Critics committed to a biographical agenda wondered why, following the recognition and commercial success of Schindler’s List as an adult movie, Spielberg returned after a three-year break with The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Freer 2001; Perry 1998). Although technically and formally highly accomplished, it appeared something of a pot-boiler: a child-oriented regression to the science fiction/action-adventure mould. The novelty of digital effects and the topicality of cloning were by now diminished. However, even Spielberg’s freedom to select projects depends on delivering hits. He had a five-production deal with Universal. A blockbuster, presumably, was Universal’s price for risking Schindler’s List. Spielberg’s name added value to the Jurassic Park franchise. Reciprocally, after the disappointing Jaws sequels, Spielberg’s team may have decided his reputation would be better served if he stayed involved with a brand already synonymous with his name.
Pre-publicity for The Lost World coincided with Universal’s Burbank theme park opening its Jurassic Park ride – which cost $110 million, twice the original film’s budget. The Lost World’s release a year on refreshed interest in the attraction in time for the summer and similar rides at Universal’s other parks.
A digital revolution
Other imperatives behind the sequel were advances in graphics software and robotic special effects. The ‘supervening social necessity’, in Brian Winston’s phrase (1998: 6), included competition to develop techniques that, once showcased, could profitably be exploited in further movies, games and rides, and licensed to other users. James Cameron’s Digital Domain – a rival offshoot from Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic (with whom Spielberg consistently worked) – had produced True Lies (1994) and was now developing Titanic for Fox. Columbia Tristar was putting together Godzilla (1998) which The Lost World pre-empted in its structurally redundant final act by changing the end from Michael Crichton’s novel and freeing a tyrannosaur in San Diego. Most important, Spielberg’s new studio, DreamWorks SKG, co-founded with former Disney production head Jeffrey Katzenberg and music mogul David Geffen, was preparing to challenge Disney. Katzenberg, no doubt vengeful after his ignominious ‘invitation’ to resign, was conversant with Disney’s plans for computer-animated releases from another ILM progeny, PIXAR, whose Toy Story (1995) was the first fully digital feature. He was actively headhunting his former employers’ talent.
This, specifically, is the import of Microsoft’s Paul Allen investing $500 million for just 18 per cent of DreamWorks’ $900 million enterprise and his co-founder Bill Gates providing half the $60 million capital for a short-lived software subsidiary, DreamWorks Interactive. Apart from DreamWork’s investment of $100 million between them – ‘reinventing arithmetic’ as they retained two-thirds ownership (Perry 1998: 92), hence two-thirds of profits, as well as 100 per cent voting rights (Serwer 1995: 71) – the rest came from Korean company One World Media, part of Samsung (Baxter 1996: 404). However, these developments, and the previous two decades of Spielberg and Lucas’s careers, occurred amid a far-reaching political and economic context insufficiently acknowledged in auteurist or aesthetic criticism or reviews concerned with movies primarily as diversion.
Entertainment is America’s second-largest net exporter after aerospace (Wasko 2003: 174). DreamWorks, Hollywood’s first new studio in seventy years, gave Los Angeles a major boost. Once established, it intended to employ 14,000 people at the former Hughes Aircraft plant. The site neatly epitomised a decade-long trend that had replaced 135,000 aerospace and electronics jobs with 144,000 in entertainment. Digital convergence, impelled by military applications, spawned ‘Siliwood’, a hybrid economy of Silicon Valley technology and Hollywood artistry (Hozic 1999: 290, 306).
Hollywood was traditionally conservative towards technology. Following introduction of sound, for example, few major developments occurred until Dolby Stereo, half a century later. Producers would innovate in response to perceived threats, but distributors were reluctant to implement anything outside their control (Hozic 1999: 291). Sound, to pursue the example, suffered because producers could not trust exhibition conditions. It improved only after loud, immersive rock concerts and penetration of domestic hi-fi, competitors for moviegoers’ spending, exposed theatre equipment and practices as inadequate (Sergi 2002: 108–9).
However, Aida A. Hozic explains, dramatic technological change usually results from ‘social, political or economic impasse’ rather than prosperity (1999: 293). Accordingly, the digital entertainment revolution occurred amid US military budget cuts following the end of the Cold War, while economists speculated about Japanese pre-eminence in advanced electronics.
In discussing Twilight Zone: The Movie I noted how studio executives, rather than creative talent, make major decisions and profit from copyright and franchise royalties. The Lost World exemplifies a ‘buyer-driven’ commodity chain, whereby major companies (as in other industries) coordinate, rather than directly engage in, production, concentrating instead on market research, distribution, advertising and promotion. These contrast with ‘producer-driven’ commodity chains, such as the old studio system, which attempt to shape demand to their output (Hozic 1999: 308). Agents package talent – personnel functioning as brand names within the industry, as well as, in the case of stars (and some directors and producers), to the public – to serve franchises such as The Lost World. Emphasis on named individuals encourages enormous fees, afforded by hiring non-union labour where possible, exporting production when locations, studios and staff are obtainable more cheaply (one reason Spielberg works in Britain when exchange rates permit), and manipulating below-the-line costs, the one flexible part of the budget under producers’ control.
Independent producers – outside the studios – have difficulty signing famous talent. This is significant in that Hozic argues maverick 1970s’ directors and producers, starting with Lucas and Spielberg, succeeded because of two tendencies. Their turn to science fiction – disregarded by dominant studios at the time, which had closed special effects departments (1999: 308) – emphasised relatively inexpensive spectacle rather than stars as the attraction, thereby improving investment value. Second, asserting their rights motivated the filmmakers consciously to experiment with technology to lower costs further and also to manage merchandising and licensing in-house. Public recognition followed for both the individuals and their companies (Spielberg: Amblin; Lucas: ILM/THX/Lucasfilm).
DreamWorks intended cheapening digital technology to widen accessibility and resurrect high-quantity production, as in the studio era, while returning emphasis to products and producers rather than merchants. In contrast to the Motion Picture Association of America (representing major studio/distributors), DreamWorks recognises authors’ rights by not altering work for future release without permission, awards animators percentage shares of gross profit, and has allied with craft guilds and unions in negotiating new broadcast standards. Technology, then, ‘the instrument of battle between producers and merchants’ for the industry’s future, has prompted massive research and development investment (Hozic 1999: 294–5).
Initially, digital systems, enormously expensive and labour intensive, only slowly improved efficiency or quality. However, demand created a swing towards the entertainment industry of companies previously dependent on Pentagon spending. Military simulation technology resembles commercial computers, interactive games and CGI effects. Naval software that originally detected submarines by comparing surface patterns against computer-generated probabilities visualised the sea in Titanic. Theme parks and shopping malls have long housed flight simulators. Computer games employ feedback mechanisms designed for virtual rocketry and ballistics trials.
The Clinton presidency introduced incentives to advance simulation technology despite defence cutbacks. Dual-use projects involved commercial exploitation alongside more cost-effective military ‘research and development’ sponsorship and conversion of military applications to profitable civilian use. In short, American military and economic domination were predicated on combining warfare control and simulation systems, telecommunications, domestic and workplace computing and entertainment. This would check economically debilitating over-concentration on purely military research, while state support, despite free-market rhetoric, sought to enhance competitiveness and restore America’s global position (Hozic 1999: 297–8).
Constance Balides notes of Jurassic Park that ‘potential for multiple viewings and the plethora of subsidiary texts on … production and special effects position spectators as knowledgeable in various ways: for example, as dinosaur [aficionados], science fiction buffs and computer enthusiasts’ (2000: 147). The Lost World’s, promotion and publicity extended these points of access and forms of knowledge by promising dinosaur species unseen in the first film and unprecedented effects, while media awareness generally of developments and rivalries in digital filmmaking prompted desire to encounter and compare. The new logo – a cracked, degraded version of the original, replacing its bright corporate sheen – promised both similarity and difference, reflected in Janusz Kaminski’s harsher cinematography, casting a duller, more sombre mood than Dean Cundey’s colourful precursor. Both quality guarantee and enigma, the logo dated the earlier movie and its merchandise, prompting consumption by proffering the lure of novelty. Expected to gross $1.25 billion in licensed sales, over 800 products carried the logo, following a style manual which alone cost $500,000 (Anon 1996: 5). With typically 40 per cent of merchandise purchased before a film’s release (Wasko 2003: 165), the products not only raised awareness but covered production costs in advance. Although aimed at family audiences, The Lost World again appealed to carefully differentiated age groups and tastes. Tie-in promotions included Mercedes-Benz cars which feature in the narrative. Hardly within the grasp of teenagers then believed to comprise Hollywood’s prime audience, nor most families’, the cars gave the movie the cachet of international quality, while themselves benefiting from association with billion-dollar global success and advanced technology. Protagonists use hand-held video and SLR cameras, product placement that associates domestic brand names, also used on professional equipment, with state-of-the-art spectacle. Chocolate bars in close-up and a computer game mentioned in the dialogue would have attracted generous payment from companies targeting children (Wasko et al. 1993).
For this movie, as most, ‘accurate and consistent production figures beyond the rumour mill, as reported in Variety or other trade publications’, are unobtainable outside legal challenges (Wasko 2003: 12). However, Universal quickly announced unprecedented opening weekend grosses; it earned as much as $24 million over its $73 million budget (different amounts are cited: Perry 1998: 95; Freer 2001: 247; Gomery 2003: 79). Its eventual worldwide gross, $611 million, two-thirds from overseas, was 1997’s highest. These figures, excluding non-cinematic income, again proved the commercial advantages of the blockbuster approach.
A family movie
Given this background, unsurprisingly many reviewers expressed cynicism, par-ticularly about what they considered a weak plot and wooden performances. Nevertheless, despite the final San Diego section degenerating into 1941-style slapstick, the direction and editing are anything but perfunctory.
Snarls and roars arouse expectations during 25 seconds of blackness at the start. Whether displaced dinosaur noises or from crashing waves subsequently revealed, they disturb like the indefinable sounds accompanying the track forward that opens Jaws. The initial shot, similarly advancing (over rather than under the sea), also links directly to Jurassic Park’s final shot of flying pelicans, immediately involving alert spectators by raising erroneous expectations of dinosaur migration when a caption announces the location as 87 miles from the earlier island. A tilt down from a mountain, ominous music and broadly familiar typography recall the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, establishing a dark mood. The shot continues for almost a minute, narrating with extreme economy. First it pans rightwards across stormy waves, pausing to frame an anchored cruiser before racking focus and tracking left to follow a steward across the beach, bearing champagne. It continues tracking and refocuses onto a second bottle carried into shot in close-up; pauses while a glass is poured and the bottle deposited in an ice bucket; resumes as the drink is carried to a man in a luxurious deckchair. Further refocusing and a rightward pan reveal a third crew-member further back, serving a young girl a sandwich. Finally a track and pan left follow her past her mother, who supervises two more seamen laying a formal meal. Although there are two deckchairs, two champagne flutes and the table is set for the family, the parents do not appear simultaneously in the shot, suggesting unease between them, confirmed by subsequent dialogue. On first viewing it seems they are drinking separately. The mother, who does not know her daughter’s food preferences, and tries unsuccessfully to control her – a matter of contention with the father – three shots later reaches to pour a drink after worrying about snakes, then stops herself and calls a steward. Apart from rewarding connoisseurship of its formal qualities, the shot brings humans close to dangerous nature (the turbulent maritime backdrop); introduces central themes of parenthood and responsibility (drinkers are uniformly untrustworthy); represents the rich, who provide the villains, as decadent and dysfunctional; establishes relationships through mise-en-scène and off-screen space; asserts the diegesis as pro-filmic reality (continuous in space and time); and trains the spectator to seek narrative information from anywhere (with several planes of action within the shot and penetrations of the frame from various sides), even while its presentation is highly controlled.
In respect of parenting, clearly relevant to many in the targeted audience, the father’s imprecation to the mother, ‘Just, let her enjoy herself for once’, self-reflexively alludes to hundreds of thousands of real-life arguments over the film’s suitability for children. Malcolm’s (Jeff Goldblum) daughter, Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester), complains about being left with a sitter when he sets off to join his girlfriend, Sarah (Julianne Moore), to see the dinosaurs. After accusing him of negligence, she stows away and joins the adventure. The San Diego sequence completes this scenario: when a boy rouses his parents after seeing a dinosaur in the garden they immediately assume he has had a nightmare and start disputing the cause, but ultimately are terrified whereas the son excitedly takes photographs. The penultimate scene offers a droll view of the movie’s awareness of its eventual use and status. The tyrannosaurs’ heavily guarded return to the island – fulfilling Hammond’s dream of his creatures establishing a harmonious eco-system, undisturbed by humans – provide dramatic resolution; rather than direct representation, this appears on television in the re-united Malcolm household. Popcorn suggests the family have been watching a film – in front of which both Malcolm and Sarah are snoozing.
Parenting, and social organisation generally, are explicitly addressed. ‘Do you see any family resemblance here?’ Nick (Vince Vaughn) asks when Kelly, played by a black actress, appears on the island. To the film’s credit her progeniture is never again raised. Dinosaurs are presented as having a right to exist, manifestations of Nature that, to paraphrase Jurassic Park, ‘always finds a way’. Unattached male humans, characterised by Ludlow’s (Arliss Howard) greed and Dieter’s (Peter Stomare) cruelty, constitute the greatest threat to both prehistoric and contemporary life. Hunters stake down an infant tyrannosaur to attract the buck so they can kill it. Dinosaurs, in line with Sarah’s thesis, instinctively protect – and, less convincingly, avenge – their offspring. Humans, higher evolved, make choices about relationships and, as the survival alliance between the two teams demonstrates, can cooperate to mutual advantage. Whereas Sarah is at one with nature, Dieter inflicts pain on animals, becomes drunk during his watch, and loses control over the camp: ‘That’s the last time I leave you in charge’, Tembo the hunter (Pete Postlethwaite) tells him, as if admonishing an irresponsible babysitter. Dieter and Nick edge around each other and start brawling, utterly inappropriately in view of the common danger, emphasising how little behaviour has evolved. Sarah’s escape when pursuing raptors turn away to attack each other parallels this moment. Nick nevertheless possesses nurturing instincts, contrary to his initial cynicism and mercenary motives. He risks himself to protect nature, and helps Sarah heal the infant tyrannosaur. Kelly is attuned to nature too, immediately intuiting, on heeding the infant’s cries, that ‘The other animals are gonna hear this!’ Compsognathi seemingly play ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ with Dieter before despatching him, their anthropomorphism offering satisfying identification for child viewers, enhanced by rapidly tracking, low-level, point-of-view shots as they advance. The nature/nurture debate remains open. Survival of the fittest recognises no morality: Eddie’s death, despite saving his team, balances Dieter’s punishment. Nevertheless, respect is a given, and Tembo, who came to kill a tyrannosaur, has the hunter’s supposed empathy for the quarry and eventually deserts Ludlow in disgust. He also compassionately entrusts Sarah to ensure Kelly remains unaware of what happened to Dieter. Some atavistic, pre-conscious pecking order instinctively bestows authority. When Ludlow cannot motivate the party to move, Nick has only to rise and say, ‘Come on, guys.’ Eventually human parental attributes are naturalised when a tyrannosaur, having reclaimed its infant, attacks Ludlow, but then steps back to let junior finish the job.
Intertextuality
Spielberg faced the problem that Jurassic Park set the standard for awe-inspiring. Given technological effects’ centrality to Lost World’s commercial logic, it is knowingly ironic that many convincing scenes involve anticipation: dinosaurs, off-screen or hidden, are inferred from crackling vegetation or other indications established in Jurassic Park, such as the clear signal that ripples in a puddle betoken an imminent attack.
Continuing the first scene the girl meets, in a movie promising tyrannosaurs, a tiny bird-like compsognathus, heralded initially by rustling in the trees. As Warren Buckland notes, cutting on action as the creature jumps towards her and enters the next shot from out of frame, reinforces the notion that this digital illusion is a ‘pre-existing entity’(2003a; 2003b: 92). The girl feeds the seemingly friendly animal – in a typically tight framing for this film (composed for Academy ratio) which isolates its snake-like head and neck, thus underlining the theme of a lapsed Eden – and excitedly calls her parents. Her expression, looking off-screen, abruptly transforms the mood. Recalling The Birds, the creature has gathered a flock of others while the camera concentrated on the human. As in Jaws, a beach idyll becomes a feeding frenzy. Compsognathus squeals merge with the girl’s screams, motivating a cutaway to the parents’ reaction, keeping the violence off-screen. Psycho-style screeches in the score, evocative of birds and hence a link to Grant’s scientific premise in Jurassic Park, reinforce their panic. The climax is the mother’s scream as she looks past the camera in horror. Its sound bridges a cut to Jurassic Park’s Malcolm, seemingly also screaming, framed against a tropical sky and palm tree, his hair blowing back as if, in Spielberg’s established code, buffeted by currents from an intense vision. Malcolm’s mouth closes; the scream continues, revealed to be squealing brakes as he steps away from a poster towards an arriving subway train. Spielberg utilises and extends a famous edit from The 39 Steps, while lightening the tone, again foregrounding narration, and jokily demonstrating visual deception without banks of computers.
The subway journey exists to introduce Malcolm. Should viewers need help, a passenger buttonholes him as ‘the scientist, the guy on TV’, and mockingly makes a scary dinosaur impression – self-reflexive celebrity intertextuality (conceivably this happens to Jeff Goldblum) – and he names himself on arrival, ‘summoned’ to Hammond’s mansion. This scene is a compendium of allusions to a landmark of cinematographic, sound, acting and special effects innovation, Citizen Kane. Even during pedestrian exposition – filling the gaps since the first film, explaining the opening, starting the new plot – Spielberg provides embellishments that are nevertheless not gratuitous. In addition to narrative functions of indirect commentary and thematic development, these are authorial inscriptions: amusing himself and fellow cineastes; demonstrating that he is neither in thrall to effects nor divorced from cinematic tradition; and, like any classical painter or poet, flexing himself by displaying mastery of, and homage to, his predecessors.
The scene’s initial shot uses a low angle that evokes Mrs Kane opening a window, as the butler, reminiscent of the discreet formal servants lurking in Xanadu, opens a heavily-latticed door. Like successive barriers falling away at the start of Welles’ film, this is both metaphor, conveying imprisonment by wealth of an eccentric millionaire, and inscription of the screen plane, penetration of which takes the viewer no closer to understanding his ambiguous motivation. The suggestions are overt, from the echoing, shiny marble surfaces to the large bed on which Hammond, like the dying Kane, reclines, although he soon makes a sprightly recovery. A 74-second wide-angle shot, in which low camera positioning includes ceilings, utilises deep-focus to recreate the composition and analogous character dynamics of Welles’ boarding-house scene. Ludlow, Hammond’s grasping corporate lawyer nephew, whose appearance and manner resemble Thatcher from Kane, signs documents in the foreground as he speaks, effectively determining the fate of Malcolm, dwarfed in the background. Overlapping dialogue, which Welles pioneered, refers to The Enquirer, one of Kane’s newspapers.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park – Wellesian deep focus: an extended shot transposes the compositional dynamics of Mrs Kane’s Boarding House to Xanadu’s mise-en-scène
To punctuate a dramatic revelation – Ludlow’s control of Hammond’s company, Ingen – a cut flouts classical continuity, ‘crossing the line’ to an emplacement unmotivated by any character’s position. Spielberg makes his film, the entire purpose of which is predicated upon at least intermittent credibility, blatantly artificial. Extensive bricolage is one among many playful foils to the effects’ realism. (I recall feeling irritation, on first viewing, at the implausibility of Malcolm, in the final section, driving through warehouse walls, while I did not question the sedated infant tyrannosaur Sarah earlier carries struggling in her arms.) Countless cinematic references occur throughout. A stegosaur using its tail as a weapon may not be accurate palaeontology (Ball 1997), but alludes to King Kong, which this movie resembles even more than did Jurassic Park. Malcolm and Sarah’s simultaneous fast talk recalls Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940), in line with the enterprise’s essentially comedic nature, while the big game hunting scenes self-consciously challenge the same director’s Hatari! (1962). They also, with the close-ups on rods and lines and specialised guns, rerun the chase in Jaws. Dieter’s death when responding to a call of nature parallels Genarro’s demise in Jurassic Park. The T-Rex chase from the camp to the waterfall uses high-pitched isolated chords in the score to underline visual resemblance to an attack on schoolchildren in The Birds. Hunters are filmed side-on as unseen raptors kill them in long grass, apparently pulling them ‘under’ like Chrissie in Jaws. Mayhem like that in The Sugarland Express recurs in San Diego as a fleet of police cars arrive, accompanying a somewhat inadequate dog warden van.
Less specifically intertextual, but equally self-conscious, narration occurs throughout. A non-synchronous edit creates an overlapping sound bridge from Malcolm’s confrontation with Ludlow to his interview with Hammond. Perhaps because narrative causality is an excuse here for special effects, but also because uncertainty can enhance realism, not least by concealing contrivance, indirect narration frequently occurs: ‘Where’s the fire?’ Eddie asks rhetorically when Nick suddenly runs off in the forest, intercut with a scientific argument between Malcolm and Sarah; and then cries of ‘Fire! Dr Malcolm! Fire at base camp!’ motivate the unexpected discovery of Kelly preparing a meal. Malcolm’s uselessness as a hero whenever technology is involved becomes a running gag, while Sarah’s ‘lucky’ rucksack is an unashamed device to extricate her from successive perils. Particularly memorable are the raptors’ metonymic introduction, in which their presence is inferred from wakes in the grass from an extreme high-angle shot as they close in on their human prey; and Ludlow’s close-up, after the tyrannosaur invades San Diego, when Malcolm’s face intrudes into the top corner of the frame, resembling shots in which dinosaurs attack, to deliver his chilling verdict: ‘Now you’re John Hammond!’
Self-reflexivity
As in Jurassic Park, parallels between the movie and its making, if perceived, contribute to the multiple-discourse address. Together with conscious intertextuality, and the fact that all but the youngest viewers would much of the time consciously judge special effects, these make spectators unlikely to succumb uninterruptedly to Imaginary involvement or consistently to maintain realist expectations or responses. The movie is consequently a ritual, a game, a celebration inviting participation, rather than a statement about life.
Malcolm, as Ludlow reminds him, has signed a ‘non-disclosure agreement’, reflecting secrecy around Spielberg productions. Hammond’s transformation from ‘capitalist to naturalist in just four years’, provoking Malcolm’s incredulity, parallels Spielberg’s philanthropy. Hammond’s expedition undergoes preparation in a warehouse indistinguishable from the movie’s art department, as technicians customise location vehicles while drawing boards display the designs in offices upstairs. These vehicles, including an articulated Winnebago with luxurious accommodation and computers resembling an editing suite, are near identical to those used by cast and crew off-screen. On the Ingen team, financier Ludlow and hunter Tembo struggle over control of their expedition, like a studio executive and star director. ‘Those are some major-league toys’, comments Nick on seeing Ingen’s rig, miniatures of which were in children’s stores in Hollywood’s ‘biggest promotional programme ever’ (Anon. 1996: 5). When Malcolm excludes Kelly from adult conversation, she complains, ‘It’s like a height restriction in an amusement park!’ During the San Diego sequence, that sits like the cynically commercial excrescence that it is, the monster devours an ‘unlucky bastard’ (according to the credits) played by the screenwriter. At the end, Hammond, minus Scottish accent, speaks on TV in reverential tones, using florid gestures, about his vision: a mischievous impression of broadcaster-naturalist David Attenborough – brother of Richard, who plays Hammond.
Although formal and intertextual density is not sustained consistently, as action-adventure and digital spectacle inevitably dominate, familiar inscription of the cinematic apparatus remains. Routine for Spielberg, and here less philosophically intriguing than elsewhere, it nevertheless enhances the attractiveness and credibility of the special effects.
Nick is a wildlife and combat documentary filmmaker. He and Sarah spend the early scenes on the island filming and photographing. This confirms both its spectacularity and its visible co-presence for them within the diegesis. ‘These images are incredible, legendary’, Nick insists. ‘Guys shoot their whole life, never get anything half as good … You can give me the prize right now.’ He means the Pulitzer, but read Special Effects Academy Award.
‘This is magnificent’, Eddie declares, awestruck by his first dinosaur, and later, ‘Wow! Is this even possible?’ Spectators, hearing their reactions vocalised and validated, share characters’ experiences. For returning viewers (had any not seen Jurassic Park?) Malcolm’s unimpressed reply, ‘Ooh! Ah! That’s how it always starts, but later there’s running and screaming’, nevertheless offers the pleasure of knowing more than these naïve characters, of shared mastery in dominant specularity. Rather than unproblematically enhancing realism, however, this reminder of the previous film, hence of the viewing situation, effects the frisson between Imaginary involvement and Symbolic awareness central to Spielberg’s commercial successes. Hammond’s team, like Neary and Jillian at the Close Encounters site, observe the Ingen safari and video conference preparations from a vantage point in the overlooking hills. Implied voyeurism validates fetishisation of the feared object. Dinosaurs’ dismembering capacity, as Jurassic Park’s Grant made clear, evokes castration; one reason little boys, fascinated by them, seek mastery by memorising their complex names. (The joke is that Tembo, big daddy of all hunters, could not care less and refers to a file of laminated sheets to identify his quarry.) Transforming them into spectacle functions similarly; Symbolic awareness disavows unconscious danger. By extension, fear that digital imagery threatens by tricking the self into accepting an illusory defining Other in the screen mirror is mastered by consuming it as overt and ‘impossible’ spectacle. (Banality, such as scuffs on uneven paintwork with wood grain showing through on a door in Toy Story, is far more uncanny.)
On Isla Sorna, Nick, Eddie and Malcolm stand, backlit, looking upwards and off-screen, initially seeking Sarah. Their projected desires prompt spectatorial anticipation as they precede in the relay of the look. When a stegosaurus enters, the reverse-shot establishes a mise-en-abyme: we watch them watching, while sharing their vision from a distance. Logs in their foreground separate them from the spectacle. Then another dinosaur lumbers past, between us and them, immersing our textual surrogates in the centre of the action and repositioning us a stage closer, as if to their previous position. The sun flashes between the second creature’s dorsal plates, into camera. The effect confirms diegetic solidity and depth while inscribing a metaphorical projector beam – linking it to light shafts penetrating the forest all around – and asserts the creature’s virtual illusoriness as occupying the same pro-filmic reality as the cast, the set and the light that enables them to be filmed. Light, as ever in Spielberg, signifies projected desire. One example among many is the shaft illuminating the tyrannosaur nest where Tembo and Ajay await the parents’ return.
Projectors require screens. Kelly, after arguing with her father in their first scene, remains behind a chain-link barrier – separating family security from dangerous adventure, although in this instance father and stepmother are part of the expedition – watching as he prepares to depart. As she enters the workshop area, unnoticed, magical music fades in while welding torches spray sparks, as when Jim encounters beloved aircraft in Empire of the Sun. A beam projects from behind her, into camera, as she enters the trailer – fitted, like a movie theatre, with illuminated floor strips and decorated in dark, muted colours – as she exclaims aloud, ‘This is so cool!’ An identification figure, particularly for younger filmgoers, almost silhouetted, a flat shadow, she looks up at an illuminated chart of the island and surrounding ocean. As the camera closes in on it, a direct cut to an aerial shot of the expedition boat functions not merely as temporal ellipsis but transition ‘through’ the screen into the Imaginary of movie fantasy.
Sarah, who has survived unthreatened until the expedition’s arrival, is spontaneous and impulsive, associated – in shots when men observe her – with water, sunshine and vibrant life. Embodiment of Nature, easily co-existing and interacting with dinosaurs (despite her scientific creed being observation without intervention), and mother figure within the central human family, she represents the Imaginary as opposed to Malcolm’s dark (literally: he wears black), justifiably cynical, rationality or Eddie’s and the hunters’ enormous guns, signifying patriarchal control. Light emanating behind Malcolm, Nick and Eddie, as if acknowledging her idealisation as their projection, evidences that this positioning of her is part of the Symbolic order. ‘She’s too close’, they worry as she approaches an infant stegosaurus, and ‘Look, she has to touch it. She can’t not touch what she sees.’ In a typical Spielberg mirroring, she merges in rapture at the creature until her camera motor – technology (culture, not nature) – scares it and causes conflict with its parents. The special effects similarly promise the spectator involvement in the action; not because they are more convincing than Jurassic Park at rendering dinosaurs, but because digital advances in plotting a three-dimensional environment allow characters and virtual creatures to occupy the same, apparently pre-existent, space. A motorcyclist in a fast-forward tracking shot, for example, rides through the legs of a galloping brontosaurus.
In San Diego, the exclusive Ingen reception to meet the T-Rex and its infant – another King Kong allusion – resembles a movie premiere, as celebrities arrive in stretch limousines. Radar screens represent the ship’s approach – digitally, but abstractly. Viewers share characters’ knowledge and foreboding while indirect narration keeps the danger, and its explanation, physically off-screen until it ploughs full steam ahead into the diegesis through the length of the pier. Like the train in the Lumières’ first screening, the ship hurtles towards the spectator.
When the stegosaurs attack, one uses its tail spur to penetrate a hollow log inside which Sarah has hidden; light shafts through into the protective darkness. Compounded with sexual connotations, this damsel-in-distress scenario inaugurates a characteristic Spielberg threat, penetration of the surface between spectator and object, negative counterpart to blissful merging. Spielberg has spoken of seeing The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) as a child: ‘My father said: “It’s going to be bigger than you, but that’s all right. The people in it are going to be up on a screen and they can’t get out at you.” But there they were up on that screen and they were getting out at me’ (quoted in Mott & Saunders 1986: 12). (Adapting a recurrent motif from the film, the Jurassic Park DVD (2000) menu features a raptor smashing through the logo towards the audience.) In The Lost World captured dinosaurs, their breath visible in the backlighting, snort through bars that separate them from Sarah and Nick, who are freeing them; moments later, as Ludlow smugly announces the San Diego entertainment that will safely contain the creatures, a triceratops tears through the back of the tent. Later, a tyrannosaur, its shadow literally back-projected onto the canvas under which Sarah and Kelly are sleeping, changes from the present-absence of a two-dimensional image to a three-dimensional presence as it inserts its head through the flaps and looms over them.
As with other cinematic metaphors, this penetration motif recurs so often that enumeration would be tedious. It is naturalised almost neutrally into style. One instance worth examining, however, because of its originality and success in building suspense, occurs when the parent tyrannosaurs attack the articulated camper to recover their injured baby. Inside, Nick, Sarah and Malcolm look off-screen over the camera, as if into the auditorium. A bright reflection between them inscribes a projector to centre their searching gaze, which intensifies as focus changes while Malcolm advances into close-up. The suggestion is that the dangerous exterior within their diegesis is bounded by the screen; the diegetic/extradiegetic opposition threatens to collapse. Unexpectedly, focus changes as a T-Rex head, in the same profile as the logo, appears outside, framed in the window behind them. An exterior shot reveals the other parent at the far side, sandwiching the protagonists, with the injured baby, between them. Protective bars and rain on the glass inscribe the windows, metaphorical screens, as both aperture and protection as the tyrannosaurs look in, roaring. The creatures, after having had the baby safely returned, shove the vehicle so that the trailer hangs over a cliff. Sarah, filmed from below, falls onto a plate glass divider, previously unseen, which serves no practical function in the trailer but places a fragile barrier between her and death on the rocks far below. Her weight slowly fractures the glass. The cracks inscribe, and threaten to rupture, the movie screen itself – the only guarantee, when disbelief is suspended, of security in the fort-da game whereby spectators master their fears. Awareness of the screen, of the projected fantasy as Symbolic, here functions not as reassuring alternative to Imaginary immersion, but as metonym for the dreaded Real.