: 8); Lex is vegetarian, and while Ellie, the only other female character, does not voice dietary preferences, she stares in revulsion at her gourmet lunch. The entire movie, Georgia Brown observes, ‘alternates between the mealtimes of humans and beasts’, culminating in a kitchen showdown (1993: 53). Constant and careless eating emphasises Nedry’s greed. Hammond’s epicurism suggests enjoyment and sharing, rather than accumulating. Hammond and Sattler comfort themselves with ice cream when all appears lost. Arnold’s chain smoking implies oral fixation: a rational, controlling man in thrall to his craving. Lex and Tim devour jelly out of animal hunger after returning to the centre.
Muldoon lives to hunt. Malcolm appears cold-blooded, saurian (Mars-Jones 1993: 16): when not spouting theory his primary aim is competition with the dominant male, to mate and move on. Social Darwinism determines Grant’s emergence as patriarch, paralleled with the dinosaurs’ evolution (Brode 1995: 219). Grant’s claw presages the seemingly impatient raptor’s, tapping in the kitchen as it stalks the children; Lex’s forefinger, curved over the computer mouse, saves the remaining humans by rebooting the control program. Corporeal emphases and dissolving hierarchal distinctions again evoke carnival (literally, a period of gorging on meat). Nedry personifies social concerns and everyday frustrations associated with the Information Technology revolution consolidated in the 1990s. Pleasure accompanies his punishment – excessive yet, by the simple logic of fantasy, just – as a grotesque creature he helped produce consumes his grotesque body. Similarly Gennaro becomes victim to the anthropomorphised animal whose fierceness he intended to package for profitable consumption.
Bodily imperatives accompany humiliation as Gennaro, having abrogated the law’s abstract moral authority for selfish gratification, succumbs to animal reflexes and runs to the toilet, where the tyrannosaur attacks. Grant simulates evisceration on the boy whose incipient obesity relates his cynicism to Nedry’s. Ellie delves enthusiastically into the heap of dino-do. A sneezing brachiosaur coats Lex in snot. Gross-out humour for child audiences, these nevertheless reinforce materiality in a world generated both extra- and intra-diegetically by computers. The virtual becomes, and threatens to incorporate, the real. The narrative celebrates computer effects yet distrusts the technology that makes them, and itself, possible. Animals change sex. Child-haters become loving fathers. Men, unusually in a horror film, are the primary victims. A vegetarian girl and woman overcome a greedy meat-eating man’s machinations to escape from both intransigent technology and voracious animals.
In carnival, shared laughter permits temporary social cohesion and levelling. The movie functions analogously, through mechanisms that encourage audience sharing of characters’ awe or terror. Likewise, overt intertextuality puts director and audience equally ‘in the know’, reversing the situation whereby ‘the viewer … lacks knowledge which those on the screen possess and impart’ (Fiske 1987a: 242) – even if visceral effects a moment later demand identification achieved through processes involving subjection. The very uncertainty surrounding the dinosaurs’ ontology, and blurring of Jurassic Park (movie) with Jurassic Park (island), conform to Bakhtin’s location of carnival on ‘the borderline between art and life’ (1984: 7).
Carnivorous dinosaurs may ultimately embody regressive desires: thirst for violence or a primordial need to assert human superiority. Feminist tendencies are nevertheless simultaneously in play. ‘In play’, literally, as in carnivalesque: reversed power relations dialogise competing discourses. This may be progressive in voicing such utterances, yet recuperative in that they are presented knowingly and, arguably, subordinated to narrative closure. Lex and Sattler’s strong gender-reversal, underlined several times through dialogue, is not connected, for example, with feminist critique of the family (Balides 2000: 156).
Crosscutting, employed during climactic sequences, repeatedly withdraws the object of fascination at the moment the spectator becomes intensely involved (Brode 1995: 222). Mastery, of observing several scenes, as if simultaneously, from a distance, together with promised closure, implicates its opposite: subjection to narration and encouragement to identify. The fort-da oscillation between involvement and separation, presence and lack, replicates on a macro level shiftings between Imaginary and Symbolic that constitute suture.
‘There is a precise fit … between the emotions felt by the characters when they first see a dinosaur, and the sense of awe felt by the audience’, argues Matthew Bouch (1996: 37). This corroborates Buckland’s observation that the first brachiosaur sighting positions Sattler and Grant within the shot – not a cutaway to their point-of-view but an external focalisation (1999: 187). This positions the spectator with them, as fellow observers, rather than encouraging secondary identification as them. King points out the pleasure in observing their response even before the cut from close-ups reveals the creature’s splendour, because prior knowledge from the narrative image creates a ‘sense of superiority established by our ability to smile knowingly’ at them, even as the spectacle itself is momentarily further delayed (2000: 43). Sufficient separation occurs, I suggest, to permit extra-diegetic marvelling at the special effect as they marvel, intra-diegetically, at what is for them a real dinosaur.
Spectator positioning through formal devices interacts with various subjectivities brought to the viewing experience, permitting a spectrum of negotiated readings. As Balides states, the potential for multiple viewings and the plethora of epitexts on Jurassic Park’s production and special effects position spectators as knowledgeable in diverse ways: for example, as dinosaur aficionados, science fiction buffs or computer enthusiasts. The densely intertextual reception context also makes it less likely that spectators would be innocent of the terms that constitute the experience’s fabricated nature (2000: 17).
Jurassic Park inflects knowledge, always present in spectatorship, that what is experienced is not real – though the experience is real and what is experienced may be realistic – by heightened awareness of the stimuli’s synthetic nature. If cinema employs various effects, some noticed, others invisible, significantly the industry produces Making of … books and documentaries to render the invisible visible and thereby profit from enhancing the mastery of those prepared to pay extra to sustain possibilities of disbelief. While the ‘immersion-effect’ remains, the ‘Jurassic-literate consumer … knows that the fake is a fake’ (Balides 2000: 148); spectatorial credibility becomes divided (Neale 1990). The image, Metz’s Imaginary signifier, evokes something nonexistent – an absence, a lack, avowed by the film’s projection yet disavowed in spectatorship. Behind-the-scenes materials standing in for, anticipating or revisiting the cinematic experience, provide further substitutions that intensify the fetishistic dimension of the primary relationship with the text. They flaunt the fact that special effects involve deceit and concealment even as they celebrate something which, as Metz says, intrinsically ‘flaunts itself’ (1977: 665). In other words, not only does the text provide various pleasures for different interpretive communities, these also involve different modalities generated by a range of discursive formations, many produced by the vertical intertextuality of promotion and publicity: ‘For many young people, knowledge of special effects techniques now offers a kind of lure of stardom and power within the industry previously available only to screenwriters, stars, producers and directors’ (La Valley 1985: 141).
Baird claims that ‘a viewer can remain consciously aware of film artifice even as spatial intelligence operates naively’ because of ‘extraconscious’ survival reflexes operating as the mind monitors its visual environment (1998: 83). If true, the implication is that the duality of distanced and involved spectatorship (wrongly supposed ‘active’ versus ‘passive’ or ‘critical’ versus ‘escapist’) is inherent in viewing even the most conventionally realist texts. This supposition remains congruent with the distinction between Symbolic and Imaginary and my thesis that alternation as well as irreconcilable contradiction between the two is a significant component in pleasure that Spielberg’s practices powerfully exploit.
It follows that movies do not totally subjugate the interpellated subject and that identification created by formal structures does not entail totally substituting a sense of selfhood with acceptance of a textually constructed position. This is not to say that interpellation and identification do not occur and are not conditions for optimal intelligibility within the institutional mode of representation. Nevertheless, it is futile to complain, as Goodnight does of Jurassic Park, that ‘audiences are induced neither to investigate the limits of current situations nor to evaluate common choices, but only to enjoy tastes of “terror” and “panic” that linger on the mind less than popcorn on the palate’ (1995: 270). It neither is nor has ever been a primary function of mainstream entertainment to challenge popular attitudes. To criticise a Hollywood film for not radically doing so is redundant. ‘The dystopic possibilities of the natural world’, Goodnight goes on to argue,
have long provided topics revisited and deployed intermittently by artists so as to spring cohorts into arenas of larger critical activity and public concern. In postmodern reversal … Spielberg … absorb[s] and exploit[s] these topics by elaborating a code of cultural scepticism. (1995: 271)
Christopher Tookey notes that near-deaths by falling car, electric fence and failed computer system signal that technology is ‘the real monster’ (1993a: 9). Tellingly, though, Goodnight’s account transmogrifies the filmmaker from popular entertainer to artist – for the sole purpose of attacking his failure as a serious artist! Such high cultural assumptions about what constitutes a successful movie ignore, in fact, that Jurassic Park mobilises concerns in the public domain and dramatises a Pandora’s Box that it does not reseal through narrative closure. In short, critics blame the text and/or its creator for their frustration at society’s failure to mobilise around the discourses it embodies.
Feminism demonstrates forcefully how reading, not textual determination, ascribes meaning. Jurassic Park conventionally feminises nature, and monsters are her manifestation: ‘a calculating, bloody-mouthed bitch, hell-bent on obliterating man as she obliterates every lesser species’ (Place 1993: 9). Place’s adjective, ‘calculating’, ignores the narrative’s predication, verbalised through Malcolm, on chaos theory. Once again, questions of subjectivity arise in relation to comprehension and pleasure, and critics propose an implied spectator and imputed effects to suit predetermined analyses. This agenda prompts Mary Evans’ assertion that Muldoon, whose last words are ‘Clever girl!’ to the raptor that has outwitted and is about to destroy him, is ‘unrepentant to the last’ in infantilising women (1994: 98) – as though he is not addressing, conventionally, a female animal (not a woman) – moreover one that, as a fellow hunter, he genuinely respects.
As Buckland (1999: 192) and King (2000: 42) both discuss, and refute, many critics dismiss Jurassic Park as a blockbuster lacking credible characterisation and narrative motivation. John Baxter even borrows Michael J. Arlen’s phrase (1979), ‘the Tyranny of the Visible’, with reference to the cutting that has left no reason for the triceratops’ sickness, even though the sequence featuring it remains (Baxter 1996: 379). Baxter’s explanation, that the model’s cost assured its inclusion, not only ignores that it shows benign as well as malignant results of Hammond’s project and demonstrates chaos theory in operation; it also, perversely, considers surprising or reprehensible such a movie’s concern with spectacular action and that its commercial proposition is to offer something never seen before (1996: 379–80). Only a critic concerned to prove that ‘Close Encounters marked the beginning of his decline as an artist, and, some argue, of American cinema’ (1996: 170), could condemn Spielberg for movies that are predominantly cinematic. If ideas and narrative coherence were all that mattered, there was already Michael Crichton’s book.
‘Cola v. Zola’: Jurassic Park as global phenomenon
Jurassic Park’s cultural and economic significance lie in its function as a global blockbuster. Blockbuster status is a marketing approach combining a simple (‘high concept’) story premise and visual style in the narrative image with mass promotion and simultaneous opening (Wyatt 1994: 112). The strategy maximises revenue at the box office, where attendances might quickly decline, but also in secondary markets. Television sales, as well as merchandising and home entertainment releases, depend on recognition value, which in turn advertisers buy from broadcasters (Elsaesser & Buckland 1998: 2). Successful blockbusters keep the industry buoyant.
Matsushita, after spending $6 billion on MCA/Universal, had not had a single $100 million hit – unlike Sony, who had achieved higher grosses five times since buying Columbia Tristar for $ 1 billion less. Spielberg too, whose image was waning after several critical or commercial disappointments, needed a certain hit – although his well-known efficiency no doubt interested Universal, whose budgets were cut by 25 per cent in 1991 (Robinson 1993).
In France, a year after Euro-Disney opened with infrastructure – including a high-speed rail link – provided by the French government, Jurassic Park focused concerns around cultural imperialism. Debates over whether the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), under negotiation between the European Union and the US, should include audio-visual industries prompted emotive protests from French filmmakers. These centred on national cinema and government subsidy for cultural production, culminating a century-long rivalry between the two countries. In this context, most French reviewers concentrated almost exclusively on merchandising and marketing. The first week there saw record ticket sales. By the end of 1993 Jurassic Park had achieved half the audience of Les Visiteurs, a ‘low-cultural’ French-language farce promoted through long runs and word of mouth, but twice those of Germinal, an epic, star-studded Zola adaptation, heavily supported by politicians, massively promoted and the most expensive film yet made in France (Jackël & Neve 1998). ‘Cola versus Zola’, quipped a pithy headline in the British Economist (1993: 78), defining the GATT’s cultural dimension as predominantly a French concern.
However, Hollywood obtained 51 per cent of box office revenues outside North America by the 1990s, suggesting market forces might reduce the exclusively US-oriented cultural content. Whereas in the 1950s movies for the US domestic market were subsequently sold abroad, undercutting local production, now, Frederick Wasser argues, ‘on a per capita basis the American viewer is of no more importance than any other member of the global audience’ (1995: 424). Moreover, as Wasser suggests, fears of cultural imperialism caused many countries to impose import quotas, leading Hollywood to finance local projects that helped provide infrastructure to support, for example, European art cinema. In a further twist illustrating globalisation’s intricacies, the French government-owned bank Crédit Lyonnais had encouraged European producers such as Dino DeLaurentiis in financing in advance ‘Hollywood’ movies by preselling distribution and exhibition rights. This was happening in 1981, exactly when France’s Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, made an influential speech on American imperialism, the terms of which were taken up again a decade later (Wasser 1995: 431; Jackël & Neve 1998).
MCA/Universal, part of a Japanese corporation, arguably had no particular remit to promote American values. It is noteworthy, then, that Wasser considers they and rivals Sony had not ‘visibly re-oriented marketing decisions away from the [US] domestic audience’; their primary business was electronics, not programming (1991: 434). Matsushita sold MCA/Universal in 1995 to cut losses. Nevertheless, Jurassic Park’s worldwide marketing was enormously profitable, possibly connected with its release coinciding with VHS video reaching saturation in prosperous markets. Just as 1950s Hollywood produced widescreen spectacle to challenge television, so Jurassic Park’s digital wonders as a media event provided an incentive to visit a movie theatre rather than await the video. At the same time, awareness of what became the world’s most profitable movie guaranteed future videocassette and subsequent DVD sales, video takings having supplanted the box office for most titles (Wasko 2003: 125).
‘Jurassic Park can be viewed as a global rather than a specifically American film’, argue Anne Jackël and Brian Neve (1998: 3). In terms of British reception, they cite Linda Colley’s observation that, whereas for modern France America provides the defining other – language, republicanism and post-War reconstruction have seen to this – Britain defines its nationality in relation to European Catholicism, especially France. (She points to the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a response to British fears concerning French industrial design (1994: 17–18, 25; 1995); coincidentally, this was the first theme park outing of dinosaurs.) Certainly the British Establishment warmly embraced Jurassic Park: it received a Royal première, followed by a Natural History Museum reception and esteemed figures such as William Rees-Mogg, former Times editor, were trotted out in newspaper features to recall their childhood fears (O’Kelly 1993). The conservative Sunday Express reviewed it as Spielberg’s ‘most important film’ for using a blockbuster to raise serious issues around scientific ethics (Morley 1993). Such cultural legitimacy fostered a flurry of serious media interest in palaeontology, cloning and computer imaging.
Meanwhile, classification debates provided acres of free publicity. Variety reported that when the film opened, UIP, its British distributor, had amassed twelve scrap-books of clippings following $1.9 million expenditure on promotion. This started seven months earlier with posters, featuring just the logo and the release date, and an enigmatic trailer, concluding: ‘Spielberg – Jurassic Park – Next Summer.’ A trickling to the press of production stills, then a second trailer and pasteboard cut-outs in theatres, followed by branded product launches and nationally circulated Film Education study packs on adaptations and the science of DNA, gradually focused the marketing from a general towards a youth audience. Three months before release, title awareness was 49 per cent and definite interest 25 per cent, a target normally attempted for the opening. A month later, awareness stood at 55 per cent with definite interest 33 per cent, more than three times the norm at that stage (Brady 1993: 64). The marketing, ‘a spectacle in its own right’ (Balides 2000: 150), focused more free publicity as the movie became a top UK news event for June, the month before its release (Brady 1993: 68). In fact, 91 per cent of Britons had heard of it two weeks before release, with 55 per cent expressing definite interest – unprecedented figures, achieved remarkably cheaply as advertising paid for by merchandise licensees had promoted the title at a cost many times greater than Universal’s direct marketing (Baird 1998: 89). Unsurprisingly, Jurassic Park achieved a British three-day opening record. Similar results occurred worldwide. It became, for example, India and Pakistan’s most successful Western film ever (Baird 1998: 88-9).
Following a 2,842-screen US opening, Jurassic Park broke first-weekend records. A year after release, 98 per cent of US adults had encountered the title 25.2 times. On a $56 million budget, expanded to $65 million as special effects developed, and $20 million initial P&A, the movie grossed $916 million worldwide before The Lost World’s release, with $1 billion additionally from official merchandising of 5,000 products (Baxter 1996: 376; Balides 2000: 139, 149). Spielberg reportedly earned $250 million from a profits share – ‘the largest sum any individual has ever made from one movie’ (Perry 1998: 82). As a comparison, the E.T. logo appeared originally on 50 licensed products, while marketing Jaws had depended on begging companies to use the logo, with little of the merchandising profits returning to the studio (Baxter 1996: 163).
Despite criticism for allegedly elevating effects over characterisation, for some the movie confirmed Spielberg’s status as ‘an undoubted auteur’ (Wollen 1993: 9). Kim Newman neatly delineated its continuity with Spielberg’s previous work:
The paring-down of a monster best-seller into a suspense machine (Jaws); the tackling of a popular-science childhood sense of wonder perennial with state-of-the-art effects that re-imagine 1950s B-science fiction (Close Encounters of the Third Kind); the all-action jungle adventure littered with incredible perils and gruesome deaths (Raiders of the Lost Ark); and big-eyed creatures who range from beatifically benevolent to toothily murderous (Gremlins, E.T.). (Quoted in Baxter 1996: 373)
Manipulative craftsman or cinematic artist, Jurassic Park restored Spielberg’s professional reputation ready for Schindler’s List, filmed during Jurassic Park’s post-production.