Of monsters and men: Peter Wollen on Jurassic Park

To the cine-palaeontologist tracing the evolutionary history of film, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park appears at first to be a rather obvious hybrid of Jaws and writer Michael Crichton’s earlier theme-park fantasy Westworld (1973). The hybrid is made possible at story level by the concept of genetic engineering. The idea of chromosome recombination has superseded that of robotics, which drove Westworld, a distant descendant of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. In Jurassic Park, the concept of genetic cloning allows the robot film to be interbred with the successful line of monster movies that runs from The Lost World, on through King Kong, and down to Jaws. 

Jurassic Park also combines the Westworld concept of the theme park with the monster movie idea of ‘The Lost World’, derived from Arthur Conan Doyle. In King Kong the monster is captured and brought by a show-biz tycoon from its remote Pacific island home to the mass audience of New York, where it is exhibited in chains at what appears to be a version of Radio City Music Hall. In Jurassic Park it is the other way round: the audience is to be transported to a remote Pacific island, where the monsters are exhibited and restrained behind massive electric fences. Isla Nublar is an island resort like Cancun or Djerba, what economists call an ITZ (integrated tourist zone), self-contained and cut off from the depressing and dangerous rest of the world in the pleasure periphery. It is also a safari park, planned and built around the dinosaur theme by another visionary show-biz entrepreneur, complete with tie-in merchandising of dinosaur souvenirs and memorabilia. On the Isla Nublar, the safari park is further combined with the Natural History Museum, displaying fabulous creatures from the past whose gigantic skeletons we are familiar with from so many museum halls. Finally, there is an uncanny echo, not only of King Kong, but of the Galapagos Islands, which Charles Darwin visited on his fateful voyage aboard the Beagle and whose wildlife formed the centrepieces of his theory of natural selection. 

On Isla Nublar, the technology of the future is used to recreate the extinct species of the distant past. Bio-technology, like cinema, makes it possible for us to engage in a kind of time travel. Again, instead of the tourist climbing into a time machine in order to travel back through deep time to the Age of Reptiles, the reptiles themselves are brought forward to the Age of Humans. Manipulation of DNA acts as a reverse time machine, harnessed now to the interests of the entertainment industry.  

Dinosaurs, in fact, have become commodities, fetishised attractions in the Society of the Spectacle. At the same time, they are like the prisoners in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison in which every prisoner could be ceaselessly observed from a single vantage point. Michel Foucault, in his classic book Discipline and Punish, points out that the prototype for the Panopticon was the menagerie built for Louis XIV at Versailles, where all the animals could be watched by a single guard. In Jurassic Park, the captive monsters are observed electronically rather than optically, from a computer-driven control centre reminiscent of that for the space ship in Star Trek, another form of high-tech island resort. Isla Nublar hurtles through time as the Enterprise hurtles through space. 

This island is also the isolated castle or fortified island where so many other mad scientists and mad doctors and mad sadists have held sway. Hammond, the Scottish entrepreneur played by Richard Attenborough, is another Dr Frankenstein, another Dr X, another Dr Moreau, another Dr No. Hammond has a Chinese American geneticist at his side, Dr Wu (shades of Dr Fu Manchu), who does the (ultra-hygienic) dirty work while he concentrates on the grand sweep of his vision and the construction of his crazed dream. Hammond’s dream does not have to be concealed from prying eyes: he is not afraid of being exposed and lynched. On the contrary, his whole purpose is to display his monsters to an adoring public. We might expect that, in the end, he would be torn to pieces by his own vengeful monsters, like Dr Moreau. Hammond, however, escapes unscathed, presumably because he is too close, in some respects, to Spielberg himself. 

At a critical point in the film, Hammond muses on his early days running a flea circus in Petticoat Lane, a realm of illusion, in contrast to Jurassic Park, where everything is real and tangible (and can eat you). Cinema, in these terms, is only a flea circus – the humbler, safer, insubstantial first beginning of the great Jurassic Park dream. But the comparison between cinema and theme park is still too close for comfort, especially when we think of Jurassic Park’s museum shop, lovingly, and perhaps ironically, tracked around. Along with the box office, all those T-shirts and mugs and key-tags and toys are, after all, the fuel that drives both enterprises, real film and imaginary theme park. More than a hundred licensees are producing Jurassic Park merchandise: video games, action figures and play sets, breakfast cereal and hamburger promotions, plush toys, magnets, story books, lunch boxes, pencils and, of course, a forthcoming Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studio’s very own theme parks in California and Florida. A film about a theme park will itself end up as a theme park attraction. 

It’s all as if Jurassic Park, the film, was really designed to end up as Jurassic Park, the ride. The strip of film unspooling through the projector is like the single-rail automated people-mover designed to shuttle tourists safely around the park. In both cases the ride turns into a nightmare from which we will emerge safely in the end. The nightmare is caused, first, by technical breakdown, and then by breakdown of the barriers which separate the safe, ‘civilised’ world from the dangerous ‘wild’ world. Things no longer stay put in their proper place. Like the Indians who have broken out of the Western reservation or the rioting prisoners escaped from Cell Block 11, the dinosaurs tear down the fences and set out to hunt down their human prey. More uncannily, the monsters have not just run out of control, they have come back from the dead as real, living, calculating presences, confronting their human captors face to face. Jurassic Park is like a palaeo-zoological version of Night of the Living Dead, in which fearsome creatures exhumed from their fossil graves converge on the terrified humans in the resort’s welcome centre. Dinosaurs, like phantoms or vampires, have come back to haunt the living – and not only to haunt them, but, of course, to hunt, trap and kill them. 

All horror is based on the return of the repressed, on some metaphoric digging up of what should have stayed buried. In Jurassic Park, the metaphor is extended into deep time to bring back what has been buried for 65 million years, all the more potent for its long entombment. The fascination we feel for dinosaurs must be related in some way to their extinction, which troubles us. First, it makes us wonder whether we are not somehow usurpers who have taken the place which was rightfully theirs. Not that we actually did the deed, but we benefited from it and perhaps will be punished in turn for our arrogance. On another level, there are the infant’s fantasies of the primal scene, of terrifying parents, now long dead but all the more able to torment us. In Jurassic Park, the children divide up the monsters into “meat-osauruses” and “veg-osauruses”, carnivores and herbivores, in a way which is surely gender-related: the savage predators are demented father figures while the sweet-tempered grazers, their prey, are beneficent mothers. One leaf-munching monster is compared to a cow; the others are obviously raging bulls. Psychiatrists tell us that another common childhood fantasy is that of saving one’s parents from monstrous attackers. This too is faithfully enacted in that it is the young boy who gets the central computer system working again and thus saves all the surviving adults. 

The dinosaur cult began in the nineteenth century with the identification of dinosaurs as a specific order of reptiles by the great palaeontologist Richard Owen. Owen coined the word ‘dinosaur’ and used it for the first time at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Plymouth in the summer of 1841. As he explained, dinosaurs had common characteristics which he deemed “sufficient grounds for establishing a distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles, for which I propose the name Dinosauria.” Owen, however, was troubled by dinosaurs for theological rather than psychological reasons. If they were part of God’s creation, what was their place in the order of things? And in what sense did they point forward to the creation of man, God’s masterpiece? Above all, Owen wanted to disprove the theory of progressive evolution, put forward by Lamarck, a process which culminated in the transition from ape to man. If man was to be clearly separated from the apes, then reptiles could not be the immediate precursors of mammals but must be separate creations who reached their peak early with the majestic dinosaurs and then declined into the pathetic swarms of lizards we see today. Dinosaurs, Owen argued, were not cringing creatures creeping about on their bellies, but upstanding beasts with advanced cardiovascular systems, almost like the mammals who eventually superseded them, just as man superseded the mammals. Life progressed in uneven steps rather than in a continuous upward curve. 

We know exactly how Owen envisaged dinosaurs because he had life-size models built. When the Crystal Palace was moved from Hyde Park to Sydenham, after the closing of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Owen was given the opportunity to design a series of dinosaurs to be erected on an artificial island in the Exhibition Park, each consisting of up to 30 tons of cement and iron, and still standing today. The Great Exhibition, as Michael Sorkin points out in his intriguing book Variations on a Theme Park, was the Ur-form of the theme park, bringing together the wealth of nations into an enclosed palace for tourists, which “depicted paradise. Not only was it laid out like a great cathedral, with nave and transept, but it was also the largest greenhouse ever built, its interior filled with greenery as well as goods, a climate-controlled reconciliation of Arcadia and industry, a garden for machines.” At Sydenham, now under commercial management, the exhibition became an expanded leisure centre and the dinosaur replicas were one of its main attractions. The artist given the task of “revivifying the ancient world”, as he put it, was Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who had earlier done the illustrations for Darwin’s report on the reptiles he discovered on the voyage of the Beagle. Hawkins is thus the direct ancestor of Stan Winston, whose studio built the models for Jurassic Park. Just as Winston was advised by a team of palaeontologists, so Hawkins was advised by Owen. 

The iguanadon, then the largest known such monster, was designed as a four-legged mammal-like creature. 100 feet long and 30 feet high, reminiscent of a huge rhinoceros rather than some lowly reptile like the crocodile. To publicise the new attraction, a dinner was held on a platform inside the iguanadon, its back still open, with Owen seated at the head of the table in the dinosaur’s head. The palaeontologists and geologists who gathered in the monster’s “socially loaded stomach”, as the Illustrated London News reported, were there to form “the best guarantee for the severe truthfulness” of Hawkins’ work. The visitor to the dinosaurs’ island was rewarded not only by the giant iguanadon, but by a monster sloth in the act of climbing an antediluvian tree, a fearsome-looking megalosaurus, a plesiosaurus wallowing in the mud of a pool whose waters were artificially raised and lowered from three to eight feet to simulate the tide, and many other such wonders. There were tie-ins too: wall charts and small-scale models. Plainly the newly-minted dinosaur was in at the very birth of the theme park, mixing science with spectacle as ever, each Brobdignagian creature frightening the Victorian tourist “with ideas of retribution in its monstrous jaws,” as the Illustrated London News gloatingly observed. 

Richard Owen’s main public antagonist in the battle over evolution was Thomas Huxley, who countered Owen’s near-mammal theory of the dinosaur with his own innovatory claim that the dinosaurs were birds. After he left England for America, Hawkins set about building a new series of models, this time of bird-like dinosaurs, to be exhibited in New York’s Central Park. Unfortunately this scheme never came to fruition and the bird-dinosaurs were vandalised and destroyed. In Jurassic Park, however, they are back with a vengeance, running around like bloodthirsty ostriches, as Huxley had imagined. 

It is appropriate that Jurassic Park should popularise Huxley’s belief that the dinosaurs were birds, recently revived by palaeontologists, since the film that is its own closest ancestor, I believe, is Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. In The Birds, as in Jurassic Park, a couple is formed and a bachelor learns to care for ‘wife’ and ‘family’, as a prelude, we suppose, to marriage. He learns to care by protecting them from the threat of predatory creatures which at the beginning of the story seem perfectly harmless. As Carol Clover has pointed out, The Birds, like Jaws, is a “marginal example” of the slasher film. With The Birds and Jaws, the slasher genre merges with the fantastic monster film, beaks and teeth substituting for knives or saws as instruments of savage yet intimate penetration of the flesh. With the dinosaurs, teeth are supplemented by claws, and instead of the woman victim as the focus, as in The Birds, it is men who are attacked and killed. In a notorious comment a propos of The Birds, Hitchcock gave as his guiding principle the maxim: “Punish the women!” In Jurassic Park, Spielberg’s motto could have been “Terrify the children!” While The Birds, like the classic slasher film, represents displaced, stylised rapes, Jurassic Park seems to represent displaced, stylised child molesting. The dinosaurs do not simply threaten, attack and kill people, they threaten to kill the most vulnerable victims – children who loved and trusted them. Thus the slasher-monster sub-genre mutates again in Spielberg’s hands. 

Spielberg is an undoubted auteur and his fascination and identification with children and the child’s point of view is a key characteristic of his work. Like Disney, another child-oriented auteur, Spielberg both seeks to nurture children and at the same time often threatens to terrify them. Disney’s own dinosaurs, weirdly gambolling to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, are innocuous enough, but other Disney characters are truly terrifying. Like Spielberg, one of my earliest memories is of being taken to see Bambi, a film which traumatised me. Looking back, I believe I can relate my fright to other fears, engendered by the blitz and associated with the forest fire, the armed aggressors, separation from the mother, the absent father. ln Jurassic Park too the children’s fear is aggravated by being separated from their parents and then left alone to their fate. Painstakingly, in the face of repeated dinosaur attacks, a kind of safe family haven has to be created. As in other Spielberg films, there is a scientist, Dr Alan Grant, this time a palaeontologist – like the ichthyologist in Jaws or the archaeologist in Indiana Jones, but in striking contrast to the unworldly, accident-prone palaeontologist who stars in Hawks’ Bringing up Baby. In Jurassic Park, Grant becomes the heroic father figure, able to draw on his dinosaur knowledge to protect and reassure the children. 

The dinosaurs themselves also have no parents, no family life, since they have been prevented genetically from breeding. Even more significant, they are sexually ambiguous. AIthough they left the laboratory female, they are able to change sex and become male. Thus like Norman Bates in Psycho, they are of uncertain sex and also seem to displace their sexual impotence into violence, itself another major trope of the slasher genre. 

We know from Metropolis that technology out of control is closely associated with sexuality out of control, two particularly terrifying forms of disorder. They are combined in the robot Maria, the creation of another mad scientist, the magician Rotwang. Rotwang too is determined to recreate the dead, in the form of the woman he lost to his rival, Fredersen. He loves his monster as, I believe, Hammond loves his, endlessly denying and disavowing everything in the face of ever-growing evidence of viciousness and depravity. If Dr Wu is the blandly sadistic father who fertilises the eggs and then castrates the offspring, Hammond is the enthusiastically protective mother who ignores every sign of his offspring’s monstrosity. He builds a paradise garden for his saurian children, a walled garden full of plants and trees and flowers. Paradise has become a theme park and the theme park replicates Shangri-La. But Paradise Regained quickly turns into Paradise Lost. Jurassic Park becomes the site of what we might call the ‘sadistic sublime’. Nursery terrors of being torn to pieces and devoured alive are magnified to saurian scale. 

Perhaps Spielberg should stop and ponder the fate of his monsters. Palaeontology shows us that the spectacular blockbuster was eventually doomed, to be replaced by a swarm of tiny, marginal, low-budget creatures.